Port Issue 27 by Port

Paapa Essiedu 27 Port

“It's about sharing. It's not about you; it's about you and someone else – you and people” Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff talks to Paapa Essiedu “A way of looking at the world, at your pantry, and finding inner beauty in the humblest ingredient” By Massimo Bottura

“It’s important to preserve African cinema: filmmaking there has been more prolific than in other areas of the world” By Martin Scorsese

Things I like / Things I dislike Sharmaine Lovegrove

“You can rewire people's emotions through the senses. That's the power of poetry” By Roger Robinson

Autumn / Winter 2020

Eduardo Paolozzi’s philosopher-inspired screenprints By Matthew Turner

An interview with industrial designer Philippe Malouin By Deyan Sudjic

£8.00

Ceramics, creative freedom and disability with Shawanda Corbett

New fiction! By Joyce Carol Oates, Hari Kunzru, Brandon Taylor and Niven Govinden

Horology supplement 1010 + autumn/winter style & collections

dior.com

design Mario Bellini - www.bebitalia.com

CONTENTS

70 The Porter Words Reiss Smith, Brian Patrick Eha, Dylan Holden, Billie Muraben, Jamie Waters, Tom Bolger, Bolanle Tajudeen, Jamie Hewlett, Mark Williams, Jean-Yves Leloup, Matthew Turner, Harry Langham, Alex Doak, Massimo Bottura, John Harris Dunning

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Paapa Essiedu Words Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff Photography Liz Johnson Artur Styling Mitchell Belk

Bags of Style â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Merging past and present with Berluti and Globe-Trotter Custodians of Craft â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Innovation and tradition with menswear brand Canali

Words Jamie Waters Photography Luca Strano Words Jamie Waters Photography Crista Leonard

Design Profile: Philippe Malouin Words Deyan Sudjic Photography Taylor Lyttleton

104 Windscapes An unexpected upsurge of windpowered turbines across America. Words and Photography Mishka Henner

CONTENTS

114

Process of Evolution Photography Philip White Styling Julie Velut

170

Matt Berninger: American Beauty Words John-Paul Pryor Photography by Arianna Lago

154 I Envy Your Evening Walk Photography Jeff Boudreau Styling Mitchell Belk 121 Commentary 184 When My World Stood Still 238 Prada Re-Nylon 246 His Dark Materials 256 Things I Like / Things I Dislike

Words Hari Kunzru, Brandon Taylor, Photostory Rahim Fortune Niven Govinden, Joyce Carol Oates Illustrations Leanne Shapton Photography Kalpesh Lathigra Styling Adam Winder Words Jamie Waters Set design Paulina Piipponen Photography Jesse Laitinen Photography Baud Postma Styling Adam Winder Words Sharmaine Lovegrove

"It's Not Where You Take Things From - It's Where You Take Them To" Photography & Set Design Matzo & Matzo Styling Lune Kuipers

220 Collections From The Rooftops Photography Daragh Soden Styling Mitchell Belk

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M A S T H EA D

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Dan Crowe CREATIVE DIRECTOR Matt Willey FASHION DIRECTOR Mitchell Belk CONTRIBUTING FASHION FEATURES EDITOR Jamie Waters ACCESSORIES EDITOR Paulina Piipponen ART EDITOR Sophie Dutton DESIGN Matt Willey, Sophie Dutton, Adriana Ji PHOTOGRAPHIC DIRECTOR Max Ferguson SENIOR EDITOR Kerry Crowe PORTER EDITOR Tom Bolger INTERIORS EDITORS Huw Griffith, Tobias Harvey CONTRIBUTING WRITER Reiss Smith EU CORRESPONDENT Donald Morrison US CORRESPONDENT Alex Vadukul JAPANESE CORRESPONDENT Ryo Yamazaki AUSTRALIA CORRESPONDENT James W Mataitis Bailey

SECTION EDITORS Alex Doak, Horology Fergus Henderson, Food Dan May, Fashion Samantha Morton, Film Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Max Porter, Literature John-Paul Pryor, Music Brett Steele, Architecture Deyan Sudjic, Design CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Richard Buckley Kabir Chibber Robert Macfarlane Albert Scardino SPECIAL THANKS The Production Factory

WORDS Tom Bolger, Alex Doak, John Harris Dunning, Brian Patrick Eha, Max Ferguson, Niven Govinden, Will Higginbotham, Dylan Holden, Hari Kunzru, Harry Langham, Jean-Yves Leloup, Sharmaine Lovegrove, Billie Muraben, Joyce Carol Oates, John-Paul Pryor, Reiss Smith, Brandon Taylor, Bolanle Tajudeen, Matthew Turner, Jamie Waters, Mark Williams PHOTOGRAPHY Tami Aftab, Liz Johnson Artur, Nathan Bajar, Jeff Boudreau, Rahim Fortune, Mishka Henner, Arianna Lago, Jesse Laitinen, Kalpesh Lathigra, Crista Leonard, Taylor Lyttleton, Matzo & Matzo, Jack Orton, Baud Postma, Daragh Soden, Luca Strano, Philip White, Alice Zoo ARTWORK Molly Blunt, Leanne Shapton HEADLINE TYPEFACE Aeonik by CoType Foundry

PUBLISHERS Dan Crowe, Matt Willey ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono MANAGING DIRECTOR Dan Crowe ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono andrew@port-magazine.com ACCOUNTS Charlie Carne & Co. CIRCULATION CONSULTANT Logical Connections Adam Long adam@logicalconnections.co.uk CONTACT info@port-magazine.com SYNDICATION syndication@port-magazine.com SYNDICATED ISSUES Port Spain portmagazine.es Port Turkey port-magazine.com.tr issn 2046-052X Port is published twice a year by Port Publishing Limited Vault 4 Somerset House Strand London WC2R 1LA port-magazine.com Port is printed by Park Communications

COVER CREDIT Paapa Essiedu, photographed by Liz Johnson Artur, wears AMI PARIS

“Everything you’ve learned in school as ‘obvious’ becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.” — Richard Buckminster Fuller

Founded by Dan Crowe, Boris Stringer, Kuchar Swara and Matt Willey. Registered in England no. 7328345 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. All prices are correct at time of going to press but are subject to change. All paper used in the production of this magazine comes, as you would expect, from sustainable sources. Fuck Boris, fuck Trump.

