Us of America magazine Issue One

Let’s Come Together

3

US $14.99 UK £10.00 CAD $23.99

The biannual journal of American culture and style Our Team

Publisher and Co-founder

David Leppan

Editor in Chief and Co-founder

Nicole Nodland

Jonathon Cooke

Kate Watson

Dani Brennan

Adam White

Borja Goyarrola

James Le Beau-Morley

Todd Larson

Editor

Head Designer

Editor

Art Director Staff Writer

Designer

Sub-Editor

Contributors Francisco Alvarado, Johnny Blueeyes, Rory Carroll, Paul Davis, Soraya Dayani, Stephen M. Dowell, Judge Laura Safer Espinoza , Claire Evans, Seth Ferranti, Larry Fink, Philip Gay, Bruce Gilden, Hermione Hoby, Kusum Lynn, Stacey Mark, Daniel Roché, Paul Rogers, Alec Soth, Jessica Weiss Special thanks to Andy Sweet Photo Legacy, Jonathan Auch, Matt Black, Clyde Butcher, Tag Christof, Calum Douglas, Brad Elterman, Lucas Foglia, Dhafir “Dada 5000” Harris, Jared Heinrich, Stan Hughes, Lisson Gallery, Ellen Sweet Moss, Deirdre O Callaghan, Oui Productions, Martin Parr, Brandon Schulman, Vishavjit Singh, Jamel Shabazz, Joseph Szabo, Twin Oaks Community, Nataša Vojnović, Skyler Wagoner Us of America is published by David Leppan

Registered address 2 Eaton Terrace, London SW1W 8EZ 3420 Sycamore Lane Plymouth, MN 55441 www.usofamerica.com Newsstand distribution

For subscriptions

Pineapple Media www.pineapple-media.com

visit www.usofamerica.com/contact facebook.com/usofamerica @usofamericamag @usofamericamag

For advertising and editorial enquiries

email us@usofamerica.com

Printed in America by Printcraft, New Brighton, MN 55112

cover: Photographer Philip Gay Model Missy Rayder

Contents 7 8 12 20 38 58 62 72 80 84 90 96 102

Editor’s Letter Flying the Flag for… Tolerance Brad Elterman: A Retrospective Larry Fink on Communes American Vision The Denim Rush The Oldest Living Tree America is Dead At Home with James Goldstein Joy & Paint: Artist Carmen Herrera Us & Them The Drum Thing Back to Front

Nico Yaryan Kendra Foster Mahsa Zargaran

110 124 142

Riot: What Nadya Tolokonnikova did next Service by Platon State-by-State: Florida

196 210

Florida Facts by Paul Davis Andy Sweet’s Photo Legacy Miami’s Gang History Agricultural Revolution Bruce Gilden’s Miami Dada 5000 Vilage People

Joseph Szabo: Eternal Youth Fashion

Benny Harlem LA Stories Philip Gay Introducing: Betsy Blueeyes

6

Editor’s Letter

America is the greatest of conundrums.

It’s a land that seems to constantly transform —a nation whose main ideals are freedom, tolerance and justice for all. Though it often feels we are far from reaching them, these ideals still leave one feeling hopeful.

Us of America is borne of this hope, with a mission to become a place to uplift the spirit of America. It’s a platform to explore the good, the bad and the ugly of our fragile country, celebrating its rich diversity, and the many talented individuals who reside here.

We hope that our journey will inspire a conversation about who we are, how far we’ve come, and what we’ve learned.

For our first issue we have worked with some incredible contributors: commissioned work from iconic photographers, spoken to artists, activists, and visionaries; and ventured into the diverse and unique landscape of Florida in the first of our regular stateby-state exploration of America.

We’d like to invite you to join this conversation on modern American life and would love to know what you think.

Nicole Nodland Editor in Chief us@usofamerica.com

Flying the Flag for TOLERANCE

He’s known as the Sikh Captain America, spreading messages of tolerance, hope and respect in a United States crippled with division. In a culture of such bipartisan distrust, Vishavjit Singh is more needed than ever. Adam White went to meet him.

8

Images by Fiona Aboud

M ODERN MARVE L Among the gathering of thoughtful moderates, angry liberals and fiery wingnuts at the Republican National Convention in mid-July was an unusual presence. The man’s placards encouraging peace, tolerance and compassion, were already off-brand inside a convention bogged down in dire proclamations about an apparently doomed nation. However it was his elaborate ensemble that truly captured the eye: dressed in a Marvel Comics leotard, action hero boots, and a sea-blue turban- the self-styled ‘Sikh Captain America’ proudly announced his intentions to “kick intolerant ass” and take names.

While it’s a kind of pop culture subversion that feels decidedly modern, it's merely the latest chapter in a decades-long journey for Vishavjit Singh, a cartoonist, activist and performance artist based in Brooklyn. Born into a family of non-practicing Sikhs, yet culturally religious, Vishavjit spent much of his youth viewing his faith as an emotional burden. On the heels of the first Iraq war and devastating anti-Sikh sentiment in his ancestral home of India, along with relentless teas-

ing in his teenage years, he wanted a change.

“I’d had enough of being stereotyped as someone who stood out,” he remembers. “I didn’t want to stand out anymore, and I didn’t want to be looked at. Being invisible was a desirable trait at the time for me.” So in his sophomore year at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he took off his turban and cut off his hair. For a while at least, Vishavjit Singh as the world knew him disappeared.

9

“Although I was born into a Sikh family, my family was not religious at all. We didn’t practice the faith, we just kind of lived it culturally. So those ten years where I cut my hair, I totally became an atheist, and through books fell in love with Buddhism.” But staying with his devoutly religious brother while in graduate school at Berkeley College in New York encouraged Vishavjit to give his faith another go. “I’m gonna try it out,” he remembers thinking. “Somehow, through listening to Sikh music, I just fell in love. I thought it sounded so beautiful, so let’s try it. So I went from being almost bald to, within a matter of three years, having very long hair.” With his faith rediscovered, Vishavjit once again donned the turban. But in a traumatic twist of fate, this religious re-awakening occurred in August 2001. A month later, the world was changed.

“9/11 was like turning on the volume,” he recounts. “For the two weeks after, I couldn’t leave my house. When I did leave, it was nearly unanimous—people on the highways giving us the fingers, these looks. Just anger and bloodshot eyes, as if I was the culprit.” He couldn’t help but see parallels between the mood of the time and India’s Sikh genocide in 1984, where thousands of Sikhs were killed in retaliatory violence following the assassination of the then prime minister Indira Gandhi, killed by her two Sikh bodyguards.

The US-born Vishavjit was living in the country with his parents at the time, but they managed to escape unharmed. “But that's kind of what it felt like,” he says. “That you just didn’t belong.”

As America came to terms with a national tragedy, artists began to explore the day and its aftermath in their work. A particular inspiration for Vishavjit was the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore. “He’d created a cartoon that responded to a lot of the hate crimes that were happening, including hate crimes against Sikhs. And that somehow had an impact [on me]. I decided that there was a power to these images, so I decided to teach myself how to draw cartoons.

And if I saw something that pissed me off, I’d draw.”

The Sikh Captain America project began as one of those very illustrations, Vishavjit drawing a turban-wearing, superhero-costumed Sikh for the New York Comic Con in 2011, demolishing racial stereotypes in the process. It was such a striking image that photographer Fiona Aboud, whose work includes the photo series Sikhs: An American Portrait, suggested he come back the following year literally dressed in the costume.

“Initially I said no, because I had body image issues. I’m a skinny guy, I’ve been teased all my life. No way was I gonna put on a skin tight leotard and have people stare at me, because I already get stared at. I’m a turban-wearing, bearded American—why would I need even more attention?”

What changed his mind were the events of August 5, 2012, when an armed white supremacist murdered six Sikhs at a Wisconsin temple before turning the gun on himself. It was a homegrown echo of the horror he had experienced in India as a child, and quickly left Vishavjit realising that tolerance, compassion and representation could no longer just be sacred ideals, but rather a modern necessity. Four years later, and the ‘Sikh Captain America’ has become a cult figure of peace, appearing across news, print media and short films, and in campaigns by Facebook and Marvel Comics.

A big part of the project’s success stems from the reconceptualising of the Captain America archetype itself. From his name to his lantern-jawed, very-Caucasian patriotism, Captain America personifies the blank, whitebread stars-and-stripes heroism that is the white-male-Republican ideal. He’s the closest thing we have to a red state superhero. So seeing a skinny Sikh-American of average height in the iconic ensemble, complete with turban, is an easy provocation. But Vishavjit has often found his cosplay emotionally beneficial. So often othered by members of the public because of his faith and ethnicity, dressing up in superhero garb has in fact helped break down numerous walls, and gotten others to open up in his presence.

He speaks of the thousands of people who have been drawn to him while dressed in his suit and embraced his message. “I knew that I had tapped into something where I could at least now temporarily create a bridge,” he says. “Mess with people’s perceptions, have them embrace me, and all the fear and anxiety goes away.”

But while there’s something almost quaint about a form of political protest being fought via inspirational posters and dress-up, it’s technology that Vishavjit feels is truly helping him kick intolerant ass. “There are people who have probably never seen somebody who looks like me, and what's happened is a lot of my images are now on people’s phones.

And images are powerful, and my hope is that if people see me dressed as Captain America with my banner, then it leaves a trace.”

With banners decorated in words of peace and signifiers of tolerant, positive, patriotic America, he hopes it can make a small difference. “In and of itself it might not be a big thing, but it’s just small drops. That’s the power of images. I’m dropping these little seeds in people's heads that they hopefully won’t ever be able to take out.”

That said, he’s already experienced political distortion of his message. In the mindset of certain sections of the right, it’s conservatives who are the victims of ‘the new intolerance’—their own beliefs dissected and criticized by liberals and a generally left-leaning media. While the majority of people he encountered at this year’s Republican National Convention responded positively, several couldn't help but split hairs. “Some people did come up and ask, ‘Well, who’s tolerant?’”

Vishavjit recalls. “There was a little bit of that taste that I got from people. That [they’re] not the ones who are intolerant—it’s the Democrats, it’s the other side.”

Somewhat inevitably, it’s a tricky perspective to navigate or even rationalize with. “I feel that we just live in two different realities.

Republicans who are supporting Donald Trump are saying this is our reality, [while]

10

Democrats don’t see it that way. And Democrats feel that [Trump supporters] are living in La La Land, and that they're all racists. So there’s a lot of stereotyping happening, which is unfortunately creating an atmosphere where we’re just not talking to each other.

We’re just coming up with labels. But I genuinely do feel that we have a lot in common beyond these labels. We want jobs, we want security—that’s just about everybody, Democrats and Republicans.”

But talk of societal divisions leads to a wider, scarier prospect for the future. A nagging sense that, regardless of the electoral result, the ever-widening gap between liberals and conservatives, exacerbated by a reactionary, sensationalist political culture, will be difficult to overcome. It’s something Vishavjit has thought about.

“Trump hasn’t created anything new,” he says. “He’s just fanned a lot of the feelings that happen under the surface. If he loses, we'll then have millions of Americans that are gonna be very upset, and we have to find ways of engaging them. We can’t just say we’re going to ignore them—I don’t see that being a great approach. But it’s gonna require a lot of work. It’ll be a very difficult next four years,

for everybody to come together on a common platform and somehow engage people. And not just say, ‘You lost, so we’re not gonna deal with you now.’”

But through his work he’s spotted aspects of the American fabric that help maintain his faith—individuals and belief systems that only empower his message of tolerance. “I travel a lot across the US and tell my story through cartoon workshops in schools, so anywhere from elementary through high school. And my takeaway from these little kids is that they're open. They’re open to differences, they’re open to cultures, they’re open to LGBTQ. They don't judge me the way adults judge me. And that gives me a lot of hope.”

He continues. “We learn our stereotypes. We learn our racism. We’re not born with those things. It’s been said by many people, but you learn to hate.”

In a culture of such division, every day bringing yet another outrageous headline, it's sometimes hard to see the wood for the trees. But hope is there—in forms of activism, in the openness of our children, and in a man dressed in red tights and a turban, calmly waving a banner of peace.

“ WE LEARN OUR STEREOTYPES. WE LEARN OUR RACISM. WE’RE NOT BORN WITH THOSE THINGS. IT’S BEEN SAID

BY MANY PEOPLE, BUT YOU LEARN TO HATE.”

www.sikhtoons.com

11

Valley Girls: Cherie Currie and twin sister Marie, and friend

12

BRAD ELTERMAN Whether it was Farrah Fawcett, Cherie Currie or Joey Ramone, it takes a special eye to capture the mood of an era in a single frame. Paul Rogers talks to the photographer who brought celebrity imagery out of the studio.

“What’s an essence of coolness?” mulled Brad Elterman. “It’s just something that comes from within… just a feeling.”

With only a borrowed camera and summer-camp darkroom classes as “credentials," the teenage Elterman plunged into the 1970s Hollywood night, seeking to immortalize that feeling. His adolescent quest for that magical celebrity snap which would propel him into pro photography became more than four decades of shaping how, where and when pictures are seen worldwide.

“I just kind of fell into something really special, and my timing seemed to be really, really good,” Elterman recalled. “That kind of period, ‘75 to 1980.”

And good it was. Elterman’s snapshotty, often black-and-white images were readily gobbled up by global magazines, becoming a planet-wide portal into the reckless glamour of the pre-publicist celebrity lifestyle. With his camera a-clicking, he captured Joey

13

Ramone loitering in a parking lot, Michael Jackson dancing with Tatum O’Neal, Phil Spector at a Magic Castle press conference, Muhammad Ali in a “sea of faces”, topless party girls, surly punkers, and Matt Dillon in the photographer’s own living room. Yes, this where-it’s-at shutterbug portrayed both the stars and satellites of fame’s addictive gravitational pull. Elterman credits a 1976 shot of Bob Dylan greeting a grinning Robert De Niro at Sunset Strip’s storied Roxy Theater, which appeared in People magazine, for putting him on the media map.

“There was a heck of a scarcity for a picture of someone like Dylan, because he never went out—he never wanted his photo taken,” Elterman said. “There was a scarcity of all these pictures. Today, it’s just in-your-face… there’s Instagram, and everybody’s pimping themselves out.”

Elterman says he “never had any sleep” back then, because taking an arresting picture

Clockwise from top left: Party in Beverly Hills (1977), Michael Jackson (1978), Brooke Shields and Gene Simmons (1978), Joey Ramone (1979)

14

was just the beginning. What set him apart from the start was an ability not just to get great photos of hot celebrities, but also to sell them.

“I started from getting my picture, developing the film, being in the darkroom, captioning the photo, stamping the photo, and then putting it in the package,” he recalled.

“I would drive off to the post office and mail the pictures to New Musical Express and Sounds in the UK, Music Life in Japan, and Bravo in Germany, and so on.”

Influenced by Ron Galella and Helmut Newton, Elterman’s intimate, immediate style was neither truly candid nor formally staged.

He largely shunned pictures of musicians performing—“that was kind of a dime a dozen”—preferring to photograph stars backstage, at clubs, at parties, and in hotels. Crucial to the insider feel of his work was that he was normally invited to be there.

Many of Elterman’s recurring subjects, like his “greatest muse” Joan Jett, became friends that he photographed on the street, eating, or just hanging out—often posed, yet in real-life situations. With rare, early-career exceptions (including much-reproduced 1978 shots of Robert Plant playing soccer in Speedos), his work was ethically and artistically unrelated to the contemporary concept of intrusive paparazzi, and Elterman bridles at any comparison.

“What I didn’t realize is [that] I was really photographing incredible icons,” he marveled. “I’m at a party at The Green House in LA with Rod Stewart… and sitting at a table was Bob Dylan, Cher, Greg Allman, Paul and Linda McCartney—all at one table. And, look, there’s Bryan Ferry! And there’s Jimmy Page!”

Magazines that ran Elterman’s photos included Rolling Stone, Creem, Hit Parader, and Melody Maker. Record labels hired him for promo shoots. He toured Japan with teen heartthrob Leif Garrett, shot Peter Frampton aboard his yacht, and, while never realizing his ambition to photograph Elvis Presley, covered the singer’s 1977 Memphis funeral.

“There was a lot of excess,” said Elterman.

“Record companies would throw these parties and spend tens of thousands of dollars, maybe even hundreds of thousands. [They’d] take over hotels—lobster and movie stars, and gorgeous groupies… Money was really no object back then.”

Some of this is chronicled in Elterman’s 2013 photo book Dog Dance. (He also published a fine-art book, Like It Was Yesterday, in 2010, and Villa Le Rêve this year.)

But as the ‘80s dawned, Elterman yawned.

Some of his favorite subjects, such as Jett’s band The Runaways, were no more, and disco was on its way out. “I loved it,” he said, “but it was very tough to sell a double-page story on a disco star.” Their replacement? Heavy metal. “I just despised it.” Furthermore, “publicists came on the scene. And they wanted to control all this imagery.”

Disillusioned, Elterman stopped taking pictures, but stayed firmly in the photo busi15

ness. With a natural marketing flair and a teeming Rolodex, in 1980 he formed one of the first LA-based photo agencies, California Features, specializing in celebrity coverage.

Consistently ahead of his time, in 1992 he co-founded pioneering digital photo agency Online USA with British photographer Paul Harris and two credit cards, transmitting pictures farther and faster in a foreshadowing of today’s breathless visual culture.

“We got this big computer and this massive scanner,” said Elterman. “I think it was, like, twenty or thirty thousand bucks. Part of the core of our business was the transmission of these pictures.”

It was the era of the O.J. Simpson murder case, when international publications were craving up-to-date LA images. Elterman literally had a waiting room in his modest canyon home for messengers queuing to have photos scanned and transmitted.

“There were always stories, O.J. or not,” he said. “Our timing was just perfect.”

Lugging an early, elephantine laptop, Elterman made what he calls “pilgrimages” to New York, trying to convert photo editors to webbased convenience. “They fought it and fought it,” he recalled. With only dial-up connections, an image would take minutes to download from Online USA’s server, yet this represented a game-changing leap from the laborious mailing of paper prints. Getty Images took note and acquired Online USA in 1999.

