Swoon Magazine Issue IV

NYC RADICAL CHEEK

Lady Jaye & Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Politics of Style: Bukowski, Burroughs & Quentin Crisp

$

5.00 Journey Issue

0100 The

Leelee Sobieski Issue 4

Ads.indd 5

5/25/08 5:42:07 PM

GirlCat Locations: 167 Elizabeth Street New York, NY 10012 tel: 212 219 1647 235 Elizabeth Street New York, NY 10012 tel: 212 966 9650

380 Atlantic Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11217 tel: 718 643 3863

www.AnyaPonorovskaya.com

6/13/08 11:30:29 AM GirlCat.indd 3

Ads.indd 4

5/25/08 5:40:46 PM

Anya Ferring Editor-in-Chief Shauna Cummins Managing Editor Kelly McKay Managing Editor Melisa Osorio Bonifaz Design Director Seth Ludman Marketing Director daniel murphy Web Master kimi huynh & isabel Huber Interns Published by Swoon Media

Table of contents

masthead

03

4 5 6 7

All content appearing in Swoon Magazine is subject to copyright.

None of it may be reproduced in whole or in part without written authorization from the editors, artists and author, including electronic retrieval systems. The opinions expressed within are those of its authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Swoon Magazine, its editors, or its contributors. Swoon Magazine is $5.00. To order copies of Swoon vial mail, please send $8.00 for shipping and handling to Swoon Magazine, P.O.Box 110521, Brooklyn, NY 11201, or purchase online via credit card at www. swoonmagazine.com. We are not responsible for lost or stolen payments sent via mail. If you are interested in advertising with us, please contact advertising@swoonmagazine.com.

Swoon Magazine International Headquarters P.O.Box 110521 Brooklyn, NY 11211 editors@swoonmagazine.com Printed in Canada. © 2008 Swoon Magazine.

Behind The Seams: A peek into the making of Swoon #4 Contributors Choose Your Own Adventure: What mysteries await?

Turn the pages to find out!

12 16

Get Dirty: Julia Mandle Fuses Fashion and Politics

20

Lady Jaye and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: A Love Story: An intimate journey through art, life, love, death, and beyond.

29

Strangers on a Train: NYC En Route: Traveling in style with a (real life) couple of commuters.

34 38 48

Beauty: Spectrum Lose yourself in a sea of color

52

Leelee on the Lake: The Lady of Shalott Revisited: Actress Leelee Sobieski invokes a modern day version of the Lady Of Shalott, with a New York edge. Shot on location in Central Park.

62

Journey Of The Artist: Swoon salutes two accomplished artists, Victoria Berdi and Hanna Eshel, whose remarkable journeys continue to inspire.

66 68

Party Page: Images from Swoon’s Winter Masquerade

70

Style File: Featuring our favorite Jersey boy-girl, style terrorist Ray Rivas

Contributing authors: Elizabeth Bachner, Hanna Eshel, Shaun Frenté, Jason Louv, Darren O’Brien, Genesis P-Orridge and Franklin Schneider

Swoon Magazine is a NYC-based fashion and photograhy media project.

Letter From The Editor

Picture Perfect by Elizabeth Bachner: Are we being retouched out of existence?

Fashion: La Maga Luscious photos to make you swoon Grumpy Old Men: Style, The Voice and the Art of Decaying Fabulously by Shaun Frente: Take a trip to Hollywood, New York’s favorite alter-ego, through the hallucinations of Shaun Frente and his three “Ghosts of Style’s Past”: Charles Bukowski, Quentin Crisp, and William S. Burroughs.

Sid Vicious’ Ghost Wishes He’d Died In A Jacket This Cool: Sewing 101 with Franklin Schneider Franklin Schneider, a man armed with a sewing machine and a poisoned pen, promises to inform, inspire, offend and amuse.

letter from the editors

04

Sometimes living in New York is like being in jail. Your room is the size of a holding cell, you have no money, and everyone acts like they’re on steroids. “Free time” refers to something you used to have during your life on the outside, and most available employment is approximately equivalent to stamping out license plates or building railroads. Through the cabin-fevered months of a brutal NYC winter we contemplated, nay, fantasized, over the concept of “journey” in all its metaphorical glories through our seasonally affected haze. Breakouts were on the horizon!!

Taiwan Photo by Anya Ferring

Now with summer finally upon us the shackles are loosening. So crack open a can of Busch Light (left over from the last Swoon party), lean back in the passenger seat, roll the windows all the way down, and feel the wind in your hair as Swoon pops the roof down and puts the pedal to the metal. Take a trip to Hollywood for style advice from the dead, hop on the MTA for a fashionable commute, or glide across the Central Park Reservoir with Leelee Sobieski. Bust a move over to Jersey in our Style File, or follow Genesis and the late Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge on their journey to become the Pandrogyne, and beyond...

From our first to this, our fourth edition, the past two years have been quite a trip for us here at the Swoon International HQ. Though we’ve meandered a long way from our beginnings as an image-only zine, we’ve stayed true to our mission of featuring the talents and stories of New York designers, photographers, and inspiring characters.

Brazil

Welcome to our Journey Issue!

Swoon Magazine’s mission is twofold: to showcase and promote local creatives in NYC and to reclaim fashion as an artistic expression outside of the push to create commercial trends. We believe photography and fashion, like any other art form, require a space for creative play and experimentation outside of the confines of their respective commercial industries. Swoon is a political organism as much as it is a party machine, and it’s politics are this–that glamour can, and must, exist in our daily lives–and you can do it, if not by yourself then with a little bit of help from your friends. We’ve come to reclaim the master’s tulles.

Buenos Aires

Iowa Photos by Kelly McKay

Chicago

Barcelona

04_Editor_Masthead.indd 4

On the cover: Photography: Ani Berberian Make Up: Danilo Omo Hair: Laura Leigh Williams Styling: Vava (See feature spread for clothing credits) On the back cover: Swoon Photobooth portraits shot by Ani Berberian at Williamsburg Fashion Weekend.

6/13/08 10:59:56 AM

05

behind the seams

Behind the Seams

contributors

06 Pedro Coube Arieta (Julia Mandle, pg. 14) Pedro fell in love with photography when he was 13 years-old and has been studying it ever since. The Brazilianborn photographer has an extensive travel photography collection and presently enjoys snapping portraiture shots in New York.

Todd Crawford (Genesis P-Orridge, pg. 22 and Journey Of The Artist, pg. 62) Todd began making pictures

Alison Brady (Choose Your Own Adventure, pg. 10) Alison Brady is

an artist based in New York. Her work explores issues related to madness and alienation, exploring feelings of anxiety, displacement, and loss of identity. She exhibits nationally and internationally and has been featured in publications such as New York Arts Magazine, Time Out NY and The New York Times. She was named one of the top emerging artists in the world by Saatchi Gallery. Brady was raised in Cleveland, OH. She holds an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from The School of Visual Arts (NYC).

Brady is currently represented by Massimo Audiello Gallery in New York. www.alisonbrady.com

Kelly McKay (Strangers on a Train, pg. 31 and Style File, pg. 70) Kelly

McKay is a photographer and cofounder of Swoon. Her journey thus far has led her from California to Iowa to Iceland to New York, where she has lived since 2002. In her spare time she enjoys wandering the ends of the earth. www. kellymckay.com

Michael Preis (Spectrum, pg. 36 and La Maga, pg. 40) Originally from Denmark, Michael Preis approaches photography with a no-nonsense, Scandinavian sensibility. His style is simple and graphic. He prefers shooting in color in order to play with various hues and saturations. When asked to list three things he cannot live without as a photographer, his answer is appropriately clear: light, light and digital. Michael’s work has appeared in numerous European, Australian as well as American magazines. Michael resides in New York City. www.michaelpreis.com

as an exercise in journalism. After getting his degree in documentary photography he lived across the country from the deep south to the Northwest, finally ending up in Brooklyn. He’s been living there for ten years now, currently with a large cat and many mice. Todd’s editorial work has been published in magazines such as Blackbook, Nylon, Noi.se, AndMen, Communication Arts and Fused. He still keeps up on the news. www.toddcrawford.com Ani Berberian (Leelee On the Lake, pg. 52) Ani photographed the cover

story for this issue of Swoon Magazine. She also was the photographer behind the “Faces of NYC” portraits on the back cover. She has been a contributor for other magazines such as NY Times Style, Surface, and Tokion. Ani grew up in Southern California, and currently lives in Brooklyn. www.aniberberian.com

Special shout outs: Sarah Duke, Venetia Boucher, Cameron Michel, Jennifer Rice, Damacio Ruiz, Alisha Trimble, Ewa Josefsson, Christina Ewald, Javanica Curry, Lauren Dalvia, Lauren Kritzer, Molly Weiss, Marcella Pinilla, Liz Candela, Bonnie Putnam, Jessica McCullough, Beth Moon, Sara Gates, Gillian Sneed and everyone else who helped with the party and this issue! We love you XOXO

choose your own adventure Stylist: Jessie Jenkins | Set Design: James Glayat Make-up: Cynthia Orourke | Wallpaper Design: Jay Pluck | Models: from MMG Jena and Florelisa

slug slug slug

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALISON BRADY

Text by Anya Ferring Photos by Pedro Arieta

Get Dirty

slug slug slug Photo by Austin Donohue

J

ulia Mandle does not want you to get comfortable at her performances. The postcard for the piece I attended reads: “Get Dirty. Engage in Political Art.” There is a picture of a soot-covered forearm poking through a hole in a wall smearing its effigy all over the clean, white surface.