CONTRiBUTORS

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff Journalist Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff is head of editorial at gal-dem, the acclaimed British publication sharing perspectives from women and non-binary people of colour. In 2018 she edited the book Mother Country: Real Stories of the Windrush Children, a collection of interviews and essays with and by the likes of David Lammy, Paul Reid and fellow Port contributor Sharmaine Lovegrove. Her writing – which focuses on topics of race, youth culture, social politics, travel, lifestyle and media – has also appeared in the Guardian, Dazed, the Observer and the Financial Times.

Jeff Boudreau Jeff Boudreau is a multi-disciplinary photographer. Born in Canada and raised in the US, he is now based between London and Paris. In addition to shooting for publications such as Vogue, Architectural Digest, the Wall Street Journal and the Gourmand, he regularly lends his talents to luxury brands and institutions including Hermès, Burberry, Louis Vuitton, Loewe and Frieze Art Fair. His book Achcha, a collaboration with Seya Paris, was published in April 2020 and documented his extensive travels around India.

John Harris Dunning The English writer John Harris Dunning announced himself to the literary scene in 2009 with his debut graphic novel, Salem Brownstone, and was endorsed by the likes of Harmony Korine, Anthony Minghella and Watchmen creator Alan Moore. In 2014 Dunning instigated and co-curated Comics Unmasked at the British Library, the largest comic book exhibition in UK history. Four years on he released a second graphic novel, Tumult, again to critical acclaim. As a journalist, his work has been published in the Guardian, Attitude, i-D, GQ and Esquire.

Niven Govinden English novelist Niven Govinden’s fifth novel, This Brutal House, published in 2019, was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and shortlisted for the Gordon Burn and Polari prizes. Born in Surrey, he studied at Goldsmiths and worked in the music industry for more than a decade, completing his debut book, We Are the New Romantics, in the early hours. His sixth novel, Diary of a Film, is published in February 2021 by Dialogue Books.

Joyce Carol Oates Joyce Carol Oates is among America's most preeminent and prolific writers. She is the 2019 recipient of the Jerusalem Prize and in 2020 was awarded the Cino del Duca, a prestigious French honour commonly considered a precursor to the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her works (of which there are more than 100) often interrogate the American condition, with many set in Oates’ hometown, New York. Her most recent book is Cardiff, by the Sea: Four Novellas of Suspense, from which the extract in this issue of Port has been taken. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Sharmaine Lovegrove Sharmaine Lovegrove has the tall task of disrupting Britain's overwhelmingly white publishing industry as publisher at Dialogue Books: An imprint of the book group Little, Brown, it has a central mission of platforming people of colour, the LGBT+ and working-class communities, as well as those with disabilities. Formerly literary editor at Elle, Lovegrove was born in south London but has spent much of the past decade in Berlin, where in 2009 she founded an English-language bookstore, also named Dialogue Books.

@theory__

EDiTOR'S LETTER

“. . .The works of John Berger / Girls skateboarding / Nike trainers / Late nights / Self-expression / Laughter / Chicken / Open fires / Listening / Thinking / Sharp pencils / Beautiful scratchy handwriting / Roast dinners with a big table of friends / Everything about Jamaica. . .” The above is from Sharmaine Lovegrove’s take on ‘Things I Like, Things I Dislike’. Her ‘Likes’ make me happy, and if I could run a whole issue of these upbeat lists from brilliant minds, I would. Lovegrove, the meteoric publisher of Dialogue Books, based in Berlin, is passionate about the things she dislikes too, but you’ll have to head to page 256 for that. Seeing how enlightened minds respond to these brutal times helps us to comprehend them, and in this issue we have a selection of extraordinary talents sharing their thoughts and recent work. Authors Hari Kunzru, Brandon Taylor, Niven Govinden and Joyce Carol Oates each provide a new extract that brilliantly alludes to our evolving sense of self and the vast waves of change transforming society. Addressing that task in a more direct way are The National’s Matt Berninger (“I was talking to Dylan about all that stuff, and he was like, “Well, the earth is ultimately going to take care of itself one way or another, and it might be doing that by getting rid of us”) and award-winning poet Roger Robinson (“If you don’t worry about your son being attacked by the police. . . then you have some privilege”). Frankly, I thought this issue might be a little melancholic, as 2020 has brought a global pandemic, a divisive US election, and the 75th anniversary of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima; also knowing that we were interviewing Kunzru about his literary thriller Red Pill (page 32), which delves into far-right paranoia and the general collapse of meaning.

But there is light. Our cover star is Paapa Essiedu, lead male in probably the most talked-about TV show of 2020: I May Destroy You. The startling yet modest young actor talks to Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff about creativity, humility and what his mum taught him. His is a generous talent. “A lot of what I’m trying to do now is to recognise that I’ve been fortunate and relish the pride of it,” he says on page 70. And we have a world exclusive. Legendary director Martin Scorsese speaks to us about his extraordinary efforts on behalf of global film conservation. He was at a screening of Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 1979, he says, when “the realisation that films were fragile and that they needed to be preserved and protected hit me all at once.” From there, he founded The Film Foundation – supported by Rolex – which has rescued hundreds of endangered works and turned its attention to Africa’s prolific movie-making output. Head to our horology supplement 1010, for John Harris Dunning’s profile of an incredible man and an inspiring project. Conservation, on a planetary scale, is so obviously the most important issue right now. But personal conservation – not going mad with the news, social media and then more news – is also something we need to attend to. As Massimo Bottura said to Port, regarding his hugely creative Food for Soul movement (page 63) – wherein underprivileged people help restore disused spaces to form community hubs for food and work: “In an increasingly individualistic world, cooking and eating together can become an act of love.” Let’s drink, and eat, to that. – Dan Crowe, Editor

News, commentary, reporting, recommendations, culture, and humor in the distinctive voice of The New Yorker. Every day, in your in-box.

