So It Goes Issue 3 by So It Goes

So It Goes . Imogen Poots . Cillian Murphy . Wes Anderson . Terry Gilliam .

. Bruce Davidson . SOHN . Dylan Rieder . John Stezaker . Alan Lomax . . Camille Rowe by Guy Aroch .

Cillian Murphy

Vassilis Karidis

Masthead Editors

James Wright & Joshua Bullock james@soitgoescreative.com josh@soitgoescreative.com

Publisher & Editor-in-Chief Lewis Carpenter lewis@soitgoescreative.com

Creative Director James Wright

Features Editor Joshua Bullock

Fashion Editor Frances Davison frances@soitgoescreative.com

Design & Art Direction Michael Knight info@anewmark.com

Picture Editor Alice Veitch

Editorial Assistants Caspar Bullock, Cecilia Golding

Contributing Photographers Guy Aroch, Vassilis Karidis, Eliot Lee Hazel, Adeline Mai, James Wright, Sophie Wright

Contributing Writers Martin Armstrong, Joshua Bullock, Elliot Carpenter, Lewis Carpenter, Robert Martineau, Doug Michaelson, Grace Pilkington, Xenobe Purvis, Alex Tieghi-Walker, India Windsor-Clive, James Wright, Sophie Wright

Contributing Illustrators Max Dalton, Stavros Damos, Sharmelan Murugiah

Contribute info@soitgoescreative.com

Advertise lewis@soitgoescreative.com Europe Thomas Nicolau-Guillaumet thomas.ng@geomarketingplus.com

Special Thanks 1st Option Locations, Association for Cultural Equity, Craig Bankey, Rachel Barker, Jonathan Bell, Sanne Frid Berntsen, Benjamin Bourgeron, Gareth Bullock, Jamie Burke, Lesley Carpenter, Philippe Contini, Isabelle Dahlin, Laura Dooley, DNA Models, Allegra Faggionato, Rose Forde, Melanie Friend, Getty Images, Chelsea Headicar, ID-PR, Leica,

Anna Lomax Wood, Liz McClean, The Magnet Agency, Magnum Photos, Thomas Nicolau-Guillaumet, Federico Pirzio-Biroli, Probation, Ridinghouse, Bryna Rifkin, Jed Root, Camille Rowe, Sarah Scott-Farber, The Shirazi Family, The Society Management, Natalie Sytner, Laurence von Thomas, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Trust, Holly Walker, Lucy Williams

Covers Cillian wears coat by De Rien Imogen wears dress by rag & bone; cardigan by Karen Willer; all rings Workhorse Back cover photograph by James Wright

Chapter Artwork Courtesy of If You Leave Cillian Murphy by Vassilis Karidis

Published by So It Goes Creative Ltd, 2014 ISSN No. 2052 - 5370

Imogen Poots by Eliot Lee Hazel

Distribution

Print Management

Reproduction

Adam Long Comag Specialist

Laura Dooley lldooley@gmail.com

Greig Scott Logical Connections

Ralph Wills PH Media

Contents p.9

p.11

p.12

Masthead

Editors’ Letter

If You Leave

The Actors p.16

p.28

Cillian Murphy

Imogen Poots

The Directors p.42

p.50

Wes Anderson

Terry Gilliam

The Places p.60

p.64

p.66

p.70

Haiti

Naoshima

Venice’s Lagoon

The Artists p.74

p.86

p.94

Heikki Kaski

Bruce Davidson

John Stezaker

The Collections p.106

p.124

Camille

Dylan Rieder

The Musicians p.138

p.144

p.148

Guy Blakeslee

SOHN

Black Atlass

The Writers p.156

p.164

p.172

p.178

Alan Lomax: Songhunter

No Country for All Men

Corporate Spartacus

The Boredom of War

Editors’ Letter

During the interviews and conversations with the photographers, artists and writers who make up the pages of this issue, we have stumbled across a continuing preoccupation with permanence. From the nomadic, young Finnish photographer Heikki Kaski to the uncompromising, visionary filmmaker Terry Gilliam, our featured artists all share a concern over the legacy of their efforts. How much can their work matter to a public with so much at its fingertips? How can they can keep doing what they do, the way they want to, and still be heard? These anxieties reach back into history and this issue’s trail stretches from the streets of 1950s Coney Island to an artists’ colony in modern Japan. In the Fifties, Alan Lomax, the legendary folklorist featured in our ‘Writers’ chapter, wrote that traditional song styles ‘are threatened to be engulfed by the roar of our powerful society with its loudspeakers all turned in one direction’. As a young magazine in a digital age we share his fears but, like Lomax, we’ve come to realise that doing things differently is the only thing that matters. Publish and be damned. The bundle of paper you hold is real; it can be found on the bookshelf or the bedside table. Unlike the Internet, it can search you out; being material in form it holds the possibility of accident. When someone stumbles across us, we feel confident they’ll return. We see So It Goes as a refuge for those who come to consider things and take their time on the scenic route back. So It Goes

If You Leave by

Sophie Wright

If You Leave could be one of the most beautiful things born of the Internet. The brainchild of photographer, videographer and creative polymath Laurence Tarquin von Thomas, it grew from a listless scrawl on a napkin into a Tumblr photography project with over 450,000 followers then back onto paper in the form of a four-volume series. The blog is a refuge from the dark torrents of the Web, a hushed corner where drifters from all over the world submit pictures that are spun together in a hazy narrative, full of the quietly cinematic moments of everyday life. A wistful melancholy threads these strangers and their pictures together, perhaps initiated by Laurence’s own private affair with photography. Though having spent most of his twenties on film sets, taking pictures has been his personal antidote to the neurotic demands of film: “I can shoot a roll and it can be the best roll I’ve ever shot and it can change my life. Or it can be nothing!” After packing in a comfortable life in his native Belgium, he moved to London with only a few possessions. After a while, the joys of a simple existence wore off. “What I realised was that all these things that you have – they’re not only objects. They can be aesthetically beautiful but they’re also time capsules: they have memories attached to them. I didn’t realise that that’s what an object can do to you. I started feeling really lost. Taking a photo was like a little time capsule, it was my visual diary.” It was through this visual diary that he broke into the community of Tumblr, a social network used by millions. What sets If You Leave apart from the mass of blogs clumsily feeding off the deluge of photographic images on the Internet is a smart understanding and investment in the ways that technology has changed and opened up contemporary culture. “We’ve never in the history of mankind had this kind of exponential amount of information available. It’s also non-linear, while everything else had to be in a book and written and be printed, it just exploded onto the Internet. For the first time, technology offered the platform which could make something that is niche into something that is larger than the population of a country.” It must be one of the only blogs to have such a high level of followers for the comparatively low amount of images uploaded, currently shy of 1,000. This ‘less is more’ approach tempers the messy digital zeitgeist, giving back the chosen pictures the resonance they deserve and eventually according them a more enduring lifespan in the book series. There is no doubt that these pictures deserve it. Laurence describes the dreamlike analogue aura of If You Leave as the embracing of photography’s imperfection: “I consider it to be almost painting more than photography. The only reason painting is still here today is because it allowed itself to be flawed. When everyone said painting was dead, that’s when it came alive.” This sense of unwavering resolve is something that stretches through all his work, from his publishing platform arthur-frank, started on an old Mac PowerBook with a taped-up screen, and beyond into future projects. The outcome is a curious marriage of nostalgia and technology.

The Actors Maja Malou Lyse

The Directors Frank Correa

The Artists Valeria Schettino

The Places Chenghao Lee

The Musicians Simon Jourdan

The Collection Margarete Elmenhorst

The Writers Arielle Berman

Chapter Artwork from If You Leave 15

The Actors Cillian Murphy Imogen Poots 17

Cillian Murphy Vassilis Karidis Lewis Carpenter

Photography Words

T-shirt: John Varvatos; Jumper: YMC; Jacket: Paul Smith; Trousers: Paul Smith

Currently catching the public eye with his turn as interwar Brummie gangster Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders, Cillian Murphy is displaying the dramatic complexity that has taken him from his debut on the Irish stage in Enda Walshâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Disco Pigs to both critical acclaim in Ken Loachâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Wind That Shakes the Barley and blockbusting stardom as Scarecrow in Batman Begins. So It Goes sat down with the Cork native, broke bread over some Ballymaloe relish and discussed the differing demands of stage and screen acting, reflecting on the course of his career and musing over what lies in store.

Suit: Casely-Hayford; Neckerchief: Marwood; Boots: John Varvatos

Jacket: De Rien; Jumper: Pringle of Scotland

So It Goes: Do you see theatre as the foremost training ground for honing your skills? Cillian Murphy: Because I didn’t officially train anywhere, for me it is. The thing that peaked my interest in acting was originally theatre, it wasn’t film – I was interested in film but it never seemed like a possibility – whereas theatre did. I was very lucky in that I got to work with great theatre companies and directors in Ireland, and work on great material very quickly. It was the only training ground I knew. The classic way of playing small parts, then playing slightly bigger parts. Aside from my first show, which was just a two-hander [Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs]. SIG: Do you feel any sense of displacement having lived in the UK for a while? Can you use that in some of your roles? CM: I think when I was younger I was very keen that I wouldn’t be just an Irish actor. I thought I would be an actor foremost and the extraction would be secondary. I wanted to go off and play English and American characters. As I got slightly older I began to realise that it was something to be embraced once you had established yourself as more than just an Irish actor. I’m very, very proud of being from Cork and from Ireland. I don’t know in terms of ‘displacement’ – I’ve never really felt displaced because we’re so close. I live in London and we go back all the time. SIG: As someone who nearly had a career as a musician, you have been quoted comparing the thrill of performing live music to that of acting on stage. That kind of live performance and authenticity is something So It Goes cherishes. What do you think makes an authentic experience in TV and film? CM: I think authenticity is something very important overall and particularly in this acting game where so much is superficial and so much is about anything but authenticity. I’ve tried to plough that furrow and stick to my instincts, stick to what interests me and to the reason I got into this in the first place. Theatre fits into that because you’re very exposed on stage. It really is just the actor. What I love about theatre is the sort of implausibility of it, the absurdity of it: at any point it could all go terribly wrong. Someone forgets their lines or the lights break, the curtain doesn’t go up, somebody in the audience misbehaves. I like that, I love the fragility of live performance. I always have done, from when I was playing music and now similarly with theatre. Film, however, has so many different layers, and the actors are very much down the ladder in terms of creating the end result, because we basically just give the performance and pass it over to the director and the editor. Then the marketing takes over. In theatre, you’re exposed but you’re also empowered. I like that combination. SIG: There is a huge variety in the characters you’ve played – can you put your finger on what you find attractive in a part? CM: In terms of live performance, I am always interested by people in jeopardy, situations where the stakes are raised. I’ve always liked the idea of the everyday man in extraordinary situations. I’ve also liked the idea of exploring the slightly darker side of the psyche. It generally appears to be the case that most people who carry out acts that we would find disturbing are trying to do the right thing. Particularly with this character I’m playing right now, Tommy Shelby, who was a gangster. He was acting according to his idea of the greater good, an idea

that requires him to carry out these acts. I’m not interested in shows that would portray those acts and then have no consequence. I’m interested in the consequences. SIG: The clearest example of a character working for the greater good is Damien in The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Watching that film elicits a whole range of emotions. Did you find it a difficult part to play? CM: Well, the thing you have to realise is that I never saw the script, so I never knew which way the character was headed. Ken Loach shoots chronologically and gives you the material on the day or the day before. I knew there was a civil war, I knew there was going to be a split and I was aware that I was a doctor but… What it does is avoid the intellectualisation – it’s all based on instinct. One of the greatest lessons I learnt working with Ken was to throw away all of that. You can get your script and spend months and months and months finding all these layers and colours and complexities. The camera doesn’t care if you have a million different reasons for why you’re behaving like that; it just wants the truth. First thought, best thought. Particularly shooting the kid, I didn’t know that was going to happen. Very cleverly he’d had us spend a lot of time together. We’d got very close, me and that kid. SIG: There has been a slew of high-concept, high-production-value TV series from America like Breaking Bad and The Wire. Peaky Blinders is slightly different again, being so heavily stylised: the slow-motions and Jack White soundtrack. Was that something that attracted you? CM: I was aware all this great television was being made. I discussed it with friends of mine and they would just talk about the depth that you could go to with the character over the course of six hours. So I asked my agent if there was anything around on this side of the pond, because I didn’t necessarily want to up sticks and go over to America. I’d be much more about supporting British and Irish television because it seems like the Americans have got it nailed already. The script then happened to come up and I was aware of [series creator] Steve Knight’s work, having met him before. He’s probably one of the most exciting writers around at the moment. I read the first two episodes and I was hooked. What I loved about it was that, although the British do the aristocracy and the big houses very well, the working class had never been mythologised, as it has been so effortlessly in America. It was the first time I’d read something like that and the character was amazing! That mysterious stranger riding in on horseback. The writing for the second season is even better. It’s got bolder, and stronger and madder. It’s a gift to go back and reprise a character – I’ve never done that before. SIG: It must be exciting to have made your mark but still not be long in the tooth. Do you think you’re at the right time of your life to get these great parts like Tommy Shelby? CM: Yes, I think I’m a bit more relaxed about it. I still have a hunger to do great work and push myself, but I know you can’t always do that. You can aim and strive for it. There are two important things: one is to be busy and to keep your mind active, and the second is that great art needs risk. I never want to get to a point where I go, ‘That was easy, that was a nice job!’ There needs to be some kind of struggle. But at the same time I’m not going to beat myself up as much as I used to in the past.

All clothing: Berluti

25 Suit: Casely-Hayford Neckerchief: Marwood

Jacket: De Rien

Coat: Neil Barrett

Photographer – Vassilis Karidis Photographer’s Assistant – Bradley Lloyd Barnes Creative Direction – James Wright Producer – Lewis Carpenter Stylist – Rose Forde Fashion Assistant – Amanda Arber Stylist’s Interns – Lezley-Anne Nabiryo and Jennifer Earnest Groomer – Karen Alder at K Management using Tom Ford skincare and Kiehl’s hair products.

Imogen Poots Eliot Lee Hazel James Wright

Photography Words

Jumper: 525 America; Shirt: Vintage Wrangler; Ring: Natalie Frigo

2013 was a vintage year for British cinema. There was no Harry Potter and no James Bond, no syrupy period drama and no breakout rom-com. Yet even in the absence of a global boxoffice hit, Britain proved that independent cinema still had the vitality, richness and imagination to combat the muscle of the Hollywood juggernaut. While orthodox thought tells us to be apprehensive about the future of homegrown filmmaking, the strength of one British commodity has never been in doubt. From Carey Mulligan to Felicity Jones, Tom Hiddleston to Andrew Garfield, the stock of young British acting talent has never been higher. Enter Imogen Poots. With eight films in eight months, Poots has attracted the attentions of enigmatic legend Terrence Malick, The Last Picture Showâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Peter Bogdanovich, titan of independent cinema Richard Linklater, not to mention Michael Winterbottom and Cary Fukunaga.The remarkable thing? Imogen Poots is only twenty-four. This is not a star rising; this is a star set to explode. So It Goes talked to the young starlet about identity, new beginnings in America and the importance of listening.

