FLU by Tasia Loekito

A-aCHOO! Oh, HELLO there!

Everything in this universe is connected and influencing each other. We are not who we are now without having a role -model to look up and a dream of who are we want to be like later on. It all started from your closest person in your life and as you grow up, you choose your own influence. A rtists, musicians, writers, politicians, designers or anyone we adore can affect our point of view and style. This few pages of little publication will talk about famous people that successfully become an inFLUence virus to not only me, but also to the society. For this issue we’ll cover on Janis Joplin, Haruki Murakami and Stefan Sagmeister. Three different fields of art and huge influence for a lot of people. Stories and histories will be told in graphics and words to infect all of you with their contagious charm and savvy thoughts. Hopefully this issue’s ‘viruses’ will be a good spur for y’all. Cheers !

con tent 04

literature

music

Haruki Murakami

Janis Jolin ART Stefan Sagmeister

eyecandy

urakami was born in Kyoto, Japan 1949. Both of his parents taught Japanese literature but he himself has been heavily influenced by Western culture since childhood. These Western influenced distinguish Murakami from other Japanese writers. “My parents were always talking about Japanese literature,” he says, “and I hated it. So I read foreign literature, mostly European writers of the 19th century - Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Dickens. They were my favourite authors. Then I took up A merican paperbacks. Hardboiled detective stories. Science fiction. Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, Truman Capote. A fter I studied English, I began to read those books in English. That was quite an experience. It was like a door was opening to another world. A nd of c ou rs e when I wa s a k id I got a t ra n s i stor rad io. T here wa s mu s ic - E lv i s, t he B e ach B oys, t he B e a t les. That was exciting. A nd they became a part of my life.” Murakami’s first novel, Hear the Wind Sing — with its title taken from a Truman Capote short story and featuring Beach Boys lyrics on the back cover — would be published within a year of his revelation. That such a moment came while watching an A merican athlete play an imported game is en-

tirely in keeping with a man whose work — at least in its early stages — was not shaped by Japanese literature, but by the secondhand foreign paperbacks he read growing up near the port of Kobe, and the jazz and rock he absorbed as a student in Tokyo. Long before his selfimposed exile overseas, to avoid the crush of his celebrity in Japan, Murakami was an expatriate in his mind. “His work referenced not classic Japanese culture but pop culture, mainly from the U.S.,” says Motoyuki Shibata, a professor of A merican literature at Tokyo University who has known Murakami for years. “He could create great literature with it.” It was with A Wild Sheep Chase, his third novel, published in 1982, that Murakami began to confirm his individuality. Hallucinatory, surre alistic, full of narrative digressions and unexplained mysteries, it features gangsters, a man in a sheep costume (sheep are unknown in Japan outside Hokkaido, the north island, to which they were imported in the 19th century) and a girl whose unusually beautiful and super-sensitive ears confer extraordinary pleasures: “ She’d shown me her ears on occasion; mostly on sexual occasions. Sex with her with her ears exposed was an experience I’d never previously known. When it was raining, the smell of rain came through crystal- clear. When birds were singing, their

song was a thing of sheer clarity.” A lthough he borrowed the book’s dynamic structure from Chandler’s novels (and was amused when someone rechristened it The Big Sheep ), this was the first time he had sat down with no idea of what he was about to write, letting the story tell itself. “It’s kind of a free improvisation,” he says of the method that still serves him well. “I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be. Many people don’t be lieve me. But that’s the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’m searching for melody after melody. Sometimes once I start, I can’t stop. It’s just like spring water. It comes out so naturally, so easily.” The spontaneity and the “searching for melody” appear to relate to his interest in jazz; to him, this shows itself most clearly in the rhythms of his prose. “ Since I’ve been listening to jazz music so carefully and intensively, that rhythm is part of me. So when I’m writing my novels and stories, I always feel a rhythm. That’s essential to me.” When Haruki Murakami’s new book, 1Q84, was released in Jap anese two years ago, most of the print-run sold out in just one day - the country’s largest bookshop, Kinokuniya, sold more than one per minute. A million copies went in the first month.The book is already

on the top 20 list of online booksellers Amazon.com - hence the plans for midnight openings in the UK and across the US from New York to Seattle. “ The last time we did this was for Harry Potter,” says Miriam Robinson of Foyles, just one of the bookshops in London opening at midnight for the launch. “It’s hard to find a book that merits that kind of an event.” Classic Murakami themes are here in the new novel - love and lone liness, alternative and surreal worlds, enigmatic characters and people who seem impassive but are stirred by deep emotions. Not for the first time, questions are raised about free will and cult religion. Now Murakami is “resting”, running and swimming and playing squash and making short trips abroad with Yoko, working on translations and essays, wondering whether to stay on in Japan or to accept one of several offers from foreign universities, and searching for a certain LP, re leased only in Poland many years ago, by Stan G etz, his favourite musician. A nd if his house were burning down, which three albums, out of several thousand, would he save? “I give up. I couldn’t choose three. So I let it burn. Everything. I save the cat.”