The inspiration for the 2007 piece “Come Have a Chicky Meal, Cuz You’re Gonna Love This Deal” sprung from the 2005 bombing of a KFC restaurant in Pakistan. Mandle was particularly struck by the cheerful irony of this KFC advertising slogan which was found amongst the building’s ashes.

Her performance-driven piece focuses on American imperialism abroad and the nature of our dominant commercial culture. Mandle intends for “Chicky Meal” to be a living portrait of the current American public: “It is about our citizens’ lost par-

ticipation in American democracy. It is meant to activate our lost majority. The commercial-slogan title shows us the pervasive American bargainattitude, where today you don’t have to put in as much as you expect to get out of the world. American democracy has been confused with capitalism, and consumer culture has enveloped us with its very dangerous bargains.”

The performance itself occurs around five walls constructed in a pinwheel fashion with a blinking neon sign reminiscent of a real KFC establishment, but with holes in the walls evocative of a ruined or damaged building. The performers smear charcoal along the walls, further stretching the metaphor of the building burning. According to Mandle, the image of the women smearing the walls suggests not only the charred destruction

of an American icon, but the idea of “getting your hands dirty.” This refers both to the idea of getting down to work as well as “getting involved in something that’s not honest.” Performed at the Art Director’s Club in Chelsea, it could be viewed from above in the balcony, up-close on the ground floor, or even while moving about within the structure. By encouraging her audience to actively engage and get close to her performance she hopes to inspire people to continue taking action beyond the gallery walls.

J. Mandle performances often blend elements of visual art, design, and dance, defying easy categorization. They are best described as performance art, with Mandle as director. Through confronting the public in unexpected ways, she hopes to fully engage and incite her audiences. Often interven13

14

slug slug slug

Organic Macrobiotic Restaurant 28 E. 13th Street btw University Pl. & 5th Avenue New York, NY Tel: 212-627-7150 www.souen.net tions are staged in public spaces, such as her early performance “When,” which was performed in the window of the New Museum of Contemporary Art at the peak of Broadway rush hour. The piece was designed to draw pedestrians in by providing a stark contrast to the busy action on the street below: two dancers moved extremely slowly in the window in clock-like progressions with their dresses connected to two large white fabric walls constructed in the manner of a sundial. Passersby would pause and reflect on perceptions of the loss of time and aging.

In “Chicky Meal,” the performers consisted of five women, all in gowns cut with a dramatic eighteenth-century silhouette, complete with bustles and powdered wigs. Purposefully constructed with a colonial bent, the gowns were adorned with detailed embroidery along the hems and bustiers. Upon closer inspection, however, the embroidery work revealed itself as heavily slanted text, some lines stitched in English, others in Arabic. Mandle, who learned to sew from her grandmother, designs all of the costumes for her pieces, and often incorporates elements of fashion—in addition to politics— into her work.

One performer dressed in white wears a chicken head and struts around with a sultry air, aggressively inviting people to read the text stitched into her dress: “I say I’m Canadian when I travel abroad.” The other performers seem to be faring less well—dressed in black with anti-American slogans stitched into their dresses, many of them press themselves into the burnt structure, as if they are trying to move or break out of it, or even change it. There are hands poking through holes, some make reaching motions while others push back as if they are trapped. Some even point directly at the audience. One performer appears to be getting very angry, as if refusing to take it anymore.

She laboriously wipes the sweat from her brow and then takes off the wig as if having a sudden revelation—and then smiles as if looking triumphantly.

Julia Mandle’s intention is to question our collective sense of civil responsibility: “The more we reach beyond the mainstream press that has controlled and filtered our information, the more we learn about America’s actions abroad and at home. If our government ignores honesty and truth, and our media manipulates it, it can be an artist’s mission in today’s world to encourage and motivate Americans to take responsibility for the actions done in our name. We have not been adequately trained for our civic role, which is demanded now more than ever. We need to start feeling uncomfortable. We need to stop and think about our role in the world.”

fashion from the trenches

16

Picture Perfect

By Elizabeth Bachner

I

want to be on the cover of Swoon Magazine, like Leelee Sobieski, laying in a boat in a sexy white dress like a crazy pirate, or better yet, that pirate’s fantasy girl. If it was my picture on the cover instead, would it make you laugh? What if it was a picture of me, but with my skin retouched to look more like Leelee’s, with my legs digitally sculpted and lengthened, my already-blonde hair lightened just a little, my cheekbones chiseled, my eyes opened up? What if they fixed me? Would you still laugh?

Kate Winslet is on the cover of an old February 2003 issue of British GQ. She has long, impossibly lean legs, flawless skin and small, pert breasts. Inside the magazine, her stomach is flat and her tiny ass juts back suggestively in her black tights. Most readers will recognize Kate right away— she’s a famous, Oscar-nominated sex symbol—but which Kate is this? These are strange pictures indeed—Kate Winslet with Kate Moss’s model body.

When the magazine came out, Kate was pissed. Yes, celebrities expect that photos will be retouched, but Kate found the changes unnecessarily severe.

Dylan Jones, the magazine’s editor and the author of the interview, responded in a BBC news program in January of that same year by saying that, “These days you only get two kinds of pictures of celebrities: paparazzi pictures or pictures like these which have been highly styled, buffed, trimmed and altered to make the subject look as good as is humanly possible…It hasn’t a lot to do with body size. Practically every photo you see in a magazine will have been digitally altered in this way. Kate…was thinner than I had ever seen her, petite and very sexy. These pictures are not a million miles away from what she really looks like.” But according to a later interview with Kate, “The retouching is excessive. I do not look like that and more importantly I don’t desire to look like that,” she said. “I actually have a Polaroid that the photographer gave

me on the day of the shoot…I can tell you they’ve reduced the size of my legs by about a third. For my money it looks pretty good the way it was taken.”

It’s especially ironic that in the feature article inside that very same GQ issue, Kate talks about the craziness of Hollywood’s thin obsession, and of the joy of having a “real” body. “Men…like girls to have an arse on them, so why is it that women think in order to be adored they have to be thin?

Very thin. I just don’t understand that way of thinking. When I was 22 and Titanic had come out and I was a slightly more Marilyn Monroe-y shape, I just became aware that there hadn’t really been anyone young out of this country that had a shape, and was becoming successful, for a long time. And because I, as a teenager, went through dieting, fat, thin, and was very chubby as a child…I just couldn’t believe my luck. I thought, ‘My God, I did all of this...I’ve done this enormous great big film and look, I’m not

starving.’ Wow. Maybe I should tell someone about that. Maybe I should actually say to these young women, ‘Look, I did it. I did it really. And I’m just a normal person.’”

What makes someone a “normal person,” versus an icon? Does Leelee’s (natural) gorgeousness make her “abnormal?”

Poppy de Villeneuve is a 28-yearold photographer whose portfolio includes documentary shots of prisoners as well as fashion work for Teen Vogue. Her mother is a model, and her father is the infamous manager who discovered Twiggy. Poppy has modeled, and she’s also had her image digitally altered—she hands me a magazine where she’s pictured on the cover with red hair and no eyebrows. Is Poppy a “normal person?” Do you avoid being a “normal” person by being beautiful, filthy-rich, famous, talented and lucky? Will nepotism do the trick?

How do we, as a society, decide who’s important and who isn’t?

“Most of the time,” says Poppy,

“people don’t want the truth…It’s the illusion that’s more exciting for people. Why do they choose to make the image on the cover perfect? It must be what people want to believe. And that to me is so limiting, that we want to believe that we’re all perfect.

Because then at the same time we’re obsessed by the fact that people aren’t perfect! We want to see altered cover images, and then we have the tabloids, right next to each other. It’s so much contradiction it’s unbelievable.

It’s ridiculous. It’s like, ‘She’s got cellulite!’ Why don’t you just have the picture with her not being perfect? I guess it creates two products. We love to poke a finger and expose the ‘perfect’ celebrity’s flaws, but god, we need to put our energy into other things…I’m surprised that people don’t feel the need to be challenged more, and I think that we do need to constantly challenge people and their ideas, because that’s what makes me feel good. If I see a piece of art that’s constantly challenging, that makes me want to investigate. At

fashion from the trenches

18

the same time, I’m an artist, but maybe if someone is working in a bank, they want a quick fix: ‘Well, my life’s this, but I want to aspire to this other thing.’ So it’s a lot to do with what people aspire to.”

Most of Poppy’s work never gets retouched. Her fashion photography has a particular look that means she attracts clients in search of clean and challenging images. But, she tells me, because most work is now shot digitally, the temptation to alter images is huge for photographers, and it’s easy to get carried away.

“You’ll notice some strange line on something, and then get rid of it, you’ll just retouch it out, because it’s just so easy to do. And once you do the one thing, you’ll want to keep going. The way we deal with images has changed.

We don’t slow down enough...

Where do we go from there?

Retouching is making everything flat. It’s got to have some shift back, because you can only take it so far. The people are going to get rubbed out eventually.”

Even for celebrities themselves, or models, these kinds of images can be strange and confusing. Modeling, says Poppy, “just makes you feel really insecure. It

makes you worry about how you look far too much.” And for celebrities like Lindsay Lohan, having a life that’s a façade “doesn’t help them. It really kind of destroys them. Lindsay Lohan must look in the mirror, and think, ‘Actually I don’t look quite like that retouched image of myself.’ That must be kind of hard, poor thing!