Overalls: Vintage Lee; Top: rag & bone; Rings: Workhorse

Dress: rag & bone; Cardigan: Karen Walker; Rings: Workhorse

“I first came to Los Angeles when I was eighteen. I didn’t understand it at all. I walked around listening to Modest Mouse, sunburnt and alone in this vast city. I remember it so clearly. I was really excited. Terrified...but just so excited.” Unlike many of the young British actors bemoaning their transatlantic migration and the machinations of the City of Angels, Imogen Poots beams ear-to-ear when asked about her new life in the US, steadfastly positive about wandering a city where no one wanders. “There’s a beautiful culture of convenience that could be something as simple as saying you want the salad without the tomatoes, and no one bats an eyelid. Try that in England and it’s like, ‘What the fuck did you just say?!’” Wildly self-deprecating and goofily charismatic, Poots is – in many ways – archetypally British; every bit the girl raised by her TV producer father and journalist mother in the well-heeled west London suburb of Chiswick. Think twice, however, about basing your first impressions on her gilded Queen’s English. For every role in bonneted period dramas, there’s another in an apocalyptic zombie movie, historical music biopic or independent festival film. There is more than a little of the chameleon about Poots. Patterns in her career choices are seemingly non-existent, and it’s hard to think of another young actor with such range, emotional dexterity and ability to flit between genres. Poots (of course) maintains that casting directors only really like her because she looks cartoon weird – “like a Moomin”. It began in 2007, when Poots was plucked from relative obscurity to star in 28 Weeks Later, the follow-up to Danny Boyle’s hugely successful low-budget horror flick, 28 Days Later. Buoyed by the film’s reception, she deferred her place to study at the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art and before long was seducing Michael Douglas in Solitary Man and providing the foil for: Michael Fassbender in Cary Fukunaga’s delicately crafted revisiting of Jane Eyre; Colin Farrell in vampire-comedy Fright Night; James McAvoy in Filth; and Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2012’s A Late Quartet. It was that last role in Yaron Zilberman’s poised, meditative study of life in a string quartet that ended up indelibly shaping Poots’ approach to acting. “I left A Late Quartet having realised that there’s no right or wrong way to how you approach something or how you should hold yourself. I realised it was all about listening, just listening,” Poots says softly. “Working with Catherine Keener and Philip Seymour Hoffman changed me. They taught me the inherent sense of possibility, that even with the darkest of subject matters, there’s a way to keep looking, keep searching.” The Look of Love, Michael Winterbottom’s 2013 biopic of Soho porn baron Paul Raymond is perhaps the purest showcase of Poots’ talent to date. Playing the damaged, drug-addled daughter of Steve Coogan’s Raymond, Poots is tragic, vulnerable and totally believable. So honest and affecting was her performance that Coogan joked, “It made me pull my socks up when it came to my own performance. I remember thinking: ‘Oh shit. She’s really good, I’d better concentrate!’” Like the legacy of working with the late, great Hoffman, Winterbottom’s unique authorial technique has stayed with Poots: “The way Michael works is extraordinary. There’s a magical harmony to his chaos where the manic sets he builds around him feed into an atmosphere of chance, spontaneity and blissful intuition.” Things happen so quickly in Imogen Poots’ world, it’s hard to predict what kind of actress she’ll become. With roles in Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups and Peter Bogdanovich’s Squirrels to the Nuts, not to mention Todd Field’s forthcoming adaptation of Jess Walters’ Beautiful Ruins, it’s safe to say that whatever your filmgoing tastes, Imogen Poots won’t be far away.

Jumper: 525 America; Jeans: rag & bone; Shoes: Birkenstock; Rings: Workhorse

Shirt: Kenzo; Trousers: Acne

Jumper: rag & bone

40 Jumper: 525 America; Rings: Natalie Frigo Opposite page â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Shirt: Kenzo; Trousers: Acne

Photographer – Eliot Lee Hazel . Photographer’s Assistant – Heikki Kaski . Creative Direction – James Wright . Stylist – Liz McClean @ The Magnet Agency Stylist’s Assistants – Elliot Soriano and Katrina Thomson . Hair – John D @ Starworks . Make-up – Melanie Inglessis @ Starworks

The Directors Wes Anderson Terry Gilliam 43

Wes Anderson Opening Illustration

Illustrations

Stavros Damos

Max Dalton Courtesy of The Wes Anderson Collection Words J oshua Bullock

Wes Anderson is the son of a writer and an archaeologist – perhaps the most effective appraisal of everyone’s favourite enigmatic filmmaker yet written. Post-modern but ‘pickled in a world of his own creation’ is how one critic put it. Pickled implies stasis and a leaching away of colour – neither seem fitting for the kaleidoscopic, bustling imagination of a director whose films divide and dazzle.

As a description of a career it comes closer. The worlds Anderson creates are consistently arch, out of time, sumptuously styled, wonderfully shot, artfully stage-managed. Kitchensink realism they are not. The pervading chocolate box Roald-Dahl-meets-Hal-Ashby tone of whimsy has affronted its fair share of commentators – “I love Wes Anderson’s films, or at least his film” – and other such catty backhanded compliments befitting a vampish Anderson character. That there are recurring themes in Anderson’s work is inarguable: a family, or family member, sets out on a quest to make reparations for a colourful past of indiscretion, betrayal and disappointment. Certainly that’s most true for the pair of exiled patriarchs in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Life Aquatic (2004). For a director stuck in another time, in music, in set design, in filmic references, old age perfectly attunes to his default setting of sentimentality masquerading as indifference. Forces of nature Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) and Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) crack into wounded humanity like perfectly cooked crème brûlées. The relationship across his films between stories, colours and even cast members suggests repetition, but you can’t plagiarise yourself as a filmmaker when each nowhere, no-time, no-place world you create is by its nature undefined. There is an ever-present ‘quirkiness’ to Wes Anderson, yes, but no two characters’ or locations’ idiosyncrasies are the same. He performs a juggling act with the two opposing sensations of overblown and refined, with the safety net of being able to throw up his hands and say it was just for laughs. One riotous jamboree. Quite literally in Moonrise Kingdom (2012). But I’d defend him against the charge of heartlessness

Herman Blume: You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I grew up. But I send my kids here because the fact is you go to one of the best schools in the country: Rushmore. Now, for some of you it doesn’t matter. You were born rich and you’re going to stay rich. But here’s my advice to the rest of you: take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can’t buy backbone. Don’t let them forget it. Thank you.

and style over substance. Everything is about the characters. Even the sets are about the characters. So much of American independent cinema mistakes depression and inaction for profundity. Individuals are often wellrendered at the expense of story and entertainment. Getting to know depressed people in film should be more engaging and pleasurable than it is in life. Anderson’s are funny, error-prone and, while you know you won’t feel heartbroken if they die or fail, you’re always interested in how it turns out for them. By comparison, Noah Baumbach (who incidentally co-wrote The Life Aquatic with Anderson) fails to evoke that kind of empathy

in Greenberg, a film where Ben Stiller acts a similarly neurotic, middle-aged man-child to his character in Tenenbaums. Perhaps only Alexander Payne has as consistently found optimism and humour in human imperfection, and given audiences such enjoyable romps along the way. A Wes Anderson film must be the party invitation everyone in Hollywood hopes they get. That said, there are transcendent moments when Anderson really allows some heart to be glimpsed and raw emotion judged; where the wry and the unfeeling give way to something unapologetically beautiful or sad. The appearance of a jaguar shark in The Life Aquatic, the lonely wolf at the end of Fantastic Mr Fox (2009), Richie’s attempted suicide in Tenenbaums. Whereas some films have comic interludes, Anderson’s have dramatic ones. Often slow-motion, always conducted against an impeccable tune from the archives of The Kinks, Peter Sarstedt, Elliot Smith or Nico. Not that the director ever allows the seriousness to linger. In Tenenbaums, Dudley, one of the coterie of secondary characters who add colour to the main Anderson ensemble, is diagnosed in the chaos as being somewhere on the autistic spectrum. He comes out of a hospital room covered in Richie’s blood. “Dudley, where is he?” asks Richie’s panicked sister, Margot. “Who?” responds the idiot savant. There has to be a willing suspension of disbelief watching Wes Anderson films. Big wides and swish pans establish expressive, colourful sets in a self-consciously theatrical manner. Characters often seem to enter and exit shots ‘stage left’ or ‘stage right’. Fantastic Mr Fox and Tenenbaums are books whose illustrated pages open to introduce the story being told. Titles and chapter cards mark the narrative and call attention to the fact this is a ‘story’ not real life, in just the same way the over-styled props do.

M. Gustave: You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant... oh, fuck it.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) ÂŠ Fox Searchlight

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Marine biologist-explorers who smoke weed and fight critics, or louche ex-attorneys who live in hotels seem more literary than cinematic. People are what they do in Anderson films, and if they’re not, they’re emphatically not. Like the bondsman keeping Steve Zissou’s expedition on budget in The Life Aquatic who redeems himself by playing hostage negotiator when the crew are kidnapped by Filipino pirates. [A woman asks a question about the shark Zissou is hunting] Festival Director: [translating] That’s an endangered species at most. What would be the scientific purpose of killing it? Steve Zissou: Revenge. At the other end of the directing spectrum, Scorsese’s Casino and Goodfellas are wonderful films that share ensemble casts and dysfunctional families but their grittiness gives them the lustre of reality. Does the average cinema-goer have more experience of American Mafia culture than of Anderson’s offbeat worlds and their inhabitants? How do we know these people don’t exist? I’ve met a few of them but wouldn’t have recognised them without Anderson. Both directors are masters of dialogue and coaxing commanding performances from their actors. It’s taken as read in the film community (particularly the awards circuit) that Anderson is a stylish ham, but a performance like Gene Hackman’s as the eponymous Royal Tenenbaum is nuanced and so terrifically written as to surpass the bounds of ‘serious’ acting. It’s seriously funny and seriously deep. The phrase ‘a Wes Anderson film’ describes a specific visual grammar that even averagely cine-literate people will be familiar with. That is Wes Anderson’s curious gift; that he has made the crossover from the cult fringes to mainstream imagination with the contrary and opaque stories he tells. Even the newfound popularity of the font Futura is due to its use in his film titles. The consistent aesthetic in his set, props and costume departments comes from repeat collaboration. Milena Canonero, Anderson’s regular costume designer, got her first gig on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Production designer Mark Friedberg has not only

realised several Anderson universes but also Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York. Director of photography Robert Yeoman has worked on all of Wes Anderson’s live-action films and this expert pedigree has been turned to other comic creations like Bridesmaids, Dogma and The Heat. On set, the director’s exacting eye means many, many takes and an obsession with detail, but the films bear witness to his success in creating a family atmosphere to loosen up his players. For The Grand Budapest Hotel, his cast and crew stayed in the very hotel they were filming in. Jeff Goldblum played piano in the lobby, formal dinner started every night at 7.30pm and there was a library of classics from the silver screen available to the cast for inspiration. Much of the dialogue in Fantastic Mr Fox was recorded at George Clooney’s Lake Como mansion between meals. Mrs Fox: Why did you lie to me? Mr Fox: Because I’m a wild animal. Everything creative needs boundaries and Anderson’s world is defined by the edifices that contain the parlours that contain the games. We are invited to travel with the camera through giant doll’s houses, Synecdoche New York style. Only unlike Kaufman, when he shows a cross-section of a train, boat or house with each character compartmentalised, Anderson isn’t trying to press home a meta-narrative. His actors respond to these constraints. Anderson has moved from road trip to high school to domestic to adventure to animal fable to India to island to The Grand Budapest Hotel. His career began at university with Owen Wilson, as the two wrote a screenplay and shot a short for it called Bottle Rocket starring Wilson and his brother Luke. The script won the attention of influential independent producer James L. Brooks (The Simpsons, As Good as It Gets) and was made into a feature of the same name for $7 million where James Caan added his weight to the cast of virtual unknowns. It flopped at the box office but delighted critics. It’s interesting to see that Anderson has never revisited the more intimate bromance of that first feature, expanding his palette and cast as his resources have swelled. This year’s The Grand Budapest Hotel certainly

reads like Harvey Weinstein’s Christmas card list, with regulars Dafoe, Goldblum, Murray and Schwartzman joined by first-timers Law, Fiennes and Wilkinson. Jack Whitman: I wonder if the three of us would’ve been friends in real life. Not as brothers, but as people. One long-term collaborator no longer around is Kumar Pallana, whose gnomic cameos dot all of Anderson’s films up to The Darjeeling Limited. Pallana’s story embodies both the Anderson aesthetic and the director’s wonderfully self-indulgent methods. As a successful entertainer, Pallana was known as ‘Kumar of India’, a circus-based performer who even appeared on The Mickey Mouse Club. After he retired, he moved to Houston and opened a café there, the Cosmic Cup, where Anderson and the Wilson brothers hung out, forming a low-rent Texas salon where herbal tea and chess were the order of the day. Once Bottle Rocket (1996) was green-lit, Anderson and Wilson invited Pallana to play the small part of an inept criminal. Anderson then cast him as Mr Littlejeans, the school groundskeeper in Rushmore and then again as Pagoda, the elderly Tenenbaum retainer. The actor says virtually nothing in all these films but his enigmatic silence and presence easily convince. What sets Pallana’s cameos and his director apart are their economy, their pathos and the release in the laugh that always comes. It’s as if Wes Anderson wants to compress as many stories and suggested histories into his characters as they can fit. As a scrupulously private person, he also wants some things to be just for him. [Royal motions to Pagoda] Royal: He saved my life, you know. Thirty years ago. I was knifed at a bazaar in Calcutta, and he carried me to the hospital on his back. Ari: Who stabbed you? [Royal motions to Pagoda again] Royal: He did. There was a price on my head, and he was a hired assassin.[Falls silent remembering] Stuck me in the gut with a shiv.

Terry Gilliam Stavros Damos Words J oshua Bullock

Opening Illustration

Terry Gilliam is a whirling vortex of ideas and invented worlds. Born in Minnesota, he moved to Britain in the late Sixties as one-sixth of the anarchic Monty Python that took his perverse and hilarious animations as the visual glue (barely) holding their surrealist humour together. Gilliam’s fantastical forays later moved into his own projects, directing the dementedly enjoyable Jabberwocky (1977) and Time Bandits (1981). Never just an entertainer, his darker dystopian visions of Brazil (1985), Twelve Monkeys (1995) and this year’s The Zero Theorem articulate anxieties over mass control and technology. An Old Testament prophet of cult filmmaking, Gilliam’s career is one of fear and loathing, tilting at calamity and triumph, making enemies of studios and winning immense respect from his peers along the way. So It Goes salutes a true original.