“It wasn’t a big enough deal to retire on, but it was enough to just kind of have some fun and travel,” Elterman explained. “And I came back [from traveling] and said, ‘Okay, what am I going to do next?’”

Inspired by the endlessly instant visual opportunities of the blossoming Internet, as well as the work of Purple magazine co-founder Olivier Zahm, Elterman resumed photography in the early aughts. Shooting both his beloved film and digital, he became an LA correspondent for Purple, while also capturing pop culture for the likes of Vice, Vogue, and Dazed & Confused. His blog (bradelterman.tumblr.com) boasts more than 300,000 followers.

Contemporary editorial aesthetics were also once again lining up with his own, Elterman said. “That overproduced ‘80s photography [and] ‘90s stuff, that’s done, that’s finished… The way I shot as when I was a kid [is] very in vogue now.”

While Elterman sees no modern equivalents to the legends he memorialized in the ‘70s, he has found charismatic, photogenic new favorites in bands like Sunflower Bean, The 1975, and The Buttertones. Now 60, he also shoots fashion, and, after attending writing and directing classes, has written a “quite autobiographical” short film.

“I’m really, really happy with the way everything kind of played out,” Elterman concluded. “I’ve come full circle, and the best part of it is, I hang out with some amazing young people, amazing young talent, and these are the people who keep me going.”

“I’m at a party at in LA with Rod Stewart… and sitting at a table was Bob Dylan, Cher, Greg Allman, Paul and Linda McCartney—all at one table.

And, look, there’s Bryan Ferry!

And there’s Jimmy Page!”

Both: Bob Dylan

16

17

18

Both: David Bowie

19

We asked photographer Larry Fink to visit the Twin Oaks Community in West Virginia. Here he gives us a rare glimpse into life on the land, through his extraordinary imagery and inspired musings.

20

Words & Photography by Larry Fink

This Must Be the Place

There is a standing joke within the community that they are Cuba. There was no evidence of missiles, nor a bay, nor were there any pigs. Cows were in plentitude, ‘30 head’ the norm. As were ‘80 to 100 head’ of people the norm within the labour force of the Twin Oaks Community—a collectivist social experiment dating back to the 1960s.

This was no loosy-goosy layabout haven for pot-smoking hippies making non-stop love. This is a highly disciplined, rule-oriented exploration of ethics based on love and sharing. It is a place which considers the weak and strong in equal degree—providing for infirmary and aging, birthing and child-caring, home schooling and beyond.

21

Coyote, an ancient hipster who has been at Twin Oaks for thirty-five years, lives in a small room with a sleeping loft. He has surrounded himself with poetic artifacts: pictures of the finest marijuana leaf, and poems by Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. With various hues and colors beaming out of his hempster-imbued eyes, he is not the most mobile, due to arthritis. But one can see, within his wizened twinkle, an imagination which goes far beyond the stars. His food is brought to him on a daily basis, along with any parcel of necessity that he may need within the mores of the community.

Brittany, a charming—if what seems to be rule-bound— woman, was given the responsibility of our initiation. For good reason, she seemed to have a judicious all-seeing overview, not necessarily given to warmth or enthusiasm.

She led us while observing our attitude. One might suspect that she was to report on our behavior to those who care about such matters within the community.

Apparently, we passed the test, for on the second and third day a smiling, rollicking chap named Ezra led us around. Ezra is a poster boy/man for the Twin Oaks Community. He and his partner have had two children there, and live what would seem to be an anxiety-free existence. He is a musician, and from time to time rolls on out of the community to play in bands. The money that he makes is given back to Twin Oaks, since it is a profit- and income-sharing enterprise. Here, all of your human needs are cared for, private rooms are on the small side, and they are placed around the site in large, well-built solar and/or wood-heated residences. These are equipped with good kitchens and comfortable couches within the collective living space. Bathrooms are well-appointed and shared by all.

This is a place where the shyest of the shy will not be intimidated by the boisterous. Where one is not in judgment of another, hugs are commonplace. A preponderance of loving gazes and a deep camaraderie hang high in the lofty air of the community’s ideals.

For those folks whose preference is to strut and carry on, you will visit with some dismay. Folks dress out of a collective clothes bin. There seems to be no feisty Saturday night regalia. Bergdorf will not be selling any “It” clothes here. Happy Hour is a subdued event after work—it displays none of the giddy sexualized hysteria of the corporate crowd.

Each member of the community is obliged to put in forty-two hours of work each week. The elders are excluded, proportionate to their capacities. The Twin Oakians have established a massive, well-organized, organically fertilized garden. Weeding this approximate ly four-acre tract of land is done daily by the people in the community.

Financially, the community sustains itself by several materialist enterprises. One is the production of handmade high-end hammocks. The next is the production of Twin Oaks tofu, pressed to be the best in the business.

Two thousand pounds are produced each day and wholesaled all over with a comfortable profit.

These collectivists are no capitalist fools. They are serious contenders in free-market enterprise. It is a group ambition that fuels them though, not a personalized one.

Personal ambition is not in evidence, if anything it is demurred. Everything is given to the all. Getting ahead is being in legion with all heads purring together like wizened cats, all fed by the warmth within the sun, all dreaming of the potent charm of the ideal moon.

22

23

24

25

26

27

“This was no loosy-goosy lay-about haven for pot-smoking hippies making love non-stop through the days with vague responsibilities. This is a highlydisciplined rule-oriented exploration of ethics based on love and sharing.�

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

“It is a group ambition that fuels them, not a personalized one. Personal ambition is not in evidence. If anything, it is demurred. Everything is given to the all.�

37

“Gone to look for America”

Photographers

Larry Fink / Jamel Shabazz / Lucas Foglia / Jared Heinrich / Matt Black / Jonathan Auch Skyler Wagoner / Brandon Schulman / Calum Douglas / Martin Parr

AMERICAN VISION 38

“Spring Haircut” Hellertown, Pennsylvania 2015

Larry Fink

Jamel Shabazz

40

“Youth and Age” Hempstead, New York 2010

“Casey and Rowdy Horse Training” Deeth, Nevada 2012

Lucas Foglia

“Rita and Cora Aiming” Tennessee 2007

Jared Heinrich

Moab, Utah 2015

“Dust storm rips off a roof” Avenal, California

Matt Black

Jonathan Auch

“ Cops attack and arrest protestors after a Troy Davis rally merged with the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street camp in Zucotti Park” New York, New York 2011

Mooresville, Indiana 2015

Skyler Wagoner

Indianapolis, Indiana 2015

“Grain Storage” Illinois 2011

Brandon Schulman

The Valley Of Fire State Park, Nevada 2016

Calum Douglas

Sedona, Arizona 2016

Martin Parr

Las Vegas, Nevada 2000

The

DENIM

Did you know that, in some parts of America, getting your hands on jeans means dicing with death? Two vintage clothing dealers tell us how far they will go to get some exceptionally old clothes — Kate Watson went to investigate

58

“Snake-bite, spider-bite, twisted ankle, broken-down car, dying of thirst, being shot.

Those are the risks,” says Dave White of Ragtop, a London-based vintage clothing outlet. But still he returns, hooking up with Brit Eaton, one of America’s ‘Denim Safari’ pioneers, to track down some seriously vintage denim.

Eaton, an American and White, a Brit, sell vintage clothing on their respective continents, and regularly meet up in America’s dustbowl on missions to unearth unique pieces of old denim for buyers across America, Europe and Japan.

RUSH

For Eaton and White, these trips mean routing off the highway and away from the beaten track. It means they are up a mountain and down a mine, nosing around country stores that haven’t seen customers for decades, and visiting ghost towns that haven’t hosted for a century. Then, along with that is the matter of convincing desert loners to let them dig through their hoarded miscellanea amassed in old cars, huts and outbuildings.

“Most of them are super-friendly,” says White. “They’ll let you sleep in their bunkhouse, and they’re brilliant. And the other

ones are super-crazy, and they’ll shoot you.

We met one guy who saw us off his property with a rattlesnake on the end of a pole.”

Old farm buildings and remote mines are hot-spots for antique denim, thanks to the textile’s design. Originally created as a strong workwear fabric, denim was the choice of miners and laborers from the nineteenth century on, its expert durability proven by its continued existence. Worn, patched, and worn again, these pieces stayed loyal to their owners year after year; when no longer wearable, they were repurposed and reused. Today, they are mined from their resting places 59

patched, frayed and threadbare—the bones of weft and warp clinging to selvage spines.

They are often rags, but the patches of wear and the careful mends are imbued with history, hinting at past tales so captivating these vintage fabrics are able to command extraordinary sums of money.

For such extraordinary sums, Eaton and White will go to extraordinary lengths. “The first mine I went down was pretty bloody dangerous,” says White. “Unusually, it was a shaft. Most of them are walk-in; this was a shaft straight down, and it had a huge ladder made of two-by-fours. Eaton went down first

“ Well, actually nobody knows where I am.

At all. In the entire world.

If something goes wrong, the chances of being rescued are, like, zero.”

“Goat” is one of the characters Dave (pictured left) encountered on their travels.

on his abseiling rope, and he said, ‘It’s all right. You should come down on the ladder.’

So I climbed into this pit with no rope or any equipment—pretty naïve, really. It’s dark, you instantly have all those movies in the back of your mind, and obviously then you’re thinking, ‘Well, actually nobody knows where I am.

At all. In the entire world. If something goes wrong, the chances of being rescued are, like, zero.’ And… that’s kind of a good buzz. Off the map, no cell reception.”

And it’s not just being off-grid. “Once Brit was abseiling into a shaft, and he didn’t really

know what was down there,” White continues.

“And I’m looking around, and I suddenly came to the conclusion that this was a mountain lion’s den, and that it was likely to return at any point. And I’m thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing?!’”

Ten years ago, The New York Times granted Eaton the moniker ‘Indiana Jeans’ in response to his unusual career choice as a so-called denim archeologist. So it is intriguing that Eaton has become a worthy adversary for incalculable danger, just like his fraternal film-twin. Eaton impresses that he does 60

plan trips carefully, checking ropes, safety kits and supplies. However, sometimes that’s not enough.

“There are the things you cannot possibly calculate happening, like, when you’re standing on solid ground in a mine that’s not solid ground,” Eaton says. “It looked like the floor but was only six inches of material, and below that there was a two-hundred-foot drop. I saw the debris and rock start to funnel down like a sand dial… I saw this little hole opening up… I was three hundred feet down in this mine. I happened to be by the last rung of the ladder, and I was able to jump and grab onto the ladder just before, ‘Whoosh!’ the whole floor gave way. Without a doubt I would have been dead.”

Such huge risks are surely worth it only for significant financial returns, right? Vintage denim remains a growth industry—and one that big brands are keen to be on board with.

In fact, Eaton and White were the subject of an episode of Red Bull’s Bullit series in 2013, and this year ‘Denim Mining’ was shown as part of Levis’ The 501 Jean: Stories of an Original documentary. Instagram and eBay are in thrall to vintage finds. And, as more discoveries are made, the market burgeons.

Vintage detail is also now vital to newer platforms. Eaton’s clients include film and TV companies who, thanks to increased commentary across social media networks, are increasingly committed to authenticity in costume design. Then, on it goes—Eaton and White share their finds with fashion houses

“ Most of them are superfriendly. They’ll let you sleep in their bunkhouse, and they’re brilliant. And the other ones are super-crazy, and they’ll shoot you.

We met one guy who saw us off his property with a rattlesnake on the end of a pole.” who cut patterns and release pieces inspired by vintage shapes and subsequently harness new buyers with antique styling.

On top of all that, we’ve heard the stories about the fifty-thousand-dollar finds too. So, is denim mining really a goldmine? Eaton is keen to quell rumours of such sales, indicating that treasures like that are seriously oncein-a-lifetime. Maybe this is because, just like prospectors of old, rumours and stories have inspired the arrival of others on a mission for their ‘denim gold,’ and the quiet Spanish towns Eaton ‘discovered’ are now being

tapped by others. Still, he is optimistic. He feels it makes a market. He tells us that vintage clothing’s reliable income is invariably from pairs of 1950s Levis in a rough condition, which sell for $500 a pair—though it is worth noting that, in mint condition, the same style will sell for $5,000.

Eaton and White will always have new places to discover and trips to plan, because these excursions are not just about the big bucks. When we catch up with Eaton, he has just returned from a trip on which he found “a rare brand… an 1880s one-pocket jean.”

He talks rapidly and excitedly, and his passion is intoxicating. “It’s addiction. It’s psychological. It’s like a disease… a positive disease. If I don’t go on the road every month, I start to jones… to need a fix. It’s not about finding that thing. It’s that moment of discovery when you get to a really awesome place—an awesome fishing ground, if you will. When you get into an old attic and see the old stuff everywhere, you know you’re going to find something. It’s like the anticipation of sex: you know something really good’s going to happen!”

White enthuses further, “Even in the globally connected world that we inhabit these 61

days, America’s so vast. There are these incredible isolated pockets. It’s the best thing in the world. It’s an adventure. It’s what motivates me to get out there. For some people, it would be to climb a mountain or go and see a rare flower. For me, searching for the denim is an excuse to be in the wilderness.”

Brit Eaton is owner of Carpe Denim, Carpedenim@wildblue.net. Dave White is owner of Ragtop Vintage, www.Ragtopvintage.com

Photography & Words by Alec Soth

The Oldest Living Tree

In pursuit of a natural legend, photographer Alec Soth found himself in small-town California, where he untangled the compelling history of its oldest living resident.

62

63

64

“I might as well paint bars on the windows of this son-of-a-bitichin’ place”

I was asked to photograph the oldest living tree in the world—a nameless legend whose location has never been revealed. The best I could get from my sources was the location of the Methuselah, the second-oldest tree. I flew from Minneapolis to Las Vegas and drove four hours north to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains of California. I followed the instructions I’d been given, but couldn’t find Methuselah. In the thin mountain air I carefully inspected every tree in proximity, but eventually gave up.

Close to the location, I found one tree that at least partly fit the description. It was one of the least impressive, and was nearly falling apart—kind of a gnarly, squatty, unsightly beast. In fact, none of the trees were particularly spectacular. One of the reasons why Bristlecone Pines survive for so long, I learned, is that they grow slowly, resistant to the harsh mountain climate.

My search futile, I made my way back to Bishop, a nearby town with a population of just under 4,000. I began thinking about the banality of aging: the impressiveness of the achievement betrayed by the un-impressiveness of the exterior. Having failed to find the oldest tree, I decided to seek out the town's oldest resident. My first stop, somewhat inevitability, was the local old folks’ home, where the woman at the front desk introduced me to Lloyd.

For over an hour, Lloyd recounted stories of selling watermelons in Alaska, catching a 500-pound fish with ham in the South Pacific, and his time in the service. I asked him what it was like to live alone in a nursing home. “It’s the shits,” he said. “I might as well paint bars on the windows of this son-of-abitchin’ place.”

I asked Lloyd if I could take him out for the day to look at the ancient bristlecone pines. “Sure,” he answered. “I’ll take my cane.

I’ll make it, I guess.” But when we got to the park, Lloyd only managed to make it about ten yards from the car. He sat on a bench while I hopelessly looked for Methuselah.

65

On the drive back into town, Lloyd wanted to show me something at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post, where some of his old war artifacts were stored. He told me he had shot a Japanese soldier in the eye. When he went back the next day to the area where he had killed this man, the locals had cut off his head. Lloyd claims they were going to cook his body. He then showed me a photograph of one of the locals holding the man’s head. As if that wasn’t gruesome enough, he also had a photograph of the man when he was alive, along with the knife used to decapitate him.

Lloyd and I went out to dinner. I asked him about his wife, who had died 18 years ago. He had been married “51 years and 4 days.” I asked him if he had ever had an affair. He hadn’t. Then he paused. “But she did.”

Ten years after his wife died, he opened a padlocked cedar box. Inside, he found hundreds of love letters and naked pictures of her and her lover. The discovery crushed him, so he burned it all. He said if she wasn’t dead, he probably would have killed her himself.

The next day I went out to view the ancient Bristlecones once more. But instead of looking for Methusalah, I simply admired the variety of these 5,000-year-old gargoyles.

Lloyd said he didn’t value life, never really did. He would be happy if he died right now.

In fact, he said he wouldn’t have minded that much if he had died as a young man. “Life… it just goes on,” he had told me. And, as the sun dipped below the Sierras, I thought about the trees enduring yet another night on the mountain.

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

Forget youth, beauty and newness: Roaming photographer Tag Christof pays his respects to the America that has been left behind.

As told to Adam White.

About five years ago, I quit a design postgrad in Chicago that I had worked like crazy to get into. On the first day of orientation, I saw my aged future self as a VP of user experience at McDonald’s and knew right then I just couldn’t go down that path. The following few months were an existential crisis: I had left a career path I had been dead sure about and had no idea what to do next.

I went home to New Mexico and borrowed an old car from my grandparents, figuring I’d hit the road and crash in a cheap motel for a night or two, clear my head, and then turn around. But I just kept going. I had traveled alone quite a bit before, but never on the road. It was exhilarating.

I avoided the interstates entirely and slept in the car at truck stops, in Waffle House parking lots, on beaches all along the Gulf Coast, and made it as far as Miami by spending money only on cheap food and gas. I pretty much survived on diner coffee and grilled cheese.

On that trip, the photos were entirely incidental. I had a crap digital camera and no skills, but I was so drawn to these un-places most Americans seem not to notice at all—especially the giant dead shopping malls. I had an old book about a defunct store chain called BEST Products, which in the 1970s and 1980s had built these incredible subversions of big box stores, and so mid-trip I decided to change course and try to find whatever remained of them. I didn’t find much, but two weeks later, I rolled back home, sunburned and filthy and transformed.

The following month, I went back to my old job in Milan, bought myself a 35mm junker, and set about trying to learn photography from scratch. I spent the next year half-starved and stayed in every night to save money for another trip. Since then, I’ve pretty much oriented my life around the time I’m able to spend on the road.

The thing about malls is that, for at least a couple of generations, they served as the main town squares for a huge portion of the country.

They were the places people hung out after school, where you went on weekends with your family, and where you learned to drive a car.

They contained the toys you dreamed about as kids, the clothes you

“I was so drawn to these un­places that most Americans seem not to notice at all”

76

needed as a teenager, and the gizmos you worked for as an adult.