It’s really important that people can become people, and these kinds of environments don’t allow them to do that. Or Brittany Spears! Why do you think she’s shaven her head? That was an amazing statement. I think people need to give her more credit for that move. It was anti- all of these things…it was a decisive moment.”

A study found that butterflies, if given the choice to mate with healthy, living members of their own species or with plastic decoys whose colors were brighter, overwhelmingly chose to rut senselessly with the fake models.

Is that what we’re doing? Rutting with fake butterflies? It’s not enough anymore to find people who match our ideals of beauty and talent—now we’re getting rid of their vestiges of humanness, their under eye circles and soft arm hair and facial shadows.

The problem started, I think, with who airbrush them with fake tan us looking at pictures, looking at and make them artfully dewy with pictures instead of living and lov- $80/ounce bronzer. Finally, a ing and interacting, instead of (as photographer or magazine staffer Poppy puts it) letting ourselves uses digital reimaging techniques become people. But now it’s got- to make them skinnier and comten worse. It isn’t enough to just pletely wrinkle-free, with bigger look at pictures of real butterflies, eyes, leaner faces, fuller lips and creatures so bright that we as- better coloring. Often, instead of pire to their colors when our own looking glamorous, they just look plumage is dimmer. Now, we’re creepy. In a recent cover image of staring at Faith Hill, the the plassinger’s arms “A study found that butterflies, if given the choice to mate with tic models, have been healthy, living members of their images so whittled to own species or with plastic decoys improved half their whose colors were brighter, overthat they’re size, makwhelmingly chose to rut sensee r a s e d . ing her look lessly with the fake models. Is that R u b b e d emaciated. what we’re doing? Rutting with out. It’s like In a recent fake butterflies?” killing a perJessica Alba son. Soon, cover, the will we create images digitally nubile actress looks like a carfrom scratch, like in video porn? toon character, with a weird, artificial torso.

In the five years since Kate’s GQ kerfuffle, photo retouching has Let’s stop pulling punches. To gotten even crazier and more out look at cover models, and the of hand. First, celebrities struggle ways we retouch their images to to look skinny and wrinkle-free make them more “perfect,” is to the natural way, addling them- confront the deepest issues of selves with bizarre diets, psycho class and power in our society. If exercise plans and daily consul- we want to celebrate the daughtations with specialists. Then, ter of a famous man, sometimes they get work done—botox, she looks like Liv Tyler, and other plastic surgery, the works. Then times she looks like Kelly Osthey get styled, by professionals bourne. We still seek out celebri-

ties who fit a conventional beauty ideal—silky-skinned, full-lipped and thin, thin, thin—but we also retool that ideal, for particular people, in certain situations.

What do we really aspire to?

“Everyone wants to be cool, which is so funny, because I think that what happens is that these people and these ideas, which are all bred on insecurity anyway, become kind of not cool, in a way.”

Reading certain fashion magazines, “makes me feel weird. As if I’m in a competition. Actually, it makes me feel bad. It doesn’t make me feel better, looking at those magazines. I don’t think, ‘Oh, isn’t life great, I feel good about myself.’ I feel bad about myself. Because I look at those magazines, and I think, ‘Oh, she’s got a great haircut, maybe my haircut’s not that good.’ You know what I mean? Or I’ll see people, and think, ‘They’re doing that’, and I’m not doing that. It makes me compare, and I don’t like this idea of comparing myself to someone else. If I don’t look at them, then I just don’t enter into that headspace.”

However beautiful we are, or rich, or thin, or powerful, or cool, the process of comparison can

batter us a little. It keeps us shy and sorry about ourselves and scared. British GQ editor Dylan Jones claimed that all magazines try to make celebrities look “as good as humanly possible”, but he should have said “better than humanly possible,” because today we’re doctoring images to defy the basic structures of human faces and bodies. We gloss them up in fashion rags, and tear them down in the tabloids, all in a strange conspiracy to make us “normal” people feel like it would be a joke if we ended up on the cover, if we had the audacity to imagine that we were good enough or beautiful enough or interesting enough to look at.

Elizabeth Bachner is a writer and sociologist whose recent work can be found in the anthology Wreckage of Reason: Xxperimental Writing by Women in the 21st Century (Ed. Nava Renek, Spuyten Duyvil, June 2008) and on the websites www.bookslut. com and www.film-forward. com. Her one act play “Pretty, Pretty” was staged at the Gene Frankel Theater on Bond Street in February 2008.

Lady Jaye & Genesis Breyer P-orridge A love story Genesis photographed by Todd Crawford

Hair by Laura Leigh Williams Make-up by Andy Starkweather

Written and compiled by Shaun FrentĂŠ, Kelly McKay, and Anya Ferring We had originally planned a feature spread for this issue on the artist duo known as Breyer P-Orridge, composed of Genesis P-Orridge and Jackie (Jaye) Breyer. Tragically, Jackie died suddenly last October at age 39, stricken by a previously undiagnosed heart condition related to her two year struggle with stomach cancer. The following is an homage to her, and to their journey together, featuring selections from their private photo collection and interviews with Genesis.

Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge 1969-2007 The couple outside of the place they first met.

E

very great artist, every thinker who has truly made the mark has always known that beauty, radically sublime beauty, can never be fully extracted from its alchemical touchstone of shock, or if you will, terror. From the subterranean panicked forests of cathartic Greek theater, to the starry vistas of the transcendental philospher Immanuel Kant, to the sepulchural poetics of French symbolists Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, there’s a sense that to truly open your eyes to the manifold mysteries of the world, you must, in the words of Iggy Pop, “swallow all misery whole.”

No one in our times can lay greater claim to this ethos than the entity known as Genesis and Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge—I say entity, singular, for though they may have traveled in individual bodies-in-the-world, in the end they were as indivisible as subatomic quarks: multiple and discrete, but tangible only as a unified cluster. The first time I was exposed to Genesis’ art—in the form of, at the time, his, later her, but finally our earsplitting 70s noise-rock outfit Throbbing Gristle—I cried myself to sleep in fear I’d gone too far. But like all those of us whose lives have been touched by Gen, in the

morning I thanked them when it was over. When I met Gen and Jaye half a lifetime later at a tepid Siouxsie and the Banshees show at Roseland, the irrefutable orgone-swell alone that emanated from their bodies let me know that ain’t a damn thing changed. As the ever courteous Genesis explained to me as we strolled back to the downtown A train together, “the old gal was just taking us up to here” —making a polite rhetorical karate chop bosomlevel in reference to La Sioux’s performance— “but I really need to be about here”—as the hand swung up right about third-eye level. In life, love, and even death, that’s where Gen and Jaye have always kept things: never flinching from recording the most horrendous depths that humanity has descended, and yet always brave enough to embrace the sheer beauty of which we’re all capable.

To use the title of one of Gen’s written biographies, their journey has been “painful but fabulous.”

But, as they say, let’s back up a minute. Presupposing that you know who Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye are is to assume you’re well acquainted with, at the very least, the signposts of the last four decades of radical underground art. If you are not

—and in today’s culturescape of glossy hegemony, who can assume so?—their amalgamated life constitutes a very handy road map.

Even before meeting Lady Jaye, Genesis had surmounted a resume most human artists would be proud to have done in several lifetimes—perhaps because several lifetimes has been what Gen has lived. Starting in the late 1960s, the teenage angel and hellion P-Orridge co-founded the notorious British street-theater/performance art collective Coum Transmissions, whose outrageous public performances set out to dissolve the borders that separate consciousness into boxes of body and gender, including transvestitism as a political statement. Contemporaries and equals of seminal “body artists” like the Vienna Action Group and Chris Burden (whose legendary piece “Shoot” consisted of getting plugged in the arm by a handgun), the occasionally bloody Coum coagulated in the mid 70s into Throbbing Gristle (British slang for a hardon), the even more infamous sonic quartet who invented the term “industrial” music. Presaging the ground-zero aesthetics of punk while never succumbing to its dead-end nihilism, TG barnstormed 21

the parameters of what we consider music, and on a lyrical level dared tarry with the most negative domains of human behavior, including serial killers, pedophiles, and Nazis. Decried as “wreckers of civilization,” the commonly misunderstood group were only ever interested in exploring further evolution of the species. By the dawn of the eighties, Throbbing Gristle and, mutatis mutandis, P-Orridge unveiled not one but two new vehicles, Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth and Psychic TV. The latter has been called a sort of musical propaganda unit for the former, a teasingly cultish collective dedicated to personal transformation through rigorous spiritual disclipline, and together the two managed to fuse together the arcane teachings of the polymath occultist Aleister Crowley with the utopian, Ecstasy-fueled love-ins of first-wave British rave. Unlike Crowley and Genesis’ friend and mentor William S. Burroughs, however, P-Orridge was not “trustafarian,” and yet without ever having a job managed to move ever forward without hesitation, creating a prolific career that never compromised artistic integrity for security or social acceptance. A perfect recipe for expulsion from Thatcherist England—and not surprisingly, after two decades of confrontation with the powers that be—Genesis was kicked out of the U.K. on obscenity charges, relocating to California.

