ANYONES

VERY GOOD ADVICE FROM VERY INTERESTING PEOPLE

ANYONES ISSUE 0

Suburban childhoods include an inordinate amount of time spent sitting in cars. Mine was no exception: I experienced the world riding shotgun in a Chevy Suburban as my mother blazed across the Long Island Expressway. She was always on the telephone, effortlessly connecting the people that called her – friends, family, business partners, loose acquaintances –to the maitre d’s that would preside over a magic night, the doctors that would care for their sick loved ones, the people they never knew they needed to meet.

A veritable human switchboard and an empathetic, but sober sounding board, she would always start by asking the person at the other end of the line a crucial question: do you want my advice, or do you want me to listen?

We seek advice when we’re at a crossroads and need to move the plot in our own lives forward. Great advisors are rarely prescriptive and need not be formal, but they are always generous. Advising is an action word, and their investment – of time, effort, experience, talent, and attention – provides us with momentum and gives us the permission and confidence to try things and keep going.

We believe that everyone should have access to a lifeline in a time of need. So too do the people you’ll meet in the pages of our inaugural issue of ANYONES. We’ve interviewed an Olympic fencer, a journalist, a climate activist, a tattoo artist, an entrepreneur building creative tools using AI, a beauty editor, a documentary filmmaker, and a photographer. On the surface, they seem to have little in common other than remarkable talent and dominance within their respective fields. But they are connected by their generosity, a common belief in the importance of sharing their playbook, and a desire to dispel the myth of self-made success. They also happen to be very interesting people with very good advice to share, and were all eager to pay homage to the people who helped them to get to where they are. If we get an Issue One, we hope to thank them by building a phone tree that connects them to the luminaries they themselves have always dreamed of calling.

Before she was my mother, Monique Bloom was a young professional navigating the realities facing a female executive on ’80s Wall Street. I’ve always loved this picture of her from that time – feathered hair and all –and chose it for our first cover because she taught me how to ask for help, and more important, to listen when others needed it. I hope that ANYONES inspires you to do the same.

Samantha Bloom

New York City

November 2021

WORDS OF ADVICE

WORDS OF ADVICE

GO

HAL LIE ULD

Beauty and wellness have evolved into juggernaut industries over the last decade, and through it all Hallie Gould has been at its beating center. As a beauty editor, she’s had a hand in shaping the way media brands narrate our lives – from social media to trend reporting. In her decade-long career, she‘s contributed to Marie Claire, Elle, Instyle, and now defunct digital-only publications Real Beauty and MIMI, and interviewed celebrities, models, and other notable women and men in the beauty space.

Today, she’s the Associate Editorial Director at Byrdie, where she continues to challenge and shift the narrative of what constitutes beauty, pushing the industry to be more honest and inclusive through hundreds of high-performing stories on wellness, diet, mental health, and body image. We caught up with Hallie near her home in Brooklyn about what it takes to become a writer and nurturing less conventional careers.

Interview by Samantha Bloom

Photography by Hana Lê Van

“

THERE’S SOMETHING REALLY INCREDIBLE ABOUT THE BEAUTY INDUSTRY: IT HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BE SUCH AN INCLUSIVE PLACE.

THERE’S SO MUCH WORK TO BE DONE, DON’T GET ME WRONG. BUT EVERYBODY HAS TO WASH THEIR FACE. EVERYBODY CAN WEAR MAKEUP. EVERYBODY CAN DO THEIR HAIR. EVERYBODY WANTS TO FEEL GOOD. THERE ARE NO SIZES.”

SAMANTHA BLOOM

What’s the most important advice you’ve ever received?

HALLIE GOULD

I have two and they’re both from my dad. He was a lawyer, my mom is a law professor, but they’re both deeply creative and spiritual people. I don’t think law was ever my dad’s passion – he never felt connected to it. I think he did it because he didn’t know what else to do, and becoming a lawyer was an acceptable path. He saw my brother and I were creative people from the start. So when I was growing up, he told us ‘never go to law school.’ That was really helpful: There wasn’t that pressure to do something more conventional. My brother became a chef, and I became a writer.

The second piece of ad vice came when I was trying to figure out how to get a job after graduating college. I knew what I wanted to do, and was lucky what I wanted to do was a specific job. I knew the steps – I could figure out how to get there. That’s really rare in a creative field: If you want to become a famous musician, you can’t just become a famous musician; there’s no playbook for that. After I graduated, I interned at Time Out New York, but I wasn’t making any money. I applied for this job as a recep tionist at the John Barrett Salon. And I called my dad and asked: What’s my move here? Do you think I’m putting off my end goal? And he just said, ‘Look, get a job. It doesn’t have to be the job – just get a job.’ That has served me so well throughout my entire life, the sense that making a choice doesn’t mean you can’t undo it. It doesn’t mean you’re sending yourself down some spiral you can’t get out of. Get a job and it doesn’t have to be the job, and then you learn.

Initially, I thought I wanted to write about fashion. And then I took this job at a hair salon and realized beauty was the area I cared most about. It’s a category where I really have something to say. I took a lot of really wonderful things from that job and met a lot of really wonderful people. I got the chance to see behind the scenes of how it all works with makeup artists and hairstylists. Taking this job that wasn’t supposed to be the job changed my entire trajectory and opened up a ton of doors for me.

SB You must’ve seen some crazy things.

HG I was there for eight months, from 2011 – 2012, and I was a receptionist catering to rich people right after the recession. It was certainly crazy to be in the back room at that salon with all the people that came in… there were a lot of funny characters.

It was a fun and challenging year – I think it’s really important for everyone to work in the service industry. It led me into this behindthe-scenes world and to people I’m still in touch with today who have impacted my life and the industry.

This hairstylist I love, Dhiran Mistry, had just moved from London and was working as John Barrett’s assistant. And he’s since become an editor darling, everybody loves him. That’s something where I’m like, this is a cool thing to be part of.

There’s something really incredible about the beauty industry, it has the potential to be such an inclusive place. There’s so much work to be done, don’t get me wrong. But everybody has to wash their face. Everybody can wear makeup. Everybody can do their hair. Everybody wants to feel good. There are no sizes. That was what drew me to it: being able to write about body image, mental health, and the way beauty intersects with identity, confidence, and community. Reaching other people has always felt really empowering and exciting.