That’s all just gone away in the span of a couple decades. All of their cultural weight has totally vanished, even though many still do good business.

What fascinates me the most is the context that has led to their total obsolescence: the throwaway culture in which not just objects are tossed out, but where enormous buildings and entire sections of cities are thrown away in favor of something more expedient. I don’t intend to romanticize malls, but they were clearly major centers of emotional, aesthetic and civic value that haven’t quite been replaced.

Architecturally, they were rooted in some genuine populist optimism, and I consider the typology to be one of the most interesting innovations of Modernism. Still, they were never actually public space— they were private property, something I’m reminded of every time I’m kicked out, chased away, and banned from one for taking photos.

Society should be able to do better than shopping centers as pseudo-public squares: we need common space in which we can be free to gather, protest, and linger without having to buy something.

At the outset, I was pretty tongue-in-cheek with the whole America is Dead thing, but as it gained traction, the various reactions to it became both more passionate and more severe. The imagery on the Instagram or Tumblr feeds make it pretty clear that I’m a photographer looking mostly at American space—I generally don’t intend to explicitly politicize my work, but the name carries some real emotional weight.

I regularly get messages from people who either (a) assume that I would empathize with their hateful right-wing cause or, conversely, (b) ominously accuse me of being an America-basher. They’ve stopped short of threats, but I get some colorful hate mail from a lot of people who really just miss the point.

Mostly the misunderstandings are more benign, though. Just this year, for instance, The Today Show picked up a video clip I had shot of a hotel implosion in Las Vegas, and they clearly avoided using my Instagram handle—I would imagine, to avoid offending their audience.

I thought that was really funny.

Optimism really gets at the heart of the project. I think optimism is precisely the thing that has died. America isn’t really dead, but that boundless, forward-looking, cavalier sense of hope that made it feel so exceptional and auspicious for so long is totally gone. Starting in the Reagan era, we began to trade in our social contract for an increasingly unfettered market, and the result has been a society now set up primarily to grease its own profit-making wheels, no matter the cost. Individuals can still realistically dream of striking it rich and famous, but a more general sense that society would inevitably improve now seems distant and quaint. And, for better or for worse, this is a model that has spread like wildfire around the world in differing forms for decades now. The places I photograph for America is Dead are some of the last remnants of that optimism.

americaisdead.tumblr.com

77

78

79

FU PRE TU SEN T RE Whether courtside at the Lakers or hosting parties at his own private nightclub, James Goldstein is a man of mystery. Rory Carroll visits the enigmatic millionaire at his iconic LA residence, discovering the house’s secrets and Goldstein’s intentions for its future.

80

James Goldstein pauses in the middle of the tour, hovering in a corner of a sunlit bedroom overlooking Los Angeles. He purposefully steps onto a tile of bubinga wood, and a previously invisible digital screen embedded in the wall glows into life, showing green numbers—the tile was a hidden scale. Goldstein steps off and smiles.

“I weigh all the girls that come here,” he remarks.

Maybe it was a joke. But, coming from an aging playboy whose bedside shelf is lined with portraits of him cuddling more than a dozen different women—all young enough to be his granddaughters—maybe it wasn’t.

“They are primarily girlfriends past and present,” he tells me as we continue on past his collection of ostrich and python hats and deeper into his home.

Welcome to the Sheats-Goldstein house, a unique shrine to celebrity and architecture.

Perched on a slope overlooking Beverly Hills, it was built in 1963 from a modern design by John Lautner, a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple.

In its lifetime, this uniquely sloping triangular house has been immortalized in the 1998 Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski as the lair of a pornographer and loan shark. It has also appeared in countless music videos and commercials, and was a location for fashion shoots

by Herb Ritts, Helmut Newton, and Mario Testino. When not crawling with cameras, it is a comfortably remote bachelor pad for Goldstein, an enigmatic millionaire with a passion for high fashion, basketball, and hosting star-studded parties. In fact, Rihanna held a raucous birthday celebration here last year.

The house is now poised to become a wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), to which Goldstein gifted his notso-humble abode, along with a $17 million endowment for its maintenance. “I want it to be an inspiration for good architecture in the future, to be open to designers and architects from all over the world,” he says.

Since Goldstein has never married or procreated, this was a simple decision for him.

Furthermore, he had a desire to preserve many of his personal accoutrements. These include the many portraits of himself—with and without his glamorous companions—that adorn most of the rooms. “I didn't want the house in private hands with possible changes made,” he says.

The LACMA considers the house an exceptional example of American architecture.

“Great architecture is as powerful an inspiration as any artwork,” the museum’s director, Michael Govan, said in a recent statement.

The house is, indeed, striking: high over Bev82

erly Hills, you enter the grounds via a curling drive fringed with jungle foliage, leading past a 1961 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud to a little citadel of concrete, glass and wood.

In every direction are stunning vistas of LA and, on clear days, the Pacific Ocean. “My appreciation of the view never lessens,” Goldstein says. “When I see hazy weather, it depresses me. When I see clear days and nights, it inspires me.”

A coffered concrete roof soars skywards, showcasing Lautner's gravity-defying style.

Surrounding it is a pool, a pond with koi fish, and a tropical garden containing a James Turrell Skyspace. Décor is minimalist: open spaces and clean lines blur the boundaries between interior and exterior.

When we visit, Goldstein is dressed down, belying his regular attendance at Milan, Paris and New York fashion shows. He is a friend to many designers, including Jean-Paul Gaultier, and in public wears colorful, attention-grabbing outfits, topped with one of his trademark hats. Today he is “off-duty” and sporting orange sneakers, black shorts with orange trim, a red-and-orange T-shirt, and a black cap with an orange-red design. This is his carefully coordinated outfit for tennis, which he plays most days on the infinity court he built on his roof.

Goldstein is an affable guide who invites visitors to call him Jim. However, he declines to share his age, and he is coy about how he made his fortune, alluding only to some canny investments made decades ago which have since funded a life devoted largely to pleasure.

“I see my business activities as a means of giving me independence to do what I want to do, when I want to do it,” he says. “I’ve never had a desire to be part of the Forbes 400.

Living well, enjoying life—that to me is much more important than pulling off some business deal that moves me higher up the wealthy list. I’m not a billionaire, but I have achieved the freedom—which has been my goal.”

That freedom let him turn the house into a passion project with an ambitious goal: “Perfection. I think I have attained it, for the most part. I’m a perfectionist in everything that I do.”

Goldstein purchased the house in 1972, working alongside Lautner to transform the property inch by inch. Upon Lautner’s death in 1994, Goldstein was joined by the late architect’s protege, Duncan Nicholson. “I can’t imagine it'll ever be finished,” Goldstein says. “At the moment, they’re doing a third level beneath my office and nightclub. It’ll be an enormous terrace with a lap pool and dining facilities.”

Many of the house’s existing areas are pure bachelor pad: TVs sliding down from ceilings, a remote-controlled Jacuzzi cover, a bedroom with underwater views of the pool, and his very own nightclub, suitably dubbed ‘Club James.’ Other details seem to exist purely for fun, notably a floor button in his bedroom closet that rotates a vast rail loaded with hundreds of jackets.

Settling down on a sofa, Goldstein underscores the playboy image. “I’ve been single all my life,” he says. “I made the right choice. It's kept me young. I go out with girls that are in their 20s, and I feel quite comfortable doing that. Having a family has never been a priority for me. I have no regrets. On the contrary, I look around and see married couples that are together many, many years, and I don’ t have any envy. I’m still too full of energy.”

A life dedicated to leisure and pleasure is hardly the American way, he says. “I feel very comfortable with European people. They feel there are more important things in life than making money, whereas Americans put money-making ahead of everything. Whenever I’m in Europe, I think, ‘This is where I belong.’”

Yet two things root him in the USA: one is basketball. An NBA superfan, his perpetual presence at Lakers and Clippers games has granted him superstar status as a court-side 83

touchstone.“I haven't been able to break away from this passion. Were it not for basketball, I think I’d be living in Europe.”

The second is his house. He describes it as an extension of himself—one that will live on and inspire. “I feel that LA is more a city of the future than other cities in the US, so the design of the house fits the mold. I want to encourage people to design in a modern way. I want design to move forwards, not backwards.”

Goldstein is handing his home down to a new generation, promising an environment that will continue to inspire and delight. After he is gone, the LACMA plans to add photos of the celebrities and models who spent time there, and will host events, along with giving tours. He is passionate that his home will thrive in the same spirited way it has always done.

“The house will be kept in motion,” he says. “There will be continual dynamism, so the house won’t just be something from the past. It’ll be a blend of past and future.”

Opening photo by Jake Rosenberg Other images by Tom Ferguson and Jeff Green, courtesy of LACMA

JOY &

PAINT Sixty years an artist, and then you’re the most exciting name in the industry: Contemporary painter Carmen Herrera talks to Hermione Hoby about fame’s late arrival.

Carmen Herrera, the 101-year-old Cuban-born artist, still paints daily in her Union Square loft, producing works of radiant clarity, which, since the mid-1950s, have consisted of no more than two colors. Herrera sees herself with a similarly radiant simplicity: as she told Frieze magazine in 2013, “I don’t want to be considered a Latin American painter, or a woman painter, or an old painter. I’m a painter.”

She is foremost an extraordinary painter, but she is also an extraordinary person— which being female, Latin American and centenarian all play a part in. No piece sketching Herrera's story can go without mentioning her selling her first painting at age 89, after sixty years of devoted work. It was after Agnes Gund, President Emerita of the

Museum of Modern Art, bought several works of Herrera’s in 2004 that the artist’s career suddenly bloomed. Five years later, the then-nonagenarian was declared “the hot new thing in painting.”

When I met Carrera in 2010, she pondered why it had taken her so long to claim her fame.

“You have to be in the right place at the right time, which I always managed not to be,” she offered equably. “But, at the same time, people were not ready to receive my work.”

Herrera, a contemporary of color-field artists such as her late friend Barnett Newman and such Abstract Expressionists as Willem de Kooning, suffered the sexual discrimination of the New York art world for decades.

She recalls, for example, how a female curator told her she could “paint circles around the 86

“I don’t want to be considered a Latin American painter or a woman painter or an old painter.

I’m a painter.”

men artists that I have, but I'm not going to give you a show, because you're a woman.”

However, waiting a lifetime to get your due has its advantages. “When you’re known, you want to do the same thing again to please people,” she told me in 2010. “And, as nobody wanted what I did, I was pleasing myself, and that's the answer.”

Herrera’s popularity has grown only in the last decade. Now she is enjoying her first museum retrospective at New York’s Whitney, which last year hung her work alongside Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and Jasper Johns.

This exhibition follows the success of her recent solo exhibition at New York’s Lisson Gallery, which formed the inaugural show of its new Manhattan space. The exhibit featured twenty canvases made in the last two years, 87

which bear her characteristically stark geometric shapes and the crisp, elegant lines that precisely divide color from canvas. Rather than seeming severe, these paintings transmit a luminous joy—much like their creator.

“You don't decide to be an artist,” she said.

“An artist gets inside of you. Before you know it, you're painting. Before you know it, you're an artist. You're so surprised! It's like falling in love.”

Which is something Herrera does every day. “It’s a passion,” she says. “Every morning, I get up, I have breakfast, I go to the table, and I begin drawing.”

Images courtesy of Lisson Gallery

Us & Them 90

In his book Us & Them, Paul Davis sought to find out what Brits think of Americans and what Americans think of the Brits. Here’s some of our favorites.

91

92

93

94

95

Acclaimed photographer Deirdre O Callaghan spent five years photographing drummers from around the world, among them some of the biggest names in music, along with an array of underrated legends. She called it “The Drum Thing�.

THE

DR UM Thing

97

previous page Pauli ‘The PSM’

Gorillaz / Damon Albarn.

Photographed at home, New York

The drum machine’s got a spirit in the same way that a human drummer has. The traditional thing to say would be like, you know, a human drummer has energy and it’s alive and will bring its personality and its touch and its flavour. No, the drum machine is exactly the same: it’s an instrument, and you’re programming the drum machine in the same way

Leroy ‘Horsemouth’ Wallace

Burning Spear / Dennis Brown / Bob Marley / Peter Tosh / Gregory Isaacs / Studio One session drummer.

Photographed at home, Jamaica

I still play music because, just like my friend Bob Marley, I have a dream.

We talk every day, I still hear him in my ears. I hear Bob Marley speaking to me, he say, ‘Horsemouth, go there and do it. You are there. Maybe you’re the only one left.’ It’s like a revolutionary in a battle and we’re going to be victorious.

98

that you programme your body to play the drum kit. When I play a drum machine, I really go to town on the fact that it’s an instrument that needs to be pushed to its limits in the same way a clarinet or a drum kit or whatever should be played. I think drum machines are amazing.

For me, a drummer must not be heard, he must be felt. If you can’t feel this drummer it makes no sense, I’m sorry. A lot of drummers, they mark timing, they play for the timing of the song; they don’t create. Like, timing is mathematics, right? A lot of people don’t understand that music is second nature to God. Music is a very jealous thing. If you leave it out, it leave you out too. It says, ‘That’s what you want? Okay, go’.

John ‘Jab’o’ Starks

Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland / James Brown / B.B. King. Photographed in Florida

I’ll say this much: with James, Bobby Bland or even with B.B. King, you wore a suit. You wore suits when you played. We played in New York with James; we had to wear a tux. With James, you were one of the bestdressed groups on the road. All of his uniforms for the band were tailormade. But the only thing that bothered me was those platform shoes. And let me tell you, I told

everybody I met, ‘I cannot play in these things, I can’t walk in these.

These things’ll break my ankles if I try to walk in these.’ They made you about 8 feet tall. So when I’d get onstage, I’d pull them off. I had shoes there that I could slide my feet into to play with. You walked onstage in them and, if they took pictures, you stood there with them, but so far as play in them, no man, no siree bob, I couldn’t play in them.

99

below Julie Edwards

Deap Vally. Photographed at the Deap Vally rehearsal space, California

“I like playing that’s ridiculously heavy. Someone who stays behind and makes everything so pimp – like John Bonham”

100

What is that drum thing? A drummer has none of the mascot bravado of the frontman, nor the laconic cool of the bassist—but there's still that thing. Is it sheer magnetism? Maybe it's just their stance? While their bandmates bounce around between every corner of the stage, they sit—the bashing, twirling, stamping heart of the whole enterprise.

“People focus less on the drummer in a way. They’re underrated,” says photographer Deirdre O Callaghan. “But they're the driving force behind a band, and I think that’s what drew me to doing this. Meeting all these people, it takes a certain personality to be a drummer. People are drawn more to the frontman, or the guitarist. But, for me, I find the bass player, the drummer, and the rhythm section really interesting.”

Zach Hill

The Drum Thing is O Callaghan’s tribute to that often unheralded musical element that acts as the engine to the big machine. Among the many she captured on camera are Dave Grohl of Nirvana, Neil Peart of Rush, Questlove of The Roots, Clem Burke of Blondie, Stewart Copeland of The Police, and Zach Hill of Death Grips. And that’s barely skimming the surface of the names included.

“One of the things that I wanted to cover were some of the very underrated drummers.

So someone like George Hurley from Minutemen—I just loved meeting him. What’s really interesting is that you meet someone like Chad Smith from the Chilli Peppers, or Matt Cameron from Soundgarden, or Jon Theodore from Queens of the Stone Age, and they all loved Minutemen. They were such a huge influence on other bands. So it was interesting to find this thread that developed throughout the project that linked all these people together."

Only now, with the project collated in its own photo book, is she able to see the enormous journey it took from its humble beginnings as a casual discussion over dinner back in 2011. In its early stages, she quickly made the decision to abandon shooting during otherwise innocuous backstage sound checks, realising the importance of documenting her subjects in their personal studios and in private rehearsal spaces. But even then she felt something was missing.

“When I photographed Roy Haynes very early on in the project, he was telling me so many incredible stories, so from that point on I realized I’ve got to start recording and interviewing people.”

The only hard part of the project, she says, was knowing when to stop. “Even when I had finished it, I was still kind of itching away to shoot. I’m there, trying to work out how to fit people in, but then I was just, ‘No, you need to stop.’”

Death Grips / Hella. Photographed in California

Just thinking about the universe humbles me. Thinking about space, about the ocean, about atoms – thinking about all these things inspires me. When I’m playing, my mind is clear of the things that are normally eating away at me or doing unhealthy things to my mind and my body. Playing takes me away from that. I definitely would have gone on a different path without it, one not nearly as good.

The Drum Thing is available now through Prestel Publishing.

101

From singing with D’Angelo to drumming for Hanni El Khatib, Paul Rogers talks to three solo artists about their time playing back-up, what they learned and where they are now.

BACK FRONT to

NICO YARYAN

“ There’s way less attention as a backing musician, so maybe that's liberating in some way.”

“I have a very complicated method of simplicity,” mulled singer-songwriter Nico Yaryan, relaxing at a lakeside café in LA’s balmy Echo Park. “I tend to sort of work on things for a long time, but at the same time, I try to make simple songs.”

With his scruff of beard and mop-in-themaking hair, Yaryan is your favorite barista, or that cool young professor whose lectures diverge on entertaining tangents. He is quietly assured, yet questions himself. He is laidback, but polite to a fault.

“I think that self-doubt is a good thing… it keeps me grounded,” he continued. “But it can get in the way.”

Released in June, Yaryan’s wonderfully lived-in debut album, What a Tease, is an organic, bluesy, dreamily romantic collection of uncluttered tunes delivered in a voice that has been compared to Jackson Browne and

Johnny Cash. At 33, his influences predate his existence, with nostalgic nods to classic ‘60s and ‘70s tunesmiths (Neil Young, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, John Lennon) and soul artists (Al Green, Bill Withers, Otis Redding).

Ironically, Yaryan’s route to solo expression was through an almost accidental sideman gig. Raised by hippie parents in Northern California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, he moved to nearby San Francisco when he was 20. Between dead-end retail jobs, he was more interested in making hip-hop beats and learning to produce music than actual hands-on performance. But local singer-songwriter Hanni El Khatib was searching for a drummer and recalled that Yaryan, a friend since their teens, once pounded the skins with aplomb. A borrowed drum set and a handful of shows morphed into two years of international touring.