So It Goes: You’re directing Berlioz’s opera Benvenuto Cellini this summer, after your successful debut with Faust in 2011. Is it more of a case of filmmaking methods influencing your stage direction rather than the other way around? Terry Gilliam: It’s probably more the former. Opera meant learning a new skill, a new craft. It’s very different to film. But for years before I did Faust, I’d been approached by people to do opera because they thought my films were ‘operatic’ or at least ‘theatrical’ if nothing else. So the transition wasn’t as hard as I thought and luckily with Faust – and again now – I was surrounded by experienced people who could keep me from falling on my face too often. It’s a totally collaborative business and I’m the novice trying to learn the job. SIG: Your new film The Zero Theorem makes me think of Brazil in terms of the Orwellian future it presents. I came out of it feeling incredibly depressed. TG: As you should! I’m curious to see what this film looks like in ten years. Most of my stuff splits the audience completely: those who think it’s fantastic and love it and those who just think, ‘What the fuck was that

all about, it’s really tedious.’ But that’s what happened with Brazil. People now think Brazil is a masterpiece. At the time, half of the audience walked out. It’s only that time has given it its gloss of prescience. Like Brazil, The Zero Theorem is trying to prophesy something. It was just my reaction to how I saw the world. I want to encourage people to learn to be alone, to find out who they are. It’s a paradox. People can’t do that because then they lose their only contact with humanity. But maybe they haven’t had contact with humanity to begin with because they’ve been tweeting and working in this abstracted version of the world. SIG: Those concerns have always been present in your visual style. In Twelve Monkeys, Brazil and The Fisher King, there’s that ‘Steampunk’ design to your sets and costumes – a refined primitivism. As your characters speed towards technological complexity, they also seem to have retro facets. They’re Neanderthal in many ways and can’t achieve humanity. TG: Maybe that is humanity. Neanderthals. It’s that struggle. All my films are jihads or struggles. Too many people come to The Zero Theorem with a feeling that it’s more intelligent or it’s more intellectual or complex

than it is. It’s not! It’s very simple in a sense. My wife kept saying, “You just have to submit to it” which is what Islam means. So this is my first Islamic film – with a Zen ending. SIG: Your creative beginnings were drawing cartoons for MAD magazine then using collage in Monty Python animations. There are certain filmmakers who have been very controlled about the special effects they use in their films and then there are others who have almost been bewitched by its possibilities. TG: I try to keep my effects primitive. Look at the first Lord of the Rings, which I loved. I was never a fan of the books but I thought Peter really captured something quite terrific. But as the films went on, the orcs multiplied and we still had the same number of heroes running around, fighting thousands more. The characters aren’t flawed enough to interest me. I’m always obsessed with gravity, how things really fall, the pain. I’m so frightened of doing things too grandly, I try to go in an opposite direction. Into something that’s smaller, more internalised. That’s why Christophe Waltz is so good. What I hear from other actors who understand this thing is that The Zero Theorem is the best bit of

acting he’s ever done, but it isn’t recognised because it doesn’t have the charm or the outrageousness. SIG: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is perhaps your grandest film in terms of production and ostensibly a child’s film. But it’s about the nature of storytelling, the creation of worlds. He’s a fabulist like yourself… TG: He’s a master liar. I’d always loved the books. Apparently the only other book that sold more in the Fifties than Munchausen was the Bible. So here was this thing that was so much part of a culture. And then it was gone. That intrigued me. Also, I wanted to put Gustave Doré’s illustrations on film. Like Munchausen, I was feeling old and burnt out. And at that point, I had two daughters. That’s why we wrote it with the young girl Sally as the character who reinvigorates Munchausen and allows him to fabulise again. SIG: Doré was an inspiration for Munchausen and you’ve said the painter Neo Rauch is a touchstone for the world of The Zero Theorem. Are these subconscious references? TG: No, it’s conscious. I start looking for images that capture something. For Tideland it was Andrew Wyeth’s painting, Christina’s World, the famous one with the girl in the foreground and the house in the distance. It’s not necessarily being literal about it. I know in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus there were a lot of different references but in this one it was Neo Rauch. I think he’s one of the great painters out there right now; he makes your brain work. He has different styles, he can hold different periods in the same painting and his sense of colour is fantastic. He works in a way that the Surrealists do for me, becoming a place to leap off from.

Storyboards for scenes from Brazil (1985) drawn by Gilliam

SIG: Talking of leaping off, you’ve probably wanted to do that from a tall building after some of the terrible luck you’ve had on films like The Man Who Killed Don Quixote where filming had to be abandoned because of flooding among other reasons. Rumours abound that you’re taking another stab at it… TG: The script has changed since then, because I have to keep convincing myself it’s a fresh idea. Back then, it was a man who is magically dragged into the seventeenth century. It’s not about that anymore. It’s the same character who’s now a commercials director. Fifteen years earlier he did this student film

where he went to a Spanish village with locals who played parts in his Don Quixote. Because it was so beautiful and poetic, he got picked up not to make movies, but to make commercials. Now, a period of time later, he’s in Spain doing commercials, strangely enough using the character of Quixote. He goes back to the village, thinking about how wonderful it was, the purity of his vision back then and the wonderful people he worked with and he realises he’s fucked their lives up. [Pause] So that’s the autobiographical part… SIG: Very... TG: That’s what I like about film. It’s impossible to really learn how to make films. There’s always more to know, things are always thrown up at you. It’s more about surviving each time. You get through it and say, “Yeah, I like that. I’m proud of that.” That’s my biggest concern, for ‘I’ in my utter selfishness to feel that I’ve done something I’m proud of – a craftsman’s approach more than anything else. SIG: Have you fallen short of that ever? TG: The Brothers Grimm. I could have made a better film of it, but for my marriage with the Weinstein brothers – a bad marriage. It was a convergence; we were in the Czech Republic and the film pretty much had its cast and our studio MGM pulled out, for whatever reason. So we were there, all revved up, ready to go. The only vultures that spotted the carrion lying on the road happened to be the grim brothers. SIG: You’re also revisiting old material this year with Monty Python. TG: In my view, Quixote’s a new movie. And that’s it. We just start again. It’s the only way. Otherwise it becomes a feeling of going back and I don’t like to go back. With this Python show, I feel why are we going back thirty years? It depresses me and I just want to keep going forward. Whoever I was then is no longer here; he’s gone. I mean your life seems to be many, many deaths of who you were before, shedding skins like a snake as you move on. SIG: Will you be creating any new animations for the Monty Python show? TG: Not really. I was playing with stuff yesterday, trying to combine things, bits that already exist, in new ways, but I don’t know yet. I’ve been focused on Zero Theorem, the

opera, and even Quixote. I’ve been doing all those things at the same time, as well as working on an autobiography. They all come out this year. I mean Python will be fine once it gets going. It will be a big show, and it will be great. Everyone will have a wonderful time and we will be fêted as living legends, egos will blossom again. But it’s not exciting in any way. I just like new territories. SIG: You came over the Atlantic to settle in the UK in the late Sixties. Let’s say you met John Cleese over the Azores going the other way. What are the reasons you’d give each other for leaving your homelands? TG: It’s always a case of ‘the grass is greener’. I was a huge Anglophile for a long time. From The Goon Show to Ealing Comedies – that was the stuff I loved. So to end up in England seemed a decent road to take, and John, well John has always been fascinated by American women…blonde American women. SIG: Python has certainly left you your sense of humour. However sci-fi or fantastical your films are, you are more of the Pratchett than the Tolkien. Could you ever envisage making a film like Dune, a more ‘serious’ sci-fi drama? TG: It has to have humour in it because that’s what keeps me alive, so why would I exclude it from my films? No, I’d rather go through life having a wry look at things, no matter how tragic or painful, because it is the element that sustains me through all the shit I’ve experienced. If you can’t find humour in life and all its aspects, then it doesn’t seem to be worth living. People now approach life much more seriously than they used to. Everything has to be explained. I’ve always thought levity is the best way to deal with gravity. SIG: Hunter S. Thompson felt that way. An angry humour. What were your experiences of him on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? TG: He was a handful, because he was used to being the centre of attention. He became a pain in the arse frankly. Despite all that, I admired the man so much. He forgave me for what I was like because I had certainly forgiven him for the shit he’d dumped on the premiere of the film. SIG: What did he do at the premiere? TG: He just had to dominate the whole show. He had a huge bag of popcorn and he

was throwing it everywhere and this was the first time we were showing it to a big paying audience and he… it just pissed me off. I don’t normally get angry like that but I was like, “What the fuck are you doing!” SIG: Were you more concerned about making him or Ralph Steadman [illustrator to Thompson’s books] happy? TG: Oh – Hunter. I knew Ralph and he was pleased. What was weird for me was that I was never satisfied that I’d captured the madness of his drawings. Ralph is one of my great idols because I just admire how brilliant he is. Not just his penmanship, but his intelligence, how he takes reality and puts it into something so powerful – and angry. At the same time it’s so whimsical and beautiful. Both Johnny [Depp] and I were terrified Hunter wouldn’t like it. We’d set up screenings and he’d always find a reason not to be there. He was actually as terrified as we were that he wouldn’t like it. In the end, he saw it at someone’s home cinema, and because Hunter always had a camera on him, there’s a shot of him as the lights came up rolling around laughing. However much of a pain in the arse he was, it was a question of whether we could be true to Hunter. And, at least according to him, we were. SIG: There’s something preposterous about being a director. You have to be creative, individual, schismatic; but simultaneously a leader of men: focused and organised. How do you reconcile those two? TG: Schizophrenia, it’s very useful. Multiple personalities. There are a lot of directors these days who don’t know anything about the technical side, they don’t deal with it. Directors have different skills. I’m interested in all of it, so it becomes really crazy, but to me, I’m doing a big painting. I need lots of help: assistants, colourists, people who can do things better than I can, but I should be able to do all the jobs. That way, I’m not asking people to do ridiculous things or asking them to do things that cost money because we don’t have the money to do them. On the other hand, I’ve got to be crazy enough to keep saying, “We’re charging down this road.” In the beginning, I was much better at banging through a brick wall with my forehead, but it hurts too much now. You need friends around you who aren’t frightened to come up with input or tell you, “That is a brick wall Terry, that’s a bad idea.”

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) wrap drawing by Gilliam for cast and crew

The Places LA Haiti Naoshima Veniceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Lagoon 59

LA Haiti

Venice Naoshima

Of all the wretched things about Los Angeles, people often overlook the most wretched of all – its reputation. Sure, there may be tens of thousands of us Brits living there, all poor dental hygiene and endearing politesse, but these emigrés are treacherous and not to be trusted under any circumstances. How dare they forsake our grey, sceptred isle? The City of Angels is a godless upstairsdownstairs collection of seventy-two suburbs masquerading as a city. The upstairs sipping on luminescent kale juice on their way to get their labradoodle botoxed, the downstairs segregated in gang-ridden South Central and toxic Skid Row. The place is superficial and artificial, cultureless and polluted. It’s Scientology and strip-malls, neon and narcissism. The ghastly traffic jams are the size of Belgium and the only way to get across the road “is to be born there” according to Martin Amis’ limey narrator in Money. In short, it’s terribly un-English to like Hell-A, and if you’re going to do so, you bloody well better not do it having ‘centered’ yourself while chewing on a goji berry. Unsurprisingly, I too was told I’d hate LA. God knows, I thought I would, influenced as I was by these same tired, lazy clichés trotted out to me by friends, acquaintances (half of whom had never been anyway) and the worldly British media. And yet, the pages of this magazine have afforded me the

chance to visit many times over the past two years. I have gradually location-scouted my way into knowing and loving parts of the city. I’ve salivated at the freshness and imagination of its food, and been taken aback by the friendliness and creativity of its people. This is, of course, despite having had to deal with acid-tongued film executives, stolen wallets and fifteen-dollar ‘oxygen appetisers’ along the way. Stereotypes seldom exist without a kernel of truth but this piece is written in defence of Los Angeles. Don’t compare it to New York, London or Paris. There’s just no point. LA is a unique city, and for what it is, it’s quite extraordinary. My first encounter with the city was, of course, everything I was told it would be. LA truisms don’t come truer than a car being as essential as a bulging Rolodex, and not being in possession of a driving licence soon became a blindingly obvious problem. My first of many cripplingly expensive cab rides took me to an interview with a young British actor

at a well-known West Hollywood restaurant. Nervously preparing my notes, I couldn’t help but notice an infamous Hollywood producer seated directly to my right. Cowering next to him was a fresh-faced, wideeyed assistant, sweating bullets. Having been one myself in a previous life, I eavesdropped intently as the conversation rapidly devolved into the stuff of parody. The bearded monstrosity cursed, threatened and frothed his way into a state of apoplectic fury. Flashing back to my own such experiences, I physically absorbed the underling’s palpable sense of panic and dread, just waiting for her titan of industry to have an aneurysm. The phone conversation (if you can call it a conversation) soon climaxed with a furiously rendered “FUCK YOU” as the producer, without pause or explanation, flung his phone theatrically into the air for his assistant to catch, harrumphing out of the restaurant with not another word spoken. It was a scene I felt I’d read in books and seen on screen countless times, but never so perfectly rendered. Welcome to Los Angeles, where the over-worked, underpaid, much-abused graduates toiling in the mailrooms of Universal, Disney, CAA, WME and countless other temples of doom have Harvard MBAs. I’m sure this girl was no different. The abominations of the film industry are, however, well documented. Yes, each issue we lock horns with individuals versed in the darks arts of Machiavellian spin and nefarious Hollywood bullshit. It’s rarely fun and occasionally rather unpleasant. Look beyond the ‘business’ however and Los Angeles’ odd peculiarities are where the real seduction lies. Consider for a moment the lack of public transport a blessing. Human interaction does not rudely manifest itself with an armpit in your face on the Circle line or on the top deck of a night-bus where gangs of eleven-year-olds chuck their Wotsits at pensioners. Unlike almost every other major metropolitan city, LA’s chronic failure to provide its inhabitants with a decent public transit system breeds an odd sense of freedom. See people when you want to, plan whom you want to see. The pressure to homogenise and fit-in, in a city where outward appearances are everything, is a fallacy, for LA’s sense of individualism is, in many ways, like no other. For all the posturing producers leasing Porsches