SB Who do you call for advice?

HG My close friend, Lauren Valenti. She and I met through work, when we were both at Marie Claire. I think it’s not entirely rare to have a really great friendship with your coworker, but our friendship became so much bigger than working together. We’re not coworkers anymore – she’s now the Senior Beauty Editor at Vogue – but I don’t know where I would be without someone who understood all of those facets of my life; everything about work as well as all the stuff outside of work. I believe her to be the most hardworking person I’ve ever met, and the most talented – she should get any job over me. So I don’t think we ever had to deal with competition, we both put each other

up for jobs at certain points. It’s just a super lovely, rare experience to have a friend like that; a real cohort.

SB Who is your unlikeliest mentor?

HG To say my mom would seem likely, but for me it’s unlikely because she is not some body who feels really strongly about beauty or wellness, or skincare, or suncare, or makeup. She still calls Byrdie a blog and asks me if I’m going to “blog” about this or that. But I think the way I carry myself in my career has a lot to do with what she instilled in us from the beginning.

My parents were both defense lawyers. They met on strike for Legal Aid, and that part of them made a difference for me in my life. And now – navigating being online, having to have a perspective, having to be thoughtful, to educate yourself – I’m really thankful to have had parents who made that a priority. She was the breadwinner in our family and we grew up in a place where that was not usually the case. No disrespect to full-time moms – I think that’s probably the hardest job in the entire world – but I had a mom who was really focused on her career. And I think a lot of my ambition came from that; she was always a staunch feminist even before I knew what that meant. I really appreciate the way she raised us. My brother and I talk about this all the time: We had to sink or swim, and we both ended up successful because we had to, but also because she made clear: “I’m not always gonna save you.”

ANYO.NE/HALLIE

EMILY LIP SON

Known to take a technically pristine image then run it through a low-res office copier as a final touch, photographer Emily Lipson is the rare artist that is deadly serious about the work, while refusing to take any of her work too seriously. Though Emily has done stints as the photo editor for W Magazine and produced shoots for legendary photographers at the top of the industry, it’s her own distinct, irreverent images that have made her a go-to when the world’s biggest brands, publications and celebrities – including Nike, Dazed, Fran Leibowitz, Charli XCX and more – want to cut through the sameness.

We caught her at the end of her itinerant summer for a conversation that resembled her work: elliptical, kinetic, and full of nostalgia.

Interview by Samantha Bloom

Photography by Emily Lipson

SAMANTHA BLOOM

What’s the most important advice that you’ve ever received?

EMILY LIPSON

Structuring and outlining boundaries is critical as a photographer, and the best advice I ever received helped me find mine.

Think about your wills , wants , and won’ts .

‘Wills’ are steppingstone opportunities. You’re evaluating an opportunity. Some aspects may not be perfect – the budget might not be great, the timeline might not be awesome, the subject matter might not be the most interesting – but you will take the job because it’s a vehicle to get you closer to what you want.

‘Wants’ are somewhat self-explanatory. You’re not going to start out and immediately shoot the most notable subjects for the most notable magazines or brands or companies. That’s been important to keep in mind when I’ve found myself in periods of aimlessness, a place familiar to any free lancer. Staying aware of your long-term goals and remembering your motivations keeps you focused as you go from job to job.

‘Won’ts’ are often in response to something that’s gone wrong, but every significant professional shift I’ve experienced has come through learning my won’ts.

SB Can you share a few of them?

EL The pace and expectations within the industry can be brutal. We’re constantly being faced with impossible deadlines, zero-budget projects, delivery of dozens of images on a 10-image budget, etc.

Those just starting out especially fall into a position where they’re not advancing because they struggle to assert themselves and establish boundaries.

I went through a period where I was overworking myself and was too slammed to do anything successfully. It seems counterintuitive, but sometimes the only way to get ahead is by saying no. If you can’t, you’re not going to make the work that you want to make,

or earn the credibility you may be seeking.

SB Where did that advice come from?

EL It’s a sentiment a lot of my peers share, but my former boss, ( W Magazine Visuals Director) Alex Ben-Gurion, is a big champion of this sort of thinking. I left W in order to pursue a career as a full-time photographer, and Alex said: ‘be picky. Think long and hard about how you’re developing your brand, and what kind of shoots you’re deciding to do.’

She’s not someone who’s going to look at a hundred images and like them all; she pushed me to hold my cards a bit closer to the chest and only put forward my best work. I still struggle to send a tight edit when I’m submitting a project and always send too many images.

SB You and I discuss this often: no editor ends up choosing your least favorite image if you haven’t sent it to them...

EL ...Show the strongest images! Take the rest out of the fucking folder! Yeah, It’s a really simple thing, but it can be so hard to do in the moment.

I see things with an imagination. I’m a big, big editor: I retouch, I do a lot in post, so I often look at images as what they can be, versus what I’m seeing in front of me... people don’t really apply that lens when you submit work for the types of jobs that I get. I typically send more with that thought in mind: oh, this could be cropped like that, that blue could be pushed to this shade . I see countless things that I would do, and rarely have the time in advance to do them, and people don’t choose them with the same imagination I have.

I look up to artists that have a very specific, uncompromising point of view, and aren’t sacrificing it in their work, like (stylist and editor-in-chief of Dazed ) Ib Kamara, (photographer) Sam Rock, or Rafael Pavarotti. The common thread between these artists is they’re able to make work clearly, unfalteringly, and consistently demonstrating their vision as artists, all within a commercial landscape. That unwavering approach to your vision is not only a skill, it’s the goal for any

“I SEE IMAGES WITH AN IMAGINATION... WHAT THEY CAN BE, VERSUS WHAT’S IN FRONT OF ME.“

artist working in this context.

SB Your work is highly collaborative. Who do you call for advice, and who are your mentors?

EL I call my friends – I’m not only friends with people in the arts, or people who work in or even appreciate photography. I actually seek advice outside of that bubble and look to people that are well-rounded, that’s important to me.