Had Jaye never joined forces with Genesis, she would have left behind an indelible mark on her own. Running away from home at age fourteen, Jaye cut a fine figure in the hardcore punk scene of 1980s New York, as stunningly beautiful as a pin-up model, yet more fiercely bad-ass than any of her male contemporaries. It could be said that in Jaye, Gen had truly met her match: a renowned performer in the downtown underground, she created innovative performances with the Black Lips Theater Cult (with Antony of Antony and the Johnsons) and was an artist and musician in her own right—and somehow put herself through nursing school with cash made as a dominatrix. The two came together as a couple in 1993 and have been collaborating since on everything from music (in the revamped Psychic TV3 and Thee Majesty), performance, and visual art, to their ultimate project—becoming one being— the Pandrogyne.

Of their honeymoon in Haiti, Genesis recalls “One night as we watched the most amazing electrical tropical storm thrashing the jungle in front of us, cuddled together and swaying in each other’s arms, I asked her, ‘What would you like if you could have absolutely ANYTHING in the world sweetheart?’

And she said, ‘I just want us to be remembered as one of the great love affairs...’”

Filmstrip Photos by Laure Leber

She will most certainly get her wish. In meeting with Genesis in the wake of Jaye’s death we were struck again and again by the profundity of their connection.

Swoon: How did you two meet?

Genesis: Well, it’s a two part story. In 1993 I was going through a terribly

22

nasty divorce. My two daughters were being stoic, but suffering inevitably. To do my best to make Caresse’s eleventh birthday special and exciting I arranged for her to visit her Godmother Terence Sellers, belle-epoque writer and celebrated dominatrix, in New York. Immediately after her return she excitedly described this nice friend of Auntie Terence who had taken care of her when Terence was busy.

I was handed a photo of this person. She was slim, covered in a towel with sunhat over her face, lying on the beach on Fire Island. Caresse taped the photo to the head of my bed telling me “she is REALLY nice daddy and I think she would make the perfect girlfriend for you!” And that was Jaye.

Sometimes I’d go to New York for a long weekend to get away from the stress…being a single parent with two kids…I’d stay with Terence, who had an apartment attached to the dungeon [where Jaye worked as a dominatrix]. So one day I was lying under a sheet snoozing away and heard voices.

The door was open and this very tall, very slim, incredibly beautiful young woman wearing all original 60s clothing with a Brian Jones bob and a cap very jauntily was walking backwards and forwards against the doorway with a cigarette very elegantly in one hand talking to someone out of view. And as she moved backwards and forwards, much to my amusement and pleasure, she started to divest herself of her clothing until she was just in lingerie and then she disappeared and came back wearing more and more amazing fetish clothing as she started to get ready for work. And I just couldn’t believe

my luck! Just watching was fabulous… but the truth is at that moment something incredibly profound happened to me and I said out loud: “Dear Universe, if there is a Universe and God or any kind of Intelligence, PLEASE let me be with this woman for the rest of my life, for she is all that I have ever dreamed or need,” and I just prayed for her to be mine and I knew that if she was we’d never be apart. At that instant I had no idea who she was (or that she was the same woman Caresse had shown me—since you couldn’t see her in the photo very well).

As this was happening Jaye’s coworker hissed to her “there’s a really weird guy in there…don’t go in there, it’s one of Terence’s really freaky friends...bad news!” So of course Jaye came in and introduced herself. I staggered out and we got coffee and chatted and were basically inseperable from there.

Swoon: And what happened then?

Genesis: For a whole year we were re23

slug slug slug

Young Genesis

Jackie at 16

ally good friends but didn’t sleep together…courting the old-fashioned way. She was extricating herself from a relationship and I was an emotional wreck having been thrown out of England and taking care of two kids and going through a divorce.

All this happened in 1993.

Swoon: What a terrible year!

Genesis: No, it was a wonderful year because it

set me free to be with Jaye. At the time it was very stressful of course, with the children and all. Jaye helped me a lot. During that year we had a very natural connection. We were both aware we didn’t want to rush into a sexual relationship—assure that it wasn’t a rebound, that it was a very deep, genuine connection. We were so surprised and thrilled by what we were feeling…there was no rush.

Swoon: How did you become lovers?

Genesis: One of those times when I came to New

York, about a year after I met Jaye, Terence rang me up to say that she was moving so I couldn’t stay with her but that Jaye had offered to have me at her place...She had fixed it up and made this cave of silk around her bed with these psychedel24

ic lights spinning around the bed where she had pinned Polaroids of me in different outfits she’d put me in...She bought two pairs of Chinese black silk pajamas, one for her and one for me so we’d be proper…Her ex-boyfriend would ring up every day and the machine would go on…”I want you back!” and we’d be lying there just cuddling and not doing anything and her ex got so upset, showed up at the door and we had to explain that no, we weren’t having an affair…But at the end of that week, we’d been kissing a lot…and the last morning came and Jaye couldn’t stand it any longer and she seduced me…and it was beautiful. Totally different, as if I’d never made love before, what was I doing wasting my time all these years? It sounds so trite, but it really was that. Something very mystical and powerful that really changed my life on a deep level…we both felt that straightaway. A recognition that we’d found something incredibly powerful and totally new. Such a strong feeling we wished we’d been virgins and never had sex before that. I went back to California thinking “Oh my God—this really is it!” Not just the metabolic waste disposal that sex had been—real love, something very different.

They continued their long distance affair for a year, until Gen was badly injured escaping a fire and Jaye decided to join her paramour in California. As Gen puts it “she didn’t trust me to be on my own anymore.” They were married on Friday the 13th of June, 1995 in California. Being Friday the 13th, it was the only open date at the courthouse and they were the only couple to be married that day—in transgender drag—Jaye in black leather and a moustache, Genesis in white lace with a cast on her arm.

Marriage is ostensibly about becoming one, closing the gap between two bodies, two psyches— perhaps no one else in history has taken their vows to the level that Genesis and Lady Jaye have. The two made it their personal mission to become as close as two people could be—to break down the limitations of body and self to create a new model for identity. Over time, Genesis journeyed from he to s/he and the two conceived a newly gendered unified entity—the Pandrogyne—which is all genders, one being in two bodies. The two took body modification to a new level using multiple plastic surgeries to mirror each other’s bodies. As they state “…pandrogeny is not about defining differ-

Genesis recalls how the Pandrogeny project began from a very natural organic place for them both.

“From the first day we went out together she decorated my hair and put me in a green velvet bodysuit and miniskirt...” Jaye was always an incredibly classy and stylish lady, and didn’t hesitate to extend her skills to Gen’s wardrobe. “She was appalled by my clothes! Having come from England with nothing but two children and the clothes on my back, sleeping in Winona Ryder’s old bedroom [her parents were good friends of Gen’s] and with no income I didn’t have much! Anarchic Adjustment in SF and Amoeba Clothing started giving me lots of free clothes—so I was wearing all these baggy psychedelic rave clothes which Jaye found awful so she very quickly started styling me. We started doing rituals about becoming each other, mirrors of each other—making art of this—giving birth to each other as the same person.” In 1994 the two began making artworks not just to illustrate this idea but to “...actually make it happen magically, shamanic works incorporated into what might be seen as an art piece. We’d take psychedelics and get into each other’s minds and reprogram ourselves to become one. Bit by bit that got stronger...She was a genius—the one who was conceiving of these ideas first and then collaborating with me—a very visionary person. It was her vision that led into the evolutionary layer of pandrogeny…the implications getting very profound. We started with this instinctive intuitive experiment with this romantic absolute love we were experiencing that was like nothing else—we wanted to be literally absorbed into one other, to be sucked into this gelatinous new being that was undifferentiated.”

frontiers and smashing boundaries—now onto the ultimate boundary—that between this world and the next.

One of the original concepts of Pandrogeny was to “stay together through infinity.” Genesis feels Jaye is still with her and refers to herself in the plural to include Jaye as well. “We still have to carry on doing what we have to do—we still have lots of work that she’s pushing us to do from where she is,” says Gen. “She’s still directing us and it’s just as effective as before—we’re continuing our work together in different dimensions.”

slug slug slug

ences but about creating similarities. Not about separation but about unification and resolution.”

As Breyer P-Orridge’s artist’s statement puts it: “Some people feel they are a man trapped in a woman’s body; some people feel they are a woman trapped in a man’s body; Breyer P-Orridge just feel trapped in a body.” Larry Ji, a close friend and bandmate of Breyer P-Orridge, believes Jaye is trapped no more. Their sometime spiritual advisor refers to her death as “dropping the body” and believes Jaye continues to live on through Genesis: “Most of the time Jaye is with you Gen, as when you do things she can live them out through you—she can get inside you and share everything you experience. Quiet your mind so you can hear her voice—communicate with Jaye while in your body. Any separation is in your own mind—so it’s your mind that you must calm down. She whispers—listen for her—expand this to a further dialogue. The mind is the only barrier to love.”

With Jaye’s untimely passing their project is met with a new challenge. As writer Douglas Rushkoff said to Genesis in the wake of Jaye’s death, “the Pandrogeny project broke down the barriers of sex—now you’re breaking down the barriers of death.” Their creative journey has always been about pushing 25

slug slug slug 26

Our Beloved has dropped her body leaving this body that was once just mine to represent both of us in the material realm. Lady Jaye meanwhile has chosen to go ahead to create a new beachhead where she represents us both in an immaterial plane. Perhaps we will receive a blurred image of her there, covered with a towel of perfecting and a solar hat of wisdom as she awaits our soul ready to amaze and shock us with her compassion and intuition, her ability to awaken all types of people the instant they meet her.