they can’t afford, there are beatnik writers living in tree houses in Laurel Canyon and designers and photographers growing chillis and pomegranates in their front-yards in Loz Feliz, Echo Park and Silverlake. There are the skaters of Venice and Huntington Beach, the Downtown artists, the USC academics. Did I mention the sprawling Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Korea and Armenia and the deeply rooted and hugely influential Latino communities on the East side? This is but scratching the surface of the city’s unfathomable melting pot. Such a giddy array of communities comes to the fore at events like the annual LA Art Book Fair at MOCA’s Geffen Center. Visitors from every walk of life converge on a space ten times the size of the Turbine Hall to leaf through a jaw-dropping array of contemporary and historical zines, prints, erotica and fiction showcased by a host of established as well as avant-garde publishing

houses. Take a day to get lost in the vastness of it all and another just to people watch. The LAABF and events like it were, for me, eye-opening demonstrations not only of the cultural richness of the city-with-noculture, but Petri dishes showcasing the collision between every conceivable stratum of LA society. Is it the sight of pink-haired Tank Girls tattooed within an inch of their life sharing a discussion about self-publishing with entertainment lawyers that makes us British uncomfortable? Maybe it’s that. Or maybe it’s just the weather. Southern California’s ever-present blue skies may just be it. It’s simply too pleasant and unnatural, like being suspended in a balmy Truman Show-esque geodome where the thermostat is permanently set to ‘agreeable’. Once you get over that, realise that such ubiquitous loveliness allows for an all-year-round exploration of the nature in and around the city. Take in the sweeping views of the Los Angeles basin, the skyline of Downtown and the hazy San Fernando valley from any number of beautiful walks in the hills criss-crossing Griffith Park Observatory, Hollywood, Loz Feliz or Altadena. Drive out to the deserts of Death Valley, beaches of Malibu and national parks of Yosemite and soon realise that the seedy noir-ishness of Raymond Chandler’s LA is only part of the story. Woody Allen once rhetorically asked, “Who would want to live in a place where the only cultural advantage is that you can turn right on a red light?” You see, in many ways battle-hardened New Yorkers share our suspicions about Los Angeles, wary and envious of its overly appealing lifestyle and white-toothed veneer of perfection. My advice would be this: don’t fear reprisal and listen to your curmudgeonly friend or cantankerous British newspaper. Don’t even listen to Woody Allen. Be it through the prism of your movie-going youth, or with unsullied eyes, just see it for yourself. Realise that Los Angeles wears its stripes subtly and to uncover its true potential requires time, exploration and an open-mind. Be forewarned, however. Hell-A is a blue-skied, blue-eyed, 25-degree vortex of seduction and before you know it, it might be you sipping on wheatgrass and living in a pastel-pink Spanish hacienda in Silverlake. And remember, that’s just fine. All Images © James Wright

A six-piece conga band plays in the lobby of the Toussaint Louverture Airport. I feel a wave of humid air as I walk into the sunlight. A fleet of 4x4s waits in the yard. The asphalt beneath their wheels is cracked like parched mud and, beyond them, hundreds of men line the fence at the compound edge. The airport guards watch the crowds impassively. The men rattle the railings as the first passengers emerge. They stand before a cluster of shacks, tents and rubble. The guards raise their guns. As in many island republics the airport is named after a revolutionary. Two hundred years ago Louverture – the Black Napoleon, as he came to be known – led an enslaved nation in uprising to overthrow one of the most powerful imperial forces in the world. During the preceding century, the French had brought close to 500,000 slaves from West Africa to Haiti to work the sugar crop that made this island the most profitable colony in the world. Louverture’s soldiers won the freedom of those that had survived plantation life and helped bring about the end of slavery across the Caribbean. Today much of the island lies in ruin. Three years ago a tremor deep in the earth’s core shook the mountains of southern Haiti. Port au Prince, the city where I have just touched down, fell to the ground in a matter of minutes. In most places it is yet to be rebuilt. I get in a Land Cruiser and drive to Pétionville, up in the hills, a wealthy suburb far from the slums. In Delmas, on a steep road lined with colourful stores, a man in a blue-and-black uniform stops the car. He asks for my papers. The driver leans over and tries to smooth things. A tourist, officer. The soldier ignores him. He rests his rifle on

the ledge of the window, so it points at my eyes. I give him fifty dollars and we drive on. I have one night in Pétionville. I buy a few supplies from the supermarket on Rue Geffrard and sleep early. In the morning I begin to walk. I am headed to the Bwa Kayiman, a clearing in a forest 160 miles to the north, where Louverture’s revolution began. They say the revolt formally started with a sacrifice. A priestess cut the throat of a black pig and said a prayer. A crowd of slaves placed their hands on the animal’s neck and made the sign of the cross in its blood on their foreheads. Then they went out to the plantations and killed their former masters. It will take two weeks to reach the forest on foot. I leave early, on the road down the hill through Delmas. The sun is just up. The women on the corners call out: Blanco, Blanco, won’t you buy some mangos? They wear straw hats and keep kittens on strings among their fruit. After a few miles the hill flattens. Crowds pour into the Baptist churches on the roadsides. The men wear black suits and carry bibles and the women wear red dresses and carry flowers. UN troops in armoured vehicles watch over them as they make their way to the chapels. I walk north, where the road turns to rubble and the only buildings are tents. Sweat pours from my forehead. My pack has begun to dig into my shoulders. I adjust the straps to rebalance the weight. I am nearing Cité de Soleil – Port au Prince’s most infamous slum. It is the last stretch before I come to the countryside. The houses here are built of tyres, bottles and cinder blocks. Goats and pigs wander the mud among the shacks. Children sit on the porches clutching crabs, which they suck on like candy. I stay on the main strip otherwise I will get lost. The only vehicles are the buses. They are painted like rainbows and have God is Love written on the bumpers. Cité de Soleil is the poorest urban neighbourhood in the western hemisphere. Every few metres a man approaches and makes a cutthroat gesture. At first I am afraid and I walk on hurriedly. In time I realise it is not a threat but a request for help. In Port au Prince it means: Help me – if I do not eat I am going to die. All Images © Rob Martineau

It was night when we arrived at the island. The crossing was smooth: twenty minutes of black waters, plastic seats and muted pools of light. We saw nothing of Naoshima until the following morning. Shivering into the midnight breeze, we were blind to its beauty. A genial obāsan took us in that evening and brought us a customary Japanese breakfast the next day of raw egg, rice and fish. It was strange, the leap from old to new found on the island. From traditional tatami mats to smooth ceramics, ancient rock against cement. That was Naoshima entirely, a very modern concept built into an age-old natural landscape. The south of Japan is almost tropical in August. The heat renders the elderly horizontal, forcing damp flannels on their faces and groans from their mouths; we walked by open windows and found sweating bodies silently watching us pass. The glare of Naoshima made us squint, its slick concrete buildings made bright with the sunlight. We began with the Lee Ufan Museum, designed by Osaka-born architect Tadao Ando and built in a place of relative isolation, in a valley by the sea. It is semi-underground and offered a cool respite from the blaze of the day. The minimalism of Ufan’s sculptures conspires with the smooth edges of Ando’s design to create a place of tranquility. The Art House Project – in which centuries-old houses across the island are used as exhibition spaces – returned us to tradition. In an installation entitled Sea of Time ’98, Tatsuo Miyajima fills the flooded floor of a restored house (kadoya) with multi-coloured LED lights, to mesmeric effect. James Turrell’s Backside of the Moon (found within another Ando-designed building, Minamidera) left us in the dark

while an image emerged unhurriedly on the wall ahead. Elsewhere, in the Benesse House Museum, Bruce Nauman’s neon installation One Hundred Live and Die told us variously to ‘Laugh and Live’, ‘Play and Die’, ‘Think and Live’. Among the cement and neon were familiar splashes of colour: the oils of Pollock and Hockney and the prints of Warhol. We were struck by the vitality of this art, the breathless, challenging interchange between disciplines. But – unlike much of the art and design in Japan’s metropolises – its impact revealed itself slowly, assimilated into the sleepy Naoshima mountainscape. It is an unusual site. Established by Benesse Corporation and the mayor of Naoshima in 1985, it is distinctive in its focus on the mutually valuable relationship between the artists and the island. In return for their involvement, the local community benefit from regenerative

projects such as the planting of Naoshima’s rice paddies. Meanwhile, Ando’s sitespecific designs complement the quiet and contemplative landscape; there is a peaceful sense of permanence to the creativity here. Elsewhere in Japan, innovation is prized over endurance. The Nakagin Capsule Tower – a relic of the short-lived Metabolism architectural movement – stands abandoned in Tokyo, ready to be razed. Shin Takamatsu’s Syntax Building in Kyoto, a paean to futurism, was demolished only seventeen years after it was built. And the Ise Grand Shrine in Japan’s Mie prefecture is ceremonially knocked down and rebuilt every twenty years, a physical representation of the Shinto belief in material impermanence. We left the island by boat again, Yayoi Kusama’s vividly coloured Pumpkin impressing itself on our sight long after the port had lost definition. The day remained bright and the quietness prevailed. That was the enduring feature, the thing that stuck with us throughout our visit to the island. It is the quietness that I remember now, a far remove from the pace of Tokyo, the crush of closely-populated streets, the rush hours and the bullet trains. The island demands from its visitors a stillness that is missing from much of life in modern Japan, drawing on patience for true appreciation. I reflect on that first ferry-ride through the night and find myself reminded of Turrell’s slowly-emerging image on the wall. It felt unending, the blackness, a cold-fingered eternity on the deck of the boat and in Ando’s dimly lit room. Yet, in both instances, it was the time spent waiting in the dark that made the beauty and brightness at its finish all the more remarkable. All images © Kerensa Purvis and Lily Ho

For several unbroken months during summer, the cultured visitor to Venice makes a beeline for a piece of modern literary heritage and props themself at the counter of Harry’s Bar. Surprisingly unspectacular, the historic watering hole is most synonymous with a thirsty writer named Hemingway. Drink done, the tourist re-enters the bustling streetscape of San Marco, all sultry alleyed and canaled, bridge parapets polished by the hands of the millions of visitors that stroke them, taking away molecules of marble caught in their pores back to the mainland at the end of each day. Rows of painted masks overlap outside shop fronts like carefully arranged fish-scales and the gurgling and whirring of the vaporetti – the water buses – choke the Canal Grande with energy and exhaust fumes; the city is bustling and alive. After a night’s dancing next to the Fondamenta della Misericordia in Cannaregio, the Jewish district of the city, I took the first vaporetto of the morning to Càorle, an island community in the very northern tip of the Venetian lagoon. The boat, filled with early morning commuters, artists, writers and strays, left the pontoon on Riva degli Schiavoni and headed towards the pink lagoon beyond. The sound of horns from the mail boats and the delivery barges faded into the distance and from the water the city resembled a horizontal mass of architecture, built with seemingly rhythmic intelligence, where marble façades appeared feather-light and floating on the water. The lagoon away from the city is remote and secluded. It is mainly a solitary place where only the seabirds and the crash of the billows of the sea break the silence.

During the night, the waters are shrouded in expansive darkness broken by the periodic passing of a fishing boat’s mast light chugging through the Stygian waters, barely illuminated by the moon. It’s in these distant waters of the lagoon that another Venice shows its face, a Venice that Hemingway would have seen when visiting his friend Barone Franchetti to shoot duck at Càorle, which forms the setting of his 1950 book Across the River and into the Trees. The vaporetto – or batèo in true Venetian tongue – branches away from Sant’Elena, the last stop in the city, and solemnly passes the Cimitero di San Michele, the ‘Isle of the Dead’, where bodies are entombed without threat of disease to the rest of the dense city. The choking fumes undulate over the metal roof of the boat, which also jolts at each landing stage with sudden surprise, like a hefty slap on the back. The tremble of the engines below makes your calves vibrate. Some 30,000 people are spread across fifty islands in the lagoon, though most of these are now deserted. Some islands, like Càorle, are home to large communities of fishermen and wetland hunters; others, like Isola delle Vignole, hold but a handful of houses huddled around a local trattoria

(which serves freshly caught – not to mention delicious – fish). The lagoon itself is an ambiguous area, neither land nor sea, which stretches as a narrow crescent along the coast of northeast Italy. Thousands of years ago it was formed by silt washing along ancient rivers from the Alps and Apennines to create marshes and mud flats, separated from the sea by barrier islands between which the tide flows and ebbs continuously. There are patches of land that rise above the deep lagoon, keys covered with reeds and wild grasses, salt marshes and islets. This parallel Venice is home to hundreds of species of fish, birds and amphibians. Seaweeds in glass-coloured tones mingle with tiny oil slicks on the surface of the lagoon. The air is damp and salt-laden, conducive to fog and mist. The forgotten silence gives the lagoon a feel of the Gulf of Mexico, presumably one of its attractions for Hemingway. Each island in the strange lagoon takes on its own identity: there is Murano, the island of the glassblowers, exiled here because their industry was deemed far too much of a fire risk to be in close proximity to the palazzi of the noblemen in San Marco, and there is Burano, all plaster-chipped and blue and terracotta, shimmering like a coral reef on the waters and watched over by a very leaning bell tower. Torcello, one of the most ancient of the islands, thrived until malaria in the swamps wiped out most of the inhabitants; today the Byzantine monastery and throne of Attila the Hun can still be visited. Chioggia, to the south of the lagoon, is home to a large fishing population and each morning a daily catch of clams, cockles, freshwater mussels and urchins is unloaded onto the harbourside; Isola di Sant’Erasmo hosts an artichoke and asparagus market during the right season. En route to these quiet hubs, one passes the lower, spongey islands of the lagoon, eaten away by the motion of the waves, and as day breaks over the barrier islands of the Lido, the vaporetto pulls in to Càorle. Out here, Hemingway has been forgotten and Barone Franchetti is long gone. Tomorrow I will be too and life in the lagoon will carry on as peacefully as ever.