Many of my mentors have been my school teachers across subjects. I think that a mentor is someone who, in a sense, was like a cheerleader to you. You need people who see you as special and want to cultivate skills within you that you’re either unaware of, or may not have cultivated on your own. My teachers all saw something in me that I couldn’t see at the time.

I don’t know if this is true for you, but I always performed worse in settings where I wasn’t challenged, and excelled when I was really pushed.

You need to have jet fuel under you, and it sort of doesn’t come from you completely. I have a lot of intrinsic motivation, but the second I’m picked up by someone else and told: ‘you’re really good at this, let me help you’, that’s when I get really inspired to keep going.

SB And the opposite can also be true, right?

EL Exactly. There are people who went through college not having direct contact with their professors. I’m just not that kind of student, or person. I gravitated to Visual Studies for the content, but also because it was a small, very hands-on program. I’ve always needed and excelled in those kinds of intimate spaces.

A photoshoot is similar: a small group of people working on something with a lot of direct contact and direct communication.

SB Who would you want to speak with if you could call anyone?

EL Performance artist Tehching Hsieh. I was flipped out when I first discovered conceptual performance art. There are great artists that don’t necessarily break barriers, but he is and was such a vanguard: no one was doing work like it at the time he was creating his ‘One Year Performance‘ pieces in the ’80s which explored endurance and the passage of time.

There’s always a concept in photography but more often than not, the work is driven by aesthetics. His documentation of his works have their own aesthetic conventions, but they’re almost beside the point.

I look to other mediums and in particular, gravitate toward performance. I trained as a dancer from childhood, and wanted to pursue it but never did.

The beauty of ballet lies in its precision and an adherence to a rubric that rarely changes. I think that’s diametrically opposed to the conceptual performance artists like Hsieh, Marina Abramovich, or Rirkrit Tiravanija –

SB – submitting Vito Acconci to that list. First Abstract Expressionists tested the physical limits of paint, canvas, and gesture, then this school of artists say: ok, bodies, space and time are the materials now. How far can our bodies go, what can they do, what can be done to them and what becomes of the spaces they move through?

EL Yeah. Part of why I respect Hsieh so much is for his exploration of those concepts of time, duration, physical and mental limits in extremis. And that’s why even in my own work, I don’t want to see just the image I made. I want to see layers. I want to see tactility – Is there writing on it? Is there a graphic component? I don’t want to see something at face value. It’s something I’m still really trying to push forward in my own work.

That said, my other advice is: don’t take yourself too seriously.

SB Have you always subscribed to that belief, or is this a post-Covid revelation?

...YOU KIND OF HAVE TO REMIND YOURSELF THAT WE’RE NOT SOLVING CLIMATE CHANGE OR CURING CANCER.“

“TAKING YOURSELF TOO SERIOUSLY ACTUALLY MAKES THE WORK SUFFER...

EL Definitely predates Covid for me. I’ve always had a problem taking myself too seriously. I believe in professionalism, attention to detail and working hard and these are all things that are super important to me but at some point you have to also relax and remind yourself that you don’t matter as much as you think you do.

No one likes a stickler. I’m not a fine artist, I’m a commercial photographer, right? At this stage of my career, I neither need to take myself seriously, nor should I.

In fact, it actually makes the work suffer. We’re not solving climate change or curing cancer. You always have to kind of remind yourself of that. And I often do –

[INAUDIBLE YELLING]

– sorry, I’m at my parents, we’re outside and my dad is spraying a garden hose at me –

[TO HER DAD, BRIAN] : I’m on the phone! Now is not the time for this!

SB This is pretty on the nose… in the spirit of not taking yourself too seriously it kind of feels like we should end it here.

EL Go for it. To the masses reading, go slap yourself across the face, take a bath, find a way to laugh at yourself, crack open a beer, call a friend. Do whatever you need to do to knock yourself off of the pedestal, and come back with a new approach.

ANYO.NE/EMILYLIPSON

CUR TIS

WALD MC

Everything about the sport of fencing – from the equipment that anonymizes its wearers to its precision movements – is designed to discourage individuality. Perhaps thats why Queens, New York native Curtis McDowald made such a splash during his Olympic debut in Tokyo this past summer. Curtis is an unignorable presence whose extreme dedication, style, and resilience are helping to augur in a new era for an antiquated sport. We caught up with Curtis right after what may have been the strangest Olympic Games in memory to chat about mentors, post-Olympic depression and realizing childhood dreams.

Photography and Interview by Samantha Bloom

SAMANTHA BLOOM

What’s the most important advice you ever received?

CURTIS MCDOWALD

When I was about 14 years old, I was kicked out of my fencing club for taking a bag from the lost and found to bring my weapons to a competition. I was suspended for about a year, and lost my funding and the opportunity to train during the suspension. It was a harsh punishment to place on a young child, and I wasn’t the only person to experience something along those lines. It was a tough position to be in at that age and usually, it results in that kid not fencing ever again, or acquiring a feeling of a stigma that they can’t really seem to shake. My teammate, Ben Bratton, gave me a really simple piece of advice. He said: you can let a moment like this define you, or you can be the first person in our program to have overcome it. It was super simple and specific to the situation, but resonated across different areas of my life. Hearing that gave me this drive to overcome that and other personal challenges, for which I had no playbook. The idea that I could be the first to do something was totally new to me. Now, when I find myself in a really tough situation that may be uncharted territory, I know I’ll be able to figure it out regardless of whether I have a model.

SB Who is your unlikeliest mentor?

CMD To me, an unlikely mentor isn’t a person, it’s pain and suffering. I have dozens of ways I can get into that –

SB – choose your own adventure.

CMD As an athlete, it’s so painful to lose in practice or even worse, in competition not because the person you were competing against was better than you, but because you made a mistake. You don’t learn any lessons when you win and succeed, but you remember failure, pain, and suffering, and resolve to do something different in order to not make that same mistake again. And then you learn how to take those failures in stride without any loss of enthusiasm, knowing that it was in service of the next thing.

SB Is that inner strength something that anyone can cultivate?