anis Joplin was dubbed the first queen of rock ‘n’ roll, and her voice is singular. She was rough around the edges, vulnerable and charismatic, and she paved the way for countless women in rock. Mid-1960s San Francisco was a mecca for counterculture musicians. Many became megastars, including Jimi Hendrix, The Grate ful Dead and Santana, but Joplin and her female peers found many doubting they could play with the boys. Singer-songwriter Tracy Nelson says it wasn’t easy in 1966. “I don’t know how many musicians [told] me, ‘Why do you want to do this? This is no place for women. This is no business for a woman.’ You know, ‘Why not just stay home, find a man,’ “ Nelson says. Joplin was fronting a group called Big Brother and The Holding Company, almost unknown outside of San Francisco at the time. Then they played the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. Among the 1,20 0 journalists covering the festival was music critic Robert Christgau, who was then writing for Esquire magazine. “I very much remember her playing in the sunshine,” he says, “and everyone really not just excited but kind of flabbergasted at how intense it was.” Like a lot of white musicians at the time, Joplin was trying to sing like a black blues musician. Christgau says that most were not convincing. Janis, on the other hand, blew audiences away with her raw, emotional voice.

It’s not how Joplin always sounded, though. She grew up in Port A rthur, Texas, singing as a featured vocalist in the church choir. When she left for college in 1960, her models were folkies — singers like Joan Baez and Judy Colli ns. Initially, Jopli n tried to i mitate them. But the young si nger didn’t believe she could make it as a folkie, accordi ng to A lice Echols, the author of a Joplin biography called Scars of Sweet Paradise. “Janis Joplin made a calculation, and the calculation was, ‘You know what? I’m not pretty like Judy Collins or Maria Muldaur, and using that pretty voice is also not going to get me very far,’ “ she says. Joplin struggled with growing up in Texas. She was a painter, she was chubby, she had bad skin, and she wasn’t conventionally beautiful. In an appearance in 1970 on The Dick Cavett Show, she spoke bitterly about her adolescence — of her classmates who laughed her out of class, and ultimately, out of the state. As she told Cavett, singing was the only way she could express how she felt. “Playing is just about feeling,” Jop lin said. “It isn’t necessarily about misery, it isn’t about happiness. It’s just about letting yourself feel all those things you already have inside of you but are trying to push aside because they don’t make for polite conversation or something. But if you just get up there — that’s the only reason I can sing. Because I get up there and just let all those things come out.”

unrecognized protest singer of the 1960s,” she says. “No, Janis was not singing explicit protest songs. But in her voice, what people heard was somebody who was refusing the status quo.” Unfortunately, many of the artists of the ‘60s who emulated the blues also emulated the drug habits of blues musicians. In early Octo ber 1970 — just a little over three years since she hit it big — Joplin was making an album with a new band. One night, she went back to her Los A ngeles hotel room and shot up. She was found dead the next day. Tracy Nelson remembers hearing the news. “I was kind of pissed off, because she had gone beyond that,” Nelson says. “ She wa s re a l ly b e g i n n i ng to b e a re a l ly s er iou s mu sicia n a nd si nger. She wa s pla y i ng w it h re a l ly go o d mu sicia ns. T h i ngs were ju st s ou nd i ng b etter, and it was just so dumb.” That winter, Joplin’s record label posthumously released her last album, Pearl, and “Me and Bobby McG ee” topped the charts. Many critics say it was Joplin’s best album. She’d begun to take more control of her voice, and was the first woman to make it big in rock. Yet Echols says she really has no imitators. “Janis Joplin is an American original,” she says. “Nobody has come close to capturing the way that that girl sang, and I don’t think they ever will, because there is something in her voice that can’t be replicated.”

Joplin brought the voice of the outcast to San Francisco’s protest culture, says biographer Echols. “Janis in some sense was the great