We feel our L-if-E only truly began that day we first saw her. She has, and always will be, like 23 inspirational beings at once; lover, saint, best friend, nurse, artist, performer, musician, whore, virgin, sister, baby, mother, father, brother, writer, angel, demon, mentor, male, female, magician, priestess, PANDROGYNE. Before Lady Jaye we had never MADE love, she revealed, through teaching us with her unconditional physical and conscious SELF, the reality of divine, inter-dimensional, infinite ever-expanding union. In this new “MAKING love” we explored indescribable intensities of each other, becoming one being that is now the core centre of my ongoing existence and belief. Our L-if-E had already been a very fortunate one that included many meetings and collaborations with remarkable men and women. Yet we can truthfully confess with happiness that after being with Lady Jaye for 14 y-eras we are gratefully aware that we have been in the company of an angelic and supreme force that we shall love and adore forever, both in this mundane period of existing and in any and all other forms that follow. Lady Jaye used to remind us that all the time we were “alive” before we met that day was necessary “…so that you were ready for me,” and vice versa. During our worst moments of depression, of frustration at the inequities of this world and the inertia of our species during a time of crisis that will decide if we become extinct...she’d tell us “you can’t save everyone Bunny, all you can do is be LOVE, and give love, unconditionally to those that you can.” Perhaps that is why she also became a nurse before we met, specializing in chronically sick babies and young children. We met some of these babies’ parents and they spoke of Lady Jaye in hushed and reverent tones, speaking of her angelic patience and care. “It is just about love…” she told us, over and over again, until we heard. —Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE, Brooklyn, NY, May 2008

Genesis is wearing pants she’s had since 1969

27

In the months running up to her death Lady Jaye had been working on a large scale art project to canonize living saints, people who she felt worked selflessly for higher causes at their own expense. Of course Jackie fit this bill better than anybody and I don’t think that was lost on anyone except, perhaps, for her.

Jackie quietly lived ideals which other people pay lip service to at best. Walking to buy cigarettes with her once, she said to me, ‘Every religion in the world says to be kind to the people who have nothing, on the street, because after all, you never know who those people could secretly be.’ This was a philosophy I saw her put into practice again and again, with the people in her neighborhood, with her family, with her friends, with strangers, with me.

Jackie had little time for the ‘old’ religions, as she called them, though she lived the simple human essence that many of them tried, and failed, to convey. Her generosity of spirit was shocking at times.

Jackie truly did touch people’s hearts and lives in a very, very profound way. She did not recognize class, race, fame or entitlement but instead saw people as they were. Her presence was humbling. Like mythological figures she lived through many lives within the space of one life and was many things to many people (and had many names as well). The greatest humans intersect reality in this way.

Jackie was an embodied, and enduring example of human possibility. Her message was her life.

I find it hard to talk about Lady Jaye without making her sound like a god-like being but I can’t help it, that’s how I see her even if she would have laughed at the idea. I love her and I miss her very much.

Genesis wearing the outfit Jaye wore the day they met. All other clothing from Jaye’s personal collection.

Photographed at Catherine Slip Studios.

28

— Jason Louv

Strangers On A Train

NYC En route

In the Taxi. On Yasha: Mandate of Heaven silk pantsuit and sash, Mad Marietta black scape (sold at Love Brigade Co-op), In God We Trust pendulum necklace, sunglasses (stylists own), Chie Mihara lace-up boots. On Keith: Ben Sherman shirt, Pierre Cardin cardigan, Vintage Lee jeans, In God We Trust felt bowler hat.

On the Sunbway. On Yasha: In God We Trust red swing dress, Hier Clothing thorax shrug (sold at Love Brigade Co-op), Barbara Feinman felt hat, Purple tights (stylist’s own), A Detacher leather wedges. On Keith: Marc Jacobs shirt, Vintage military vest, Calvin Klein jacket Love Brigade jeans, Vintage spectacles (stylist’s own).

On the Tramway. On Yasha: Love Brigade 2x2 dress, Tashkent grey/ black boots, Couture Saboleut necklace (sold at Love Brigade Co-op).

On Keith: Love Brigade t-shirt, Love Brigade black jeans, Jil Sander white corduroy blazer, Vintage rubber boots (worn throughout).

Next Page: On the Ferry. On Yasha: Alisha champagne dress (sold at Love Brigade Co-op), Mandate of Heaven lace sheer top, Miss Dater tights, Chie Mihara Ofelia shoes. On Keith: In God We Trust grey shirt, Torsion black vest (sold at Love Brigade Co-op), Love Brigade black jeans, Beaded necktie (stylist’s own).

Make-Up and Hair by Mariko Tokuno Styling by Alex Zorbas-Maiden Models: Yasha Jackson and Keith Downing

slug slug slug

Spectrum Photography by Michael Preis | Creative Direction by Melisa Osorio Bonifaz

Make-Up: Rebecca Casciano www.rebeccacasciano.com | Model: Karen De Souza from Marilyn Model MGT, Inc.

Skin: strobe cream, face and body and moistureblend cover in NC 35, all by M.A.C. | Brows: lingering pencil by M.A.C.

Eyes: print and carbon eyeshadows, pitchblack pro longlash, by M.A.C. | Lips: strobe cream, fresh brew lipstick by M.A.C.

Black Pleated Tube Top HACHE Silver Bracelet stylist’s own

38

Photographer: Michael Preis Stylist: Verena Gralert Stylist Assistant: Shay Baker Hair: Shannon Wall using Con Air Make Up: Hope Choman using NARS Model: Florence @ MC2

Tan Silk Strapped Top BRUNELLO CUCINELLI Pink Silk Underwear VICTORIA’S SECRET

White/Grey See Through Top CHRIS HAN Grey High Waist Shorts THRIVE Red Patent Leather Belt RENE LEZARD Corset: Worn around waist TOP 10

40

Soft Pink Silk Heart Neck Dress AURELIO COSTARELLA

43

Black Mesh Top SKAPARINN Fushia Caplet MATHEW AMES Black High Waist Hot Shorts AMERICAN APPAREL

Black Corset PATRIK RZEPSKI Aqua Blue Ribbed Skirt PATRIK RZEPSKI Black Sheer Underwear AGENT PROVOCATEUR Knee Highs HUE Fuschia/Grey Patent Leather Oxfords STEVEN BY STEVE MADDEN

44

45

Black V-Neck Blazer THUY Black Satin Red Rose Underwear AGENT PROVOCATUER Silver Rope Chain stylist’s own

46

White Linen Top MATHEW AMES White Eyelet Bloomers BETSEY JOHNSON White Lace Knee Highs HUE Off White Leather Belt with Zipper CHARLOTT VASBERG Black/White Leather Oxfords STEVEN BY STEVE MADDEN Red Patent Leather Belt RENE LEZARD

pop vista

48

Grumpy Old Men

“California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.” —Don DeLillo, White Noise

By Shaun Frenté

T

onight, as on so many nights before it, I cantilever down the bougainvillea and dogshit descent into the belly of Hollywood proper, slouching from the relative Bethlehem of Hills-hushed deco to the dirty action below. Where is the real sting for a 35-yearold downwardly mobile male writer in four inch patent leather mary janes? If your calves can’t handle the 45 degree swayback shuffle, don’t even bother moving up here, dolls. No, it’s that absinthe-tinged neon liquor bottle floating between the firmament and Tinseltown that gets me every time, toggling back and forth in the nightsmog between two alleged ideals of cultural perfection being brewed in the velvetrope crucible below: Rock Star. Movie Star. It’s enough to make a decaying pretty boy without a headshot to his name retreat back to the bungalow, into a jug of spirits half the price and twice the proof of that advertised, honest. Foul Cerebus of porcelain skin and eternal youth! Who can afford to buy in when the coin of the realm is a divine pagan knowledge imparted by some gnostic splendor that anyone above age 25 can neither bear nor communi-

Illustrations by Seth Ludman

Style, the Voice, & the Art of Decaying Fabulously

cate? Just then a hummer limo barrels towards at the Roosevelt might symbolize fashion, but Vine, its vapid subwoofers electroclashing into the unapologetic revolving door slapdashery of the night: “They only want you when you’re 17; the eastside is the seedy repressed truth of bling. when you’re 21 you’re no fun.” I decry to no Lapdances aside, I’m running here to escape the one in particular, why must death-drive of fashion; Style is the answer to everystyle be so goddamned for those of you who will thing: a fresh way to approach SHALLOW? look it up, the Gresham’s a dull or dangerous thing. law of style.

To do a dull thing with style is Tonight is no night to be preferable to doing a dangeralone, dear hearts. Luckily, Bugger the Beautiful ous thing without it.”

Hollywood is a place where People, I mumble to my isolation comes at a premium so; it’s down to the half-reflected face given back to me by knocked boulevard of broken dreams I go. But instead of about toe-tops, as the last remaining grommet heading towards the throngs of thongs, the PYTs from my threadbare capri pants pops into a and VIPS, I stumble east towards Koreatown, the puddle of piss: fuck style, man! And just then, a scuzzy divery of Hollywood and Western where gossamer growl reeking of bacon grease, Wild heavenly bodies are gone to earth, where the Turkey and coconut oil finds my ear, telling me planned obsolescence of the glitterati parvenus maybe I’ve got it all wrong: a few blocks west gives way to the true sweatypalmed erosion of filthy lucre: 99 cent stores sup- “Style is very important...It’s a sense of deplant boarded up free clinics supplant ten-by-ten cency...If we have nothing left amongst our taco shacks...and so on...The miracle of these carnivorous, gluttonous, anti-human, anti-life miles is that somehow, you can manage never ways, we should have a sense of style left in all to see the same storefront twice. Rodeo Drive or the rubbish. I think style is more important than the teetering hordes praying they’ve been listed truth, endurance is more important than truth.