CMD There’s only two options: to either succumb to pressure and let it break you, or push through. And I think you have a choice in the outcome You get tired of being a place where your circumstances continue to define you and pull you down. And at some point, you make a decision because you’re too uncomfortable, too tired, or just done. That’s where the change happens.

SB How are you thinking about pain immediately after the Olympics?

CMD Whether they medal or not, I think every athlete experiences postOlympic depression. I heard this quote from (Olympic speedskater) Apollo Ohno that‚ the difference between becoming a celebrity and going back to your local town and maybe becoming a gym teacher is the difference between two handclaps’... that’s the time difference between a medal. But the emphasis of pushing through and pushing through, there’s a danger in that as well – not listening to your body, not listening to your mind, can do more harm than good. You have to find a balance.

I haven’t returned to training (since Tokyo). I’ve been in Europe for over a month now, avoiding anything that I thought was going to cause me more stress, because I truly could not have dealt with any more stress than I have at this point. From the crazy amount of media attention, both positive and negative, to the actual pressures of competing, to the pressures of qualification, to all the politics happening behind the scenes. At this current moment, I’m taking a great deal of time, energy, and money to step away from all the stress, travel without a fencing bag, my weapons, or my uniform for the first time in my life. And I’m seeing places I’ve been before with different eyes.

SB Who do you call for advice?

CMD I call a lot of people for advice. I really love this idea because I personally spend a great deal of time on the phone, which a lot of people my age don’t do. But I’m I’m always seeking out mentors and advice,

from people whether they’re in my field or not. There’s just so many amazing people to get advice from. I call a lot of the guys from the Fencer’s Club, like Ben Bratton, Dwight Smith, Adam Rodney, even Peter Westbrook. But then I have a lot of people in my personal life that I’ve met while in New York or traveling, who have given me really good advice. With a little bit of luck and clarity on the people I want to connect with, I’ve been fortunate to have been able to find a way to talk to them. Ryan Leslie is a producer, artist, and entrepreneur who runs a company called Superphone. Sophia Chang formerly worked with artists like the WuTang Clan and D’Angelo. She now has a women’s mentorship group where she brings in people from her network to help people for whom her information and contacts would be valuable. I’ve been fortunate to have relationships with them both, to be able to pull some information from them outside of their companies, and to utilize some of their resources.

SB If you could call anyone in the world for advice, who would you call?

CMD Elon Musk. He can say: ‘my dreams and aspirations are so big that they’re now extraterrestrial’, and then has the time and means to go into outer space. I know a lot of people may see that as a billionaire’s overindulgence. But how many people can say that about their childhood dream –

I’m going to be an astronaut or travel to space, one way or another – it’s a crazy position to be in.

SB To have the headspace to imagine things that take you to literally stratospheric places?

CMD Exactly. This is a guy who has gotten to a point in his career where he can literally point to his most innate childhood dream and be able to say yeah, I’m doing that. I think that’s what everyone truly aspires to do – find a way to get to their personal equivalent of ‘space’.

I think as people are trying to figure out what they want out of their lives, part of the process should be going back to childhood, and finding that thing that kept you up at night – that in adulthood may have been beaten out of you as a possibility. Figure out how to put yourself in a position to go and try that.

SB Well, I would put you in that category –aren’t you doing exactly what you wanted to do when you were a kid?

CMD Being an Olympian was definitely a childhood aspiration, but it was only one of them.

“WHETHER THEY MEDAL OR NOT, I THINK EVERY ATHLETE EXPERIENCES POSTOLYMPIC DEPRESSION.

I’M TAKING A GREAT DEAL OF TIME

I think we tell ourselves you can only get one thing, but I don’t believe that’s the case. That said, everything takes and comes in its own time. So I checked my super big goal off the list, and now I’m moving on to the next one.

SB That’s good advice. I bet you finish your list in its entirety.

CMD I hope so. I’m going to try really hard, that’s all I can promise.

ANYO.NE/CURTIS

TO TRAVEL WITHOUT A FENCING BAG

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE. AND I’M SEEING PLACES I‘VE BEEN BEFORE WITH DIFFERENT EYES.”

DAI SY FA

Multi-skilled director Daisy Ifama grew up amongst people from all walks of life, moving house often, and learning to embrace differences at a young age. This singular perspective has influenced her to create work that explores her own identity and beliefs as a founding member of the beloved media platform gal – dem. Her most recent film for the Guardian Documentary strand, RIP Seni, follows what happened as mysterious graffiti launched a discussion about race, mental health and injustice in the UK. We grabbed a few minutes with Daisy between shoots to discover what advice means to her.

Interview by Lisa Cadwallader

LISA CADWALLADER

The most important piece of advice you’ve ever received...

DAISY IFAMA

When I was at university I was sitting in an edit suite finishing up my final year film and my good friend at the time, Beth, came to hang out with me. I was about to go and have a difficult conversation with another friend and I think she probably knew I needed some words of wisdom. Beth was two years older than me, really strong willed and way better at communicating her feelings than anyone else I’ve ever met. So before I left she very frankly said to me: Remember, this person is not a mindreader and they won’t know what you haven’t told them i.e come to the discussion with honesty and everything you need to say, don’t beat around the bush, you have to get to the root of the issue to really work it out. I remember thinking, wow she can really see how my brain is working and she’s right! It’s stuck with me through both work and life –

you can’t expect people to know what you’re thinking, you have to tell them how you feel and get to the bottom of things to make them better. I’ve found it a lot easier to do in work vs my life, but I’ll keep trying!

LC The living person I’d most like to interview is…

DI The author of Keisha Da Sket, Jade LB. It’s a series of chapters about a girl called Keisha that my friends and I used to bluetooth to each other back in the day. It really was the gift that kept on giving and I’d love to know what the mysterious author was thinking when it all blew up.

LC Someone in my field I look up to and why...

DI Mahaneela! She’s a multidisciplinary artist from London with roots in Ghana, India and Jamaica. She has such a great creative career and has really successfully

managed to not be boxed in – she’s a film director, photographer, DJ and runs a creative agency with producer Sadé Lawson. She’s just killing it and it’s always so sick to watch a UK gal doing bits over in America.