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HOW LOVELY By Reiss Smith. Margaret Howell celebrates 50 years

Margaret Howell often recalls a shirt she came across at a jumble sale in 1970: beautifully made, likely from the 1920s, with a fine pinstripe and delicate stitching. But this isn’t the story of the sort of hackneyed ‘eureka’ moment you might expect of a lesser designer. When Howell discovered the shirt, she was a recent fine-art graduate, experimenting with different forms of craft, primarily creating colourful necklaces from papier-mâché beads. The shirt gave her fresh impetus to revisit a childhood love of clothes-making: first shirts, then jackets and other simple items. Fifty years on, she is regarded as one of Britain’s most discerning designers, with a consistent aesthetic, encapsulated by that original pinstripe shirt. Her brand was synonymous with utilitarian minimalism long before the current wont. Simple blazers and chore coats are mainstays, usually cut from traditional British fabrics such as Harris Tweed and Irish linen. The shirt is another constant, and perhaps Howell’s calling card: gently refined over the years; cut with different collars, sleeves and hemlines; occasionally reworked in unexpected collaborations with those such as Kenneth Grange and Dan Pearson. But whatever its incarnation, a Margaret Howell shirt is instantly recognisable as a Margaret Howell shirt. So, fitting then that her 50th anniversary should be celebrated with a limited reissue of two classic designs (collared and collarless). Both are made using Sea Island cotton woven by David and John Anderson, the textile-maker which has been a partner of Howell’s since her early days, and both are available for men and women. And, while the designs are some 50 years old, the genius of Howell’s work is that it is forever contemporary: Who else could spot a decades-old shirt at a jumble sale and use it to build a brand which, at its half-centenary, feels more relevant than ever? Photography William Bunce. Styling and set design Paulina Piipponen

SEDUCED RATHER THAN CONTROLLED By Brian Patrick Eha. The far right and a shared decent into madness

Hari Kunzru is not in a hopeful mood. The British novelist and author, most recently of Red Pill, has spent more than two decades immersed in internet culture, and what he now sees rising up out of cyberspace to meet him is a resurgent fascism, glib and media-savvy, frogfaced rather than black-shirted, confident of its threat to the establishment and secure in its disaffected cool – an irrepressible anarchic energy channelled to bad ends. Nearly as bad as the message, to Kunzru, is the medium: a monitored and gamified mockery of the agora endlessly urging us to share; a megacorporate system of surveillance by which, he says, we are being “seduced rather than controlled”. The private self, “a space of experimentation” so basic to our idea of what it means to be a person, “is being constricted as it never has been before”, he says. What it could mean, if Kunzru’s darkest fears come true, is the end of meaning itself. Kunzru was, it is clear, extremely online avant la lettre. After graduating from Oxford he worked in London as a freelance technology journalist and, for a time, as an editor at Wired. In those heady days he would fly out to San Francisco for regular doses of dot-com fever and techno-utopianism, absorbing ideas and modes of being which, back home, he cross-pollinated with underground leftist thought. This was “sort of a Janusfaced thing”, he says – hanging with left-leaning hackers and crypto-libertarians alike, all of them jazzed up about the cypherpunk dream that the internet would make national borders obsolete. If only they were all heavily encrypted enough, they figured, they “could sort of float free”. Looking back now, he is struck by how easy it was to sell himself as a tech writer. If you had an internet connection and could write a decent sentence, you could get hired, he says. “Everybody was desperate for somebody who could explain why it was a good idea to connect computers to phone lines.” It seems appropriate that our conversation is mediated by these same tech32

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Photography Nathan Bajar

nologies. Kunzru and I both live in New York City, but the strictures of the coronavirus pandemic dictate that we not meet in person. “If there is one thing the pandemic has taught us, it’s that things happen which exceed our understanding of what’s possible,” he says. Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016, long thought impossible, looms over Red Pill’s denouement. But it is the pitiless march of technological progress, more even than populist nationalism, that Kunzru fears will destabilise civil society, scything down both the organic past of conservative nostalgia and the pat liberal notion of the public sphere. In Red Pill, the public sphere is problematised as a panopticon. Having cadged a fellowship to a cultural centre in Berlin, the unnamed narrator finds to his horror that it spies on him and other resident scholars in the name of “transparency”. By his own admission a “waster”, a Brooklyn-dwelling progressive who writes ineffectual essays and, though settled in a stable marriage, is at loose ends, the narrator seems to stand at the exhausted end of something, conscious of his belatedness. Time and again, he finds himself unable to articulate his principles or his reasons for holding them. He is thus easy prey, first for the lurid delights of a transgressive cop show called Blue Lives, and later for the show’s creator, Anton, a sinister alt-right “magus” who preaches atavistic violence. What follows is a descent into madness. Anton is not merely a neo-Nazi but a prophet of the posthuman, and the narrator – who shares much of Kunzru’s biography and an etiolated form of his politics – becomes convinced that Anton is seeding the ground for something horrible, a future in which a “cognitive elite” are liberated from their bodies while the masses “can be used and discarded without compunction”. Ironically, the narrator comes to accept Anton’s twisted philosophy even as he fights desperately to repudiate the man himself. “The joke to me is that it’s the story of

his redpilling,” Kunzru says, using the alt-right term, borrowed from The Matrix, for awakening to the true nature of reality. “Instead of refuting the naughty fascists, he ends up in some way colonised by their more powerful, nihilistic story.” Unlike many liberals, Kunzru doesn’t scoff at the allure of the alt-right. At a time when Nike and Amazon are toeing the line on progressive causes, the altright “is seductive”, he says. “Suddenly they’re the ones with the jokes; they’re the ones with the panache.” You have to go back to the skinheads of the 1970s – “Those were the people I had to run away from in subway underpasses when I was a teenager,” Kunzru says wryly – to find a far-right counterculture of similar force. Liberals have been caught flat-footed by this burgeoning movement of ironic nihilists who scornfully shrug off the scarlet letters of mainstream society. “Calling someone a racist only works to shut them down if they give a fuck,” Kunzru points out. He should know. He was born in London in 1969 to a Kashmiri father and a British mother, and his first published novel, The Impressionist, was an attempt to grapple with his father’s heritage. Subverting the classic going-to-India novel, Kunzru “had this character passing as white and going to the ‘exotic West’”, he explains. The Impressionist won the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, but the book’s acclaim in certain quarters discomfited him. “It’s sort of disguised as one of those big, luxurious Raj-era stories with lots of elephants and all the other furniture of an Orientalist story, but was intended as a subversion of that,” he says. Many people, however, read it “as being much straighter than it was”. With Red Pill, as with his last novel, White Tears, about white record producers appropriating the music of a black musician, Kunzru has written a decidedly topical book of enduring relevance. This time the topic is apocalypse. That our future may not be liveable but may nonetheless be inevitable is one of his novel’s animating concerns. There is a sequence in which the narrator, feeling like “a saint, a desert father”, holes up in a bothy on a Scottish island to record his bleak Revelation. Given the chance to dismiss his protagonist’s imaginings as the ravings of a madman, Kunzru laughs. “That’s the part of the book closest to my actual suspicions.” Technology will tend to dissolve “human boundaries and the set of human meanings”, he says. Even his most cherished beliefs, things that he finds “beautiful and true and good”, will likely one day become “part of the past, rather than the terms in which people understand things”. Although the novel gives us a vision of Trump as hellmouth – “a portal through which all manner of monsters could step into our living room” – its author sees him as merely a symptom of a larger trend. Kunzru is as impatient with the “enormous intellectual complacency” of ostensible allies on the left as he is sceptical that electing Hillary Clinton would have solved anything. He considers Red Pill “an exhortation [for them] to try harder”, to make their case more forcefully, even as the humanistic terms in which they make it are threatened with obsolescence. The technological drive to reduce everything to brute function is, for Kunzru, something worth writing against. “My project, such as it is, would be to rescue some sort of ethical position which finds value and dignity in human life in the midst of this tsunami-like event,” he says. “That may be pointless and quixotic, but that’s what I’m doing.” 34