“I had no plan to play the drums,” Yaryan recalled. "We were suddenly touring Europe, and we did a lot of amazing touring, and I was doing back-up singing for a couple of songs… and I realized I could sing!”

Yaryan began to learn rudimentary guitar from Khatib backstage, further honing his fresh skills by studying instructional YouTube videos. When time allowed between tours, he self-recorded demos of many of the songs that were eventually revisited on What a Tease.

“I realized if I could just get some chords together, if I could get to play good enough where I could sing a song that meant something, then I'm going to connect with people— and that'll be okay!” he laughed.

Yaryan’s fledgling songwriting efforts soon caught the ear of Britton Campanelli, a former Khatib tour manager who had moved on to

an A&R position at New York-based Partisan Records. Campanelli pursued Yaryan for six months before finally pinning him down to a meeting, and ultimately a contract with the label.

“I think my progress was slowed down by a definite lack of confidence, and, logistically, my pace was slow, [and] I’m a slow writer, generally,” said Yaryan. “Having someone push me in that way… was very important to me. I think I needed some sort of validation in that way.”

Yaryan’s apparent elusiveness was in fact directly tied into the inspiration behind What a Tease. While on the road with Khatib, the then-drummer had fallen for a girl in Amsterdam. To fund their ensuing long-distance relationship, he was working for weeks at a time at a remote—and “very boring”—NorCal pot farm, which allowed him almost zero contact with the outside world.

It was this bipolar chapter of dramatic separation and reunion, very literal loneliness, and ultimate togetherness that spawned most of the material for What a Tease.

“The album’s about romance, and it's also about this sort of illusion of romance,” said Yaryan, briefly distracted by a middle-aged couple sunbathing nearby in their underwear. “And the sort of delusion of romance.”

Post-Khatib—“He essentially fired me, but really I didn’t put up much of a fight”—and after a breakup with the girl in Amsterdam, the musical expressions born of these two character-shaping experiences were bound into his fledgling career.

“Not everything [on What a Tease] is about my own story,” Yaryan explained. “When I look back now and analyze some of the songs where I was maybe creating a character, or thinking I was writing about something metaphorically, I can now look at it and see that I was maybe talking about my own experience.”

How did his work with Khatib influence him? “I was more inspired by his mellower stuff, like ‘Dead Wrong,’ than his heavier rock and roll stuff when it comes to my songwriting. My song ‘You Belong to Me’ is one that shows a bit of garage-soul influence that I think shows a link from my time playing with him. It's the only song on my record that I wrote when still playing in his band. It’s a little heavier than the rest of my record.”

Recording his album in his now-native Los Angeles with producer Kevin Augunas (Cold War Kids, Nick Waterhouse), Yaryan strove to expose himself emotionally by keeping most of his songs spartan, free of sonic obstructions to—and distractions from—intended sentiments.

“I tend to connect with music most that comes from a very pure part of a person, where they're really putting themselves on the line and being vulnerable and revealing something about themselves… and that comes before just pure musical talent,” he said.

“There's definitely an intentional omission— trying to leave certain things sparse and build other songs out. Half the songs on the record I'd say are well produced… Some are very sparse.”

Drawing comparisons to fellow sidemen-turned-solo acts such as the rather woozier Diane Coffee and more overtly soulful Curtis Harding, self-taught multi-instrumentalist Yaryan is currently gracing stages with his live quartet. This setup lets him switch between guitar and keys while singing, laying the foundation for a career that seems set to be more slow-burning than flash-in-the-pan.

All the while, he intends to continue collaborating with other musicians, retaining as he does fond memories of his time with Khatib.

“We’re best friends now.”

“I intend to play with other people in the future, definitely,” said Yaryan. “There’s way less attention [as a backing musician], so maybe that's liberating in some way.”

While Yaryan is starting his solo arc relatively late in life, he embraces this as both creatively advantageous and just plain fate.

“Given my age and given my experience, I feel like I have more to draw from, and… a somewhat mature perspective,” he concluded.

“I’m happy to be doing what I'm doing now, because there’s really no other way it could be.”

Photo: Nicole Nodland

MAHSA ZARGARAN

“ If I’m a fan of the music; that’s really the only factor … I need to love the music and the people”

Fresh off her first tour as a member of Puscifer last winter, Mahsa Zargaran played a solo set at a New Year’s Eve house party in her native Los Angeles. After weeks of headlining theaters, with roadies attending her every need, the multi-instrumentalist found herself having to repeatedly fight through the celebratory crowd, laden with equipment, before she could even play a note.

“Kind of a humbling moment,” she recalled. “I kept saying, ‘You need to do shows like this. You’re paying your dues. And what you just went through with Puscifer, that’s what’s on the other side of this, hopefully.’”

A trained pianist from age five, Zargaran grew up in sanctions-impacted Iran listening mostly to classical music and bootleg European pop recordings. At her parents’ frequent music parties she would play along on piano or percussion. Always an art lover, she would roam Iran’s capital, Tehran, with friends, salvaging everyday items to craft into sculptures.

It wasn’t until her family moved to Orange County, California, when she was in her midteens that Zargaran even heard of bands like The Beatles.

At 21, she relocated to Los Angeles to study architecture but enrolled in a six-month recording program beforehand. Surrounded by like-minded creatives, she was swiftly sidetracked into music and began writing her own, mostly instrumental, songs.

“It progressed from me writing film compositions to writing songs and singing and writing lyrics in the pop structure,” she said.

Zargaran was playing numerous instruments in various local bands when she joined her friend Jonathan Bates’ Big Black Delta project, on drums, in 2010. Two years of touring with the likes of Jane’s Addiction and Gary Numan followed before she departed to focus on her electronic alter-ego, Omniflux.

“Omniflux is the project where I have complete creative control… as well as the technical side,” Zargaran explained. “Because I execute the creative visions. I produce it and record it and perform it.”

Working almost entirely alone, Zargaran/ Omniflux birthed a string of dreamily cinematic, gorgeously dark recordings and videos.

Inspired by the likes of Massive Attack, Dead Can Dance and Scott Walker, her self-described “faster version of trip-hop” has been compared to Portishead and Bat For Lashes, with stark beats and burbling basslines offset with delicately textured, breathy and distracted vocals.

“The intention’s always been to create something that is just completely honest and genuine and not trying to sit within a certain genre–or a specific anything, really,” said Zargaran.

Many of the Zargaran’s unpretentiously exotic, trance-like live performances were at off-piste LA art spaces or word-of-mouth parties. Originally appearing as a quartet with live drums and guitar, of late Omniflux is literally a one-girl band.

“We were playing venues that don’t have proper sound systems, and you’re not getting proper soundchecks, [so] it just seemed like a chaotic wall of sound,” said Zargaran. “I didn’t want to fall into a micro-managing style of conducting rehearsals.”

On the recommendation of Nine Inch Nails keyboardist Alessandro Cortini, she was invited to meet with Puscifer guitarist and 106

co-producer Mat Mitchell to discuss becoming a touring member of the band (the popular art-rock side-project of Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan).

“It was quite strange, because he had not heard me play, [and] this was the first time that he had met me,” said Zargaran. “And right there on the spot he gave me their tour laptop and said, ‘Okay, you have two months to program all these sounds.’”

Handling keyboards, guitar and vocals for Puscifer’s famously theatrical show, Zargaran twice crossed the US and then Europe, including major festival appearances.

“It taught me that you can get to that level of musicianship and have this number of fans and still not lose sight of the creative side of things and just be your natural self,” she said of the experience. “It just makes me want to work so much harder. It makes me feel like nothing’s good enough: my live show’s not good enough, my musicianship is not good enough.”

Enamored with Germany while on the road, Zargaran retreated to Berlin this summer to create Omniflux’s debut album, apprenticing for an installation artist by day and recording by night.

“I have my phases where I’m writing thirty, forty songs within a month, and then I will go a year and not write any,” she said. “I had written all these songs prior to coming to Berlin, and my goal is… to finish everything except for recording vocals, which I will do at my home studio when I get back to LA in October.”

Omniflux’s lyrics, which Zargaran says are implied by the music long before evolving into actual words, are more abstract than overtly personal.

“I’m a visual thinker, and when I’m writing… I am just playing with a synth patch, and those sounds are inspiring melodies and, in turn, inspiring songs,” she said. “There are visuals that go along with that—colors and stories that are just unfolding. So when it comes time for me to write lyrics, it’s not a separate thing.”

Passionate about multiple artistic disciplines, and having sacrificed architecture for music, Zargaran views Omniflux as much more than a solely sonic expression. “[It’s] the one platform that I get to exercise different mediums [on],” she said. “I make most of my own show clothes and do all of the graphics and the photo shoots, and some videos.”

Zargaran resumes touring with Puscifer in late October, and remains open to further such supporting roles in the future.

“It’s really nice to step outside of your own projects for a second,” she said. “I’ve learned so much touring with Big Black Delta and Puscifer, and it’s really great to step into situations of people that are ahead of you in the process. If I’m a fan of the music, that’s really the only factor. I need to love the music and the people.”

Photo: Daniel Roché

107

108

KENDRA FOSTER

“ There was a point where I was like, ‘Oh man is any of this ever going to see the light of day?’”

Kendra Foster is a warm, effusive woman palpably enthused by the very discussion of creativity. With a velvety yet assertive voice and innate sense of melody, she has been in demand as a backing singer and co-songwriter since the turn of the millennium. Yet, by her own account, most of her career has been spent “hiding in plain sight.”

“There was a point where I was like; ‘Oh, man, is any of this ever going to see the light of day?’” Foster confessed. “But then I learned to just kind of rest.”

All this changed in February, when double Grammy wins thrust the flame-haired Floridian firmly into music’s mainstream. Her well-received eponymous second solo album, released in June, confirmed Foster as an

“overnight sensation” that was a lifetime in the making.

Born and raised in Tallahassee, Foster’s early singing experiences were with her mother and in church. While attending Florida A&M University in the late 1990s, she made a radical shift of major from math and chemistry to jazz studies and commercial music.

But her schooling was interrupted in 2001 when bandleader George Clinton, impressed by her work at his Tallahassee recording studio, whisked her away to join his legendary Parliament-Funkadelic collective on the road.

Years with “P-Funk” followed, during which Foster also wrote and recorded with the likes of Armin van Buuren and Sunshine Anderson before making serious waves with her contributions to D’Angelo’s 2014 Black Messiah album. It was her background vocals and her co-authorship of eight of the chart-topping Messiah’s songs that earned Foster Grammy Awards for “Best R&B Album” and “Best R&B Song” (for “Really Love”).

“Oh, my God—[the Grammys] meant that my parents would probably stop asking me when I’m going to go back to college,” Foster recalled. “‘Cause I didn’t get any of my degrees!”

Foster refers to hiding in plain sight because, while technically a backing singer and a behind-the-scenes co-writer of lyrics and melodies, she was no stereotypical “hired hand." Indeed, she has often been front-andcenter on stage with P-Funk and D’Angelo’s band, The Vanguard.

“I really felt like, in [Parliament-Funkadelic and The Vanguard]... every member of the band had space to be their own star, even within the structure,” she explained. “With P-Funk, none of them are, like, taking a check… because you’re being part of a legacy, and you’re a really big part of it.”

Foster carried this mindset into her collaboration with D’Angelo, whom she had initially approached at a Clinton birthday party in Los Angeles in 2008. “Particularly with D’Angelo and The Vanguard… I cared for it like it was my own album,” she said.

The contrasting influences of Clinton and D’Angelo on Kendra Foster are both audible and subliminal, she said. “I think the influence I found in funk… especially in P-Funk, the way I learned it from them, [is] it’s an undiluted fusion of all the genres. And maybe even a fearlessness… [to] sing from the heart and get out and just see what happens.”

Accordingly, the album’s soul-based soup of styles floats Foster’s smoky timbre on classic R&B grooves, feisty funk basslines, and subtler jazz, hip-hop, gospel and rock vocabularies. Opener “Respect” somersaults assertive, Lauryn Hill-ish neo-soul into a jazzy cascade of a chorus, while stand-out track “Promise to Stay Here” is five minutes of delightfully supple, Rufus-era Chaka Khan worship.

Foster cites vocal stimuli vintage (Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington) and contemporary (Erykah Badu, Mary J. Blige) while also 109

referencing an eclectic palette embracing everyone from Björk, Wu-Tang Clan and Radiohead to Crosby, Stills & Nash, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell. Trumping all of these, she singles-out her late P-Funk bandmate Belita Woods as the artist most channeled on Kendra Foster.

“She has this voice,” Foster implored. “It feels like it resonates, it transcends boundaries of the earth and goes beyond and through the highest transcendence of the heavens.”

D’Angelo’s impact on Foster’s solo work ostensibly contrasts with that of Clinton’s freewheeling ethic, but ultimately the two approaches proved to be complementary in helping her to find her own voice. “He reminds me to be patient with our perfection,” she said of D’Angelo. “Like, if you’re coming up with beautiful stuff, I know we want to finish or complete—and we should; that’s a good way to feel… But he taught me to wait on that: ‘It’s okay; sometimes take a moment.’”

Foster’s first solo effort, 2003’s Myriadmorphonicbiocorpomelodicrealityshapeshifter, comprised a hodgepodge of recordings dating back to 1998. While its genesis was long-winded and long-distance, Kendra Foster is an altogether more linear expression, crafted closely with Alabama-based producer Kelvin Wooten, who also played most of the album’s instruments (except for “Just a Memory”, produced by fellow Vanguard member Jermaine Holmes).

Beginning in 2007, Foster’s rare synergy with Wooten—whom she has described as her “liver and kidneys, sonically”—blended seemingly incompatible inspirations into a coherent collection. And for Foster, singing her own songs wasn’t so different from her longtime backup roles.

“Typically, perhaps, background vocals may… have a certain precision, and maybe more of a stock sound,” she said. “But sometimes backing vocals can require a certain amount of personality or sensitivity or your own thing, too. When you’re singing lead vocals and recording, you have a certain freedom, but a person like me, if I have a vision of where I’m going melodically… I wouldn’t say it’s always free and expressive.”

Across her growing body of work, Foster’s goal has remained consistent, whether she’s singing about social injustice or revisiting her own romantic rollercoasters. “We’ve got to perfect it, so it’s this feel-good thing,” she insisted. “So that it feels good even if it’s a deep message.”

While she feels destined to continue perfecting her solo “thing”, Foster has far from turned her back on band life. “It’s time”, she concluded. “I’m ready for it. I’m ready to be that [solo artist], and also still loving being a part of continuing to lift up and maintain the legacy of Parliament-Funkadelic and… D’Angelo and The Vanguard.”

Photo: Stacey Mark Hair: Wesley O’Meara at Honey Artists Makeup: Patrycja Cichon at Honey Artists

RIOT Photography by Nicole Nodland 110

Where do you go next after spending two years in a Russian penal colony? For Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova, it involves running down Venice Boardwalk in a balaclava.

Claire Evans tries to catch up with her.

111

112

113

114

T

he first time I saw Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was when everyone else did, in 2012, sitting in a cube of bulletproof glass in a Moscow courtroom.

She was with her comrades, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina; the three were members of a punk band called Pussy Riot. To this day, Pussy Riot has never toured, played in a club, or recorded an album, but their song, “Punk Prayer—Mother of God, Chase Putin Away,” performed on the apse of a Moscow cathedral, landed them there, behind the glass, in front of cameras, on the world stage.

The Pussy Riot trial was a jolt of color and madness.

Although they faced charges of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” Nadya, Yekaterina and Masha were unafraid, petulant, magnificent. They looked like Manson girls—feral and fearless—Nadya, most of all.

She faced the trial with a look of steely condescension only young women can truly master, as withering on the schoolyard as in the courtroom. In photographs, she clenched her fist and set her jaw, or else smirked, unimpressed by the full might of Putin’s juridical process, clearly the bravest, coolest girl in the world.

I promised myself I wouldn’t mention Nadya’s hair, but it’s too important. During the trial it was blown-out and curled under in the chin-length bob of queen bees everywhere. It was razor- straight, shampoocommercial shiny. How could someone with such good hair be a political dissident? How could hair like that even be possible, when she and Maria and Yekaterina were being shuttled from a holding cell to the courtroom every day, writing their remarkable closing statements with pencil nubbins on scraps of paper in the van, already wards of the state? Every follicle was a further act of defiance, a refusal to be seen on anything but her own terms.

At the labor camp in Mordovia where they eventually put her, Nadya wore her hair tied back in a kerchief.

When you’re working brutal hours at ancient sewing

machines making police uniforms, you don’t want to get your hair in your eyes. Nadya was so horrified by working conditions in the Soviet-era gulag that she went on a hunger strike and was hospitalized. It seemed for a time that the system would swallow her alive, but Nadya is a bitter pill. By the time she had been digested, end to end, she knew the bowels of Russian crime and punishment from the inside-out, and came out with a vengeance, focused on what she had experienced most vividly: the penal system and the press.

Within a year of their release—an amnesty granted months before the Sochi Olympics—Nadya and Masha founded a prisoner’s rights NGO, Zona Prava, and a media company, Nova Zona, which reports from the gap created by government restrictions on independent media in Russia. Building new institutions, as Nadya has told most anybody listening over the last two years, is the only way to subvert the old ones.

As the only unmasked members of the band, Nadya and Masha have become political celebrities, fêted (and funded) by the Western liberal elite, palling with everyone from Slavoj Žižek to Banksy.

They crossed the world like “crazy horses,” starred in an episode of House of Cards icing a Putin stand-in, and have released music videos for songs about Eric Garner (“I Can’t Breathe”) and Russia’s embattled general prosecutor Yuri Chaika (“Chaika”). Nadya endorsed Bernie Sanders and spoke at the International Students For Liberty Conference wearing anti-Trump boxer shorts under her dress.

The second time I see Nadya, she rolls up in an Uber from Hollywood wearing yellow heart- shaped sunglasses and a kid’s raccoon cap, carrying her things in a backpack. She’s feeling herself. She has this husky voice and a way of being in her body that’s totally arresting. At some point during our interview, which meanders the more iced coffee we drink, we’re discussing the ethics of punk rock, and she pulls out her phone to show me a picture she had posted to Instagram that week. The photos is of her own middle and pointer fingers, dripping wet, above a tangle of sheets and her bare knees. “That’s DIY,” she says gleefully. That’s DIY.