LC The person I’m most proud to know...

DI Janay Dorrance. She found me online when I was just bumbling through the world and she really did change my out look on life and the course of my career by brin g ing me into Google Creative Lab. She’s so loving and gentle and just an incredible person all round. I am so so thankful to have her in my life.

LC My childhood hero/my current hero…

DI My Mum, always was and always will be! She’s just such a legend, and lived a very exciting and fun life and raised me by herself. She has such a great approach to life and is just my bezzie and I love her.

LC How I think happiness will be measured in the future…

DI By how at peace you are. These last two years have really tested my happiness and where it lies and I think it does all come down to how at peace I am to

really accept happiness back into my life, which sounds really sad - but it’s true!

LC How I support my best friend…

DI My best friend Heather (they/them) moved to the UK from New Zealand when they were five and then they moved back when we were 19. We saw each other for the first time in six years at the start of 2020, which was amazing and very emotional. Most of our adult friendship has been via WhatsApp, which is so weird to think about because we grew up pretty much as siblings in the same house. We post each other little treats and care packages and speak mainly through back and forth voice notes.

LC How I make decisions…

DI I usually try and lay out the issue at hand, make a list of pros and cons, listen to what truly feels right in my soul and then check in with my Mum and my girlfriend before I make the final decision

SM How I’d improve cities in one day...

DI I’d protect social housing.

ANYO.NE/DAISY

DAISY AND HER MUM

PA RA

OLA MOS

In her work as a Vice correspondent and contributor to Telemundo and MSNBC, Emmy-winning journalist and activist Paola Ramos has crossed the world’s most dangerous path for migrants, tagged along with Latinx drag queens working to battle an HIV epidemic in a Texas border town, and followed Latino Trump supporters as they worked rooms – and social channels – during the 2020 Election.

Whether you refer to the community of 60 million in the U.S. as Hispanic, Latino or Latinx, Paola’s rigorous reporting seeks to broaden our understanding of the roles Latinx communities and individuals play in a society that too often ignores them until a political scapegoat is needed. Her first book, Finding Latinx: In Search of the Voices Redefining Latino Identity, is a travelogue of her time exploring these vastly different communities across the U.S.

While she reported on the spread of vaccine misinformation across immigrant and diaspora groups, we spoke to Paola about the importance of accurate advice and trustworthy sources.

Images and Interview by Samantha Bloom

What’s the most important advice that you’ve ever received?

Sometimes, your job is to shut up and listen. It’s less obvious advice for me, given that my career has become about asking questions. When you report stories and have all these interview opportunities, often you walk into spaces prepared and armed with words, questions, and facts to counter people. But with time, I’ve found the way to get the best answers or the most honest version of someone is truly to listen. It’s taken me a while, but it’s changed the trajectory of my conversations and interactions and led me to my best stories.

Can you think of a particular instance where you went in with a very clear idea of what you thought a story might be, then recalibrated based on what you’d heard from your sources?

We were talking earlier about COVID disinformation: when I was walking into interviews with people that are spreading conspiracy theories – and especially Latinos or Spanish speakers that are spreading conspiracy theories or convincing others that COVID and the vaccines are a fraud – my initial gut reaction was to see them as perpetrators of a problem, right? People who are literally committing crimes and spreading lies. And then it’s very different when you just start to listen to what they have to say instead of pushing back. I talk about it in my piece, but I suddenly came to this realization that they’re not aggressors, they’re actually victims. And then you start to have a completely different conversation within that interview. I’ve experienced this with so many Latino Trump supporters, where I’ve gone in aggres sively, trying to defend universal values. And then suddenly when you try and listen, to truly try to hear what is driving a Black Latino to love white supremacy, you under stand that it’s not so much about politics, but that it’s so much more about inherent trauma, pain and assimilation. And it’s happened to me at the border a hundred times. I’ll be there covering breaking news, and then suddenly find out that the situation is completely different than what’s being covered by the mainstream media. We’ve been talking about President Biden and his Administration’s more humane

SAMANTHA BLOOM

PAOLA RAMOS

“ THE WAY TO GET TO THE MOST HONEST VERSION OF SOMEONE IS TO LISTEN.

IT’S TAKEN ME A WHILE, BUT IT’S CHANGED

THE TRAJECTORY OF MY CONVERSATIONS AND LED ME TO MY BEST STORIES.”

approaches to the border, only to find out through conversations on the ground that families are still being separated at the border by this Administration. The only way you reach those conclusions is by listening to people.

So much of the work that you’ve done is to get people to stop using unnuanced narratives that paint an entire community or issue with a broad brush. We can’t ever expect to understand complex issues if we rely on them, can we?

Yeah, exactly. It’s the easy thing to do to fall into the stereotypes, the big narratives, when you’re reporting and writing. It’s harder to listen and to be open to questioning yourself – that literally only comes if you listen, and if you have the right people to ask the right questions. But again, that requires shutting your mouth sometimes (laughs).

Who do you typically call when you need advice?

My dad (journalist Jorge Ramos). He’s shown me two things: how to listen and go in with an open mind, to let conversations guide you as you’re conducting interviews. And that in certain situations, your role becomes the complete opposite, which is to question, question, question, question authority. Those are two very different modalities. He’s lived this work for so many years and been in rooms with everyone, from the most vulnerable migrants, to the most powerful, evil dictators. I think that’s sort of taught him how to navigate these fundamental questions, which I’ve then had the immense privilege of internalizing and walking around the world with. Humanizing the most vulnerable requires listening, and holding people accountable requires questioning authority. Those are two very different ways of using your voice, but he’s been able to master them both at this point in his career.

Who is your unlikeliest mentor?

My sister (Gabriela Roca). I’m older by six years and on paper, we’re very, very different in both our approach to life and our lifestyles. But I never had to come out as a

gay person because she was empathic, open, and loving from the beginning and never questioned anything about me – it wasn’t even a topic of conversation. I don’t know how to explain it... nothing was ever a problem to her, it was kind of a „so what?“ Today we take that for granted, but it made a huge difference 15 or 20 years ago... to grow up with that was amazing, and I learned that from her, not from my parents or any elders.