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Photography Nathan Bajar

PALATINUS By Dylan Holden. Armani/Casa’s abstract art offering

While on leave from the military, a young man named Giorgio Armani found work as a window dresser at La Rinascente, a department store in Milan. This would be his first foray into fashion, and the beginnings of a business that would define not only clothing, but also shoes, perfume, jewellery, eyewear, cosmetics and design – an all-encompassing lifestyle. Later in life, when asked whether he could ever have imagined that his work would expand into so many different fields, that the poor boy from Piacenza would see such success, Armani remarked, “I like the idea of having built this beautiful empire, but I still think of myself as the stable boy.” Few designers have articulated their aesthetic vision so holistically, and Armani/ Casa – the interior design arm currently celebrating 20 years – continues to reflect Armani’s love of harmony, simple lines and Italian craftmanship. “It represents now, as it did at the beginning,” he notes, “a stimulating opportunity; the place where research and experimenting give life to objects and environments that reflect my idea of design – luxurious and essential.” The abstract art of the early 20th century – a world punctuated by primitivism and cubism – is the inspiration behind Armani/Casa’s 2020 collection. Henri Matisse and Paul Klee’s joyful colours and rhythms are the building blocks for patterns and finishes on rugs, chairs, tables and lamps, while weave motifs found on fabrics and wood are a subtle nod to constructivism. A highlight from this year’s offering is the imperial Paladino table lamp, a ribbed brass metal lacquer base with a canneté effect usually reserved for Jacquard looms, fitted with a white, red or turquoise shade. ‘Paladin’ comes from the Latin palātīnus, the title given to the closest retainers of the Roman emperor. Apt then, that it was designed by a modern-day sovereign.

Photography Crista Leonard. Set design Lisa Jahovic

iNF NFiiNiTE REST By Billie Muraben. The flexible radicality of the Camaleonda

Camaleonda is a portmanteau of camaleonte, meaning chameleon, and onda, meaning wave; two bodies that shift and change according to the conditions of their environment. The Camaleonda sofa, designed by Mario Bellini for B&B Italia in 1970, was part of a collective shift in Italian design against bourgeois, establishment practices. The radical design movement, which engaged with Italy’s socio-political context through its utopian ideals and material experimentation, pushed for new ways of inhabiting space, while maintaining a productive relationship to nature. The Camaleonda went a step further, by grounding its radicality in the day-to-day realities of people’s homes; challenging the relationship between the evolution of new patterns of behaviour in the home, and the limitations of furniture available at the time. The Camaleonda is a modular sofa made up of padded – capitonné – 90x90cm seats, with detachable back- and armrests; individual parts strung together by a system of cables, hooks and rings, which can be unhooked and recombined in potentially infinite configurations. It quickly became popular, and was adopted by many households – includ-

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ing New York’s Gracie Mansion, where ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, alongside another dancer, was photographed performing a naked handstand on the Camaleonda in the ‘champagne room’ during a reception for the Russian Winter Olympics team. Despite its early popularity, the sofa was only manufactured for eight years, and has since become one of the most sought-after sofas on the secondary market. This year, B&B Italia reissued the Camaleonda in celebration of its 50-year anniversary. The new edition honours the original design, and B&B Italia’s Research and Development Centre – which was established when co-founder Busnelli built what was once called the most fully automated furniture factory in the world – has finessed the balance between the rigorous geometry of the seating, roundness of the padding, and replaced materials to be representative of new technologies and requirements. They’ve maintained and progressed the Camaleonda’s reputation for adapting to shifting conditions, lifestyles, and new ways of inhabiting space; recognising that the only permanent state should be a constant will to transform.

Courtesy of B&B Italia

DON’T BELi BELiEVE THE HYPE By Jamie Waters. The era of anti-hype menswear

Collages by Molly Blunt L–R: Issey Miyake, Lemaire, Issey Miyake

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In April, when the Western world was in the midst of lockdown, the streetwear website Highsnobiety asked its readers, who are mostly young men, how the pandemic was affecting their attitudes to fashion. The results were striking. “Our audience has developed a sudden immunity to the hype and status signals that once plagued them,” read the survey report (oddly choosing language in keeping with the virus sweeping across the world). Logos, it said, had “never seemed less cool”, “timeless [had] replaced trendiness”, and “minimalism” was king. Coming from a publication at the heart of hypebeast culture, this was quite something. The report was one of the first statements about the impact the pandemic will have on menswear consumers. In lockdown, they’ve had time to sit and reflect – on how much stuff they actually need; on what they appreciate; and on what they want to wear when the world reopens. ‘Hype’ has become synonymous with the streetwear movement that in the past decade has dominated menswear, infiltrating every corner of luxury, sportswear and casualwear. This movement is about a mode of consumption as much as an aesthetic. Will the pandemic, and the impact it has on our mindsets, spell an end to the hype ecosystem – the whir of ‘drops’, the constant collaborations, the conspicuous logos – and usher in an era of quiet dressing and gentle marketing? Are we heading into the age of anti-hype menswear? There were already signs things were shifting. Pre-pandemic, fashion folk murmured about the end of logomania. At the end of 2019 Virgil Abloh – founder of Off-White, artistic director of Louis Vuitton men’s, and all-round hype maestro – said streetwear was “gonna die” in 2020; while in January’s autumn/winter shows, boots reigned over sneakers, and blazers trumped bombers. “The trends were changing before the pandemic, so we started to invest much more in tailoring or cleaner pieces. We’d already moved away from really big logos and that real sort of visual-statement streetwear,” says Damien Paul, head of menswear at Matches. “What the pandemic’s probably done is driven that change at a much faster pace.” In the wake (or midst) of economic crises, it’s natural to see an uptick in ‘stealth wealth’ pieces that avoid showy statements and feel sensible rather than frivolous. The safe, commercial looks presented in the recent