115

116

117

118

119

122

Two years in a Siberian work camp will do that to you. It’s not that, before jail, she was too punk for pleasure. She just didn’t have time for it. Pussy Riot may have appeared to the West in a fever dream in 2012, but Nadya had been tossing the proverbial tampon for years. In the mid-oughts, as a member of the street-art group Voina, she fucked her husband Pyotr Verzilov in Moscow’s Timiryazev State Museum of Biology for an anti-Medvedev protest piece called “Fuck for the Baby Bear Heir!” But, like throwing live cats into a McDonalds or kissing cops on the street, sex was an action among many—a means to a political end.

“I didn’t care about sex at all before prison,” she tells me. “I was, like, ‘I will care just about revolution.

I will rebel against sex—I will not have it.’” Sex was “too Freudy,” and the pleasures of life all “too bourgeois”. She could live on rice alone, and she could squat, as she did in the Voina years, in an automobile garage.

“Nerdy activist,” she explains. “Pretending to be a revolutionary.”

“So you’re not pretending anymore?” I ask.

“I am revolutionary,” she answers. “Maybe it’s the only one identity which I could keep. I don’t pretend.

I am.”

When Nadya is on a particularly good riff, she has a tendency to pick a focal point about thirty degrees off from your brow and hold there, gazing into the middle distance as she talks. It’s tempting to try and meet her eyes, but what she really seems to want is to be beheld, in three-quarter profile, like a portrait etched on money. I don’t pretend; I am. Print it.

She has learned to enjoy things. Food isn’t only a vector for protest. She eats, and enjoys it. She drinks wine. Sex isn’t bourgeois; it’s an art form. She is less bound by language, by the dogmas of punk rock.

Instead, she lives ever-questioning herself and her collaborators, talking sharing experiences. That’s something she learned in jail, too—how to talk openly with people different than herself. Her politics don’t starve her life. Instead, her life is enriched by her politics.

When I ask her if sometimes she doesn’t just want to write a song about nothing, about love, she says yes, all the time, but her love is political, too, and “once you open this box you will never close it.” She’s free now, but prison is what liberated her.

Siberia, Nadya tells me, is shaped like a dick.

The balls graze the steppes of Mongolia, and the head reaches above the Arctic circle—which is where she grew up, in Norilsk, an industrial town that would be unlivable were it not for the rich stores of copper, nickel and cobalt beneath the permafrost. The wealth of the mines account for 2 percent of Russia’s GDP, but the spoils are hard-won. Temperatures in Norilsk drop below 25 degrees Celsius during the long midnight, between November and January, when the sun never hovers above the horizon. “The whole idea of this city is to bring people to the place where people are not supposed to live,” she explains, “and make them pollute the Earth.” That Nadya was hardy enough to survive the gulag is due in no small part to her upbringing here, in one of the most brutal cities in the world. No small irony that Norilsk was built on prison labor; it was a center of the Soviet-era gulags.

In the early 0th century, 16,806 prisoners—mostly political—died of cold and starvation developing the mines. After the death of Stalin, the gulag prisoners of 123

Norilsk went on strike, organizing a peaceful “uprising of the spirit” that would last longer than any other attempt to overthrow the gulag system. In the long shadow of this history, Nadya read Aristotle and dreamt of the city.

Norilsk “was the reason I became political in the first place,” she says. Those working the mines today face unusually high rates of cancer, lung disease, and depression; they must retire early. The natural environment, within a 20-mile radius of the industrial operations, is dead. As a teenager, Nadya wanted to write an article about it all. The local paper had published her previous stories—but this time they refused. When told her they wouldn’t publish anything on the subject, Nadya awoke to the Russian media censorship she fights tooth-and-nail even now. At eighteen, she escaped to Moscow to study philosophy at Moscow State University, where she developed the brew of Russian actionist art, riot grrrl, and old-school leftist radicalism that would grow more potent with each Pussy Riot performance. She never went back.

Pussy Riot’s first music video, in 2011, was for a song called “Release the Cobblestones”. To film it, they staged a series of two dozen actions in the Moscow subways. For each, they would climb scaffolds or clamber to the top trolley cars, and perform their song while tearing apart pillows and showering the feathers onto dumbfounded passers-by. In the grey haze of snow and the cold fluorescent light of the underground, their colorful tights and balaclava were otherworldly. Even though they were arrested after almost every action, they told nobody.

“Our idea was to be superheroes who will never be caught,” Nadya explains. “It was so disappointing when they put us in jail—not because we lost our personal freedom, but because we lost this myth.”

Pussy Riot was not untouchable. Like anybody in Putin’s Russia, they could be dominated, intimidated, even disappeared. They could be paraded in front of the world in a show trial and shunted off to the gulag.

But what nobody anticipated was their fortitude. Even though Nadya wears the scars of Mordovia on her body, she is as impermeable as the Siberian winters that forged her strength. And the myth of Pussy Riot’s indomitability is hardly lost. They are the girls with good hair and wild hearts who faced Putin and won.

I’ll take that over a superhero any day.

Photography

by Platon

124

Words by Adam White

In the early years of the Iraq war, a specific narrative dominated mainstream discourse.

The military personnel tasked with ensuring American victory in Iraq were not individual men and women, but instead a vast collective.

Think a GOP Megatron—a sentient collective of assembled freedom fighters, all bombarding an apparently corrupt country with hope.

This collective was spoken of a lot. They peppered the speeches of Bush-era politicians and made occasional visual cameos on daytime TV, typically around the holidays. Broadcasting live from Baghdad during humaninterest segments sandwiched in-between lighter fare, they wished their families well, and spoke of bringing progress to a nation.

We rarely knew their names, their hometowns, or the people they had left behind. But we were often told what they were fighting for, and the morals and values they were representing overseas. We heard their voices through proxies, or splashed across the backs of pickup trucks via catchy slogans, but we had little access behind the curtain. These were men and women simultaneously everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Highlighting the thousands left dead in the Iraq war would “politicize” the conflict, providing greater ammunition to the everincreasing antiwar sentiment in the country.

Denied voices even in death, their own stories were left untold—collateral damage in the midst of unfolding chaos.

Platon is one of the 21st century’s leading portrait photographers, and his newest project, titled Service, is his response to war.

Granted unprecedented access to military bases and training facilities, as well as facetime with hundreds of Iraq veterans, Platon highlights the internal struggles of those in the middle and on the precipices of conflict— how it shapes, strengthens and forever alters those with whom it comes in contact.

Through the work, US soldiers become actual human beings, individuals with close bonds and relationships, existing outside of war and the narratives in which they've been framed. Service put faces to names, contexts to stories, and nuance to modern history.

125

left

Exposed brass blanks with artificial blood used during training at the NTC. Fort Irwin, 2008

Spc. Douglas Jury days before deployment to Iraq. Three weeks before deployment, soldiers are sent to the US Army’s National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin in California. About five thousand soldiers pass through the NTC each month. Predeployment paperwork can include registering for life insurance coverage, drafting or updating a will, and assigning power of attorney.

Fort Irwin, 2008

126

Vincent Butto plays a soldier who has suffered a severe injury at the NTC. Butto, a civilian with no military experience, is one of the real-life double amputees playing a victim of an IED. Fort Irwin, 2008

127

Seaman Jeremiah Lineberry just after lowering the flag aboard the USS San Antonio, as he prepares for his first deployment.

Norfolk, 2008

128

Sgt. Tim Johannsen and his wife, Jacquelyne Kay, in a rehabilitation unit at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Johannsen spent two-and-a-half years at Walter Reed after losing both of his legs on his second tour in Iraq.

2008

129

No one understands the adage “hurry up and wait� like soldiers. Forced to run from drill to drill, soldiers often find themselves biding their time between exercises.

The average Army recruit is under 21-years-old.

Fort Benning, 2008

130

131

Sgt. Matthis Chiroux, honorably discharged in 2007 after five years of service, refused to be redeployed to Iraq.

Chiroux is a members of Iraqi Veterans Against the War, a controversial advocacy group.

Philadelphia, 2008

132

Spc. Patrick Quinn, of the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, wears night-vision goggles. First made available to the US Army in 1959, night vision goggles form images by detecting discrepancies in temperature between objects.

Fort Irwin, 2008

133

Vincent Butto plays a soldier who has suffered a severe injury at the NTC. Butto, a civilian with no military experience, is one of the real-life double amputees playing a victim of an IED. Fort Irwin, 2008

Jessica Gray was widowed at age 26 by her husband, Staff Sgt. Yance Gray, who was killed in Baghdad in 2007 while serving with the 82nd Airborne Division. He was also survived by a five-month old daughter, Ava Madison Gray.

North Carolina, 2008

135

136

Alu Banarji, a role player and cultural affairs consultant, plays a civilian in Medina Wasl, the Iraqi village inside the NTC. Soldiers are trained in cultural sensitivity, such as techniques to search women wearing abayas or burqas without touching them.

FortIrwin, 2008

Medina Wasl is a mock Iraqi village at the Fort Irwin NTC. These soldiers, from the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division, are performing an exercise known as Medical Trauma Lane.

Fort Irwin, 2008

137

Using special effects, this Hummer explodes into flames multiple times a day in Medina Wasl, a mock Iraqi town at the NTC. Fort Irwin, 2008

138

139

Jakob McKay, the son of Sgt. John McKay, home after four tours of duty in Iraq, at the Capdepon’s wedding.

Camp Lejeune, August 16 2008

140

141

From the southern tip of mainland America to our northernmost cities, in every issue we will take a closer look at each of our fifty states, relating the stories we discover on our journey.

FLORI WELCOME TO

142

148 Florida Facts 152 Paradise Lost 160 Miami Keys 164 Agricultural Revolution 168 Bruce Gilden’s Miami 186 Dada’s Home 190 Vilage People

RIDA

144

145

Photograph by Clyde Butcher

We commence in Florida, which has faced a glut of devastating events throughout the year.

This section aims to move away from the recent troubling stories that have dominated world media in that state, in order to celebrate its people, share its inspirational tales, and tap into the unusual.

We look back on the last few decades, from SoBe’s evolution from seventies retirement bolthole to gangland mecca.

We hear from social revolutionaries from city to upstate, from those tackling fair treatment for migrant workers to those literally fighting their way out of poverty. As for those modern-day sun-seeking retirees, we spend time with them at The Villages, America’s fastest-growing city.

First, writer and Florida resident Jessica Weiss introduces the state.

146

This

long, swampy peninsula is many things to many people: a paradise, a safe haven, an entry point, an end stop.

Throughout most of its history, the land we know as Florida was underwater, submerged in a shallow pool. Fish skeletons, corals, and shellfish slowly amassed to create a layer of porous limestone, on which the state now resides.

Until the turn of the twentieth century, Florida’s population was sparse. But then, a railroad system and the promise of freshly drained swampland lured early homesteaders. After World War II, the state boomed, thanks to air conditioning and highways, which encouraged hopeful northerners to head south and claim a new home in the land where it never snows. Within decades, Florida evolved again, playing host to Cubans fleeing Castro’s Communist revolution, with Latin Americans following soon after.

The result is a dizzying mix of people, most not native to Florida. Today, retirees, Native Americans, immigrants, opportunists, and rednecks all call Florida home, along with religious zealots and ex-cons. There has always been a salacious and lavish lure to Florida, too, whether for cash, fame, or the scantily clad.

This blend, of course, makes for entertaining news— and Florida produces more of that than anywhere else in the country. This is partially due to the state’s shockingly lax open-records laws, which give the public access to detailed police files. Thus, Florida is the butt of jokes and a factory for the most bizarre news headlines imaginable.

But the state is in trouble. In the face of climate change, the vast, powerful swamp from which Florida rose is threatening to swallow it once again. Sea-level rise is already being felt in South Florida, where the streets are known to flood on sunny days. Obama’s recent visit to Miami heard him exclaim about fish swimming down the street. And so, in praise of a place that is yielding to its brackish origins, we dive into some of Florida’s lesserknown stories.

147

CAPITAL

STATE ABBREVIATION

TALLAHASSEE FL

GOVERNOR

RICK SCOTT, R (to Jan 2019)

SENATORS

MARCO RUBIO, R (to Jan 2017) BILL NELSON, D (to Jan 2019)

U.S. REPRESENTATIVES ORGANIZED AS A TERRITORY

27 MARCH 30, 1821

FLORIDAFACTS ENTERED UNION (RANK)

MARCH 3, 1845 (27th)

MOTTO

IN GOD WE TRUST (1868)

STATE SYMBOLS

Flower, ORANGE BLOSSOM Bird, MOCKINGBIRD Song, “SUWANNEE RIVER” (1935)

NICKNAME ORIGIN OF NAME

SUNSHINE STATE (1970) From the Spanish Pascua Florida, meaning ‘feast of flowers’

POPULATION

19,893,297

Paul Davis draws some of Florida’s strangest facts, laws and oddities.

148

Florida is the largest producer of citrus in the US and the second largest producer in the world. Here, you are never more than 60 miles from the ocean. And if you’re not on the beach, Miami is home to the world’s first ATM specifically for rollerbladers.

149

Clearwater, Florida has the most lightning strikes per capita in the country. And Florida has more golf courses than any other state.

So, if you’re golfing in Clearwater, beware.

150

Don’t even think about skateboarding without a license in Florida, because it’s illegal. While we’re at it, you probably shouldn’t sing in public while wearing a bathing suit, either. Believe it or no, that’s technically illegal too.

151

Aging art deco hotels bathed in fading light. Retirees don party hats on New Year’s Eve. Kosher delis and temples set against impossibly turquoise waters and indigo skies. One photographer’s recently rediscovered photographs intimately depict a long-forgotten incarnation of Miami Beach. Jessica Weiss tells us more...

Paradise Lost

Photography by Andy Sweet

154

155

156

“Andy knew there was something special to record there, something that would soon disappear.”

Miami’s South Beach is known for glamour, glitz, and overindulgence. But, forty years ago, it was the unfashionable home of a mostly aging population living off Social Security payments in a sun-drenched paradise.

In the less than two square miles below 21st Street, seventy-five percent of the neighborhood’s 42,000-odd residents were Jewish.

Most had escaped the cold of the northeast to make a home on the narrow barrier island between the sea and Biscayne Bay. Others came from Eastern Europe, as evidenced by the Yiddish and Russian that trilled on the streets, as well as the sight of tanned arms tattooed solemnly with numbers.

And yet they had endless reasons to celebrate. They reveled at bar mitzvahs and bocce games. Sunbathers, lathered up with zinc and baby oil, lounged in folding chairs blanketing the beach and the grass of Lummus Park.

Andy Sweet was a young photographer who came of age in that time and place, and yet found it fascinating all the same. A joking and popular kid, he could have spent his teens and twenties surrounded by girls or friends. But he preferred the gray-haired women with whom his mother played cards and gossiped.

After finishing graduate school in Colorado, Andy returned to South Beach with an affirmed admiration for his hometown, ultimately adopting it as his favorite photography subject. He and his best friend and fellow photographer Gary Monroe embarked on an

ambitious ten-year photo project to document that unique Miami Beach life before it faded into memory.

Still in his twenties, Andy began to amass an impressive portfolio of photography.

The warm faces of his photo subjects suggest the ease and familiarity with which he wandered the streets, beach and parties with his Hasselblad camera, knowing just where to look and what to say. Standing before his subjects, they seemed to relax and succumb— to grin. Even his captures of the fading Art Deco architecture told a story of vibrant aliveness. Andy knew there was something special to record there, something that would soon disappear.

By the early 1980s, Miami was changing.

Colombia’s Medellin Cartel had made the city the headquarters of a $20 billion-a-year cocaine business, provoking a steady stream of bloody shootouts and deals gone wrong in the streets. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled from the port of Mariel in Cuba and landed on Miami’s shores.

As Sweet felt his neighborhood transform for the worse, he made plans to install a burglar alarm at home, perhaps to protect his cameras. But it couldn’t save him. On October 17, 1982, the same day the alarm was installed, the burgeoning 28-year-old photographer was stabbed to death in his South Beach apartment. It was a tragedy that shook a tight-knit Miami Beach community to its core and af-

157

firmed a sense of paradise lost. Then, as his family struggled to heal from his murder, a storage company lost most of Andy’s original color negatives in the late ’90s.

It wasn’t until 2006 that Andy’s older sister, Ellen Sweet Moss, learned that thousands of her brother’s snapshots still existed. One afternoon, her husband, Stan, was organizing the family’s storage closet in downtown Miami when he noticed a shelf of small gray boxes. He pulled one down and opened it, to find a set of square photographs—faded and worn, but unmistakably Andy’s.

On that shelf, Stan had found 1,600 eightby-eight color test prints Andy had made in preparation for larger final prints. That day was the start of a decade of work to refurbish a portion of Andy’s photo collection. Stan and Ellen digitized all of the prints and began to catalogue and organize them. Then Stan, an artist himself, got to work restoring each photo’s color palette, in a painstakingly manual process.

Almost a decade later, Stan and Ellen Moss completed close to 500 of the photographs, and created the Andy Sweet Photo Legacy to promote the photographer’s work. They have sold prints of Andy’s photos, and a gallery show of them is in the works.

The South Beach that Andy Sweet once feared might change most certainly has.

Would he even recognize it now? His photos validate our nostalgia, and tempt our whimsy.

158

Ellen Sweet established the Andy Sweet Photo Legacy, which supports, promotes and educates the public about the work Andy created.

For more information, visit www.andysweetphotolegacy.com Jessica Weiss previously wrote about Andy Sweet for the Miami New Times.

159

The acclaimed Netflix series Narcos dramatises the activities of notorious Colombian drug smuggler Pablo Escobar, whose gun­slinging enforcers, the Cocaine Cowboys, brought terror to Miami throughout the 1970s and ’80s. However, the decades that followed were increasingly bloody and violent. Seth Ferranti talks to three men, some convicted of drug and gang crime, about their experiences in ’90s Miami and views on gangs today.