Style is the answer to everything: a fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it.”

Could this be some crackpot reciting from a polemical Kenneth Cole ad blasting by on a wayward bus? Which of those over-educated blowhards of the runway is slumming into the slough of my despond? The words, in fact, come from no other than writer Charles Bukowski, I shit you not. This slovenly, suicidal gin-pickle who’d rather die than put on a pair of winklepickers is telling us about style? And that it has something to do with decency?!? Not only decency, it turns out, but even human privacy...“If someone walks in with three heads on,” he tells me. You just take a glance and go back and say, “Well that’s their business...I’ll have french fries and onions. That’s it. It’s what I call style.”

He’s sporting a button-up flannel I’d be loath to host a picnic upon, he’s fifty pounds overweight and would surely give me a right hook for taking his words along this wise-ass detour, but...as a

writer, Bukowski was a poet of the downtrodden drunks, the benighted, the slatternly savants of Hollywood and Western—the very people who don’t give a damn about what label they’re wearing. Okay, maybe because they can’t afford to.

Nevertheless and because, Bukowski’s transcendental advocacy of style as something that cannot be lazily reproduced but must be LIVED boldly into existence speaks to me. Call his nihilistic bluff if you will, damn his stumble-bum prose if you must, but the man drudged and drank through hand-to-mouth decades of wage-slave poverty in the service of something he dubbed, in the last decade of his alarmingly—by East Hollywood standards, anyway—long life, STYLE. It obviously was not a case of literary style alone —or even at all—but as a way of being in the word, of survival. His comeuppance in the publishing game, his stardom, mind you, did not come well into his forties, after his dubious looks had gone to seed.

From under those folds of fleshy molasses, one crested with a defiantly un-removed stye, his eyes taunt in concert with that slack-a-day drawl the

possibility that he found in his ugliness some kind of vanity, something that They could never take away. Through all the boozing and brawling, this was a man that lived in his body, whose whole life was a course of existential endurance for its own sake, with increasing ferociousness as the 20th century sped along to evanesce us all into pure image. Well, he did live in a body: luckily for me he’s now a ghost in a fashion magazine fantasia, for at the mention of that dirty stuffed-shirt word “existentialism” his sucker punch would have knocked me clear to Vermont Ave. Okay, okay, I think, as he fades away into the night, style can be more than just being young, rich and pretty...

But does it have to be so foul and graceless?

In answer, a second voice saws its way into my ears, a frayed violin-bow of English equipoise whose sole raison d’etre can only be to hold court—even in such a shabby setting as this, and even, one imagines, if no one else could hear. Indeed, the voice warns me, “There is a vertiginous tightrope stretched between pomposity and clowning that all stylists must be prepared to walk.” The voice must fight its way through the

Grumpy Old Men: Style, the Voice, & the Art of Decaying Fabulously

pop vista

50

most frightful bouquet of lavender ascot I have ever seen, the latter billowing out from the spread of a collar so wide it might often command its wearer to step sideways, under the moon-shade of an equally grandiloquent hat-brim, cocked at an angle that throughout history has only been described as “piquant.” My second apparition is as aged as the prior, more so, but even in this edition, mercilessly re-redited by Time, there is an immediate understanding that this is a person who has been beautiful.

Quentin Crisp—if you are unfortunate enough not to know him—was indeed savagely beautiful by any standards, yet in a manner all his owning. Wearing arched eyebrows and cupid-bow lipstick, high heels and all species of frippery in a mid-century U.K. where even women held such indulgences in check, Crisp literally risked his life for his demeanor—in fact his journey to the end of style was his all-consuming vocation.

A Warholian superstar decades avant-le-lettre, Our Quentin was in the final analysis “famous for being famous,” for his own insistent witty and

extravagant persona. His deliciously wise books, including the insightful primer How to Have A Life Style, his years spent as a nude model, his one man shows, and his film appearances, (including the role of Queen Elizabeth in Sally Potter’s Orlando), were all a mere afterthought to the profession of being Quentin Crisp.

All easy to do if you’re born with The Look, I venture. But Quentin assures me that had he arrived in this world as homely as Bukowski, he would have sallied forth with the same embrace of what he called the Stylist. “Anyone can do it,” he sighs.

But it’s not what Cosmopolitan would have us believe. “Fashion is never having to decide who you are. Style is to decide who you are and being able to perpetuate it.” And perpetuate it he did. Like Bukowski, Crisp carried on for the better part of a century—ninety years exactly—and without ever having a proper career. Also like the slovenly Chuck, the viscerally fabulous Quentin surprisingly lived in the most run-down digs: one of his countlessly over-quoted aphorisms holds that cleaning is a waste of time: “After the first

four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.” The parallels between the Prince of Schlitz and the Queen of Queens begins to alarm me, in fact...

Quentin too, did not achieve any kind of greater recognition until he was well into his fifties— and once achieved, he accepted his fame with a modesty unimaginable amongst today’s precious elite. (“I am not famous: I am notorious and if I am rich it is because I have taken my wages in people.”) But never mind the damned clock of youth, this Fairy Godfather of eccentrics nods...“If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.” It seems that it’s not the end so much as the middle that’s bitter, but in the final analysis style is not about looking or even doing, but being.

With a tug at his ascot, he’s gone. The breeze of all this existential wisdom ushers me back toward home, and I feel a hell of a lot better, though I think I’ve had enough ghosts for the evening. But don’t you know, phantoms only visit in threes, and from The Western Lands to the land of Western, a third voice cozies into my ear, “Don’t

51

worry, kid, I’m just a footnote on the long lazy way up the hill.” What is it with these inimitable voices of style, I think, as the third voice fills in, “a gentle old cop making a soft arrest?” As with its predecessors, this one is a character all by itself, as fast as concrete and strangely, in its carnybarker-on-downers way, entirely entrancing.

The ectoplasmic body that comes with it is a plain-dealt, no frills business. A Brooks-Brothers beanpole poured into wingtips under a hat as narrowly brimmed as Crisp’s had been expansive, this ornery old cuss nevertheless totes with him...well, style. And while he was never celebrated as a stylist as such during his lifetime, William S. Burroughs—my final dubious guardian in this Lalaland night—was there in the thick of the 1970s Beautiful People, embraced by the Warholites, the disco kids, and the glam-punk, me-generation at large. And again: self-immolated on heroin, perpetually unemployed (albeit largely through a trust-fund), and though never as suicidal as Bukowski or Crisp, on a perpetual death-trip—this cold-blooded tur-

tle-faced novelist somehow lasted, long enough to see himself through a penniless, anonymous existence in the opium dens of 1950s Tangiers to the trendy coke-parties of the Studio 54 crowd, an “overnight celebrity” in his autumn years. “Style doesn’t come overnight, princess,” he spits out at my heels. “Do what you’re gonna do, but look...do it easy: never fails in the end.”

He can tell I’m beginning to see the light, but he goes on in his totally affected 30s gangster drawl, “How fast can you take your time, kid?” I see what you mean, Honest Bill. Look past all this mishegoss of making pretty and looking productive and you’ll find your style, after all. “You’ll find that Do-Easy can be applied to anything you do, even to the final discipline of doing nothing.” And if I am the first to say so, Bill Burroughs somehow looked good doing it. *** The night is finally still and quiet back in my studio bunker on Argyle Avenue, and I set to my $160 reconstructed Compaq typer and Nat Sherman

Hint-of-Mints. Maybe life does begin at forty— but it’s a queer kind of man who seems to discover this. A hedonistic misogynist, a flamboyant homosexual, a flamboyant misogynist homosexual—cherchez la femme in all this, I think to myself. Could it be because all of these voices of style finally endure in their utter contempt for un-earned reproduction that I’ve found myself amidst this wombless coterie? Maybe so, but we shouldn’t have any of it. With equal parts humility and vanity, I gladly inherit the growing pains of the Twentieth Century’s New Model Male, warts and all. I might just have until the Twenty Second to hammer it all out.

Shaun is a freelance pop-culturologist whose rantings can be found in encyclopedias, zines, anthologies and scribbled on the back of rave flyers.

Currently he enjoys exile as a film publicist in the special horror of Hollywood, though he feels the tug of home equally from New York City, Detroit Rock City and Black Rock City.

And down the river’s dim expanse Like some bold seer in a trance, Seeing all his own mischance— With a glassy countenance Did she look to Camelot.

And at the closing of the day She loosed the chain, and down she lay; The broad stream bore her far away, The Lady of Shalott.

—Lord Alfred Tennyson

Photographed by Ani Berberian Interview by Anya Ferring Concept by Kelly McKay Styling by Vava Make-up by Danilo Omo using Giorgio Armani Cosmetics Hair by Laura Leigh Williams Hair assistant: Laura Palmersmith Photo Assistant: Amanda Christie

Black Lace Cape by New York Couture, made for Leelee Sobieski; Natural color cotton sheeting dress with torn sleeves

by Susan Cianciolo at Ekovaruhuset.

Antique hoop skirt worn over cape courtesy of Anya Ferring.