It’s part of your remit as a journalist to interview some of the most influential people in the world, but if you could call anyone for advice, who would you call and what would you ask?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Here’s this Latina woman from the Bronx, sitting in the highest possible realm of power in this country, if not the world. And I know that one would have to have imposter syndrome at every step on the way there, right? There’s no way that she didn’t. So, my question to her would be: how did you get over it? When I got into Harvard, or into college, I thought someone made a mistake. Every time I go on TV, or I write something or I’m on camera, I always question myself. It might be my job, but that feeling never goes away.

ANYO.NE/PAOLA

WILL IAM

SKEA

PING

London-based William Skeaping would be thrilled to kill the mood at your next dinner party. As the specter of our future climate dystopia, Will has turned his considerable marketing and communications talent to full-time activism, working as a strategist with Extinction Rebellion and co-editor of This is Not a Drill, their best-selling handbook urging humanity to do something about the climate crisis before it sleepwalks off a cliff. An erstwhile advertising and music exec who worked closely with everyone from Alan Moore to the late MF DOOM, our call with Will ahead of COP 26 ran the gamut from anecdotes about Oasis impresario Alan McGee to Japanese robot theater. Turns out the grim reaper is a great conversationalist...

Interview by Samantha Bloom

SAMANTHA BLOOM

What is the most important advice you’ve ever received?

WILLIAM SKEAPING

In the last few years the most useful advice has been to listen to the science. Pandemic aside, we are all way deep in a climate and ecological crisis and have just a few years to cut our emissions globally and radically transform our relationship with nature, and each other. It’s real and it’s terrifying. I took this advice to heart and have spent the last three years as a full-time activist, encouraging politicians to do the same.

This is your crisis too. If you’re not sure where to start, give me a call. As our cycles of

consumption, news, and noise spin further out of control, most practical work or relationship advice from even a few years back feels antiquated and irrelevant. That said, I’ve received three timeless pieces of advice, each of which has proved widely applicable:

I’d just quit a very safe but dull job at Google, to join hip hop label Lex Records, and found myself on a plane to Coachella Music Festival in Palm Springs where some of our artists were performing. Despite flying coach, I had music-video fantasies and decided to misinform a flight attendant that it was my colleague’s birthday. The flight crew unwisely donated a couple of full size bottles of champagne to us without checking their supply, which must have led to a booze shortage in first class. Out of nowhere, music

“RIGHT NOW, THE ONLY ADVICE THAT MATTERS IS LISTEN TO THE SCIENCE.

MOST OTHER PRACTICAL ADVICE FROM EVEN A FEW YEARS BACK FEELS ANTIQUATED AND IRRELEVANT AS OUR CYCLES OF CONSUMPTION, NEWS, AND NOISE SPIN FURTHER OUT OF CONTROL.”

impresario Alan McGee, who famously signed Oasis, stumbled out from behind a curtain scoping for a top-up from the hoi polloi and doing a great impression of a man trying to overcome heavy turbulence.

Young, plucky, and inebriated, I promptly stood up and introduced myself. He took an immediate shine to our free booze and was happy to sing for his drinks, though I think he was just relieved to hear a non-American accent and find a seat headrest to brace himself against. The soundbites started flowing, snatches of band names mumbled in a very strong Scottish accent… “(mumble mumble) Primal Scream, (mumble mumble) Pete Doherty…” until eventually, someone from his team arrived to beckon him back to a much more comfy, fully-reclining seat.

Little he said was fully intelligible, but he leaned in, frothing slightly at the corners of his mouth and in one final gasp, whispered a mantra as if it were the vital clue to locate buried treasure:

“Don’t believe the hype... believe the checks... Dont believe the hype, believe the checks.“

I like to remember he encouraged us to join in with him and repeat it back, and I may well have embellished this memory over the years, but the take-away is probably more valid than ever.

Advice I received in my formative years has also really stuck. My parents are musicians and I remember as an eight year-old in a pre-internet world, helping my mother to copy edit the brochures she was mailing out to booking agents across the country. I was practically learning how to think ‚audiencefirst’, and probably laying the groundwork for a comms-adjacent career.

The most practical piece of advice I’ve ever received? “Bend with your knees, not your back”. I learned this from a summer job moving boxes at Harrod’s department store as a teenager, where I was forced to watch a half-hour video on the importance of lifting boxes properly. I’ve stayed injury-free, but still hear that stern video voiceover in my head, even if I’m just bending down to pick up after my dog.

SB Describe the person who gave you that advice and your relationship to them?

WS Feeling a connection to the person advising you is more important than whether or not you meet them. My high school art dissertation was on modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth and I got a rare opportunity to explore an archive of her original corres pondence that hadn’t been seen for decades. She was writing to artists, critics and friends –but the letters read as if she was addressing me directly, so I took her comments to heart. Her consideration for truth to materials should be taught in school: paying deep attention to understand our creative mediums, their origins, space and temporality so we can work with them effectively. Platform agnosticism is often a race to the bottom. At the other end of the frivolity scale, there’s a strange intimacy in Andy Warhol’s memoir, Popism , that feels like a hauntingly prescient cheat-sheet for our disturbed times.

SB Who do you typically call when you need advice?

WS My friend, Jen Stilwell (@Monte.Vision), who deals highly-coveted Post Modern furniture in Palm Springs. We met in LA and immediately bonded over a shared love for early ‚80s Italian disco. I’ve stopped flying for climate-related reasons so we haven’t seen each other in five years, but we speak several times a week. It’s like having an extremely funny and judgemental oracle I can legitimately call in the middle of the night, supported by an eight hour time difference. We’re still trying to work out which of us is the other’s spirit animal.

SB Who is your unlikeliest mentor?

WS Deep sleep is an extremely underrated mentor, as is spending time in nature, water, and green spaces in general. The unconscious can do a lot of advising behind the scenes. Cheese before bedtime can help turbo-charge the all-night movie experience. I recommend a strong comté or a mature cheddar. I also worked closely with rapper MF DOOM, who gave me a handmade ‚Orgone Energy Pyramid’ to aid our psychic communication. Though he has

ascended to another plane of existence, I’m certain he’s still sending useful signals.