Miami Keys

“The Colombians and Cocaine Cowboys really set the tone in Miami,” “T” tells me. Tall and slim with dreadlocks and gold fronts on his teeth, T is a Miami native who has done time in federal prison for a cocaine conspiracy and is now living back in the city. “They were the first gang that ratcheted up the level of violence. It was like, ‘What can top this?!’ It kind of started a free-for-all, for real. I mean, if they’ll shoot it out at a mall, then I guess it can pop off anywhere, right?”

T is referring to the infamous Dadeland Mall murders in 1979, when a shootout between two Colombian traffickers took place in broad daylight in a busy shopping precinct. What followed was a series of brutal murders and drive­-by motorcycle assassinations as drug prohibition violence erupted on the streets.

As the Colombians raised the bar on brutality, the local kids took note. “The gangs were the best thing going,” T says. “For the kids from the ghetto it was the gangster American Dream. The careers these drug dealers chose led to two outcomes: death or jail. But they chose to lead what they called ‘the good life.’

As a result, mid­-‘80s Miami saw the drug game infiltrated by the locals: the poverty­stricken inner­-city youth of Black, Cuban, Haitian and Jamaican heritage. “Growing up, I realized who the hustlers and the killers were,” T continues. “Dudes were out in the streets, on that Cocaine Cowboys-type shit.

They would pop off. Wasn’t nothing to bust your gun. They knew that territory was the valuable thing. That, and reputation. People weren’t valuable. Dead people are more valuable. They were like trophies.”

By the 1990s, the Cocaine Cowboys were all in jail, dead, or back in Colombia, giving the locals free reign to prove their gangster cred. Two gangs that developed fierce street reps in the era, Vonda’s Gang and the Boobie Boys, clashed violently throughout the ’90s in a vicious tit­-for-­t at contest that upped the ante considerably. In the hoods of Miami, AK-47s blasted indiscriminately, laying waste to anyone who got in their way.

The Boobie Boys were led by Kenneth “Boobie” Williams, a young gangster from Liberty City who put together a dominant drug coalition of crew bosses from different neighborhoods that came together to dominate the cocaine trade.

T was a street hustler of Haitian descent who moved about the city and got to know all of the local players before his eventual incarceration. He remembers both the Boobie Boys and Vonda’s Gang as particularly fearsome—a throwback to the deadly Colombian narco ­trafficante. “People feared Boobie. He was straight gangsta,” T says. “A real killer. And his team were straight killers, too. Early ’90s and shit, they were pumping weed, base, and

“ They knew that territory was the valuable thing. That, and reputation. People weren’t valuable. Dead people are more valuable. They were like trophies.”

“ For the kids from the ghetto it was the gangster American Dream.

The careers these drug dealers chose led to two outcomes: death or jail. But they chose to lead what they called ‘the good life.’”

161

lace. The Boobie Boys had a one-stop shop going for dimes, nickel-pouches, DP’s, and halves­—the twenty-dollar bags. They had that shit sewed up. They’d kill anyone to protect their drug trade.”

The Boobie Boys’ supply of yayo fed over twenty-five Florida cities and twelve states and cities across the western hemisphere.

“Once the drugs were in South Florida, they moved them into neighborhoods all over the nation,” T recalls. “From the city they built a base with Boobie as the recognized street boss. They were shooting keys all up and down the coast. They were the stars of the city, building their rep based off their deeds.”

And they carried it like street stars, too, unafraid to demonstrate and put into play that “Gangster American Dream” lifestyle. In the ghettos where they held court, a world of iced­-out Presidential Rolex watches, solid gold eight-carat diamond pinky rings, and parties at the prestigious oceanfront Delano Hotel emerged. Trips to Miami’s Bal Harbor to shop at stores like Gucci and Mink Fashions for Men were frequent. Popping bottles of Moet and Don Perignon in the clubs was routine.

Sporting whips like the S­Class 600, Lexus Coupe, 750 Beamer and Porsche Carrera were the norm.

“Kevin," a cocky ex­-con who has served time in both state and federal prisons for drug and gun violations, was in the streets when the Boobie Boys held sway. He remembers how they operated: “Them dudes knew their role and got in where they fit in.” But Vonda’s Gang, led by Avonda “Black Girl” Dowling, kept crossing their path, creating a bloody rivalry. “Vonda was a street business woman doing her thing, but if you fucked up and got her wrong, she didn’t fuck around, and had dudes that would do you in,” Kevin says. “Vonda was loved by people, but they feared her, too, because she wasn’t with the BS, and had the money to fund your ending, with shooters ready for a payday.”

One of those shooters—perhaps the most infamous of all­—was her childhood friend, Robert “Rah Rah” Sawyer. As Vonda’s chief enforcer, he was allegedly responsible for multiple murders. Now serving time in a Edgefield federal penitentiary, he relayed what it was like in the streets of Miami back then.

“I came up in an era when real gangstas did exist,” he tells me. “In order to survive, I had to get on some real gangsta shit. If not, then I wouldn’t be telling this story today. So no matter what generations I encounter in life, the gangsta will always remain in Rah ­Rah. I’m as real as they come. ‘Cause I don’t soften up with time—I harden up.’”

Rah Rah was born and bred in Overtown’s tough streets, and most people I talk to tell me that it didn’t matter whom he went against; he was never shy about using his weapon. He was known as a straight killer.

In fact, Miami police called him “a one-man crime wave” and pursued him relentlessly around the city from his base in Overtown.

At six feet tall and two hundred pounds, he

“ All that gunplay brought too much attention. It was a violent era, and dudes was getting money, for sure. But most of them are in the penitentiary now. That, or dead.”

was built like a football player, and wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. Easily riled up, he was a man on a mission­—a mission to get money by any means necessary.

“Statistically, Overtown was known as the poorest and most feared black community in the country, but it bred fortune from various activities, including our pipeline, the Port of Miami,” says Rah Rah. “Dudes from Carol City and other areas throughout Miami was scared to come to Overtown, because, like I said, it was times when real gangstas did exist.” He continues, “Overtown had that tropical atmosphere with the structure of a mother-fuckin’ jungle. I could recall back to the times when the big-time kingpins from other parts of Miami would put down in Overtown, but they never made it out alive.”

So, around 1993, when the Boobie Boys tried to muscle in on Vonda’s territory in Overtown, an all­-out war erupted. “Because that’s where the cash was,” says Kevin. “And since the cops knocked down the Matchbox in Carol City, the Boobie Boys needed another booming spot. Rah Rah was warring with Boobie and his homies on behalf of Vonda.”

The conflict between the two gangs continued for five straight years, and Miami was gripped by the lawlessness of a gang war that left a trail of bodies across the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The murderers carried AK-­47s and wore ski masks, camouflage clothing and body armor. Police reported 62 shooting deaths and 36 wounded during this time period, and victims were riddled with as many as 99 bullet holes­, their faces blown to smithereens.

“Shootout. Straight up. Dudes whacking at each other,” T says. “The cops thought it was too crazy out there. There was drug fighting going on. There were dope wars going on.

Drugs—that’s the only reason someone would try to kill someone. It was a big old dispute with everybody trying to kill each other. But sometimes they killed the wrong people.”

Night and day, the battle raged. The Boobie Boys shot at Rah Rah on a public highway, 162

allegedly firing at him as they traveled in a car alongside. The violence was scattered so much that the city’s residents were afraid to leave their homes. Newspapers hyped up the gang wars, and soon Miami was anointed as the murder capital of the world. With the public outraged at the murders, the feds were called in. And because gang members were afraid to get caught without a strap, “…better to live and die with a weapon in hand.” The feds had an easy time getting them off the streets with gun charges.

The US Marshals captured Boobie at a traffic stop in 1999. He was alone, unarmed, and driving a Ford pickup under an assumed name. By the end of the year he was sentenced to life in prison. In 2003, Black Girl was arrested and, after a six-week trial, found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

Rah­Rah plead guilty, agreed to cooperate, and received 40 years in prison on a plea-bargain.

“ People feared Boobie. He was straight gangsta.

And his team were straight killers, too.

They had that shit sewed up.

They’d kill anyone to protect their drug trade.”

“They were too trigger-happy,” says T. “All that gunplay brought too much attention. It was a violent era, and dudes was getting money, for sure. But most of them are in the penitentiary now. That, or dead. Well remembered in the streets. Part myth, part legend.”

As Vonda’s Gang and the Boobie Boys faded into street lore, new gangs picked up the legacy of drugs, guns and violence, emulating the actions of the gangsters they held in high esteem.

Today it’s a different era, where millennial gangs like the Miami Boys, Big Money Team and Brown Sub Boys run wild­, gang-banging, slinging drugs, and acting out their favorite video game or movie role. “For one thing, you have too many fake wannabe’s in a grown man’s game,” says Rah Rah. “Brothers who never experienced times when honor and loyalty was amongst the true players. So when you mix honor and loyalty with a cutthroat era, then it’s only natural for all hell to break

loose. So where there’s supposed to be respect at, there’s only a bad case of egos.”

As a result, these gangs jump into the limelight before ultimately being brought down by authorities. In today’s Y2K world, the Haitian gang Zoe Pound rules the streets of Miami. Established in the ’90s to protect themselves from local gangs in Miami, they still exert control over the Port of Miami and have been linked to boat­fuls of cocaine floating up the Miami River.

“Miami today is: ‘Me, me, me. Fuck you, I got mine. Fuck you if you don’t have yours,’” says Kevin. “That’s why the Haitian dudes still got the city in a yoke. They know there’s power in numbers, and they’re out­balling damn near every other group in Miami today.”

In turn, Zoe Pound have tapped into the emotions of their community. Everyone I speak to indicates that the gang hold a vital, strong influence within their neighborhood and are a focal point for promoting Haitian pride 163

among local youths, encouraging those around them to stick together.

Was it always this way? When I ask Rah Rah about his affiliation with Vonda’s Gang, his response somewhat echoes the approach of Zoe Pound. “When it came to Vonda and I, it was all business and love for each other: ‘You watch my back, and I watch yours.’” Then he sums up, “But actually, it wasn’t no gang.

Instead, it was just childhood friends who had genuine love for each other.”

Writer Seth Ferranti served 21 years in prison, where he broke bread with the men he has written about. He is the author of the Gorilla Convicts’ Street Legends series (www.gorillaconvict.com) and GR1ND’s Crime Comix and Easter Bunny Assassin series (www.sethferranti.com).

Images of the Boobie Boys Courtesy of Gorilla Convict

Judge Laura Safer Espinoza tells us about one organization’s pioneering campaign to end shocking cases of slavery and migrant worker abuse in modern America.

Agricultural Revolution

164

Southwest Florida is well known for its beautiful beaches and sunny weather. When I retired here in 2010 after twenty years as a judge in New York, I did not know that federal prosecutors had called the area “ground zero for modern slavery.” Just a short distance from the state’s celebrated sites of leisure and luxury, migrant workers labored in the shadows. And many of them were working in conditions that had not changed significantly since Edward R. Murrow’s 1960 conscience-stirring documentary Harvest of Shame.

Immokalee, featured in Murrow’s film, continues to be more of a labor reserve than a typical town. Every season, tens of thousands of migrant workers flow through the area, seeking harvesting jobs in nearby fields.

For visitors who relish shade and air conditioning after a short time in Florida’s blazing sun, it is difficult to understand that the workers who harvest the food we eat must often pick tons of produce daily, over long hours, to earn minimum wage.

For decades, workers in the fields faced violence, sexual assault, wage theft, unsafe conditions, and, at the far end of the spectrum, forced labor, prompting federal prosecutors to grant the state its unfortunate moniker. Occasional exposure and successful prosecution of these cases served, however, as mere interruptions in a cycle of abuse. The exploitation soon resumed.

As it turned out, however, my arrival also coincided with the dawning of an exciting new day in Florida agriculture. This movement was a result of 20 years of work by a farmworker organization called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and the unique partnerships they were forging with both buyers and growers in Florida’s $650 million tomato industry. Together, they were building the first social responsibility program of its kind—one in which workers’ participation is the driving engine and which harnesses the power of the market as a force for good to create much-needed change: it’s a win-winwin solution to a generations-old problem.

CIW, a community-based human rights organization, was founded in 1993 to help secure dignity and respect for farmworkers who are historically excluded from many legal protections. Initially, CIW used traditional labor tactics such as work stoppages and hunger strikes to demand change. By necessity, the Coalition also became an anti-slavery organization and, over the course of a decade and a half, pioneered a worker-centered approach to forced labor investigations leading to nine major investigations, seven

federal prosecutions, and the freeing of over 1,200 workers.

Added to that, CIW’s groundbreaking efforts helped to spark the anti-human trafficking movement in the United States and passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000—the first federal anti-slavery legislation since Reconstruction. CIW later received a U.S. State Department “Hero Acting to End Modern Day Slavery Award” and a Presidential Medal for its “Extraordinary Efforts to Combat Human Trafficking.” Still, CIW perceived that if abuses were actually to be prevented, rather than prosecuted after the fact, a structural solution was required for an industry that had been unwilling to police itself.

Therefore, as a unique and innovative strategy, CIW members turned to the tomato growers’ large customers: massive, multi-billion dollar fast-food and supermarket brands that have come to dominate the 21st century food system over the last 40 years. Based on the idea that major buyers exert real influence over their suppliers’ operations—specifying every detail of their tomato purchases—CIW argued that the same resources and influence could be used to improve farmworkers’ wages and demand more humane working conditions.

This resulted in CIW launching the Campaign for Fair Food, a campaign that made a case to consumers of conscience across the country. And, after four years the Campaign’s 165

first target, Taco Bell and its parent company, Yum Brands, agreed to pay a premium on their tomatoes to improve farmworker wages and to purchase only from growers who implement a Fair Food Code of Conduct.

In the decade since that watershed agreement, thirteen additional retailers—from Whole Foods to Walmart, McDonald’s, and Subway—have signed agreements with the CIW. As a result, in 2010, the members of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange—representing 90 percent of the state’s tomato production—also signed agreements with CIW, committing to pass the premium to workers in their paychecks and to comply with the Code of Conduct.

These legally binding agreements form the basis of the Fair Food Program. The four elements that make the program effective are exactly what one would expect when workers are finally able to design a social responsibility program to protect their own rights. They stand in stark contrast to typical corporate approaches, which focus on abuses in supply chains as a public relations issue.

First, there is a Code of Conduct written by workers themselves. The Code includes requirements for direct hire, worker control of time registration devices, reforms in harvesting practices, provision of shade, an effective complaint mechanism, and zero-tolerance provisions for violence, including 166

sexual assault, forced labor, and child labor.

Second, education on workers’ rights and responsibilities under the Code is another critical element. All workers receive Fair Food Program materials at the time of hire, and the CIW conducts in-person education sessions at all participating growers. Through this process, tens of thousands of workers become front-line monitors of the Code’s human rights provisions, which include the right to make complaints, free of retaliation.

Third, the program’s monitoring regime is designed to provide a continuous flow of credible information. Workers actively enforce their own rights in the workplace, as well as through their interactions with the Fair Food Standards Council (FFSC), a unique organization established by CIW and solely dedicated to monitoring and enforcement of the Fair Food Program. FFSC conducts interviews with all levels of management and more than 50 percent of workers at any given farm. Audits provide a snapshot of conditions, while FFSC’s 24/7 complaint hotline, staffed by its bilingual investigators, provides a complementary and ongoing video feed. Through corrective action plans and complaint resolutions, FFSC maintains continuous enforcement of Code Standards.

Fourth, and most critically, behind the Code of Conduct stands serious and effective market consequences: any grower that does not comply with the Code simply cannot sell

to the Fair Food Program’s 14 major retail buyers. These meaningful economic consequences provide the incentive to take the steps necessary to prevent abuses.

Participating growers have moved far beyond the adversarial process to become valued program partners, who are also employers of choice. They have invested substantially in infrastructure improvements and benefit from reduced employee turnover, lower insurance costs, and the program’s purchasing preference from participating buyers. By 2014, these farms were called “the best working environment in American agriculture” on the front page of The New York Times.

Added to this, participating buyers benefit from transparency and risk prevention in their supply chain—an increasingly relevant requirement as Information Age consumers care increasingly about the conditions under which food and other everyday goods are produced.

This win-win-win model works. Five years since its implementation, the worst human rights violators in the industry have been weeded out, and FFSC’s monitoring confirms that forced labor, sexual assault, violence and wage theft against workers have virtually disappeared on Fair Food Program farms.

Simultaneously, calls received on FFSC’s hotline from workers outside the program are tragic reminders that these conditions are still rampant elsewhere in U.S. agriculture.

Beyond this, well over $20 million in Fair Food premium has been distributed to workers as line-item bonuses on their paychecks, and 1,400 complaints have been successfully resolved without retaliation, in collaboration with participating growers, resulting in numerous work environment improvements.

The FFP model has been lifted up by national and international human rights observers from the United Nations to thep White House, and program expansion is well underway. The Program now operates in six additional states up the east coast of the U.S. and in two additional crops. The program’s label and point of sale displays have begun to appear at participating buyers’ stores. Exciting talks on further expansion are ongoing with buyers and growers who understand the program’s great value and potential for U.S. agriculture.

Actors in other sectors, states and countries are also seeking to adapt this model of worker-driven social responsibility, with its powerful market enforcement mechanisms, to their own circumstances. These range from dairy workers in Vermont and construction workers in Texas to those charged with en-

forcing the Bangladesh Fire and Safety Accord and the overseeing of the Japanese Olympics.

In the European Union, this model is also being adapted to assist implementation of human-trafficking prevention models, as human rights observers and organizers have recognized the exciting potential of worker-driven social responsibility. Now, its history has begun to be written.

Looking back, chroniclers will note the poetic justice of this transformative model’s birthplace in Immokalee, Florida, a small, forgotten farmworker community atop the Everglades that packed a powerful punch in the fight for low-wage workers’ rights across the country and around the globe.

167

Judge Laura Safer Espinoza is a retired New York State Supreme Court Justice who served in New York and Bronx counties for twenty years. She was Deputy Supervising Judge for five years. Before ‘retiring’ to Florida, Justice Safer Espinoza helped to design, and became the first presiding judge of, the Bronx Treatment Court, an innovative alternative to incarceration for nonviolent offenders.