spring/summer 2021 collections chimed with this sentiment. “I think the overall mood and aesthetic of the style to come will be relaxed, and ostentatious purchases will be out, at least for a while,” says Daniel Todd, buying manager at Mr Porter. “The [desire] to own the latest sneaker or hoody isn’t suddenly going to disappear – but I do think the world’s consumption of these types of products will decrease compared to previous years.” The greatest change will be to the way we buy. Sustainability and conscious consumption were increasingly prominent concerns pre-pandemic. Their importance will escalate. Now, with fewer places to go and often less money to spend, consumers are more questioning of their purchases, says Emily Gordon-Smith, director of consumer product at trends intelligence company Stylus. This hints at an appreciation for special pieces that will last, rather than an obsession with snagging the latest buzzed-about item. “Hype suggests, or has connotations of, mass,” says Paul. “We’re seeing a shift in perspective: Customers don’t want to connect themselves with something that’s considered super now, super ‘one season’.” Meanwhile, Jack Cassidy, head of menswear buying at Selfridges, foresees challenges for collaborations, a key cog in the hype machine. “Before, people were just consuming the next collab or drop or exclusive; now, they still want it, but it needs to be really good – it can’t just be collaboration for collaboration’s sake.” Which designers embody the post-lockdown mood? Buyers from Matches, Mr Porter, Berlin’s Voo Store and Selfridges all point to the same cluster of brands, including established names like Lemaire, Dries Van Noten, Issey Miyake Homme Plissé, Maison Margiela and Prada, alongside smaller brands such as New York’s Bode and New Delhi’s 11.11. These brands do not share an aesthetic, but, whether it’s Lemaire’s clean lines, Van Noten’s vivid palette, Bode’s craftiness or Margiela’s boundary-pushing creativity, each possesses a strong identity. They’re cool rather than hot, and their pieces feel like worthy investments. Plus, these are clothes that will excite shoppers. After months of confinement, men are itching to ditch the sweats and don something nice. As Cassidy says: “I think that there’ll be a resurgence in getting dressed up. There’s a real opportunity for designers to think, what’s that new look for 2021? I’m feeling optimistic.” 39

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Photography Jack Orton

A PORTABLE PARADi PARAD iSE By Tom Bolger. Roger Robinson reflects on his TS Eliot-prize-winning poetry collection

Tom Bolger: How does ‘paradise’ appear in your book? Roger Robinson: It morphs. Paradise became hope when thinking about my prematurely born child; it was the idea of people coming to paradise and finding hell in Grenfell; it was grappling with where paradise was for the Windrush elders who were sent back. I was born in London, raised in Trinidad, but came back to the UK to put down roots – could I create paradise here? Can a text be a portable paradise? Can it give hope? All of these strands from my life coalesced, and the book wrote me as much as I wrote it. Your opening poems focus on Grenfell. Beyond the terrible loss of life, what did it represent? That people were devalued, underrepresented and not given an equality of opportunity. Many of us live happy lives, but Grenfell came along and showed that for some, there is no value put on their safety or general wellbeing. Why are certain people devalued in society? It’s not simply a race issue, it’s class, sociology. I drew attention to it because I thought the media was doing a hopeless job; they weren’t getting anything down that I could empathise with. Just the facts, that would inevitably get lost in the news cycle that turns and turns. I thought their lives were worth remembering. Can poetry help process trauma? You can rewire people’s emotions through the senses. That’s the power of poetry, as well as other art forms. When I see a Mark Rothko painting, I am literally different for seeing it. Witnessing the collisions of blood and light, spirituality, artistry, depression; there’s so much in so little. That rewiring is in me; I’m altered by it. That’s the importance of art – it’s the possibility to change someone and for them to practice that humanity with others. How did it feel to win the TS Eliot and Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje prize? Really good! I’m into the idea of creative citizenship and would like to fill out the idea of what a poet is, what they can be in society. Poetry should not be people failing to solve a riddle and thinking they’re stupid. The poet used to be an important part of the community: These orators would stand up and be counted. If you look back at Latin America, they were busy creating revolutions, helping people get fed. What care does poetry have to take when working with real life? When things truly happened, you have to honour the moment. My mum always said that before something is a thought, it’s a spirit. If you move in a spirit

of honouring the best of the person or event you’re writing about, then hopefully it will come out true. In ‘Citizen III’ you write that “areas become ends”, suggesting some young people have little to hold on to beyond their postcode. How can we fix this alienation and fatality? We still struggle to see capitalism as the driving force for oppression. Nobody wants to tackle how wealth, land and housing is distributed, or how generations get stuck on repeat. Society can flourish in most spaces, but to take the example of living in a tower block, the very nature of a mother being at the top of the block while her child plays at the bottom in a prescribed area – that physical distance in surveillance is a simple thing that can lead to social problems. Small details can make a massive difference, and we can begin by providing living conditions for people that don’t set them up to fail. My book looks at the context of somebody running away as a slave and the context of people being killed in tower blocks. These are not separate stories. When people say communities are “acting out”, you’re never given the context, because they’re trying to criminalise the act. I wanted to give context to resistance and the devaluation of black bodies. Your poem ‘Beware’ (“When police place knees/ at your throat, you may not live/ to tell of choking”) has only gained more urgency. Why have we seen global protests during lockdown? COVID-19 is a collective trauma, but one that disproportionately affects minorities. Black men are dying at three times the rate of white people. Then we had the entire global arena looking at George Floyd’s death with terrible clarity – a metaphor for how we’re perceived in the world. People had time to sit still, assess their lives and build a collective voice. With all that trauma, past and present, things will explode. I have a lot of hope in millennials though: They’re politicised, serious about diversity of thought and employ unapologetic change quickly. You’ve written that “Your strength lies in the very humanity of the questions that your poem asks of the reader.” What are some questions we need to wrestle with? Here’s one everyone should think about: If you don’t worry about your son being attacked by the police, that he will be safe coming home, or you can clearly see him living past 22, then you have some privilege. Are you willing to lend some, and do some heavy lifting for those that don’t? A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson is published by Peepal Tree Press 41