Grey organic linen jersey dress with hand crocheted neckline by Johanna Hofring at Ekovaruhuset; Hair piece by Lint at Studio Dee Services

Swoon casts actress and native New Yorker Leelee Sobieski to fill the dramatic role of the Lady of Shalott, shot in Central Park.

Swoon: How old were you when you started working as an actress?

Leelee: Seven Swoon: And how do you feel the journey has been for you growing up as a working actress and now reaching adulthood?

Leelee: Yeah it’s really weird, I wasn’t really aware of it in a career sort of way...when I look at young actresses today they seem very serious.

I took my job seriously and treated it with respect but I didn’t have this foreboding energy that I think people today associate with child actors. At the time for me it was really something much more simple, even though I gave it my all, I just thought of it as, “Oh this is so exciting I get to skip school and go on this trip.” I wasn’t an extremely passionate child actress or anything, but I really loved the work and I worked really hard for it because I wanted to go on the adventure. It was more about the adventure of getting to leave and go be somebody else and go away, it wasn’t just, “Oh, I love acting so much and can’t wait to act.” When working on the material, I took to it the way a child would have to learn a piano concerto for a recital. But there wasn’t all this stress to get the jobs, or whatever. I look at kids today and sometimes I think, “Well, I wouldn’t want my child to do that,” but when I was growing up it wasn’t something that was so important. You know, my dad’s a painter and my mom’s a writer, so everything was a little bit more casual even though they were really involved— my mom and my dad manage me, and my dad is my acting coach.

Swoon: How did you see acting fitting into your career when you were younger? Was it something you wanted to do or was it really just like “practicing the piano?”

Leelee: Well, I knew it would be part of my life. Because, you know, I like to dream. And people that like to dream, whatever you’re dreaming at present you like to think it will go on forever. And it’s not necessarily a life goal, it’s like when you’re spending time with somebody, whether it’s a friend or somebody that you’re interested in, especially then, you often think, “What would it be like to be with this person forever?” Even if you just spend time with someone for two years, you would hope that they would be that great that you could still be friends with them when you’re eighty. And that’s the same way I feel about acting—when I was little I could see myself doing this forever, but it was always amongst other things that I wanted to do.

Swoon: Was it a nervewracking thing for you to switch gears and go to school in the middle of your career?

Leelee: Yeah, I think I like to be strange and on the other hand I also like to identify with the people around me, and I felt like I would lose touch with being who I would normally be if I went on a path that wasn’t an actress, (which could have easily happened as well), and gone to college...I just wanted to have a broader experience...and feel what my friends were going through and I also thought, “Maybe I’m the type of

slug slug slug

Natural color organic cotton gauze gown with hand carved wooden trim by Melissa Kirgan at Ekovaruhuset; Leather and horse hair harness with oversized cape byJose Duran; Perforated leather bangles and bag by Dres

Lady of Shalott, 1888, John William Waterhouse

girl that plays the girl that doesn’t go to college, but I’m also the type of girl as an actress that would play a young lawyer, or a young medical student, or you know, people that would have a history of going to college.” And that if I didn’t go to college I would be missing out on a lot of experience as an actress if I didn’t take that path.

Swoon: Did you feel like an actress going to college or did you feel like a college student in college?

Leelee: It’s interesting because I think when you’re involved in entertainment stuff it’s like being in a little society and being in college is also like being in a little society, and neither one of them are really reality, they’re both a separate kind of world...the thing I liked most about college was the kids that were there because they were smart and interesting. I made friends with people that weren’t in the entertainment industry which was nice. Most of my close friends I’ve had since elementary school...I really think that who you surround yourself with is, in a way, who you become...it’s what energy you want to have around you. And I wanted to be around smart kids that chose to study and learn. I thought that that was really an important thing to do— especially if you spend a lot of time in Los Angeles, priorities have a tendency to really shift.

Swoon: Yeah, you can see that coming through, you have a different edge than a lot of other young Hollywood starlets, a different grounding.

Leelee: Well, I think everyone thinks I’m really serious [laughing] because “I WENT TO COLLEGE.” Swoon: Do you still spend a lot of time in Central Park?

Leelee: Yeah I think just walking to the park is amazing and walking to the Reservoir also. It’s one of those really iconic New York things, walking through the park—you can always picture it on black and white celluloid. It’s probably one of the things that has remained the most stable too, that hasn’t changed as much...A peacock fell in love with me once at Central Park...I was wearing a green duffel jacket which was a great jacket because I used it to go sledding in Central Park...and this male peacock must have thought that I was a female peacock dressed in solid green...I was probably like six years old, and this male peacock fell in love with me and ran towards me and opened its feathers, and I kind of fell in love with the peacock too! So I had a love affair with a peacock when I was six...

Swoon: How have you seen New York change as you’ve grown up, what are some of the biggest things you’ve noticed?

Leelee: I just think Manhattan will always be this incredible place that is unparalleled, but at the same time when it becomes too expensive for the artist to live in the city is taken. Even though it was expensive in the past, there was still a way for the artist to survive in the city—there were

Crocheted ring with onyx by Keren Peled at Studio Dee Services; other rings Leelee’s own; Garter: gold belt

by Fornarina and onyx hair pin by Lint; Riding Boots by Sartore Italy

areas where it wasn’t all about hiding behind your sunglasses on the sidewalk—that sidewalk was reserved for selling art—and not just art that was being sold to the tourists but really good stuff too.

know, there’s this great New York women thing...and I think that really is something that’s just so special.

Swoon: And you could say you are a product of that as well.

You know what I think the most interesting thing is? New York has the best women, I really think that whenever I go somewhere else, that the brain of a woman is not valued as much as it’s valued in New York...When I come to New York, the thing that I notice is the women—I mean, the men may look cooler in New York than they look other places, but in New York I really think, “Wow, look at all these smart interesting women that are really valuing their minds and digesting information on such a daily basis.” That’s a really exciting thing and I think becoming a woman in New York is really a beautiful experience because you are more appreciated for the right reasons.

Swoon: That’s a great observation.

Leelee: It’s the hottest commodity that New York has to offer! I can’t tell you the number of men that are like, “Oh yeah, you know the women in New York are so hot...” and I think that’s so funny that they say that because I was thinking that was the symbol of L.A. I feel that the women in New York have this confidence marching through the streets—and walking through the streets you have to battle the elements, you know, or you’re on the subway, etc...and it’s just, I don’t

Leelee: Yeah. I mean in terms of, well, what is the dictionary definition of “Swoon?”

Swoon: Oh several things...we like it because it references a fashion element, when women had to wear corsets, and they would constantly be “swooning” all the time because they were restricted by this thing, and it also references the idea to fall in love with someone or to just be so taken with something that you are physically moved.

Leelee: And that’s New York, it brings one to swoon because New York is so fast-paced. When you’re actually moving around the city, and then all of a sudden you do sort of fall in love, that feeling of swooning is the creepiest thing to feel in the city, because everything is moving so fast around you and then it slows down, and then goes around you again. It’s not like swooning in the countryside, and being one with nature. Swooning in the middle of a city all of a sudden—amidst iron and steel and concrete and millions of people—these become one with you and they become like your countryside. It’s amazing.•

Hair accessory by Peace; Lily bridal wreath by Artikal Handcrafted Millinery; Dress by Ekovaruhuset; Sheer dress worn as cape by Selma Karaca; Crocheted choker with garnets worn as belt by Keren Peled; Earrings Leelee’s own; Lace-up boots by Ann Demeulemeester

Leelee.indd 61

6/13/08 11:09:14 AM

Photo by John Bechtold

JourneyOf The Artist

Throughout her four decade career as a model, musician/percussionist, and voice teacher, Victoria Berdi has maintained a persistent sense of self and an impeccable personal style. Her life’s remarkable narrative includes performances with some of the top names in music, photo shoots around the world, and a cozy midtown apartment she’s called home since 1968. Whether she’s showing off her most recent fashion finds, extolling the virtues of singers who control air properly, or dazzling her guests with war stories from the front lines of the music industry, Victoria never fails to teach, entertain, and inspire.

Photo by Gordon Munro Photo by Dick Ballarian

Victoria Photographed by Todd Crawford in her Midtown home.

Hanna

Photographed by Todd Crawford in her NOHO loft.

Hanna Eshel is an artist whose journey has spanned three continents and six decades.

Masquerade Benefit Ball 2007

At Shangri-la Studios Special thanks to Brooklyn by Hand

Fashion Show: Fashion show performers from the Nina Buisson Dance Troupe Produced by BandWagon All designs by Jose Duran Hair by Laura Leigh Williams (at Public) Make-up by Kalyani Thiruchelvam Acrobatics by Lollo Birgitte Photography: Photo booth by Jonathan Hรถkklo Event photography by Andries Boekelman, Liz Candela, Eric Brown, & Dr. Photog from Going.com Installation Art by Sarah Duke Tarot by Bruno Coviello, Elizabeth Bachner, and Lilith Dorsey Performance art by Gillan Sneed, Cammisa & Labanna of Orgy Aztec Styling Booth by Ewa Josefsson Hosted by Najwa Moses Musical Performers: Austin Donohue, Jock, Brightside, Young Lords, Stalkers, Jonathan Toubin, Sune of the Raveonettes Sponsored by V2 Energy Vodka, Tiger, Kirin, Amstel Light, Love Brigade, Fox and Fawn, Ph by Philia, and Alisha

’ s u o i c i V Sid s e h s i W t s Gho a n i d e i D d He’ This Cool: r Jacket lin Schneide Frank y b 1 0 1 g in Sew

Y

ou ever walk down the street and see someone wearing the exact same item you’re wearing? If this doesn’t make you feel like a total asshole, then you are a total asshole. For this reason alone, you should avoid buying fresh new clothes. It’s bad enough suspecting late at night in bed that you’re not as unique as you like to think you are; it’s another thing altogether to have your face rubbed in it by some poseur wearing the same played-out colorful scarf.