73 © Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

The Artists Heikki Kaski Bruce Davidson John Stezaker 75

“I gave myself permission to photograph whatever I wanted; however I wanted.” Heikki Kaski’s restless independence has created an original body of work culminating in his latest series of off-kilter documentary photography, Tranquillity. His delicate film images, with faded colour and subtle light, contain a fragile and unearthly free spirit. Kaski is from Finland, but for the last few years has been hanging out and taking photographs in California. One town in particular, Tranquillity (spelt with two ‘l’s), caught his attention. It is the subject of the book that won the Unseen Dummy Award for unpublished photobooks at the Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam last September. Heikki initially went to photograph a street sign that said Tranquillity after spotting it on a map: “To me it was bliss to plant a town with that name in the middle of the desert – at that time I thought the area was desert, which it would be without the irrigation.” Tranquillity lies between San Francisco and Los Angeles in the San Joaquin Valley. Part of California’s Central Valley known for its agribusiness, its flat and arid landscape is carved up by a network of irrigation canals stretching all the way to northern California and beyond. It is surreal and desolate, one of the poorest counties in the country. As an outsider, Kaski initially found access difficult to come by. Undeterred, he kept going back, sleeping in his car or a tent outside the only bar in town, to meet people and find a window into their world. “It may be important that I am from somewhere else with a ‘fluid’ global identity. Finland means absolutely nothing to most people. I can only imagine what I look like, lugging around big cameras and pointing them at the strangest things.” Kaski describes being overwhelmed at first as he tried to keep sight of what he was doing there in “the heat of the valley that the winds never reach”. “Doing this kind of thing, you expose yourself to the possibility of another kind of reality other than your own. With that comes the inevitable change of your perception through learning; the subject changes and the photos change. The book depicts this process as much as the real life subjects.” With no narrative as such, the book is far from a conventional collection of photographs; it makes “a point of complexity and refuses a cadence”. It is peppered with various stilllives and landscapes that describe the remoteness of place. Usually only one person features in a picture at any one time, their purpose veiled and uncertain, their face often blurred. Tranquillity is the embodiment of personal experience. With a moving sense of loneliness, Kaski uses the language of documentary photography to create something that is selfreflective: “I hope there is still a place in our culture for something that is slow, difficult and private. That something exists even if it’s not posted to a stream. Right now, at least for me, it’s hard to bear something that’s not stimulating in the immediate sense of the word – to just sit it out.” Kaski’s work is a stream of life in which human beings are not the sole focus, yet are present in every picture. Tranquillity will be published by Lecturis and launched at the Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam in September. Heikki continues to work on his own projects as well as assisting Eliot Lee Hazel.

Heikki Kaski Words

India Windsor-Clive

In the spring of 1959, a fight broke out in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Routine and unremarkable, it was one of many. At the time there were over 1,000 gang members in New York City and the five boroughs. From the tip of Harlem to the tenements of the Lower East Side and over the bridges into Queens and Brooklyn, the young men of New York City banded together for the pride and protection of their neighbourhood and people. This particular fight, however, happened to catch the attention of a young photographer called Bruce Davidson. At the time of the brawl, Davidson was just twenty-five, having signed the year before to photographic agency Magnum whose founder, legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Davidson had met during his national service in Paris. The Illinois native would go on to conduct epic, important photographic work, most notably an extraordinary chronicling of the events and effects of the Civil Rights movement in both the north and south of the country. However, this small fight in Prospect Park and the photographic series that followed it, Brooklyn Gang, remains one of the most honest, beautiful and profoundly sad projects of Davidson’s rich archive. Intrigued by the fighting in Prospect Park, Davidson went to Brooklyn in search of a gang to photograph. “I met a group of teenagers called the Jokers,” wrote Davidson. “I was twenty-five and they were about sixteen. I could easily have been taken for one of them.” The delicate boundary between professional objectivity and immersion slowly eroded as Davidson intimately captured the fractured lives of the teenagers. For several months, Davidson and the Jokers wandered the streets of Brooklyn and beyond. From the rock’n’roll dances on New York’s airless summer nights to the beaches and boardwalks of Coney Island, the local diner, Helen’s Candy Store, and the back-alleys of Joker turf, Davidson was there. Though undeniably a golden age for New York street photography, Davidson’s portraits are stylistically unmatched by his contemporaries, in part because of the beauty of their imperfections. The cinematic black-and-white brings to life their world both with a crispness and clarity, but also, at times, an out-of-focus, soft melancholy. The artistry of Brooklyn Gang is such that it was a study of youth culture before the phrase even existed, and Davidson’s portraits are so timelessly cool and graphically evocative you instantly feel transported to the world of the Jokers; lost yet confident, innocent but damaged. The beautiful Cathy, subject of many of the series’ most iconic photographs holds the frame, cigarette tightly fixed between her lips while Jimmie’s matinée-idol looks and the gang’s uniformed white T-shirts and slick, black hair feel like a reference point for countless films, songs and television shows since. However, much as with the subjects in his other series East 100th Street and The Dwarf, Davidson’s world tells a deeper story than the beauty of the images might initially suggest. The Jokers’ early recreational drug use was soon replaced by harder substance abuse, violence and alcoholism. Lefty was the first of the gang to die as heroin addiction trickled down from older gang members, and the James Dean-handsome Jimmie followed soon after. Emily Haas Davidson, Bruce’s wife, spent over ten years talking to Bobby, fifteen at the time of Brooklyn Gang and, in Bobby’s Book, recounts the unbearable sadness of what became of the Jokers. The story of Cathy, the blonde heroine of the piece, is perhaps the saddest of all. “Cathy was beautiful like Brigitte Bardot,” Bobby remembered. “She always was there, but outside... Then, some years ago, she put a shotgun in her mouth and blew her head off.” The sad stories captured in these fragile, poetic street images will stay with us forever thanks to the mastery and craft of the inimitable Bruce Davidson. All images © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson Words

J ames Wright

Mask I, 1991â&#x20AC;&#x201C;92

A quick glance at British artist John Stezaker’s enigmatic photographic collages will tell you nothing about the movie stars and picturesque postcard settings they feature. Fascinated by the way we use and look at images, his search is for what we don’t know: “the world without you”. Its papery skin, saturated with thick trees and pouting lips, is spliced open and turned inside out to reveal something else. The viewer becomes lost on these new planes, in the faces punctured by never-ending landscapes and the unsettling expressions of their grotesquely elegant and forgotten inhabitants. So It Goes talks to Stezaker about making the familiar unfamiliar.

John Stezaker Words

S ophie Wright

Mask X, 1982

So It Goes: When and how did your fascination with the photographic image begin? John Stezaker: I first started collecting photographic images because I wasn’t very happy with what I could do myself. When I was a young teenager I started taking pictures on an old Brownie. I was always mystified as to why what I saw through the viewfinder never quite corresponded to what came out. I started to work from found photographic images. As a teenager I would find a particular photograph and then use it as a source for a painting. Then I wasn’t very happy with the paintings! I remember in particular there was a postcard image of Big Ben that I had tried to paint and do various things with and I thought, well, it’s there already. Why do I need to do it? It was that realisation that started me off. I wanted to stick with what was already there before my eyes. I’ve always suffered – even though I was a fanatical draughtsman in my youth – from a lack of belief in my own mark. I had a hatred of leaving my own mark, of imposing myself on an image. SIG: What attracted you to collage? JS: Collage was a way of resuming drawing. Art school sort of annihilated my ongoing practice of drawing. And collage replaced it as a way of sifting through the world and making order out of the everyday world that I encountered. Originally I saw it as a kind of microcosm of everyday life. A way of looking at its fragments to confront another side of the everyday; less benign, something malevolent even. But there was another force that I hadn’t recognised; that of my own fascination, which was pulling me away from the everyday image and into obsolete material. I fought against my own fascination for a while and tried to drag myself back into the contemporary world. Yet there was this other pull toward the defunct image. I worried that it was a kind of nostalgia. I realise now that it wasn’t nostalgia, it was just one of the ways in which an image frees itself from its own symbolic references and therefore becomes amenable to fascination. SIG: What is your relationship to photography as a medium? JS: I always say this and it does annoy photographers a great deal, but I have very little interest in the history of photography, the documentary tradition etc. My fascination is always from the periphery of photographic practice, where photography is used for fairly utilitarian purposes. Or it’s subordinated to other functions. Film stills are the classic example. It was never really recognised as a genre. Botanical photography, certain kinds of very standard topographical photography, tourist imagery, these are the kinds of images that I see as slightly naive in terms of their belief in their functionality and which, when subverted away from that representational function, then become fascinating in their own right. SIG: Do you feel like the initial relationship that the viewer has to a photographic image is dangerous or in some ways incomplete on its own? JS: I actually think that the photographic image does represent a kind of real danger, but people never look at the photographic image: rarely do they see the photographic image independently of the linguistic context which determines its representational function. I remember reading a book by William Burroughs called The Third Mind, which was a real awakening to the subversive function of collage. He carried out this exercise, which I did a version of myself, in which he took everything that happened to him from the moment he woke up: flicking through a magazine, reading an article in the newspaper; keeping a track of all these things so that it all starts to make a kind of independent sense. When you divorce these things from their original context they become something else, they become supernatural. SIG: What is it that fascinates you about film stills? How did you begin using them in your work? JS: T hat is something I’m still pursuing! Rather than getting closer to an answer to that question, I can only tell you that in the last thirty or forty years since this all came about, it’s become more obscure. When I was a student I became really interested in film noir and I’d spend a lot of time at the cinema. I would go to see a feature and always watch the blackand-white B-movies that would come on afterwards. I steeped myself in them for several years until they weren’t shown any longer in the cinema. Then I pursued them into latenight TV on odd channels like BBC2. Soon I became more fascinated by images of them. I wanted to divorce myself from the narrative, so I’d watch them with the sound off. That’s when I started collecting them with a camera: at the foot of my bed I had a set up with a cable release and whenever an image appealed to me I would press it. But just about that

time, and we’re talking in the mid-Seventies, all the big cinema chains were starting to go into crisis – people weren’t going to the cinema, they were all watching TV. The film still therefore became redundant and the informal archives from those big cinema chains found their way into second-hand bookshops. So I had much better access to much better film stills imagery than I could get from my clumsy attempts at photography at the end of my bed. SIG: With these archives, how do you choose the pictures that you want to work with? JS: I have to say that I don’t do the choosing: they choose me in some way. At the very beginning, searching in a shop, it’s something that absolutely compels me. I never know. The process of my work is to find out. Mind you, once I get into a series, I’m often on the look out for fixes. For example, at this moment I’m working on silhouettes and I’m looking for particular kinds of images. I’m also always aware that the moment I think I know what I’m doing is the moment I’m lost. I have to be aware of that at all times: the search is actually only a way of creating digressions. I never feel satisfied if through the process of searching I find what I’m looking for. It has to be something that will throw me completely off track and in a different direction, but that will bring me back to what I was doing but in a richer way. SIG: Do the images you choose have a power or a powerlessness? JS: I try to think of them as apparitions of a kind. They are things that somehow are lacking, in which something is exposed inadvertently. I want to show them to other people, I want to share. That’s the point. SIG: Can you tell us about your more recent foray into moving images? JS: I ’ve made four films. The best one is just a film of all my film stills called Blind where each film still is projected at one twenty-fourth of a second. Every time you look at it you see a different film, because the selection of images that you manage to register on your retina is quite random. But everyone sees a different image. This was illustrated by my dealer, when he first saw it he said, “It’s wonderful, but are you sure about all those swastikas?” I said that I hadn’t noticed any swastikas! And nobody else seemed to notice any swastikas! But we went methodically through the whole thing so as not to upset anyone and took all the swastikas out. I called the film Blind because I assumed you’d be blind to the imagery, which is what interests me – the fact that cinema is a form of consumption of images which, unique to the twenty-first century, puts us in a position where we cannot be consciously aware of those images. I think cinema is a gigantic collectivised unconscious. It’s the technological form of the unconscious. Which is why, incidentally, I see myself as different from surrealism. I don’t want to immerse myself in the unconscious, I want to make the unconsciousness of everyday culture conscious. SIG: We are in the middle of a total transformation of how we view, share and consume images thanks to the Internet, which makes the process of ‘looking’ more complex. What are your thoughts on these changes? JS: I think dwelling on the death of images is a very important way of creating an antidote to that integrated circuit of consumption through computer technology. But I look at someone like my son who is completely in tune with all of that and it worries me enormously, for his own psychological survival. So when you think of what this is doing to millions of people, it’s a deeply worrying situation. I get very apocalyptic about the whole thing. It’s a strange world we’re entering into, yet oddly I’m fascinated by it. Although I don’t like to partake in it too much. I don’t carry a mobile phone, for example. I’ve exiled myself. But then, even in the old days, I didn’t have a TV. I’ve always lived outside mass communication, although mass communication is seen to be the subject of my work. I make a story about the liminal aspects of it, from the edges of it. SIG: Have you any plans for delving into the digital archive? Unpacking the digital image and making us aware of how we engage with it hasn’t really been explored much. JS: I have begun to probe certain things. I’m not going to say what I’m doing though. Watch this space! All images © John Stezaker courtesy The Approach, London

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Mask XXXV, 2007

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The Bridge (from the ‘Castle’ Series) II, 1986–2005

Untitled, 2012

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Table I, 2006

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The Collections Camille Dylan Rieder 107

Camille Photography

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Jacket: rag & bone; Shorts: Reformation

Guy Aroch

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Dress: Sonia Rykiel

All clothing: Gucci

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All clothing: Altuzarra

T-shirt: What Goes Around Comes Around; Trousers: Vintage; Bracelet: Delfina Delettrez

Jacket: Isabel Marant; Shorts: Reformation

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Hat: Isabel Marant for H&M; Shirt: rag & bone; Jeans: Leviâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s; Bracelet: Delfina Delettrez

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T-shirt: Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Ecole des Femmes; Shorts: Wrangler

Camisole: Kiki de Montparnasse; Jeans: Leviâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s; Bracelet: Delfina Delettrez

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Bra: Kiki de Montparnasse; Skirt: Christian Dior; Bracelet: Delfina Delettrez; Earring: Delfina Delettrez

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Dress: Marc Jacobs; Underwear: Eres; Shoes: Adidas

Dress: Chloé

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Jacket: rag & bone; Shorts: Reformation

Photographer – Guy Aroch . Photographer’s Assistant – Matt Ellis . Creative Direction – James Wright . Producer – Sarah Scott-Farber Production Assistant – Una Harris . Stylist – Liz McClean @ The Magnet Agency . Stylist’s Assistants – Elliot Soriano and Emily Briggs Hair – Marki Shkreli @ Tim Howard Management . Hair Assistant – Cameron Rains . Make-up – Cyndle Komarovski @ Brydges Mackinney . Digital Technician – Matthew Sprout . Prop Stylist – Isaiah Weiss . Prop Assistant – Ian McElroy Retouching – Velem @ Milk Studios, NY Model – Camille Rowe @ The Society Management

Dylan Rieder Words & Photography

James Wright

Born in the small town of Westminster, California, skater Dylan Rieder has always done things a little differently. Ripping the bowls and streets of the notorious Huntington Beach from the age of nine and turning pro at eighteen, today Rieder is one of the most talented and influential skaters in the world. Standout parts in videos for Gravis, Transworld and most recently Supreme’s Cherry, jolted the skateboarding community into life, as Rieder turned in consistently unrivalled, gamechanging footage, all with a nonchalant, breezy style that looked like he wasn’t even trying. Before long, his disarmingly good looks and classically cool but acutely unconventional skating dress had kids the world over cuffing their trousers, ripping their t-shirts and skating in loafers. At only twentyfive, Rieder is just getting started. Whether it’s on the streets of LA, Berlin, Sydney or Tokyo, look out for Dylan Rieder; he’ll be the one doing impossibles without a care in the world.