BLACKBiRD Mi BLACKBi MiSS SSiiSS SSiiPP PPii By Bolanle Tajudeen. Turner bursary-winning artist Shawanda Corbett discusses cyborgs and ceramics

When Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, announced its 2020 bursary recipients (the Turner Prize was cancelled this year due to COVID-19), he remarked that the selected artists showed “care for oneself, care for a community one identifies with”. The ethics of care are evident across Shawanda Corbett’s practice, the bursary-winning, interdisciplinary artist who recently had her first solo exhibition, Neighbourhood Garden, at Corvi-Mora. Corbett’s show astutely referenced the many personali-

Shawanda Corbett in her studio, Ruskin School of Art, Oxford

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Photography Alice Zoo

ties that she grew up with. On entering the gallery, visitors were greeted with luster and gold-painted vessels positioned in pairs – ceramics that honour her family and humanise characters from “the hood”; her vibrant, jazz-inspired paintings lining the walls an ode to childhood memories and universally shared experiences. Born in Mississippi in 1989, Corbett gives thoughtful consideration to how Blackness is portrayed in her artwork, choosing to tell the stories of people in her life

without offering viewers a definitive, figurative image. “You have to be knowledgeable and wary about Black bodies in certain spaces,” she notes. “The history of the crack epidemic in the United States, and how the drug was introduced, for example, was a way of breaking down Black bodies and communities. I didn’t feel comfortable doing caricatures of them in white-wall spaces, so I focused on their personalities.” Under the tutelage of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at the Ruskin School of Art, Corbett has also expanded her practice into performance, forcing audiences to think about what constitutes a complete body, born as she was without legs and one arm. Her arrival at this proposition stems from extracting ideas from Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory, a school of thought that rejects boundaries between humans, animals and machines, but one I had initially been reluctant to engage with because of its lack of intersectionality and citing of Black feminism. Although Corbett agrees it contains omissions, she also highlights that the theory is similar to how sci-fi writer Octavia E Butler created worlds with characters unstifled by narratives of racial identity and histories, while cyborgism “uses a lot of terminology from the trans community”. As a child, Corbett spent a lot of time at her grandmother’s home in New York among her friends from the LGBTQ community, including trans women of colour. Their presence and attitude impacted how the Oxford-based artist saw herself: “In my interaction with them, they never announced themselves or said what their societal identities were. Taking that way of being, seeing, just existing – I transferred it into my work.” Corbett, it seems, is too busy creating her own theoretical language and unique practice to be entangled with the laborious and continuous announcement of being Black, Woman, Disabled, or as she stoically puts it: “It is what it is.” Our conversation turns to making, and she explains she shifted away from Western methods of pottery production because it requires a trimming technique with two hands. There is no indication that having one arm is obstructive to the creation of her work; in fact, problem solving is part of her creative practice. Whilst a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology she entered into a debate with her calculus professor when she didn’t understand a mathematical problem; he in turn used a pottery analogy: “You really don’t need two hands to throw the clay, you just need a point.” She began looking at ways of throwing that weren’t occidental, leading her to the Japanese method of making vessels from the bottom up. “No shade to the other professors, but they are only teaching what they were taught. When I tried it, it was much easier,” she laughs. As someone who understands the ways white supremacy functions in the arts, constantly re-affirming Western methods of making and doing which can suppress creatives of colour, as well as those with disabilities, I put it to her that finding new ways of making must be liberating. “It is not a worldwide truth that you need two hands, because you have gravity pulling the clay down and out,” she replies. “All that matters is the speed and pressure you put on the wheel.” As we finish, I congratulate her again on the bursary and ask what the recognition means to her. She pauses and giggles: “It wasn’t something I was working towards, but it’s nice to know I am headed in the right direction.” Whatever direction she takes, throwing down or up, I have no doubt it will be the right one. 44

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Photography Alice Zoo

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Photography Jesse Laitinen. Styling and set design Paulina Piipponen

SEEiNG DOUBLE SEEi By Tom Bolger. Hermès’ iconic silk scarf takes a great leap forward

It is said that the Chinese empress Xi Ling-shi discovered silk by accident. A silkworm cocoon fell into her tea, heat slowly unwrapping the fine thread until it could stretch across her garden. The latest from Hermès, by contrast, is the result of a decade of deliberate, closely guarded innovation. A world-first feat in printing, its new silk-twill scarf bears artwork on either side by designer and graphic artist Dimitri Rybaltchenko, a technical leap forward from last season’s offering of two opposing colours. “It is magical and poetic to offer two choices, two atmospheres, two designs, two stories,” notes Christophe Goineau, creative director of men’s silk. “Astonish and surprise – this has always been the hallmark of the men’s silk scarf. It’s the Abracadabra moment!” The iconic carré (square) scarf was introduced by Hermès in 1937, exactly a century after it was established as a harness and bridle workshop. Expanding from its equestrian leatherwork, the French luxury house used strong silk and an intricate drawing by family member Robert Dumas for its first design. In the following decade they were painstakingly drawn and dyed by hand, the engraving and silk-screening achieved with woodblocks. This technique was eventually replaced by a traditional method pioneered in its Pierre-Bénite workshops, near Lyon, meticulously printing each colour frame by frame. Made from the silk of 300 moth cocoons, hems hand-rolled and stitched, a single scarf can take two years to finish. Designs – of which there have been over two thousand – are complex and colourful, revolving around mythology, cartography, flora and fauna. Styled in myriad forms, figures such as Queen Elizabeth II, Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Grace Kelly (who famously used hers as a sling after she broke her arm) have become synonymous with the accessory. While a men’s line was introduced comparatively recently in 2004, both sexes have enjoyed the androgynous versatility of the scarf since its inception. Rybaltchenko’s dual story of driving a vintage or Formula 1 car – Formule chic – is a rush of motion and muted green, burgundy and teal. Anchored by the first-person perspective, they are rich and detailed universes that speak to the brand’s convergence of man, machine, precision and speed. “Innovation is the result of constantly renewed creativity,” says Goineau. “For us, it means supporting the momentum and spontaneity of creation while remaining faithful to our history. It is the perpetual movement of the soul of the house.”