SB If you could call anyone in the world and ask them for advice, who would you call and what would you ask?

WS I’ve become obsessed with a choreographed robot theater that briefly existed in Japan in 1985. I’m planning a fact-finding trip that means travelling from London to Tsukuba, by bicycle, train and sea. I need to speak to someone with international non-flight travel experience, ideally a japanese design expert and probably a psychologist to check that I’m not going mad.

ANYO.NE/WILLSKEAPING

SNU Y FF

Julius Margulies (aka Snuffy) is a multidisciplinary artist whose mediums include skin, sound, screens, glass, fabric, metal and concrete. Snuffy’s boundary-pushing, surrealist work has celebrity friends and fans rolling up their sleeves, and digital and physical collectors clamoring to own his art. We caught him at the opening of Primordial States, his new show at Palo Gallery in New York City, for a chat about NFTs, using art to let go, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Photography and Interview by Samantha Bloom

SAMANTHA BLOOM

So Snuffy, what’s the most important advice you’ve ever received?

SNUFFY

There’s not a single moment, but all of the advice I’ve received that’s stuck came in times of trauma: I’d gotten arrested, or gone through a bad breakup, or failed at something massive. The advice, in short, was to accept failure and learn from it. I guess that’s kind of become my MO: nothing is really a failure unless you don’t learn from it.

SB That’s a big theme across your work, especially your “Addiction Series“. Does pushing through trauma or failure require some intrinsic selfbelief, or can it be generated?

S I think now, what I’m doing with my art is letting go – creating and then analyzing myself through it, as opposed to the other way around. It actually takes such a toll to force myself to think about something. We were talking about this at the gallery: the level of perfection required in tattooing is daunting, the precision isn’t fun or explorative. I’m actually discovering who I am more by going into a meditative state, making, then making sense of it later.

Whether you push through or whether you let that thing define you, it’s still defining you. I rest my hat on my failures because I learn from them and don’t allow them to happen again. I’ve become really good at tricking myself, and I do think it takes sheer will to mentally trick yourself, but that’s how I’ve quit smoking, or drugs. It’s just... this isn’t what I do anymore.

SB Who is your unlikeliest mentor?

S I never had somebody to shake me and say, get up and do the thing . I’ve probably lived 10 different lives. I installed car stereos and car alarms at like these‚ Fast and the Furious-type car shops. I did that for a while and then got into trouble with the law. And then I got into real estate, renting apartments in Boston. And then after bouncing around, I started setting goals and doing things with intention. I keep a very strange cast of characters around me. When ever I need advice, I triangulate information be -

cause nobody has full context on every thing. I think to make an informed decision, it’s important to ping ideas off of people that live in different worlds. For me, that’s people like Jeremiah (Joseph), my friend Dor, and my brother. The only thing they all have in common is that they only dress in black.

SB You’ve worked in areas where there’s a strong culture of apprenticeship. In tattooing, the normal pathway for that would be to apprentice for someone. Was that your experience?

S I got where I am tattooing by shooting from the hip. I had a pseudo mentor in Oskar Akermo, one of the best tattooers in the world, but our relationship was super unofficial. I would call him and be like, ‘Hey, I need to shade this area. Should I use like a five mag or a nine mag?’ I think he watched me tattoo twice in the first year and a half.

But I recognize that everyone isn’t going to proactively go out and find that person to nurture their curiosity. And because I never had a traditional mentor, I’m super serious about giving that to my own apprentice.

Tattooing is super easy... you’re just putting color in places and not putting color in other places, manipulating darkness and light, creating dimension. But I’m not teaching him how to tattoo, I’m teaching him how to think.

He’s going through my school, and because I saw him work his ass off, my goal is to make him so good that he surpasses me. Today, he’s tattooing a celebrity at my studio that’s been trying to get on my books forever, so I think we’re getting there. What’s the point in teaching someone if they’re not going to be better than you?

SB I’ve always considered you an artist that’s media-agnostic. You‘re so willing to work in any format. You’re tattooing, your show up now at Palo Gallery consists of drawings rendered in three-dimen sional light boxes, you’re creating life size sculptures. You’re also a very early adopter of NFTs, and released a big series on NIFTY Gateway this summer. Is your approach contingent upon format,

WHETHER YOU PUSH THROUGH TRAUMA OR LET IT DEFINE YOU, IT STILL DEFINES YOU…

… I REST MY HAT ON MY FAILURES BECAUSE I LEARN FROM THEM.”

or does it stay the same across mediums? What about when, as in the case of NFTs, the medium is so new?

I mean, making art with no template is exactly what I’ve been doing since I started making art. There’s no boundaries to art. I can take a white canvas and sell it to a museum, and it’s art. That’s what‘s cool about it: it’s not like the music industry where you can’t sample shit – it’s just perfect, unrestricted freedom to do whatever you want. Some people are puritanical and precious about it – “oh, he sold a blank canvas to a museum“ –

Fontana, Malevich –

– yeah, the other camp sees their work and says, “sick, those guys are gutsy... what other buttons can we push?” I’m in that camp. As far as NFTs go, it’s just a different audience. If I’m a comedian and I tell jokes at the Comedy Cellar on MacDougal Street, that’s my fine art. If I then fly to Berlin and tell jokes there, it’s the same jokes... just a different audience.

And you find the people that get it…

...they find me. Everything that I do fundamentally starts with a question: can I put my soul into this or not? There’s a clear divide in the NFT world. In less than a year, it’s gone from early adopters to celebrity attachment to community-based projects. Crypto Punks is a prime example: there’s 10,000 punks, and if you own one you’re part of the squad. And so on one hand, you have that being viewed as a concept, like performance art, and on the other it’s people that care deeply about being part of something.

It’s all about packaging and intent, right? You don’t sell someone art, backstory is everything. Everything that I do has undeniable intention, that’s why I never invested in crypto, because like, it’s a soulless endeavor. But I’m a sucker for that…

...soulless endeavors?

No, the opposite! I’m a sucker for not putting a hundred dollars in Bitcoin 10 years ago when I had the opportunity!