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This page and opposite – Jacket: BLK DNM. All other clothes, Dylan’s own Photographer – James Wright . Stylist – Liz McClean @ The Magnet Agency Stylist’s Assistants – Elliot Soriano and Alina Hardin . Key Grip – Camille Rowe All images taken on the Leica S. Special thanks to Leica, Los Angeles

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The Musicians Guy Blakeslee SOHN Black Atlass 139

Guy Blakeslee Eliot Lee Hazel Lewis Carpenter

Photography Words

Taking his early musical cues from the great psychedelic West Coast bands of yesteryear, Guy Blakeslee has added a certain streamlined troubadour trim to his output. By day, front man of The Entrance Band, he has struck out on his own with fantastic new album Ophelia Slowly. Though admitting an institutional soft spot for music of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Black Angels ilk, Blakeslee’s record is an instant favourite for this writer all the same. ‘Smile On’ rises and falls, lilting all over the joint with ermine-fur vocals and delicate picked guitar – the good-looking and charming progeny of Lou Reed and Arthur Lee’s Love. And if that’s not enticing, nothing is. Packed with forget-me-not hooks and choruses, the release is one to look out for this summer and will fit perfectly for those hazy days when you’re pretending it’s 1967. What’s more, the album’s title takes inspiration from the lines of ‘Ophelia’ by precocious decadent poet Arthur Rimbaud, so get out the deck chairs and the absinthe – the long nights are yours. Ophelia Slowly is released on Everloving Records this June

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SOHN Sophie Wright Elliot Carpenter

Photography Words

For a musician to admit, “I have an inherent dislike for myself”, would surely signal a certain degree of uncertainty in their convictions. Yet for singer, songwriter and producer SOHN, this distaste for his own character and personality has resulted in the channelling of talent and belief into one new and separate persona. A Londoner, born and bred, he experienced much the same trials as many budding musicians “in bands that had zero success”. He then made the unorthodox decision to remove himself from the bustling musical hub and start anew on the Continent in Austria: “I felt I wasn’t really connecting with anything here, so four years ago I made that very specific decision to go to Vienna. It’s very important to me to have this place that I have time to get confusing things out of my head. If I lived in London, especially right now with all the music taking off, I think I’d tie myself in knots and be unable to keep a strong sense of myself.” Nowadays, time spent in his former home is predominantly business orientated, including production

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work with other burgeoning talents like Kwabs and Rhye; a sign of the demand he is in and high regard in which he is held, with only a handful of releases so far including debut album Tremors. As is becoming an increasingly important problem to deal with for recording artists in the digital age, SOHN has seen his material leaked online a full month before the scheduled album release. “Obviously it’s not something I want and it’s been very difficult to talk about. I would have put some time aside for my brain to prepare for it, but I haven’t really been afforded that time.” There’s a deep belief in SOHN that only by meticulous mental readying will he achieve his vision, but his approach to instrumentation is intriguingly contrasting. The departure from programming on computers to physical manipulation of hardware offers an element of the unknown on which he thrives and which has influenced his sound. “You can experiment, which you can’t do when you’re a programmer as your imagination creates the idea, whereas with hardware

sometimes the instrument creates it without you knowing you’ve done it. It’s about how you react and how quickly that makes the music.” It’s then interesting to discover that he “never really liked electronic music. More straight alternative stuff like Radiohead and I also think Tyler the Creator is a genius.” Add “old Seventies Paul Simon stuff, preGraceland” into the mix and you get an insight into his lyrical and poetic influences. The many aspects of his own self, a personal life kept away from a musical life, as well as a new creative direction, offer up a fascinating future for SOHN and his soundscape. “It’ll be interesting to see where I’m at six months down the line and where the focus might be. No context for it in the slightest.”

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Black Atlass Adeline Mai Lewis Carpenter

Photography Words

All Clothing by Dior Homme – Autumn 2014 Collection Preview

2012’s Black Atlass EP, with its keening, soulful voice and precise, moody beatmaking suggested a fully-formed artist. There was no hint at Alex Fleming aka Black Atlass’ tender years and the constant process of refinement that underpins his music. Self-reflection is his method: “The best work is done in that way, because you really have the chance to criticise yourself before anyone else has the chance to criticise.” It galvanises a steely belief in the quality of his work. “You know that once any part of what you’re doing is completed that it will be the ultimate of what you can achieve because you’ve eliminated all the variables for yourself.” Standouts like ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Castles’ possess a maturity of tone and content that belies his twenty years and it’s this precociousness and professionalism that sets Fleming apart. His clarity of thought and expression is startling – “I want to be able to reach the largest audiences, and I think that’s why the genre of pop is such a great platform for musicians and creatives. It’s the highest level of success you can reach within

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this industry, because the most people will hear it and see your vision; it gives a lot more people the chance to reflect upon your work.” February’s Young Bloods EP, though still recognisably Black Atlass, moved on to a more immediately accessible, radio-friendly style with the irrepressible ‘Blossom’. Influenced by “suburban love” at high school, further work is underway on the first full-length LP and Alex emphasises that this will mark a watershed in his life, the distillation of what has gone before with the first releases. After a suitably modern ascent – darling of the blogosphere and the fashion front row – there is a sense that a pause for breath might be needed to execute the album and to make sure it remains an artefact forever: “like a sonic photo book that I can look back on and that will take me back to a time in my life where I can hear myself talk about what are now memories”. However, the Ontario native has his eyes trained on more than just pop pre-eminence; he talks of progression into acting,

design and fashion. Any wearer of sepia-tinted specs would find it warming to see him hold to creative ideals of pop’s less manicured past and hear him lament the quality of current radio staples. For this very last fact alone we welcome Alex to the fold; perhaps now there will be some pop worth tuning in for this year.

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The Writers Alan Lomax: Songhunter No Country for All Men Corporate Spartacus The Boredom of War 157

ALAN LOMAX: SONGHUNTER by

Joshua Bullock

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Prisoners chopping word. Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary). 1959

Would you believe the person who told you there was a man who spent his life trying to record the whole songbook of the human race? And for that simple fact was followed by the FBI and hounded by Franco in Spain. Who had a fistfight with Bob Dylanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s manager and invented the modern music festival. Who was funded at points by both Columbia University and Columbia Records. Who brought the world Woody Guthrie and Muddy Waters. Who had the ear of congressmen but slept in his car on field trips. Who marched with Martin Luther King. Who dragged 150 kilos of equipment down dirt tracks and up logging roads to record mountain folk and bluesmen, then invented the musical precursor to Wikipedia. Who heard the world in a grain of sand and saw all people under one song, however differently it was sung. There was such a man. He was called Alan Lomax.

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Images courtesy of the Association for Cultural Equity ÂŠ The Estate of Alan Lomax

Lord Beginner and Alan Lomax, presumably New York City. Circa 1950

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Alan Lomax was no statesman, he wasn’t even really sure what he was. When he died in 2002, his obituary in the New York Times described him variously as ‘a musicologist, author, disc jockey, singer, photographer, talent scout, filmmaker, concert and recording producer and television host’. Had he just been a folkorist, the richness of his legacy would be cause enough for greatness. But Lomax did more than simply catalogue the music of the world. He explained its context, what it said about the peoples who sang the songs and the history that forged them; how they might be invested with new meaning. Every folksong ever sung was a protest song, he used to say, only half-joking. His line of work was recording hard-hitting songs for hard-hit people. He was not in the entertainment business. Born in Texas in 1915, Lomax was a child of the old South. His father, John, was a mixture of bank manager and university professor who had an esteemed career as a folklorist himself. At the age of eighteen Alan began assisting his father on field trips recording cowboy songs, Lousianan Cajun music and Negro spirituals. Lomax’s father was antagonised by his son’s revolutionary zeal and his pressing of music into political polemic, but in his way John Lomax was no less revolutionary for his times. A white Southerner born a few years after the Civil War, he pushed for funding to travel and record black and Mexican songs of the border country. He saw American heritage not as a white story but a complex one and he would endow, at very little personal

Folk music’s were not dead traditions – they spoke of the suffering of the oppressed – told it in a language white, black and brown that was always evolving. Music held in it historical conversations between different cultures that a flawed American present might learn from. The bluegrass banjo of the Appalachian white Protestant settlers compressed the rhythms of West Africa into the ballads of Britain. The fife and drum music of the northern Mississippi grafted African dance to the regimental music of European colonials. It spoke to great injustice, but to something positive too. Nowhere was the fusion of European and African tradition more apparent than in New Orleans and in the figure of the great Creole composer and pianist Jelly Roll Morton. When Lomax met Morton, he was in his forties managing a music bar in Washington DC. After talking, Lomax was convinced he had found the person to explain the origins of jazz. Lomax had initially seen the genre as a danger, a boogie-woogie populariser and corrupter of purer traditions from the Negro songbook. Through Jelly Roll, Lomax came to view jazz as a folklore to a community in New Orleans at a particular time. Jelly Roll was the critical eye and witness to an art form needing elevating to the esteem of other European musical forms. Lomax invited Morton to the Library of Congress. Morton was a national treasure the nation didn’t know. But at a piano in the lofty Coolidge Auditorium, Lomax and Morton reclaimed the history of

Alan Lomax: Were the women crying, screaming [when the dustcloud came in]? Woody Guthrie: No Alan, you’d be surprised. There wasn’t one person in the crowd that way… Most people are pretty level-headed. They just said… this is the end of the world. People ain’t been living right. Human race ain’t been treating each other right. reward, over 10,000 recordings for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress to which Alan Lomax would also contribute. They never became rich men and what money they did realise from royalties was mostly put back into further schemes. It was Lomax Sr who found the famous Lead Belly in Louisiana’s Angola Farm Prison, recorded him there and then on his release toured the country promoting him as the first black folk star. He even employed him as driver and intermediary on their field trips to mediate with black communities impenetrable to those who even cared to record their music. Like Alan, John Lomax divided conservatives and liberals alike – but got his hands dirty on trips, camping out at night with his son under the stars, setting the tone for the broke, under-funded and hands-on life in music Alan would follow. During one Texas recording, a singer in Huntsville addressed the Lomaxes’ recording machine directly. “Now Mr President, you just don’t know how bad they’re treating us folks down here. I’m singing to you and I’m talking to you so I hope you will come down here and do something for us poor folks in Texas.” Lomax spoke later of that moment: “When the record was over, we played it back and there was immense joy in this group because they felt they had communicated their problem to the big world. That experience totally changed my life. I saw what I had to do.”

jazz from the mists of time and metropolitan lounges. The jazz man told the stories of turn-of-the-century New Orleans and the bordellos and pleasure-boats he had played in. He gave an oral history interspersed with musical numbers about how he had turned classical compositions into jazz-time, having heard them at the French Opera House. It is an utterly unique piece of radio documentary as well as a seminal first-hand account of a new art form created by African-Americans. Not all places advertised their musical wares as brilliantly as New Orleans. Luckily they had a champion in common. Lomax quietly set about putting the template for modern music festivals – curating acts from up-and-down the country, both black and white for the Newport Folk Festival, which he saw as playing a part in the ongoing civil rights struggle from its birth in 1959. As well as programming musical events, he staged plays and found funding for other folklorists to hunt down folk musicians. He brought blues and other forgotten rarities to the attention of New York beatniks and put it into further circulation through other art forms. You might find A Streetcar Named Desire director Elia Kazan or Bob Dylan at one of his nights. When the latter went electric at the Newport Folk Festival of 1965, Lomax said that Dylan had made folk accessible to the middle class, an idea he thought good, just not personally that interesting.

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Couple at Charlie Houlin’s juke joint. Hughes, Arkansas. 1959

Lomax matched the vibrant, intoxicating language of the music he championed with wonderful writing. Books like The Land Where the Blues Began and Mister Jelly Roll are lyrical yet exacting distillations of what his biographer John Szwed described as ‘his desire to put art at the centre of humanity and return us to the magic of creation’. He was aware of the unique paradox of his position as a folklorist. At the same time as he was preserving musical styles for posterity, he was creating a fixed commercial entity and a copyright for a song that belonged to no one and which was always evolving. His father, in his introduction to American Ballads and Folk Songs, wrote: ‘Worse than thieves are ballad collectors, for when they capture and imprison in cold type a folk song, at the same time they kill it.’ However, many musicians saw real benefits from a Lomax recording. Muddy Waters was one: “I got a cheque in the post for twenty-one dollars and a newly pressed record. I went into a bar and put it on. You could say the Lomaxes got me started.” Lomax made a point of corresponding with local contacts and musicians years after visits. Often he would return, niggled in the interim by the treasures he had brushed up against but not committed to history. Like in the delta country of the Mississippi. This farmland crucible produced such bluesmen and

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myths and records and rumours of records that, thanks to Lomax’s work, it might now be said to have influenced its descendants of rock, soul and R’n’B as much as Muscle Shoals, Motown, Nashville or Laurel Canyon. Unaggregated in studios, unedited by producers, it sat mystically upriver and exercised the imagination as well as the ear. Which for any musician is half the battle. Just ask The Black Keys about R.L. Burnside. In fact see him for yourself in Lomax’s filmmaking. Lomax’s documentaries are a joy to watch, which let the music and the musicians do the talking. In particular, his 1990 American Patchwork series of hour-long films is stunning. Lomax comes across as the David Attenborough (actually the producer on his Fifties BBC folk music show: Song Hunter: Alan Lomax) of musical ethnography. He has gravity and spectacular warmth, but remains an occasional commentator rather than presenter. You can understand how singers could come to trust him as a stranger, how acolytes like British folk singer Ewan MacColl were inspired by him and came to see the world through his eyes: “We sat and listened to him sing and talk for some eight hours and felt ourselves catch fire as a new world was opened to us. Up to his time, folk music had been for most of us a pleasant medium of relaxation…but after that night…we were ‘committed’.”