If you have any aspirations beyond squaredom, you have to go vintage. I mean, all the shit you think is cool in stores is ripped off from old clothes anyway. Whenever it’s time to deliver a new collection, designers dispatch armies of fashion school dropouts to Berlin squats and Vietnamese flea markets and Salvation Army stores in Mobile,

Alabama to bring back one-in-amillion gems that they painstakingly disassemble, make into patterns, and then mass-produce for people who desperately want to believe that authenticity doesn’t matter anymore. I mean, c’mon, every designer has models in sixties shit or bell bottoms or eightiesstyle silhouettes...it’d be easier to list the designers who aren’t openly derivative. And again, if you’re buying shit off the rack, you’re ideologically no different from a Nebraska soccer mom who “supports the troops” and Tivos gameshows.

You’re a square in wolf’s clothing.

I’m not saying you should be herded into a concentration camp but I am saying that any claim you think you have to the subcultural elite is null-and-void.

Of course, the problem with vintage clothes is fit. You sift through

enough bins and racks, you’ll find something that fits like a glove, but in the meantime you’ll also

T-Shirt handmade by Clint Jensen

opinion

70

jacket from the seventies that finally forced me to acknowledge the obvious but intimidating solution.

It was the Hope Diamond Though threading a sewing of vintage items, a jacket machine is like assembling a so cool that Sid Vicious’ Rube Goldberg machine, once ghost wishes he’d died in it’s threaded, sewing itself is it...the only problem was, like drawing, only with thread. it was just too fucking big. I thought back to 8th find a million other gems you have grade Home Economics class in to throw back because you aren’t Iowa, in which we sewed a pair of shaped like the Liberty Bell. I’ve bermuda shorts and a drawstring often thought that if I were mor- backpack, both of which I threw bidly obese, I’d be the most styl- into the garbage as soon as the ish morbidly obese man on the class was done. I didn’t remember planet, just by dint of all the excel- too many details from the actual lent old jeans I find with 54-inch construction, but shit, if a thirteenwaists. (Of course, this is not true. year-old could do it, how hard If I were obese, I’d wear a trash- could it be? I went to a flea market bag poncho every day, with noth- and got a sewing machine for forty ing on underneath). bucks and, as suspected, it was super fucking easy to use. Though I think it was a tattered, blood- threading a sewing machine is stained, acid-washed Levi’s jean like assembling a Rube Goldberg

machine, once it’s threaded, sewing itself is like drawing, only with thread. Lazy man’s alterations are easy: for jeans, for example, you just take them in with pins and sew along the lines, or turn the too-big item inside-out, lay your favorite pair of jeans over, trace around with a piece of chalk, and sew along the outlines. Hems and crotches take a bit of ingenuity, but overall, it’s as easy as it sounds. T-shirts and jackets are pretty much the same, only easier. Your craftsmanship won’t pass close examination from a trained eye (especially not at first), but the other 99% of the population won’t notice a thing.

Fashion bluffs aside, there’s something ideologically appealing about sewing your own clothes. For most of human history, every single thing people used, wore, ate, and lived in they also made with their bare hands.

It’s only recently that the means of difference between the cringe-inducproduction have been consolidated ing Wal-Mart jeans your mom wears in the hands of the few. Which is and the high-end denim sheathing the kind of fucked up, if you think about delectable lower regions of greasyit. Remember that stupid fucking haired Brooklyn girls is so small, so contemptible roommate you had in insubstantial, as to be nonexistent. college who We’re talking Altering your own clothes couldn’t even millimeters. doesn’t exactly make you make macaroIt’s doubly Daniel Boone, but it does make ni and cheese absurd with you a little less of a helpless because his jeans bewhimpering bedwetting conmommy had cause denim sumer, and that’s a good thing. always cooked is essentially for him? We’re all that guy now. Alter- dyed burlap (but we won’t get into ing your own clothes doesn’t exactly that here). Suffice it to say that what make you Daniel Boone, but it does the general population considers make you a little less of a helpless “style” consists of nothing more than whimpering bedwetting consumer, the minute adjustment of a handful of and that’s a good thing. measurements (usually with an eye toward whatever was popular fifteen Once you’ve sewed your way around years before). In the long run, sewing a bit, and you begin to understand your own clothes actually corrodes how clothes are conceptualized and your sense of style, as it becomes put together, you realize what a fuck- more and more difficult through the ing smokescreen most fashion is. The changing seasons to take the funda-

mental concept of aesthetic variation seriously. I suspect that in the near future I’ll be wearing the same homemade, amorphously cut, raw cotton jumpsuit every day.

Of course, the real point of all this, aside from the questionable halftriumphs of ideology, is that you’ll look cooler than everyone else on the street. You will have street cred in spades, the likes of which most can’t even dream. We’re talking way beyond people liking you or even thinking you’re cool. People will fucking hate you on sight, because your mere existence is proof of how half-hearted and disingenuous their attempts at individualism really are. It’s great!

In addition to altering his own clothes, Franklin Schneider also cuts his own hair. Tragically he remains unable to clean his own house. His interests include himself.

style file

72

#### WHO: # vas ray ri

####

ista fashion r e d n e n ### transg volutio e : rebel r T e l A y t H W of a s ron ntlines o r f hn came e o h J n i on t & t The Hi ge with a t s n o E: WHER bus ” uniform ’s short l ’s l r e e h i c d t mi a sol tfit like u o y m r “i wea wear by HOW: es nd mens a n e oundari m b o e w v g i n t i i defin redefin ng their i t WHY: c e p s e ely disr # complet ### ###

## # # # # # # # kelly mckay Photogr

aphy:

The Lunatic : at My Baclidlental

n Ac Tales of a Boy ty Poster Swoon Par

‘07 ur Winter es from o ur ct to pi d e te th ar As l st querade Bal number Swoon Mas inordinate an d ce ti o n I m my , o in fr s ur po meo contain ca band Jock se happened to ho w , ren O’Brien Darfriend Dar ht. I sent nd that nig co se made me at th played es ur of the pict him to take ren some and asked st ing o m e -Anya Ferr . laugh th ht ig ur of his n to a n o us

See, candid pictures are much better. Whatever Jim Gaffigan and conventional wisdom tell you about the unanimous popularity of cake, I actually don’t care much for it. Except for red velvet. So it must have been a nice surprise to see that the cake I’d picked up from the bakery earlier in the night was my favorite kind (Ed.’s note: Birthday cake for Kelly McKay!). Unfortunately I have no recollection of this. And, yes, I have it all over my face, but to pick up a fork I’d have had to put down my one-way ticket to the mountains.

Just to set the record straight, I’m not playing guitar with my teeth when I do this.

It’s been far too long between dentist visits to take a risk like that. I’m actually singing into my pickup, which probably no one can hear, but I suppose it looks neat. While we’re at it, my glasses are prescription, I’m not seventeen years old, and I’m not a total asshole.

Just shy.

Them Jock boys. We decided to pose as b-boys, and I was all ready to go into a headspin when the other guys misinterpreted and pulled my legs up, so I went with it, and got accused of being a prima donna. Makes for a good band picture, though.

Three increasingly slack-jawed pictures with friends. First with superstar DJ Jonathan Toubin, whose record collection must be rivaled only by his closet. Then, something in my bottom lip must taste good, with Steven (It Lives, the Judith Light) and Laura. The last one, with Dave Dirt (the Dirty Needles, ex-Jock), looking very Adam & the Ants, and unidentified lady friend, reminds me of the movie Edvard Munch, which is put together like a documentary but with actors in period dress. Every once in a while one of the actors would look at the camera and react just like someone in the 19th century seeing a video camera for the first time. That picture seems a little more dignified now, doesn’t it? I promise I’m not a mouth-breather. Really I just hate posing for pictures, so when I do I just act like an ass. Doesn’t always work in my favor, obviously.

As you can see, though, every pint of blood in my body is about to come spewing out of my ears, and Basil and David aren’t doing the best job of keeping all my weight off my neck. What started as fun soon turned dangerous, as usual, but luckily, no one was hurt. I did lose $1.63 in change, though.

Eventually, perhaps inevitably, the professional backdrop came tumbling down (I didn’t do it). This part I barely remember, and not just because I’m selectively trying to forget the cuddling and infant-esque finger clutching from Basil.

There’s a whole series of these that only get creepier.

Or cuter. No, creepier.

This, obviously, was far more interesting than my activities. See how left out I look? Be on the lookout for Animal from Stalkers’ sequel photologue soon. Something tells me all this was seconds before everyone was told to go home, and a good hour before everyone actually did go home. I think my friend Andries took a lot of these; it’s kind of fun being reminded by photo of all the retarded stuff I can do when the synapses aren’t so inclined. I can’t wait for my first neardeath experience.

to be continued...

Jock in action. From left: me, Basil Bayne, and David.

We just can’t seem to get David to put a shirt on; it’s getting embarrassing. We were relative unknowns on a bill full of knowns, but I think we performed admirably for the early crowd.

www.swoonmagazine.com