Now, in Florida, she is Executive Director of the FFSC.

Photography by Shane Donglasan and Forest Woodward

Miami isn’t all bikinis and bling. Renowned photographer Bruce Gilden has a history with the city and he recently returned there to shoot for Us of America. Here, he shows another side of the Sunshine State and tells us what inspires his photographs.

Bruce Gilden’s Miami 168

W

hen I was ten years old, my babysitter in Miami was an ex-boxer by the name of Kewpie Gordon. It must have been a funny sight to see this small featherweight ex-boxer, always with a cigar in his mouth, keeping up with this ten-year-old kid who was the same size as he. I was quite active as a child, and once when he was taking care of me I ran into the back of someone’s head in a hotel lobby and got a terrible black eye. I used to go to all of the sporting events at the Miami Beach auditorium with Kewpie and collect autographs from the players.

We shot some of these images in Overtown, a historic district that has been—up to recently, at least—mostly black with hookers who offer their services to drivers passing by, and drug dealers sprinkled among the ordinary people. It is starting to become gentrified in sections. We were also in West Perrine, where Dada is the unofficial mayor: wherever he goes, people know him, greet him and love him. He has the charisma of a preacher, and also, in such a pretty tough area, he is seen as a success.

As for Miami… boy, has it changed! South Beach was not as fancy as it is now, and it had many rundown places on Washington Avenue. If I remember correctly, the boxing gym was located there. However, I don’t like glitz—it doesn’t ring true to me.

I did want to be a boxer when I was a little kid—but my father, who was a tough guy, said no. Because of my childhood, I’m attracted to the dark side of life, and hookers are part of that environment. All my photography comes from my soul. I’m not an outsider looking at these people like curiosities; I’m photographing myself. The older I get, the closer I get to the people I photograph, and closer to myself.

I’m drawn to my photography subjects by their character and the intensity in their eyes. To me, their faces scream a story. If I’m visually attracted to them, I start a conversation. Though, with a person like Dada (a professional fighter), even though I had never met him, I felt comfortable right away.

169

Rene “Level” Martinez MMA fighter. Opa Locka, Miami, FL

Dhafir “Dada 5000” Harris Bare-knuckle fighter and founder of Backyard Brawls (BYB Extreme). West Perrine, FL

171

Tara Outside the nail salon. Miami, FL

172

Rodney Neighborhood friend of Dada 5000. West Perrine, FL

173

Trish Prostitute, heroin user. Overtown, Miami, FL

174

175

Yunasky “El Monstruo” Gonzalez Professional boxer. Miami, FL

Freddie Delgado Retired professional boxer. Miami, FL

Dada 5000’s feet

178

179

180

Kat Prostitute, crack cocaine user. Overtown, Miami, FL

181

182

Texas Prostitute, heroin user. Overtown, Miami, FL

183

Backyard brawl at the home of Dada 5000. West Perrine, FL

184

185

Photography by Nicole Nodland

Over the last four decades, Miami has struggled with the ongoing impact of drug violence across the city. Francisco Alvarado catches up with Dada 5000, a man on a mission to inspire impoverished youths toward an alternative path—one that encourages them to, literally, fight their way out.

Dada’s Home An ambulance raced through the parking lot of the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas. In the back, a paramedic worked feverishly on Dhafir “Dada 5000” Harris, who was unconscious. Minutes earlier, the 39-year-old brawler from Miami, Florida, had collapsed in the third and final round of a mixed martial arts bout on February 19 against old neighborhood chum and MMA star Kevin “Kimbo Slice” Ferguson.

Initially, Slice had been declared the victor by technical knockout after a combo of punches to Dada’s face had appeared to send him sprawling to the mat. But the true cause of Dada’s fall was much worse.

“At the time, no one knew Dada’s kidneys shut down after the first round,” recalls his older brother Dyrushio. “When he went down in the third and lost consciousness, Dada was clinically dead. He had two massive heart attacks that night—one when he fell, and another one in the ambulance.”

Arriving at the emergency room of Memorial Hermann Texas Medical Center, para-

medics lost precious minutes trying to stabilize the roller-bed carrying Dada. When they were unable to get through a restricted door, Dyrushio and his twin, Dynel, forced it open.

Once inside, doctors were able to restart Dada’s heart, but the prognosis was still grim, Dyrushio remembers.

Their younger sibling was in critical condition after going into cardiac arrest. No oxygen had flowed to his brain for fifteen minutes. To help Dada breathe again, the medics placed him on a ventilator.

“The doctor told us it was over,” Dyrushio says. “We told him to step aside, because he was about to witness a miracle.”

Dyrushio and Dynel began to pray. “My brother starts yelling, ‘Dada, move your right leg! Move your left leg! Move your arms!’ ” Dyrushio says. “Dada wiggled his toes, but the doctor was like, ‘That’s just his nerves.’

My brother replies, ‘No, that’s God.’ ”

186

I first met Dada and his brothers in the fall of 2007, when they had just begun to lay the foundation to their grand plan to make backyard street-fighting as big as MMA. At first glance, Dada strikes an imposing profile. He packs 255 pounds of mostly muscle into a tatted-up 6-4 frame.

He punctuates his intimidating size by sporting a bright red mohawk, a scruffy beard, and fingernails painted in black polish.

His twin brothers Dyrushio and Dynel, former corrections officers, are more clean-cut.

The trio promote bare-knuckle, almostanything-goes fighting matches in the backyard of their house in Perrine, a poor, predominantly African-American suburb fifteen miles south of downtown Miami. The events, held sporadically throughout the year, attract hundreds of local residents hungry for bloodsport. Dada and his brothers recruit anyone willing to step into the ring for a few hundred-dollar bills. Whether you’re an ex-con

187

On a crisp Monday afternoon, Dada emerges from the front door of the Harris household in Perrine. Six months have passed since his brothers sat beside his hospital bed, praying for a higher power to bring him back. Despite losing some weight, Dada still casts a formidable appearance.

“I am coming back bigger and stronger than ever,” he tells me. “I tasted death and came back. A majority of the time, you are going to stay dead.”

After regaining consciousness on February 19, Dada remained in the hospital for several weeks. “I had shortness of breath and couldn’t sleep at night,” he says. “I was on dialysis, and I had to learn to walk again.”

When he returned to Miami in mid-March, Dada ended up in the emergency room again for a blood transfusion. “I really didn’t start feeling 100 percent until May,” he said. “But I have a warrior's mentality.”

He reveals he is not giving up on his dream to make backyard fighting a mainstream sport. In addition to filming footage for a sequel to Dawg Fight, Dada says he plans to organize a bare-knuckle, no-rules fight at an Indian Reservation later this year. And he won’t rule out a return to pro fighting despite his brush with death. “I intend on making a comeback,” he says. “I could be back in the cage in early 2017.”

However, a rematch against Kimbo is out of the question. On June 6, Slice died unexpectedly of heart failure at age 42. Despite their rivalry, Dada recognizes the significance of following in Kimbo’s footsteps.

“We revolutionized a movement,” Dada says. “We had two dudes who came from the streets put up numbers that have never been matched by MMA guys in Bellator history.

Presentation and delivery is key. I really feel it is the beginning. Men lie, but numbers don’t. We made history. No one would believe that the two main-event guys died the same year. I thank God I am still here.”

or a true mixed martial arts trainee, all fighters are welcome in Dada’s backyard.

For Eddie Falcone, a 23-year-old mechanic from nearby Cutler Ridge, Dada’s backyard fights offer him the opportunity to put some extra money in his pocket. “I make $200 to $250 just stepping into Dada’s backyard,” he says. “I make at least another $100 if I win.

It’s an opportunity to make some bread.”

Another backyard regular, John Fisher, has found it hard to find a regular job as a convicted felon, so any time Dada puts on a show, Fisher is one of the first in line to sign up. “I was in prison for three-and-a-half years for firearm conviction,” he says. “I had just got out when Dada put on one of his fights. I fought a lot of dudes in prison, so it was easy for me to get in there.”

Inspired by Kimbo Slice’s rise from backyard fighter to MMA sensation, Dada seeks to create something bigger. He fancies himself to be a ghetto version of Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the world’s largest MMA organization.

Over the last decade, Dada and his crew have achieved their goal of reaching a mainstream audience. His events and fighters have been featured in news documentaries on ESPN, Telemundo, and National Geographic.

In March 2015, Rakontur, the film company that made Cocaine Cowboys, released Dawg Fight after six years of shooting and editing footage. The movie chronicles the rise of Dada’s backyard empire, ending with him challenging Kimbo after his own debut as a pro fighter.

Two months later, Dada held the first payper-view bare-knuckle fighting event to be streamed on the website for his company, BYB Extreme Fighting Series. Then, in November, Bellator MMA announced that Dada would face off against Kimbo, his mentorturned-foe, in a match to determine who would be king of the backyard.

“Interest in backyard fighting hasn’t died down,” Dyrushio affirms. “It’s at an alltime high.”

188

189

Village People “This place is like Disney World for adults”

The United States’ fastest growing city is a 55-and-over retirement community in central Florida called The Villages.

Populated almost entirely by white Republicans, The Villages is a surreal, sprawling community fabricated down to its very history. Jessica Weiss gives us an exclusive insight into this extraordinary city that is making thousands of American retirement dreams come true.

Photography by Stephen M. Dowell 190

Ed Berberian jolts forward in his white plastic chair as the band starts a new song, listening and reminiscing. The 83-year-old retiree wears black cowboy boots, black pants and a white short-sleeve button-up and has an Elvis-style mop of white hair on his head. He looks to his wife, Athalie. “Remember this one?” She is a petite, friendly woman with glasses, red-painted lips and thin gray hair. Ed starts to move his feet. “You follow?”

The five-piece band strikes up on an elevated stage, singing a fast-moving Mary Chapin Carpenter number. Athalie squints at Ed as she tries to recall the song’s accompanying dance moves. Thirty seconds later, she signals to her husband that she’s ready.

They hoist themselves out of their chairs and stand up to head toward the dance floor. Ed slides the soles of his boots over a block of paraffin he brought from home to grease up before dancing. Athalie, in red cowboy boots, does the same.

“Nobody dances on bumpy pavers—you get caught on the cracks,” Ed says while walking toward the middle of the dance floor. “If I can’t spin, I can’t dance.”

The couple begins to move together in step, side by side, with incredible energy. As they kick and spin, the crowd gapes in disbelief. Ed and Athalie do synchronized, embellished line dancing moves—a “push-tush” and a “boot-scoot.” Ed jumps with gusto, and shakes his head back and forth.

With decades of practice behind them, Ed and Athalie are the best line dancers on the floor tonight. That’s part of the reason why they love life at The Villages so much. Among the countless activities available at this sprawling retirement community in Central Florida are dozens of line-dancing classes per week and free nightly entertainment in the community’s three “town squares” 365 days a year.

The Villages—self-proclaimed “Florida’s Friendliest Hometown”—is home to some 120,000 residents who live in a gated area bigger than Manhattan. It covers three counties, two zip codes, and more than 20,000 acres. According to the 2015 U.S. Census, The Villages was the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country for the third straight year.

Residents are almost entirely white, church-going, and upper-middle-class. The vast majority are Republicans, matching the political affiliations of The Villages’ owners.

The Morse family are among the richest in the country, hence loyal, powerful donors to the GOP. Ed and Athalie have lived in The Villages since 2009, when they moved out of their Fort Lauderdale condo. The couple met and fell in love in New York in the ‘50s, introduced to each other through their tight-knit Armenian community.

In 1985, Ed lost most of his eyesight. But The Villages, he says, makes his condition easy to manage. Athalie drives him wherever he needs to go in the couple’s red golf cart, and he is part of a club with other visually

impaired residents. Here, he gets the best medical care and nonstop support, without having to leave.

When the song finishes, Ed and Athalie are out of breath. They are jubilant as they saunter back to their chairs, greeting friends along the way. Once back to his seat, Ed grabs a small plastic water bottle with a fan-head attached to the top and begins to spritz his face with water.

“This is life,” he says, smiling. “I wish I had moved here 20 years ago. This place is like Disney World for adults.”

A day earlier, I had departed Miami Beach around midday, headed for Orlando. After three hours, I passed Disney World and then bore northwest on Florida’s turnpike toward Oxford, a tree-filled rural town. There, I passed a farm stand selling oranges and cucumbers, an RV park, and a car-parts store.

Run-down homes and deserted storefronts added to the rough-and-tumble air of the place—one of the poorest areas in Florida.

About a mile out of Oxford, a small sign announced The Villages, and a delicate wooden fence appeared on both sides. The road narrowed, and the speed limit slowed.

My surroundings were suddenly more refined and clean, more perfectly planned and manicured. Though there was no more rolling pasture for cows, there was lots and lots of grass. Lush green golf courses surrounded me on all sides, and rows of houses appeared around man-made lakes spewing water out of extravagant fountains. Golf cart lanes outfitted every road.

I turned on the radio to AM 640, The Villages’ own radio station. As if on cue, the DJ announced: “It’s another beautiful day in The Villages!” I suddenly felt as if I had arrived in Pleasantville.

Though now an impressive, profitable retirement development, The Villages had humble beginnings. The creation of Michigan businessman Harold Schwartz, it started as a mobile home park in 1968 called Orange Blossom Gardens. In 1983 he brought on his son, H. Gary Morse, to help execute his new vision: a retirement community inspired by the one his sister lived in. In short order, Morse built homes, restaurants, pools and golf courses. Within three years he was selling more than 500 homes per year. By 1987, the development had $40 million in annual sales.

Schwartz soon retired (to The Villages), but Morse had a bigger vision. In 1994, he hired an entertainment consultant and took control of The Villages full-time. Over 20 years, he created dozens of residential “villages” anchored by small downtown areas for eating, shopping and socializing. Spanish Springs, the first town center, opened in 1995, designed to be reminiscent of a Mexican town. Next came the New England fishing village-inspired Lake Sumter Landing in 2004, and finally the southwestern-styled Brownwood in 2012.

191

For added intrigue, each town center was also given its own customs, traditions and made-up history, parts of which are imprinted on phony statues and plaques throughout the town squares. The Villages were, according to these tales, the supposed sites of plagues and sordid romantic affairs. It’s said that Juan Ponce de León visited Spanish Springs on his search for the famed “Fountain of Youth.”

Morse didn’t stop with houses. In his book Oh, Florida!, Craig Pittman writes that Morse owned “all or part of everything worth owning in The Villages, including the bank, the hospital, the utilities, the garbage collection company, the TV and radio stations, and the newspaper.”

The streets are patrolled by residents who wield no real power. Each village comes with a guard station and gate and is also manned by residents often dressed in shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops. “I’m guessing you don’t live here,” a resident joked as he let me through without asking a single question. But there is almost no need for security; the majority of crimes in The Villages are said to be committed by the sons and daughters of Villagers.

Recently two residents got into a fistfight over a chair during the nightly entertainment, which made Village headlines.

“There’s an exceptionally light crime rate here,” says Lieutenant Robert Siener, who is single-handedly in charge of policing the entire city. “Almost all the crime in Sumter County comes from outside The Villages.”

Seniors use golf carts to get to and from the town centers, which has inspired a vibrant golf-cart scene. Coupe, convertible and hardtop golf carts can cost upwards of tens of thousands of dollars and be styled to look like Porsches, Mustangs and classic car replicas. The Villages have some 65,000 golf carts, and designated parking areas for them throughout.

“You really can’t describe this place to people,” says Dave Lee, a Chicago native with red cheeks and a Hawaiian shirt who retired here in 2013. He works as a starter at one of The Villages’ 70 golf courses, as well as showing people around as a Villages “ambassador.”

The Villages offers a program in which prospective buyers can come to town and “live like Villagers” for three days to a week, taking advantage of all of the amenities. That, it seems, is how many people end up here.

Once inside, you’re hard-pressed to find a hint of misery or dejection—thanks in part to the long list of restrictions, covenants, rules and regulations associated with living in The Villages. No weeds, twenty-somethings or brightly-colored houses are found here. Children may not visit for more than 30 days per year, and they are allowed only in select pools.

No dog-poop or “flamboyant lawn ornaments” can be seen anywhere on the sidewalks. The water in the pools is always the right temperature, and the flowers are changed every few weeks. “Even when they don’t need to be,” Dave says.

The Villages have some 65,000 golf carts, and designated parking areas for them throughout.

192

Dave and his wife had already bought a house in Naples when they came to The Villages. But the idyllic community they found here was enough to make them change their plans completely.

“The ads I saw were of golfers advertising ‘Free golf for life,’ and I thought, ‘That’s so hokey.’ “ Dave says. “[But] within the first four hours of touring the Villages, we knew we were coming here and staying.”

In my hotel inside The Villages, I look out from my balcony to a giant lake. On the opposite shore, water laps the grass of a golf course. A row of off-white and gray houses sits atop the green. The lake is man-made, with no access to other waterways, but a big lighthouse sits in the middle of it. Boats are tethered up to ropes on the shore. But they’re just for show, I’m told, not for human use.

Even the hotel has its own sordid and made-up history, dating back to the “phosphate mines of the 1800s.” In reality, it was built a decade ago. Now there are only vestiges of the landscape that was here before, in tiny pockets where the developer has chosen to “preserve” the natural ecosystem for the scenic pleasure of the residents.

I turn on the television and click to Channel 2, The Villages’ 24-hour local news station.

The day’s upcoming activities—bingo, sewing, clogging and harmonica—flash on-screen in colorful text, set to cheery music: “I have a feeling it’s gonna be a perfect day,” a song blares. Every few minutes, scenes of smiling Villagers pepper the screen as interludes to the activity listings.

Down at breakfast, I pick up a copy of The Daily Sun, the town’s thick and attractive newspaper. Despite a brief overview of local, national and international headlines, the newspaper emanates the same vibe as the radio and television: positivity, perfection and good cheer. To avoid causing drama or gossip, The Daily Sun does not use residents’ names in stories, but instead focuses on profiling the best people and activities in the community. “Have a Jolly Good Time with Lawn Bowling,” one headline reads.