FiRE COMi COMiNG OUT OF THE MONKEY’S HEAD By Jamie Hewlett. The artist behind the world’s biggest virtual band

Damon [Albarn] and I had known each other for a long time but had never been friends. We were born 10 days apart and share a Chinese zodiac sign, the monkey. We found each other annoying at first, but finally accepted one another and became very good friends. We were sharing an apartment when he was having his first real break from Blur. Initially we thought we’d create a T-shirt company, which was a terrible idea. Then we thought fuck it, let’s make an animated band. Manufactured bands were everywhere in the noughties, they came and went. If you’re going to artificially construct a band, choose the members and style them to within an inch of their life, why make it so dull? If we’re pretending, why not have some fun? Damon is all about melody and song and didn’t want to restrict himself to one genre. Now he could hide behind the characters and do whatever he wanted. For me, putting visuals to his music was a marriage made in heaven. We both suddenly found a new freedom to express ourselves, and no one to tell us what to do. Our creations often end up being reflections of our ourselves. I’d always liked The Clash because each member was an individual and had a certain style; each one had a role to play and something to say, which bled into the thinking behind our four members – 2D, Murdoc, Noodle and Russel Hobbs. When our first album was released, most magazines said they weren’t interested in a cartoon band. I guess the fact that some people didn’t get behind it was initially difficult. After all these years, I think I’m still trying to prove something. Originally, we were criticised as being ‘for kids’. Now we’re working with people like slowthai, who told us, “I was a kid

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Illustration Jamie Hewlett

when the first album came out, I grew up with you.” So yeah, of course it’s for the fucking kids, because one day they’ll be the writers, artists and musicians inspiring the next generation. All my life I’ve been learning to draw. Whether I’m changing style or moving in a different direction with animation or VR, I’m always learning something new. With these characters I have an excuse to tell any stories I like, so this year we’re releasing the Gorillaz ALMANAC. It’s Private Eye meets Monty Python, Mad magazine and 2000 AD – funny stories, mad shit, artwork from all our campaigns. . . even a comic strip, which I haven’t done in a very long time. It was meant to be an annual, but 2020, what a fucking year; we thought we’d make it a collection, a reflection of what’s happened recently as well. We’re called the world’s most successful virtual act, but really we’re the only virtual act! It seems we stumbled on an idea that makes as much sense today as it did two decades ago. When me and Damon are in the studio, we’re not concerned with what is it going to be, how will it be received, will it make lots of money? The moment you start thinking like that you’re done. We’re lucky to have collaborated with so many talented people: the late, great Tony Allen, Bobby Womack, Dennis Hopper, Lou Reed, Grace Jones, Mos Def, George Benson, De La Soul – simply too many to count. We never imagined it would last 20 years. Hopefully we’ll have another 20. As told to Tom Bolger Gorillaz ALMANAC is published in October by Z2 Comics

STYLE COUNCi COUNCiL By Mark Williams. The music that shapes Ben Sherman’s creative director

Growing up, I listened to a melting pot of music. As a kid I was influenced by my parents playing The Rolling Stones, Frankie Valli and a lot of ’60s and ’70s rock and pop on a Saturday night. Back then it was all about vinyl and having friends over, sitting around the hi-fi system. As my own tastes grew, I listened to Prince, Roxy Music and Talking Heads on repeat. My first gig was The Stone Roses at Brixton Academy. It was one of those moments when you really felt like the world was changing; or rather, a new subculture was emerging. The music was so loud it blew me away. Much of that particular day is a blur – I can’t remember how I made it back home in one piece. Each decade has shaped me in some way. Discovering rap and hip-hop during my early-’90s breakdancing phase was my first step towards understanding how music and fashion are interlinked. Big Daddy Kane, The Sugarhill Gang, Sugar Bear and LL Cool J were always the top tracks mixed and played at our local civic centre, and the best for breaking and popping to. Music and musicians are usually at the forefront of the concepts Ben Sherman creates – just as most youth cultures are woven together with music. Every season I go on a different musical tangent: For example, the AW20 collection, Modern World, is a nod to the mod-revivalist era. We began the journey looking at iconic bands like The Style Council, and took an excursion from there. I loved the way they would mix a sports T-shirt with formal trousers, or layer roll-necks with shirts – sharp dressing with an edge. It’s difficult to define Ben Sherman’s sound. Over the past 60 years we’ve been intertwined with so many different styles: American R&B, northern soul, British rock, ska, Brit-pop, reggae, and artists like David Bowie, The Kinks, Mick Jagger, The Who, Small Faces. Even now, we’ve got ties to really fresh alternative genres, like grime. It’s vital to be contemporary and not get stuck in the past, as cool as that may be. Photography Tami Aftab

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Photography Peter Boettcher, courtesy of SprĂźth/Magers