oodling on the misty gallery window were Milton Glaser and Massimo Vignelli, the venerable designers of the IN Y logo and New York’s subway signs respectively. A bove them, a giant inflatable monkey clutched an “Everybody always thinks. . .” sign. The slogan ended in “. . . they are right,” emblazoned on a sign brandished by another enormous monkey inside the gallery, where thousands of bananas covered a wall. Most were still green, but some had yellowed to spell the words: “ Self- confidence produces fine results.” Dubbed “ Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far,” the exhibition and accompanying book - or wittily boxed booklets, to be precise - celebrate a sevenyear project in which Sagmeister dreamed up unorthodox ways of spelling out slogans in public places around the world. One set of letters was made by floating plast ic pipi ng i n a n A r i z ona sw i m m i ng p o ol, a not her by st ick i ng le a ve s i nto a cha i nl i n k fenc e i n B erl i n, a nd a t h i rd by t w i st i ng s ome 60,0 0 0 w i re c o a t ha ngers into shape in the Austrian city of Linz. Everything about the project - its energy, humor, ambition, ingenuity and sheer chutzpah - is typical of Sagmeister’s work. “It’s a sublime mixture of violent and subtle, gross and endearing, direct and pensive,” said Paola A ntonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern A rt in New York. A ntonelli attributes Sagmeister’s D -I-Y brio to “his punk past.” His teenage love of The Ramones’ music and Jamie Reid’s Sex Pistols graphics was undoubtedly an influence, but his zest for the impromptu began much earlier, when he was growing up in the Austrian city of Bregenz surrounded by the wooden signs painted by his grandfather, a professional sign maker. “G oing really, really back, that would be part of it,” Sagmeister recalled. “But there’s also a practical reason. My first real design job was for Alphorn, a left-wing magazine, when I was 16. We used old Letraset sheets donated by design companies, and the most popular letters - ‘e’ and ‘s’ - were always missing. Rather than making a new ‘e’ from an ‘ f’ and a ‘y’, it was easier to draw them.” A fter studying graphic design in Austria and the United States, Sagmeister worked in Vienna and

Hong Kong, before joining the New York office of his design hero, the late Tibor Kalman, in 1993. A few months later, Kalman moved to Rome, and Sagmeister stayed in New York to open a studio.

himself,” said a fellow graphic designer, Jessica Helfand. “ The only constant in Stefan’s work, other than its superior quality, is that there’s nothing constant about it.”

He improvised from the start. Asked to design business cards costing no more than $1 each, Sagmeister scrawled the contact details on dollar bills. He once made an invitation for his fashion- designer girlfriend, A nni Kuan, by spelling out the details in clothes draped on the floor, and created a lecture poster by having the details literally carved into his chest with a knife. The scars took a month to heal.

The “Everything. . .” project was spawned in 20 0 0 when Sagmeister took a year off, and considered ways of working more expressively. “I thought about be coming a filmmaker, but decided to use the language I knew - de sign,” he said. “Back in Austria there never seemed to be a difference between art and design, but in the U.S. I became very, very aware of it. As a viewer, I couldn’t care less. Work is either good, or not good. But as a doer, there’s clearly a distinction be tween the two worlds, and their different distribution systems.” He conformed to the design system in “Everything. . .”, which was shown on media paid for by clients, such as French billboards and G erman television. But the Deitch show takes Sagmeister inside the art system. “Jeffrey hopes to sell the work, but who knows?” he said cheerfully, re ferring to Jeffrey Deitch, the gallery’s owner. Though with the opening behind him, Sagmeister is now looking ahead to September, when he’ll head for Bali for another year off hoping to hatch another big idea.

The same raw humor colors his conceptual projects. For the cover of David Byrne’s “Feelings” album, Sagmeister commissioned a series of Byrne dolls with different expressions: happy, sad and angry. Recently he created an identity for the Casa da Música cultural center in Oporto, Portugal, based on a digital silhouette of the building, designed by Rem Koolhaas. It is programmed to change color and perspective, depending on what the staff members want to say. Sagmeister’s work isn’t to everyone’s taste. Graphic purists tend to prefer the formal elegance and sophisticated visual codes constructed by M/M in Paris, Graphic Thought Facility in London and Experimental Jetset in A msterdam. Sagmeister relies on instinct: deploying an eclectic repertoire of styles to elicit an emotional response, often shock or laughter. “What I’m drawn to is his uncanny ability to reinvent

04. EYECA

NDY

KAFKA ON THE SHORE

VINTAGE Inter national

Kafka on the Shore is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka.

THINGS I HAVE LEARNED IN MY LIFE SO FAR Abrams

1Q84

Box Set by VINTAGE Inter national A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of selfdiscovery, a dystopia to rival G eorge Orwell’s —1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.

JANIS JOPLIN’S RECORD CLOCK

This book began as a list designer Stefan Sagmeister made in his diary under the title Things I have learned in my life so far, which includes statements such as “Worrying solves nothing” and “ Trying to look good limits my life.” The list reveals something that is profoundly true: A lthough human beings have been pursuing happiness for countless generations, it is not so easily achieved. A nd we need constant reminders to keep us on the right path.

Authentic crafted clock from the original Janis Joplin’s vintage record disk.

RECORD EARRING Etsy Unique handmade earring for you vintage Janis Joplin lover.