Dancer and guitarist in village square. Barranco de las Conejeras, Andalucia, Spain. 1952

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As a young interviewer in the Thirties, there was the occasional note of impatience in Lomax, as if he were searching for something precise from his subjects, for his listeners or for himself perhaps. In later recordings from the Seventies, the archivist seems less present, more of his questions have an emotional rather than socially scientific bent. If you spend long enough doing the thing you love, the science of it becomes art. Lomax seemed to have learned an instinctive way of dealing with people. It took courage to do what he did, to go to dangerous places, get robbed or driven off. All in the search for a porch, a field, a place of work where people might sing for you and play. You’d need to know which situations required persuasion, booze, money, which a smile. Despite that calm, he could be angry and there were plenty of things to be angry about in his America. There still are. A white man could be arrested in the Jim Crow South just for shaking hands with black folk as Lomax was in 1940s Mississippi when he came to meet with the mother of the deceased great bluesman Robert Johnson. Lomax was marked by his early experiences of southern penitentiaries and conditions that were redolent of slavery: work farms, whippings and white overseers on horses. The prisons’ weird throwback to unmechanised labour made it a Petri dish for pure vocal traditions. The rawest traditions were found in the rawest places. Lomax’s whole philosophy would attest to that.

an alternative African-American history that told the untold stories of black explorers and black cowboys and the rich African traditions still practised throughout the country. As Lomax travelled to Europe and the Caribbean, he reached out from the American experience to a shimmering matrix of global musical cultures. Starting with Ray Birdwhistell’s work in kinesics, the interpretation of body motion communication including facial expression in song, Lomax extrapolated his life’s work into the theory of ‘cantometrics’. He profiled regions of the world in his ‘Global Jukebox’ by taking a sample of singers and indexing harmonies and rhythms, comparing pockets of cultures to one another using the statistical grammar of kinesics, vocal style and dance. Among Native Americans, the body moved as a single unit; sub-Saharans danced moving the torso and legs independently. Some critics argued that his sample was too large and too shallow, but Lomax drew on an unrivalled network of collaborators to provide the data. As later Wikipedia would in the Internet age, he believed in folksonomy – allowing users of the system to add to the samples themselves. Initial funding and support from Microsoft and Mac arrived but as ever his ambitions were too grand for folkorists and too unspecific for scientists. Soon, though, his Global Jukebox, which sets out to defend the individuality of human cultural resources from mass media in his lifetime, will go online and take up where he left off.

The music went white in various ways until the blacks were then taking off from the whites based on the whites’ interpretation of jazz… And they thought these old handkerchief heads down there in New Orleans were nothing, but they couldn’t hack that [music]. Nobody has hacked it since. Nobody. There’s nothing like it still. Nothing, nothing. Alan Lomax Lomax gravitated towards trade unionism for its politics and musical institutions. He was arrested for staging hunger strikes to intervene against the threatened deportation of strike-leaders in 1931. With typical self-perception, he saw his arrest and swift release as a radical, middle-class student to be a further ludicrous example of inequality. The event was the start of an FBI file on his activities that would follow him all his life, beyond the McCarthy witch-hunts of the late Fifties. According to the dossier, Lomax was ‘always singing peculiar songs of a Western and Negro type’ and was ‘known to associate with a Negro by the name of “Lead Belly”’ who was released from a southern penitentiary’. In a time where the potency of music to effect social change has been utterly diminished it is hard to grasp that power of song to jar, to rouse and to unite. When Martin Luther King marched on Washington in 1968, Lomax pulled on his connections to bring a cultural programme of music and talks to the protestors camp, Resurrection City. Muddy Waters came overnight from Chicago and slept in his car. Lomax tried enlisting the Ford Foundation and advertising agencies to advance his ‘Black Identity Project’ to broadcast through books, pamphlets and TV shows

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Why should we care? All Lomax’s work is drowning in the noise of the Internet. Too few people have even heard of one of the twentieth century’s most important figures. We might never understand the meaning of what he accomplished for the diversity of human culture until it’s too late. Mass media has its fingers in our phones, our homes, our ears like never before. Never has homogeneity and blandness been so instantly marketable to so many people and self-sufficiency so hard to come by. We need to educate people that there is more vibrancy, invention and soul in real communities than those online; in musicians who play in person with one another rather than a mixing console and LogicPro. We need to narrow the webs of the world and reconnect to live performance; the music is only as good as the interaction it feeds off and kinship is found in pockets not on email chains. Artists should find their voice before their audience and the best place to start is the world that surrounds them, not the abstract. Music might then regain its power to shock and mean something, not just to entertain. This was the story of Alan Lomax. Go now to www.culturalequity.org, where all 17,400 of his 1946–1990s audio recordings can be streamed for free and begin the story of everything else.

Spencer Moore at his farm. Chilhowie, Virginia. 1959.

Alan Lomax and Raphael Hurtault. La Plaine, St Patrick, Dominica. 1962

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NO COUNTRY FOR ALL MEN by

166 Members of a local Free Syrian Army brigade in the towns of Hayyan and Bayanun pray beside a burnt-out Syrian regime tank

Martin Armstrong

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All Images ÂŠ Martin Armstrong

In March 2013, driving through the Aleppo suburb of Kafr Hamrah, the sound of mortar rounds punctuated the still spring air. A group of men stood around a crater measuring ten square metres – the result of a stray rocket attack. A couple were taking selfies, a strange yet fairly common phenomenon to encounter in theatres of conflict in the Levant. The driver slowed the van to observe the scene. In the back of the vehicle, Cookie, a kid no older than eight wearing a Max 10 utility vest and a grin simultaneously angelic and demonic, sat playing with a pistol – another strange yet fairly common occurrence. Caressing the cold steel in his hands, Cookie clicked back the safety before pointing the weapon playfully at a Hungarian journalist who formed part of the retinue.

“Bang,” said Cookie, smiling that angelicdemonic smile before Kareem Ramadan, a former English student at the University of Aleppo fighting within the ranks of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), took the gun from the boy’s hand. Cookie looked crestfallen but his disappointment was short-lived; within half an hour he’d be holding a Kalashnikov. Exiting the vehicle to observe the crater, Kareem, who possessed a particular affection for Braveheart and spoke of a desire to visit the Scottish Highlands one day, grabbed my shoulder before pointing to an image on his mobile phone. “My cousin was killed in an airstrike two weeks ago. A shell landed on the room he was sleeping in,” said Kareem with a lack of palpable emotion – a mixture of apathy towards the omnipotent cycle of death and destruction Syrians now live with, and the steadfast religious belief that those martyred now reside in a better place. “Look how peaceful he is in the picture,

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and look at his beard. It is a miracle,” continued Kareem. “You can see the word ‘Allah’ inscribed in his stubble. Surely this is a sign of God’s favour.” I looked closer at the image, aware of Kareem’s enthusiasm, but couldn’t see it. The scenario reminded me of Daily Mail headlines about people in Bognor Regis or New Zealand discovering the image of Jesus or the Virgin Mary on pieces of burnt toast. Looking back at Kareem, keen for affirmation, I decided to agree. It was a miracle. Kareem was part of a local unit of the FSA stationed in the towns of Bayanun and Hayyan in the suburbs of Aleppo. Others in the group included Bashar Hajj, a former mechanic whose Shia wife had been kidnapped by her own family after Hajj joined the FSA; Ramadan’s brother Abdul, a former teacher with a passion for training pigeons; an impeccably dressed, smiley man who people called Abu Aqrab (Father of

the Scorpion) and, of course, Cookie. Some often did not seem sure which division of the FSA they belonged to, but morale was relatively high. Rebel forces had managed to expunge the Syrian army from all but small isolated enclaves of Aleppo province. Walls in rural villages throughout the province were tagged with hastily inscribed epitaphs stating ‘The End of all Oppressors’ and ‘Freedom Alone’, with more vitriolic statements directed at Syrian President Bashar al-Assad reading simply, ‘Leave You Iranian Dog’. Whilst the battle for Aleppo city was still raging, many rebels claimed that a strategic attack on the regime-controlled Minnigh airbase would stymie the transport of supplies and personnel to the Syrian army, enabling the FSA to take the city and move on towards a decisive battle for Damascus. Some predicted that, once given Western aid, Minnigh would fall within two months and the Assad regime by the end of the year.

A poster depicting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah chief Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah hangs from the Hafez al-Assad roundabout near the Dahiyeh, Hezbollahâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s main stronghold in Beirut

A procession in the southern Lebanese town of Nabatieh during Ashura, the commemoration of the martyrdom of the third shia Imam Husayn at the Battle of Karbala in 680

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Much of Aleppoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s infrastructure has been destroyed by regime bombardment

Cookie stands beside an empty swimming pool in the village of Bayanun, Aleppo province

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A local sheikh stands beside a rocket that landed in his garden in the village of Hayyan in Aleppo province, Syria

Syrian refugees seek shelter in an abandoned building in Wadi Khaled, north Lebanon

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Children posing with guns: an unfortunately common sight in conflict zones in the Levant

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The buzzword in the international press at the time was Jabhat al-Nusra, the ‘Victory Front’. The Al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadist group had begun to emerge as a fighting force in northern Syria, professing an ideology centred on the establishment of an Islamic caliphate. Their emergence had understandably led to concern in Western corridors of power. People in Aleppo knew it. Some joked about the group in a manner evincing a strange mix of fear and loathing; awe and admiration. Others, perhaps wary of negative press impeding the flow of Western support to the opposition, provided good PR, playing up in particular a perceived lack of corruption within the group, coupled with a commitment to distribute aid. Some did both at the same time. “Nusra. They will kill you,” joked one taxi driver in Aleppo rather seriously before then stating that the Islamist group contained a Christian brigade within its ranks. Everyone laughed. The taxi driver began talking about Chinese snipers. Ramadan seemed wary of Nusra’s growing presence but pointed out that other foreign actors were present in Syria supporting Assad. In May 2013 in a safe house on the outskirts of the village of Hermel in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley, Zeina Abbas sat drinking a cup of sweet tea. Plumes of smoke could be seen on the horizon rising from the town of Qusair across the Syrian border. A poster depicting Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, alongside his

gime in Damascus, it also ensured Hezbollah would become targets for jihadist groups, such as al-Nusra, linked with the amorphous Syrian opposition. Lebanon became the proxy front in Syria’s civil war. Standing outside the Iranian Embassy in the Beirut suburb of Ouzai on 19th November 2013, Nabil Houwary stepped awkwardly over a car door lying on the tarmac. Glass, recently displaced from the windows of surrounding buildings, covered the street, crunching under foot. Paramedics, the Lebanese army, neighbourhood enforcers loyal to Hezbollah and a crowd of civilians congregated around a blast crater. Sweat began to form on Houwary’s brow. He tried his mobile but couldn’t find a signal. The lines were jammed, a common occurrence in the aftermath of suicide bombs in the Lebanese capital as state and non-state actors relay information, and civilians try desperately to elicit responses from loved ones. The Abdullah Azzam Brigades, Al-Qaeda affiliates, had claimed responsibility for the attack. Later twenty-three people were reported dead. “My aunt … she lives in this area, beside the embassy. I can’t get through to her,” said Houwary, a local municipal worker. “I mean, I am sure she is fine. I just want to confirm. This attack is a result of Hezbollah’s fighting in Syria but they are doing it to protect us. Sorry but I must go, I need to find her,” said Houwary before disap-

The lines were jammed, a common occurence in the aftermath of suicide bombs in the Lebanese capital as state and non-state actors relay information, and civilians try desperately to elict responses from loved ones successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei covered the back wall. Hezbollah operatives in military fatigues intermittently passed through the building’s salon before making their way into the backrooms. Hezbollah were fighting in Qusair. The group’s leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah had just openly announced the group’s military support of the Assad regime – confirming what everybody already knew. Abbas supported Hezbollah’s intervention. One of her sons had recently been killed fighting for pro-regime forces during clashes with the opposition in a village on the outskirts of Qusair. “I asked him not to go,” said Abbas, taking a moment to compose herself. Sitting on the sofa adjacent to her was a severe-looking Hezbollah member with a short beard, half-moon glasses, and a prosthetic right hand that I’d absent-mindedly tried to shake minutes earlier. “But he said he wanted to defend his country. After he was killed, we left Syria. The situation is so bad that they will kill the smallest child because of the religious or political affiliations of his father. At first I supported calls for reform but now these people are not freedom fighters. They are erhabiyeen (terrorists),” continued Abbas. “I want to go back to the same regime as before. God willing, Hezbollah can help us,” she said. “But I don’t feel safe here.” Abbas’ sense of insecurity was perhaps understandable. Whilst Hezbollah’s participation in Qusair helped secure strategic thoroughfares linking the party’s stronghold in the Bekaa valley with the Assad re-

pearing into the melée. A few minutes later he returned, a look of relief palpable on his face. His aunt was fine. Others have not been. Syria’s civil conflict has claimed over 140,000 lives. Since Hezbollah announced its participation in Syria there have been nine suicide attacks in Lebanon, killing further hundreds. Meanwhile, skirmishes between groups on either side of the political dividing line in Tripoli, and cross-border rocket attacks along the Lebanese–Syrian frontier, have become almost daily realities. Lebanese and Palestinian refugees now account for over a quarter of the Lebanese population. Back in Aleppo some things have changed, but not necessarily for the better. Minnigh airbase fell to the rebels in August 2013 in a siege lead by the jihadist group ISIS, though talk of a united and decisive rebel assault on Damascus now sounds somewhat fantastical. ISIS and al-Nusra set up shariah courts in some districts of the city and, elsewhere in Aleppo province, children have been sentenced to death for as little as replying, “Not even if the Prophet himself returns” to requests for a free cup of coffee. At least one member of the local brigade I met in the towns of Bayanun and Hayyan has joined al-Nusra, others have died – images of their faces wrapped in white funeral shrouds appear intermittently on my Facebook feed. Meanwhile Kareem still dreams of visiting the Highlands and Cookie is still playing with guns.

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CORPORATE SPARTACUS by

Doug Michaelson Illustrations by

as told to Joshua Bullock

Sharmelan Murugiah

Despatches from the front line of the back office.

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THE DISCO CRUCIBLE Perched atop an ostrich-upholstered banquette in a generic bottle club, sporting midnight-velvet lapel, the Aesthete interloper scans the assembled throng of disco twats lubricated on Belvedere. Everywhere grinning inanity and murmuring superficiality – hack hack hack – all set to the throbbing beat of an awful Pitbull/Rihanna remix. He finds himself flanked by the corpulent figure of an oil trader grown rich with a nasty case of gout, a shattered complexion over which orgies had flowed like rain on the rooftops. Here, the vapid silhouette of a nasty euro-shit fingering a flute of Dom Perignon with a grotesque air of self-satisfaction. There, a triptych of gurning jocks, gargoyle visages plastered with a sticky film of Jaegermeister. Limp fops twirl harlots in a hackneyed parody of a Viennese waltz. Piercing, plumed pomposity. Circling like carrion are a swarm of painted Asiatic sluts squeezed precipitously into fake Hervé Léger bandage slips who suddenly coo like doves as another train of besparklered Methuselahs is ushered through the revellers towards the VIP section. Revolted by his complicity in this preening, panting self-obsessed pantomime the Aesthete’s disco reverie is punctured. He – a thinker, a cultured man. Holding an oversize champagne bottle in his hand, but the collected works of Shakespeare in his heart. Descending from his eyrie he limps forlornly stage left, tasselled slippers gliding across the marbled atrium to console himself on a bedraggled socialite and the carnal delights of the McDonald’s breakfast menu.