In the Lifestyles section, I find the day’s schedule. You can play billiards or cards, visit a stamp club, hang out with writers, jam with bluegrass musicians, study the Civil War, or find Zen at the spirituality club—not to mention the normal golf, bocce, shuffleboard, tennis and pickleball games that go on every day.

In total, The Villages offers residents more than 3,000 clubs, including 39 different billiards clubs, more than 40 dance clubs and classes, a miracles club, and clubs for hula, archery, deep-sea fishing, philosophy and optimism. Seniors can contemplate the “Art of Aging” and study astrology, baton-twirling, belly-dance, and civil discourse. There’s a club for “Freethinkers, Darwinists and Humanists,” iPad users, Jane Austen lovers, and Retired Police and Fire, to name a few. There’s

even a club called “Village Idiots” for telling jokes and riddles and for dressing up in costume. Here at The Villages, you can learn or be anything you want. You can practice a craft or hobby you’ve been doing your whole life, or try something completely new.

“If you can’t find something to do here, you’re never going to find something to do,” Dave says.

The Villages also has some 75 different support groups, including offerings for multiple AA and Alzheimer’s caregivers, the visually impaired, and even “Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.” Though it’s said that a handful of LGBT residents live here, no one seems to know any.

Deb Schmidt, a 63-year-old from Cleveland, is active in the Singles Baby Boomers, one of The Villages’ most popular clubs. They have some 700 members who get together for monthly music nights and other activities. In The Villages, women outnumber men ten-to-one.

“You walk in, and it’s very interesting,” Deb tells me while we sit on her porch sipping red wine and talking about dating in The Villages. “Everybody’s already eating, a lot of people are already hooked up. Then the band starts. I can’t decide if it’s a good band or not.

Usually it’s a shitty band that plays slow songs, and I feel like I’m in junior high.”

Deb moved here full-time in 2013. Her younger sister Lisa, 57, soon followed. Though they originally planned to live in separate homes, they decided to share a big three-bedroom house in the southern part of The Villages—a newer part of town known as an area for younger residents. The house has a wideopen living room with high ceilings and comfortable couches.

Both Deb and Lisa are divorced, which is not uncommon in The Villages. Many people come here after the end of a relationship or the death of a spouse, looking for a fresh start.

But neither Deb nor Lisa is looking for a relationship. They have each other, endless activities, and a St. Bernard named Stella.

“I have so much to do that a man is not the most important thing in life,” Deb says.

“If something falls into my lap, I’m open, but I don’t have a compelling need to go search.”

A few years ago, The Villages made international headlines after a gynecologist told the New York Post she treated more cases of herpes and HPV at The Villages than she had done when working in Miami. Then, in 2014, a man and woman were caught having sex in Sumter Landing’s town square after dark and were arrested. Their mugshots made their way across the Internet.

But for Deb, The Villages is much more than just a way to meet a man. For her it’s a safe and cozy cocoon. “When I was in Cleveland, divorced, I always thought, ‘Where will I go?’” Deb says. “And then I found this place.

I was searching for something, and I found it. Every time I leave the bubble, I can’t wait to come back.”

193

On a Monday afternoon, about 20 residents assemble in the auditorium for the weekly get-together of the ‘Karaoke for Beginners Club.’ A man dressed in a white shirt and shorts stands in front of the room singing a song by the 1960s doo-wop band The Duprees.

He looks as if he came from tennis, but 62-yearold Joe Dileo has an absolutely beautiful voice, emanating a crooning, longing ballad of love and loss. When the song finishes, the room erupts in cheers. A woman in the back yells, “Bravo!” As he walks toward the back of the room, a row of people pats Joe on the back.

“That sounded really good, Joe,” one says.

Joe tells me the club is currently mourning the loss of its longtime leader. A few weeks ago, the 72-year-old went in for routine back surgery but suffered an infection and never came out. “The next day we all came and just cried for the whole three hours,” Joe says. “It’s something you know could happen but you never expect.”

It’s the first time since I arrived that I’ve spoken openly to a Villager about death and dying. Though it is an age-restricted community, it has surprisingly few reminders of that.

The Villages has no cemetery, as most residents prefer to be buried in the cities they long called home before retirement. It seems that “Florida’s Friendliest Hometown” is really nobody’s hometown at all.

The Villages has three types of people, he tells me: snowbirds, snowflakes, and frogs.

Snowbirds come for winter, when it’s cold up north. Snowflakes come and go. Frogs come to croak.

Before his death in 2014, Gary Morse refused to speak to the press about his Republican fantasyland. In his footsteps, his kids and grandkids, who manage The Villages, are notoriously secretive and hard to reach. But clearly they have even greater ambitions still for this retirement paradise.

Within the next few months, 1,000 more people will be able to call The Villages home, due to a new expansion called Pine Ridge.

They will finally have achieved their version of The American Dream: a safe, indulgent, well-earned exclamation point. Here, it’s always a beautiful day.

Back in Sumter Landing Town Square, Ed and Athalie dance as the sky grows dark with clouds that threaten rain. Back in their chairs, their attention turns to a saxophonist who’s serenading members of the crowd. Suddenly, a fly starts buzzing around Athalie, and she begins to swat at it dramatically. She taps Ed’s shoulder to grab his attention.

“Ed, there’s a fly!” she says. “Why is there a fly, Ed?” Ed watches as his wife swats at the small bug. “Yeah, that’s weird,” he finally responds, genuinely curious. Seemingly unfamiliar with this particular annoyance, he turns to me and explains, “We have a mosquito control department here in The Villages. I have never seen a fly. Actually, I think it’s illegal.”

194

You are now leaving Florida, have a safe trip.

195

Marianne & Mary Kay 1976

ETERNAL Joseph Szabo’s photographs of 1970’s teenagers are timeless American classics. Photographer Philip Gay learns how Szabo came to capture these iconic images.

196

YOUTH “I was really one with them when I was photographing them. We’re just people, my age doesn’t mean anything and your age doesn’t mean anything.”

197

Seniors First Date, Jones Beach 1987

Amityville, NY 1979

Girl in Mirror 1981

Chris on Senior Day 1977

Priscilla 1969

Regardless of where you grew up, you’ll see your teenage self in those pictures. Or you’ll wish you were there, smoking, drinking, laughing, dancing, and kissing. Perhaps, in many ways, we feel more defined in our teens than when we are older—and perhaps this is why these images work so well.

But they’re about that time, too—the 1970s—a time that perpetuated the youth-led counterculture that had burgeoned in the 1960s, a movement that had demonstrated just how rich life could be if you tugged a little on the ropes. So when the next decade began, that sense of freedom really took hold, and was even adopted by the teenager next door. Joseph Szabo was the e to capture the mood of an era.

Szabo’s younger life was more sedate than that of his subjects. He was born in 1944 in Toledo, Ohio, a quiet industrial town south of Detroit on the picturesque Lake Erie. He recalls his childhood with fondness. He had lots of friends in the neighborhood, loved high school, and even met Nancy, the love of his life, whilst studying there. Above all, art class was notable: the nun that taught him had a radio and let students listen to music while they worked. Artistically inspired, Szabo landed an assistantship at the Pratt Institute in New York and graduated as a Master of Fine Arts in 1968.

Joseph Szabo’s earliest photographs clearly show his innate composition skills, and many of them include studies of people. But, despite endless trips around the city, it wasn’t until he landed his first job that inspiration struck.

“It was ‘69,” he says. “Right out of Pratt Institute, I was working in the junior high, photography was in my blood, I realised photography could be a real strong form of expression. Even though I was teaching art, I was looking at these kids and thinking, ‘I need to photograph these kids. There’s just something about them.’”

The earliest picture in Szabo’s Teenage collection—one of his most well-known—is that of “Priscilla”. The photograph shows her strolling across Jones Beach, both hands pulling up her jeans, looking out to sea with a cigarette in her mouth. She’s young to a point and exudes as much insecurity as she

does nonchalance. It’s an image as defiant as it is heartbreakingly touching. “That was just the moment,” he says. “I had two shots, and she was gone.”

When you meet Joseph Szabo, there is no doubt that he facilitated the moments he captured, not with any artifice, but with presence, compassion, and his love of life. He talks of every image in his archive as “a gift—a gift that I was in that place at that time, that those people were there, and that we connected.”

That 1969 image of Priscilla became a definitive moment for Szabo, a precedent—one he has stuck to throughout his career. “When I started photographing teenagers, the direction was kind of put into me, and as I photographed more and more, I realised that this is a goldmine.” He refers to the myriad of emotions a teen is capable of expressing.

Capturing those emotions became Szabo’s direction, his focus, and his drive.

The seventies was the decade where the younger generation no longer kept quiet.

Authority was challenged at every level: by rock bands, artists, writers and filmmakers, and in turn every teen made that part of their identity like never before. So, in 1972, when Joseph Szabo began teaching seniors at Malverne High School, he found a huge barrier between pupil and teacher. Despite being in his twenties, he found that teaching the undisciplined and uninterested was a tough job.

As a result, his camera became his means of communication. “I realised that, when you take somebody’s picture, you’re really saying that you care for them and that you appreciate them,” he says.

Slowly, he began to win the trust of his pupils, and they opened up. Plus, there was the radio: like the nun of his childhood, Szabo always brought a radio into the classroom and let his students choose the music they wanted to listen to. “Listening to that music gives you an insight, unconscious, into their world and their minds.” Szabo soon established rapport and built bonds with his pupils, and we see this in his work, with photographs ranging from straight-up solo portraits against the classroom blackboard to pictures of groups and friends.

Jones Beach Disco 1980

Bernie 1977

Air Guitar 1978

Long Island Girl 1974

Szabo had found his direction “A lot of people don’t realize the image is right in front of you,” he says. “You don’t have to go to the top of mount Everest to find the picture.” It wasn’t long before Szabo’s students invited him into their social lives outside of school, to bowling alleys, parties and even into their homes. Szabo recalls that sometimes at the parties it would be so dark he could hardly see, but still he sensed the moment. As joyful and celebratory as his pictures are, his subjects also trusted him enough when they were feeling down or fragile, too. “I was really one with them when I photographed them” he says. “We’re just people: ‘My age doesn’t mean anything, and your age doesn’t mean anything.’”

In 1978, two of his students asked if he would drive them to see The Rolling Stones in Philadelphia. They got there a day early and checked into a big hotel “full of Stones fans, up all night, doors open.” The next day, Szabo headed to the rain-soaked stadium packed with beautiful girls and rock ‘n’ roll boys. As the band played, Szabo turned his camera away from the stage, gathering a collection of images that contrast with those from other music events of the era. His focus wasn’t on the band—it was on the fans, the teenagers, and all of their heartbreak and excitement. These images make up his book, Rolling Stones Fans, and it was this body of work that further underpinned his ability to unearth and capture the emotions of people that were strangers to him.

Szabo attributes this ability to the fact that he has empathy and affection for his subjects.

Jones Beach is testament to this. Since “Priscilla” in 1969, he visited the beach every summer, capturing images that are often funny, sometimes titillating, and certainly erotic, all imbued with the sounds and smells of that moment. In contrast to the pubescent Priscilla, one of the most striking images in Jones Beach is that of an older couple with beaming smiles. They’re on a first date, and behind them a group of pretty young girls assume they are the subject of the photographer and clown for the camera. But with this image, Szabo’s capture of youthful enthusiasm is derived from the older couple, who emanate virility and energy like any teenage counterpart. This image is testament to his extraordinary ability to celebrate emotion and quickly gain the trust of his subjects. His approach is a positive one.

“I don’t believe in capturing an ugly moment. I like to show the real side of people, but even when it’s a sad or tragic moment, I would never undermine their trust by taking a cruel image of someone.”

THE

Instagram celebrity Benny Harlem is famous for his spectacular ‘do. Always accompanied by his beautiful daughter Jaxyn, meet the First Family of Big Hair in their native LA. 210

L A R U T A N Photography by Nicole Nodland Styling by Kusum Lynn

211

212

Osman blazer, button-down shirt and trousers 213

from left

Loren Stewart chainlink necklaces, Anndra Neen gold triangle necklace; Etienne Derceux jumpsuit, vintage ChloĂŠ sunglasses, Loren Stewart chainlink necklaces

214

Vintage silk robe, Maison KitsunĂŠ top and pants, Emilio de la Morena dress

Photographer: Nicole Nodland Models: Benny Harlem and Jaxyn Harlem Stylist: Kusum Lynn Hair: Anna Cofone of The Wall Group using Oribe Make-Up: Georgina Hamed using Chantecaille Stylist Assistant: Jenna Riddle Photo Assistant: Andrew Arboleda Digital Operator: Phil Sanchez Production: Oui Productions (with special thanks to Gabrielle)

216

Etienne Derceux jumpsuit, Loren Stewart chainlink necklaces

LA STORIES Photography by Nicole Nodland Styling by Kusum Lynn

Tatras bomber jacket, What Goes Around Comes Around swimsuit and belt, Asos jeans, Avocet Jewelry and We Who Prey rings

221

Models’ own

Oak NYC jacket, Tomorrowland turtleneck, ASOS denim

224

225

Rellik vintage leopard vest, Harley Davidson leather shorts

Coach leather jacket, Thaddeus O’Neil turtleneck, Maison Kitsune pants

227

Zadig & Voltaire slip dress, Laruicci ring and earrings, stylist’s own bracelet

228

229

Priscavera jumpsuit, Altuzarra turtleneck, Karen Walker handbag

230

231

3.1 Phillip Lim dress, Zaldy NYC turtleneck

232

Photographer: Nicole Nodland Stylist: Kusum Lynn Hair: Anna Cofone @ The Wall Group using Amika Make-up: Georgina Hamed using Chantecaille Stylist Assistant: Jenna Riddle Models: Courtney Money at Photogenics Media Carmen at Photogenics Media Miles at Photogenics Media Derrik at Photogenics Media Kris at Photogenics Media Bryce at Vision LA Madison at Next Alexandria at LA Models Digital Operator: Phil Sanchez Photo Assistant: Andrew Arboleda Filming: Alexander Cole Production: Oui Production

233

The Movement You Need is On Your Shoulder

Friends and free spirits Missy Rayder and Nataša Vojnović show us how to get down to earth at Missy’s upstate NY refuge

Photography by Philip Gay Styling by Soraya Dayani 234

Dinosaur Jr tee, ChloĂŠ skirt

235

Vintage Dinosaur Jr. tee, Norma Kamali pants

237

Clockwise from top left: Houghton body, Victor dE Souza shorts, A Détacher cap; all Sophie Theallet; Chloé shorts; vintage Kate Moss for Topshop dress

238

239

240

Clockwise from opposite: Nina Ricci tanks, vintage Dolce & Gabbana pants; vintage Dinosaur Jr. tee, ChloĂŠ skirt; Diesel dress; Houghton body; Diesel dress

241

Philosophy sweater, Eres briefs

242

243

ChloĂŠ Blouse, Rochas sweater, Courage skirt

Amen body, Dolce & Gabbana shorts, and Redemption boots

Houghton body and Victor dE Souza shorts

246

Clockwise from top left: Norma Kamali swimwear; ChloĂŠ blouse, Rochas sweater, Courage skirt; Wanda Nylon turtleneck and pants

247

All Sophie Thealet

248

249

Vintage Kate Moss for Topshop dress

Houghton body

251

A DĂŠtacher dress, hat and socks, Redemption boots

252

Vintage YSL dress

Philosophy Dress

254

255

Clockwise from top left: Moschino top and leggings; Rochas blouse, Sonia Rykiel pants, Wanda Nylon turtleneck and pants; Moschino top and leggings

256

257

258

Special thanks to Missy Rayder, Nataša Vojnović, Mary at AWACS, Laura Motta at 2DM Management, Patricia Black, the Albright Fashion Library, and Nicole Nodland.

Photography by Philip Gay Styling by Soraya Dayani at Art-Dept NY Hair by Nicolas Eldin for Bumble and Bumble Make up by Yacine Diallo at Bridge Artists using Chanel Models: Missy Rayder at Marilyn and Nataša Vojnović at Women Photographic assistance by Joseph Borduin at Highlight Studios Retouching by AWACS

Clockwise from top left: Michael Kors leopard hoodie, Céline dress, Wanda Nylon trench, Saint Laurent duffle coat, vintage Alexander McQueen dress; Eres briefs

259

Words by Betsy Blueeyes

Meet America’s newest sweetheart, a shining beacon of glitz and glamour beamed from a better place and spreading to the masses her message of love.

Hey girls and boys… ladies and gents… you gorgeous people of the world.

Betsy Blueeyes is here… and she, my dears… is love.

With a warm, vibrant heart and a joyful wink in her eye, Betsy is here to sing from the rooftops (of penthouse apartments around the world!): “We come from love… we are love …” And we go to love! And Betsy is all about it!

As the wonderful Belinda Carlisle sang, “Heaven is a place on earth” and Betsy knows this is absolutely and unequivocally true.

We really do live in heaven.

And Betsy is here in her own loving, artistic, and perfectly imperfect way, to help the world to shine.

Betsy loves all of you.

From the teeniest, tiniest of bugs to the tallest and grandest of trees. Whether animal or human, young or old. Whether you be pink, blue, black, white, gay, straight, trans, or anywhere in between.

Whether you’re able or disabled.

Betsy loves you.

Betsy loves the guys. Don’t get her wrong, she likes to have a little moment of joyful lovin’.

But honestly, Betsy just loves, loves, loves the ladies.

INTRODUCING

BETSY BLUEEYES Throughout Betsy’s life, when she has fallen on hard times, it was the ladies who picked Betsy up, brushed her down and treated her with kindness and love. Betsy has never forgotten this.

So, ladies of the world — Betsy loves you the best!

And when you see all the unique, beautiful, and fantastically strange Betsys out there, know that they are a reflection of the incredible magic and fabulousness that you as women possess.

Girls, guys — we can talk all night until the sun rises… but really what we all need to do is to be loving, kind and put others before ourselves.

It’s the key to life and the magic of happiness.

Be who you please… love who you please… dress how you please.

Betsy would love for you to fall in love with you. Fall in love with yourself and have the best love affair of your life. In falling in love with yourself, you can fall in love with others… and in turn, fall in love with the world.

And just remember — as long as you love, and are kind and compassionate, you can be anything you want to be in this world.

You are free.

260