Look, I don’t know anything about art, but my intent and the way that I put myself out there is pure. And that’s what resonates with people. That’s how I became the tattooer that I am.

Last question. If you could call anyone in the world and ask them for advice, who would you call and what would you ask them?

Simon Sineck would be a cool one. He has this “Golden Circle” theory, the basic concept being people don’t buy what you’re doing, but why you’re doing it. Besides him, maybe Neil deGrasse Tyson... he just seems sweet, and he loves space. We could vibe on interstellar shit.

ANYO.NE/SNUFFY

LA SON KO

MIN

Stockholm-based Lamin Sonko’s in the middle of building an AI-powered reference library called KIVE (short for archive) for the modern creative who is light on disc space, but in need of expansive visual storytelling tools. On a wet August afternoon, and discover the simple power of asking questions with Lamin.

Interview by Lisa Cadwallader

Photography by Angelina Bergenwall

What was the most important advice you’ve ever received?

The piece of advice that always sticks with me, that I always go back to professionally and personally, is actually from my mother. I’m three or four years into my career as an ad agency creative, it’s abstract but also basic... I go to the office to type on a computer, I write emails, I present stuff. So one day I was in her living room watching TV, and she came over to me, sat down on the sofa beside me, and put her arms around me. She says: You know, I noticed every time I ask you about your work, you get a bit annoyed, and I get all of that, but I also sense that you have a hard time formulating what it is you do. This is not only about me, but if you want other people to respect what you do, respect the knowledge that you possess. Become the best you can at formulating your knowledge. And that has always stuck with me since: how do I best formulate my knowledge so that other people respect it... in any context?

What expectations did your parents have?

My parents got to where they’ve gotten by working their hardest and taking any opportunity that comes before them. To me they were like: Listen, please just do better than us. Take what we’ve built for you, and build upon that. What was the one skill you’ve worked hardest to acquire? When I was young I was super shy – I didn’t know how to talk to strangers or ask questions from anybody... And my parents were always saying: You have to ask, you have to ask. And that’s something that’s been ingrained in me - If I don’t have the answers to something, I find someone who does. And I’m not afraid of that now, it’s become my way of surviving basically. I reach out to people I know and people I don’t – I’ll do whatever it takes for knowledge.

Can you think of a time where a wrong choice resulted in a good result?

Absolutely! I was studying International Relations at university. My parents were so proud, but after the first semester I thought: Oh shit, this isn’t for me. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I wasn’t going anymore. So I would just leave the house and go roaming

and filling time while they thought I was studying. And one day I went to this local meeting place that every municipality has in Sweden. And saw a bunch of people having a meeting. I didn’t know anyone but I went along with it and sat down at the table and started listening in. The guy next to me started talking about his start-up and a course he’s doing in entrepreneurship – it sounded so interesting so I took his contacts just to see where it might lead. And in less than a week I was on the course. That was all it took to light the spark up in me. I am still close with him today, we have shared network of amazing contacts. I’ve never looked back.

Is there such a thing as a bad or good decision? How do you make decisions?

I like to attain as much knowledge as possible. I think about what is needed, what is the premise, what’s the scope. I like digging as deeply as possible, and you know giving people a bit of a hard time. Then I’ll make my assessment based on that. Most people say instinct, but i think instinct is built on former experience – so it still comes back to knowledge.

How about happiness - how should we measure happiness in the future?

Interesting question! I think that out of the 24 hours that we have each day, that we all have, how much of that can you allocate to what makes you most happy, without compromising your quality of life? That’s the measure of happiness.

Can you talk to me a bit about the last time you were scared? Or a fight or flightmoment? How did you deal with fear?

Hmm... it’s not work related. I think it was when my wife was giving birth. We had everything planned, and things were getting very close so we called in at the hospital. And they were like: There are no beds here, we can’t take you... we can send you to a hospital that’s far away or you can deliver the baby at home and we’ll be on the phone giving instructions. And I was like how the hell am I going to handle this – and I just plugged

into the situation as it was - I can’t do anything about it, so I have to handle it. That’s my go to for fear – it is what it is now, let’s just handle it. Nothing I would type into an academic book, it’s that simple.

Is there a mantra you live or work by?

Sure - something that runs through everything which is: talent is universal, opportunity isn’t. I like to level out the playing field especially when I work with younger people - you see that everybody just needs a chance to shine.

If you could sit down with anyone for five minutes, dead or alive?

Toni Morrison. She’s astonishing and incredibly intelligent – but she also has this outlook on life and work that a lot of people would benefit from: don’t compromise your voice and values. Her writing is activism.

Who is your best friend?

Ah… I have a childhood crew of six, but I’ll lift one person up. Her name is Sophia. I can be a bit closed or hard to reach the core of. I think she and my wife are the only people who I feel like it’s okay to have real talk with. Both of them have an emotional intelligence that at times makes me super uncomfortable, but I’ve learned to appreciate it. You always find that it’s your friends and family who give you the best advice.

ANYO.NE/LAMIN

FALL 2021 ISSUE 0

Publication Contributors

PUBLISHER ANYONE

Nybrogatan 8 114

34 Stockholm, Sweden

CEO

David Orlic

CO-FOUNDER S

Sam Ducker

Alfred Malmros

David Orlic

CHIEF OF STAFF

Yassine Benjelloun

CHIEF CURATOR

Samantha Bloom

HEAD OF IMPACT

Amy Dick

HEAD OF COMMUNITY

Vjera Orbanic

HEAD OF MARKETING

Meera Sanghvi

ENGINEERING

Nicolas Albanel

Sam Hadley

Richard Mohammed

FEATURED ANYONES

Hallie Gould

Daisy Ifama

Emily Lipson

Curtis Macdowald

Paola Ramos

William Skeaping

Snuffy

Lamin Sonko

COVER Monique Bloom

TYPEFACE Lausanne

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Samantha Bloom

DESIGN & LAYOUT

Marius Rother

PHOTOGRAPHY

Angelina Bergenwall

Samantha Bloom

Hana Lê Van

Emily Lipson

WORDS

Samantha Bloom

Lisa Cadwallader

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