My life, which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love, will turn out to be like everyone else’s – monotonous, sensible, stupid. I’ll attend law school, be admitted to the bar, and end up as a respectable assistant district attorney, in a small provincial town, such as Yvetot or Dieppe... Poor madman who dreamed of glory, love, laurels, journeys, the Orient. Gustave Flaubert

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

The thought occurred to me that if one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, one at which the most fearsome murderer would tremble, shrinking from it in advance, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning. Fyodor Dostoevsky

The office. Every day a conveyer belt of inconsequentiality. Beaten, broken, bludgeoned into submission by the billable hour. The Aesthete takes slow, uneconomical strolls to the sweeping glass-fronted curvature where he looks out over the city. But no Central Business District panorama can mask the suffocating miasma of despair and bitterness. His well-accessorised life falling to its knees at the feet of once steepling ambitions. The Aesthete looks up and begs forgiveness, like the chiaroscuro figures on his luncheon dash to the National Gallery when he muscles aside tourists who fail to realise that this is his life and not a holiday. One day at work, he dares rebellion and makes a presentation on the convoluted strategic benefits of investment in francophone West Africa, based on a stolen half-hour of advanced Bing searches. No one discovers him because no one cares. The stultifying conformity of the cubicle. Broken financially and emotionally by the excesses that redeem his pointless existence, Monday 9am as ever finds him hunched over a mountain of turgid docs detailing the twisted relationships of anonymous corporate entities. Phone calls go on for weeks with faceless names, only to be replaced the next month by others. Chain-gang emails marching deeper into the inbox of his subconscious and his ill-spent life. Scarred by the inauthenticity of his daily existence and wincing at the invertebrate stupidity of the gilded cage, the Aesthete passes sovereign judgement on society and the unquestioning acceptance of his colleagues. He feels disdain for bullshit hierarchy but resignation too. Suspects others might share the feeling. Knows he cannot ask and then take it back.

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COLLEAGUES IN ARMS Spurred by the tantalising prospect of ‘closing the deal’, enraptured minions scamper to attention around a totemic brace of Xeroxes, which purr seductively in an antechamber, chewing up sacrificial wads of pristine A4 and belching out a rich cascade of jargon for signature. Then the puffed-up middle manager appears, with insipid moustache and shiny pate. Cheap square-toed loafers shuffling between cubicles amidst a flurry of closed social media windows, he relishes the management of workflow agendas. A corporate harpy gorged on a diet of insincere flattery, pouncing on the Aesthete’s free time. The lilacshirted, ill-shod predator scythes through weekend plans, stubbing out the flickering remnants of personality, loafer poised perpetually at the bruised necks of these poor souls. On deal day, a contorted puppet master in a horror fantasy of his own imagining; outside the corridors of power a meek cunt with no friends and a penchant for one-handed literature and Dancing on Ice. The office bristling with Herman Miller swivel-chairs with nothing to swivel for. An oval table flanked by a cohort of earnest young lawyers in cheap suits eagerly sucking at the corporate teat. Unctuous trainees officiously tend stacks of unsigned contracts in a desperate demonstration of utility. A hired clown conducts the symphony of twattery and increases personal bandwidths. A Gatling gun of buzzwords opens up in the boardroom around the Aesthete who cannot die with so many colleagues willingly flinging themselves before it.

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It was a fact that he suffered actual pain at the sight of certain physiognomies, that he almost regarded the benign or crabbed expressions on some faces as personal insults, and that he felt sorely tempted to box the ears of, say, one worthy he saw strolling along with his eyes shut in donnish affectation, another who smiled at his reflection as he minced past the shopwindows and yet another who appeared to be pondering a thousand-and-one weighty thoughts as he knit his brow over the rambling articles and sketchy news-items in his paper. J.K. Huysmans

AN ESCAPE

Already he had begun dreaming of a refined Thebaid, a desert hermitage equipped with all modern conveniences, a snugly heated ark on dry land from which he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity. J.K. Huysmans

The Aesthete is drowned by utter revulsion and demoralisation. Is he resigned to life in a limited liability partnership? Can he survive on literature alone? Mortgage his hopes for the present on the weekend, on retirement, on the box set? Unable to endure the contempt for art so prevalent in the mean, mercenary minds of his contemporaries, he juggles a vision of a scone shop in the Cotswolds, a crab shack in Phuket, on darker days a swan dive from the Shard. Or tossing himself, dressed in finest Loro Piana, onto the tracks of the Jubilee line. A sad, superior death to the District line suicides that have slowed his own commute to and from this rotary, slow-playing nightmare. He hears suggestions, rumours, snatched tellings of a secret meetingplace for office malcontents. Fellow aesthetes wallowing in the romantic notion of severing the corporate umbilical cord. He attends a few gatherings then abandons the charade. Despite the bluster, none of them will be forgoing the yearly incremental benefits of bonus and salary upgrades they need to fund spiralling disco agendas. Everywhere there is the tired acceptance of a future of performance reviews, charity hikes and value-added propositions. Professions full of demands, full of hostility for the individual, steeped in the hatred of those who with sullen resentment have settled for a life of sober duty.

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Robert Capa / ICP / Magnum Photos

THE BOREDOM OF WAR by

Grace Pilkington

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As a young man, Don McCullin, the doyen of war photography, said he wanted “to make sure that when they [the public] look at my pictures on a Sunday morning after breakfast, it’s going to hit them hard.” Where are we now, then? The images in the media are more horrific than ever. The blows are undoubtedly getting heavier, but we consume horror with our tea and toast. If photojournalism is a means to an end, the end being to motivate an audience to act, that end is no longer being realised. The media has warped our notion of truth. Televisions blast staged ‘reality’ shows and images are photoshopped to falsified perfection. In a world where we are constantly exposed to untruths and surrounded by fake images that seem hyper-real, our search for the genuine is more complicated than ever. In such an environment, the impact of conflict photojournalism has diminished significantly and the role of the photojournalist is laden with new problems. Vietnam was the last armed conflict where journalists had unfettered and uncensored access and because the images published generated hostility towards the conflict, securing journalistic freedom on the ground has proved challenging ever since. Now their military hosts have more control of photographers’ movements and thus their reportage.

memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners.’ The photojournalist is there, not to interfere, but document. But at what point does the passivity of the profession become immoral? Once the images reach the hands of newspaper editors, pages are designed to steer readers towards a particular interpretation. Media coverage of the Rwandan genocide inferred that the killings were random, chaotic and the situation hopeless. Bombarded by pictures of machetes and spears, the public were encouraged to believe it was tribal hatred, rather than a state-sponsored genocide. Killing with such barbaric weapons involves an inhuman detachment from the action and, in turn, the prevalence of this imagery left the Western world feeling detached from the conflict. Rwanda was depicted as a madhouse, where nothing could be done by the West. Meanwhile, an estimated 800,000 to 1 million Rwandans were killed in the genocide that engulfed the country. The cries for help were ignored. Had the mass killings been accurately portrayed in the media, might the public have been mobilised to act? Artistic photography can be more effective in giving the viewer a participatory role. John Torgovnik’s Intended Consequences is a series of portrait studies of women raped during the Rwandan genocide next to

Bombarded by pictures of machetes and spears, the public were encouraged to believe it was tribal hatred in Rwanda, rather than a state-sponsored genocide Photojournalists are time and again faced with the moral dilemma of their profession. How much pain and suffering can they witness, without intervening? The 2013 documentary McCullin shows a man haunted by what he has seen and battling with what he could have done to prevent it. McCullin did, on occasion, intervene to help the injured. James Nachtwey could not remain inactive during the 1998 riots in Indonesia. His desperate pleas to save a life were ignored, and he witnessed a man butchered by a machete-wielding mob. Capturing the moment on camera, with aesthetic considerations, Nachtwey brought the brutality to our attention. Despite being horrified by the image, I feel defeated by the brutality. It gives me an overwhelming feeling that nothing can be done. This feeling is not inaccurate – Nachtwey was, indeed, unable to do anything. Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer prize-winning image of a starving toddler stalked by a vulture during the Sudan famine caused uproar. Carter chased the vulture away and left the scene after the photograph was taken, but was not able to answer questions from the public about the girl’s fate. They attacked him for not saving her and instead acting as voyeur to her starvation. Soon after, he committed suicide, leaving a note that included the following statement: ‘ I am haunted by the vivid

the children begotten by the crime. For many of the women, this was their first opportunity to speak out, previously silenced by the shame of having children with the very militiamen responsible for the death of their families. The horror of the story is embodied, though the images themselves specifically do not showcase the violence they allude to. To gain a better understanding of suffering through photography, we need to investigate the individuals, not the acts. In a society centered on the self, seeing the anguish of an individual holds our attention captive. The war photography that has endured is often based around the experience of one, rather than hundreds. The most prominent example of this is The Falling Soldier by Robert Capa, where war is manifested in one soldier’s demise. The depiction of the soldier as he falls to his death, brought to his knees by war, is more powerful than a scene of hundreds of butchered bodies. It is the very solitude of this man, dying for the supposed betterment of his country that evokes in the audience the very same questions Capa must have struggled with as a war photographer. Images of piled bodies and severed heads leave a lasting impression of finality and futility, where the brutality has been administered and nothing can be done. Such impersonal accounts leave the audience

1. Kigali, Rwanda: photo dated 4th May 1995 in Kigali shows a 15-year-old Rwandan Hutu, Ncogozabahizi (left), who lost his right eye in the civil war, standing with other prisoners accused of taking part in the 1994 genocide. (Pascal Guyot/AFP/Getty Images) 2. A boy stands on an airplane in the Christian Mpoko refugee camp on 20th February 2014 during sunset, in Bangui, Central African Republic. Interim President Samba Panza has vowed to “go to war” on the anti-balaka, who claim to seek vengeance for atrocities committed by a mainly Muslim rebel alliance, the Seleka, which temporarily seized power in March last year. (Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images)

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“Then one of them took a butcher’s knife and said, ‘Cut his hand off.’ I stretched out my hand but he didn’t do it. One of them pointed a pistol at my eye and threatened he was going to kill me … all this torture lasted from about 6.00pm to 11.00pm … the next morning I was taken to another room where they turned on the electric saw and threatened to cut off my head, unless I told them about my friends and their activities… It has already been a year of my insecurity here, and as I have got a wife and three children I have nowhere to go. So I stay at home and every day I expect them to come back …” Photo and caption text © Melanie Friend from Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible (Camerawork Gallery, London, 1996) This catalogue is out of print but most of the work was republished as the first chapter of No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo (Midnight Editions, 2001)

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unable to give the photographed an identity and to relate. Danger lies in images that allow the audience to believe it is the country as a whole in disarray; photojournalism cannot be politically motivating if everyone and no one is to blame. We need to know whose hands are bloodstained to prevent blood from being poured. Images of this kind desensitise us. When we are faced with suffering on a large scale without a blameworthy party, we grow immune to its horrors. Melanie Friend’s Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible investigated the domestic interiors where violent abuse took place in the prelude to the war in Kosovo when the area was effectively a police state under the Milosevic regime. The exhibition was accompanied by a soundtrack of mainly Albanian testimonies. By representing their domestic lives, the victims were given an identity beyond their suffering and empowered rather than condemned as injured. An eerie image depicts a plastic chair in an orchard in the shadow of an apple tree; it suggests absence and consequence rather than immediacy and cause. The emotional growth of the victims is stunted, but the fruit continues to flourish. In the Western world, death remains a taboo; it is not something we are faced with day to day. Gone is the Victorian era where the casket was marched through the street; the ordeal of death is personal rather

what an image means, it needs to be presented with all the information. To paraphrase Susan Sontag – to photograph is to frame and to frame is to exclude. Although pictures and writing give very different accounts of human experience, words are needed to validate a photographic account. Depending on an individual’s political standpoint, they will interpret scenes of violence differently. Much is lacking in celluloid depictions of slaughtered souls; the perpetrators and the social context of the killings need explanation. The lack of written accompaniment to the recent images of the Syrian conflict published in The Sunday Times was shocking. The victims of Assad’s chemical weapons were plastered all over our newspapers and televisions. There was little explanation of the political situation and thus public opinion sided with the rebel cause, as patently intended by the BBC and national newspapers. A photograph that lacks badly needed written context is a liability, not an asset, in the treadmill of information dissemination. An image provides persuasive power, but it is the information carried in a caption that gives it profile. The proliferation of such images is progressively hindering the emotive power of successive generations of photojournalists. Photography can both create and shrivel sympathy. As with everything else, war has become médiatique – that is to say, shaped by and for the

A photograph that lacks badly needed written context is a liability, not an asset, in the treadmill of information dissemination. An image provides persuasive power, but it is the information carried in a caption that gives it profile

than communal. When someone dies it is usually alone in a hospital. As we are not accustomed to death on a wide scale, viewing it can arouse feelings of discomfort. Melanie Friend’s work creates a connection to the victims, not through death, but through living. We can see their homes – where they lived before the violence and where they continued to try and live their lives. The media need to reflect on the struggles faced by those living lives affected by conflict before moving on to the next crisis of war. Rapid movement of media coverage from one to the next leaves us ignorant of lasting damage, which only adds to a feeling of detachment from the victims. We can only grasp what suffering looks like, rather than what it feels like. If photographic essays such as Friend’s and Torgovnik’s were more prominent in the media, we would feel like participants, rather than spectators. By giving the victims the chance to represent themselves through the photographs and accompanying interviews, we feel that we are interacting with the suffering and find ourselves a step closer to acting. Photojournalism in the digital age of mass reproduction needs to be accompanied by a context, whether it is a spoken interview or the written word. The very nature of photojournalism necessitates explanation. In many circumstances, for an audience to understand

media that reproduce it. Today’s photojournalism is similarly affected by media-related concerns. The wake of digital globalisation brings with it the ability to access photographs, videos and information from around the world at any hour. Citizen journalism poses a threat to traditional photojournalism; anyone can now act as witness. The prevalence of mobile phones has lessened the need for photojournalists with professional equipment. Certain photojournalists have implemented this in their work. Michael Christopher Brown’s recent project on Libya documented his experiences using the same tool used to start the uprising – the smartphone. A very modern circularity. The photojournalist profession is fraught with mental, financial and creative challenges. The world has changed dramatically in the past twenty years and, as with many creative industries, photojournalism is suffering. It has ceased to be a politically motivating medium and the media is to blame. The daily blitzkrieg of raw and brutal images depicting death and violence on a grand scale allows us to consume suffering, rather than involve ourselves in any meaningful way. Reportage should begin with the individual and the coherent domestic contexts of Jonathan Torgovnik’s and Melanie Friend’s work are all the more powerful for giving victims representation. Suffering should never be a spectacle and that is what it has become.

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