MUSIQUE NON-STOP By Jean-Yves Leloup. The enduring legacy of Kraftwerk “Our reality is an electronic reality,” noted Ralf Hütter, who, together with the late Florian Schneider, founded Kraftwerk in 1970. From their Düsseldorf production studio Kling Klang, the pair explored a new world of music using synthesizers, drummachines, vocoders and tape recorders, freely mixing sound, contemporary art and performance. Across five decades and eight concept albums, the multimedia project would take on the form of a Gesamtkunstwerk – the German notion of a total work of art. Influenced by Joseph Beuys and the avant-garde Fluxus movement, Hütter and Schneider maintained a flawless aesthetic and almost complete withdrawal of personality behind their work. Harmonising the artist and technology, or ‘the man machine Kraftwerk’, the eventual quartet invented an electronic groove whose character and mechanical dimension invaded dance floors from the 1970s to today, through disco, electro-funk, house and techno, while exerting a considerable influence on pop, rock and even hip-hop. Beyond visionary electronic music, the two invented a romanticism and technological poetry which drew its essence from the expression, and often exaltation, of modernity. The repetitive, ‘industrial and popular’ sound of their iconic 1974 work Autobahn perfectly expressed the intimate relationships woven between the individual and the technology of the late 20th century. Some of their most beautiful tracks, such as ‘Trans-Europe Express’, ‘The Man-Machine’ and ‘Computer Love’, evoke universal and everyday emotions related to these advances in travel, home computing, modern communication, the meeting of cultures within a global village, and a growing fascination for the automaton or mechanised human body. They acted out, with great precision, a kind of melancholy and affection towards the formidable developments of the modern information age. Beyond their influence on British artists such as New Order and The Human League, Kraftwerk’s perfect drum-machine rhythms and high-tech equipment resonated deeply with the burgeoning American hiphop scene (immortalised in Afrika Bambaataa’s 1982 track ‘Planet Rock’) and Detroit techno figures like Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. They found in the art of Hütter and Schneider a vision of the future that allowed them to imagine new paths for Black music. The co-founder of record label Underground Resistance, Mad Mike, best summarised how they were perceived across the pond: “They weren’t Germans; they weren’t white; in fact, we thought they were robots. We had no idea they were human beings till we saw their show.” Countless tributes, pirate remixes, covers, plagiarisms and parodies have further contributed to making the band a pop-culture totem. Although Schneider passed away this year, aged 73, the band continues to tour, and the influence of their industrielle volksmusik – which David Bowie translated as “folk music of the factories” – shows no signs of fading. Kraftwerk may be granted their wish that the ensemble’s techno pop reaches the eternal state of musique non-stop. Electronic: From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers runs at the Design Museum until February 2021 51

All clothing and accessories FENDI fall/ winter 2020

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Photography Jesse Laitinen. Styling Natalie Brewster, Set design Paulina Piipponen

VICE VERSA By Jamie Waters. Double entendres abound in Fendi’s F/W20 collection

For this season’s Fendi man, nothing is as it seems. Big square bags in canary yellow with black piping mimic the Roman brand’s signature packaging, but are rendered in leather instead of paper. Overcoats are reversible, so can be worn with their intricate construction and contrasting lining proudly on show (which also lends a certain bionic quality). Panels can be removed, converting long fur coats into skimpy boleros with the swoosh of a zip; and what looks like a pair of trousers from the front is a skirt from the back. Jackets are loaded with hidden pockets – for earphones, credit cards, gum, cigars – and bags are woven in soft knitted wool that recalls chunky handmade jumpers. Garments are wallets; bags are garments; pieces are modular and adaptive. “There is always something to discover,” says creative director Silvia Venturini Fendi. Last season, Fendi took us to the garden, dressing men in khaki overalls and sand-coloured shorts. But for fall/winter it’s all about city slickers. “This season the Fendi man is more urban; he is even more sexy to me,” says Fendi. There’s plenty of dark moody tailoring in classic shades of black, grey and camel – but The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit has been catapulted into 2020. These suited gents are stomping the sidewalk in chunky lug-soled boots or featherlight sneakers, carrying cross-body bags in place of briefcases, and donning cashmere bucket hats rather than felt fedoras. Shocks of Fendi yellow cut through the understated elegance. This is dressing up for the post-streetwear consumer, but that doesn’t mean it’s boring. Quite the opposite. From the shearling mimicking cashmere, to the cashmere mimicking shearling, to the accessories mimicking packaging, to the inside-out garb, playfulness and a sense of the surreal is omnipresent. Everything looks good – but make sure you look twice.

Grooming Jody Taylor. Model King Owusu at The Squad

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Photography Jesse Laitinen. Styling Natalie Brewster, Set design Paulina Piipponen

Grooming Jody Taylor. Model King Owusu at The Squad

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Artwork Sarah Sze

TEARS IN TiME AND SPACE By Tom Bolger. In conversation with Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain curator Leanne Sacramone

Since the late 1990s, NYC-based artist Sarah Sze has used mixed media to navigate space, time, materials and memory. Using an intricate assemblage of everyday objects, sculpture and fragmented images, Sze’s paintings and installations are often in a state of flux, exposing the fragility and futility of how we make meaning through materials.

between two states – structure and fragility, inside and outside, permanence and impermanence. Both works are concerned with how organic processes reveal temporal cycles – the rotation of the earth, phases of the moon, the passage from night to day – as well as the power of the tactile in an image-saturated world.

As she prepares for her second solo show at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Night into Day, Port spoke to exhibition curator Leanne Sacramone about Sze, altered states and ways of seeing.

What are the consequences of living in such a world? The show reflects our contemporary visual experience, the overload that many of us are subjected to. We’re constantly engulfed by a flood of images that disrupt our sense of reality, and Sarah explores how this modern experience has created a completely new engagement with time and memory. The Internet has altered our relationship to images – for example, how they’re produced, circulated, communicated; there are now more than 3 billion images shared every day on social media. While analogue photography was intended to help remember scenes of the past for future audiences, many pictures taken today for social media encourage us to imagine and invent the present. Digital photographs have slipped the bounds of materiality, taking on a life of their own outside of the control of the photographer, and she makes us pause to think about that.

Tom Bolger: What draws you to Sze’s work? Leanne Sacramone: She imbues a myriad of images and objects with a vitality and presence that leads us to look at them in a new way. Sarah often talks about wanting to alternately orient and disorient the viewer, creating moments of anticipation, surprise and discovery. Her works are worlds in and of themselves; they encourage active participation and ask big questions: How does an object acquire value? Where does an artwork begin and where does it end? How do we view and represent reality? What is the human experience of memory? What will we see in the show? Sarah’s installations will evolve in dialogue with Jean Nouvel’s glass building, depending on the time of day. Sarah has long been interested in the idea of the sculpture as a tool for measuring time and space, and these works were inspired by the planetarium and the pendulum, scientific instruments that were originally designed to map the cosmos and demonstrate the earth’s rotation. The idea of cyclical time is explored in the larger work, ‘Twice Twilight’, a spherical, skeletal, steel and bamboo structure that evokes our planet. It is composed of photographs, ephemeral objects such as plants and birds’ nests, light, sound, and videos of the natural world projected onto torn pieces of paper: clouds moving, fires burning, geysers erupting, spores growing. In the other gallery space, a pendulum will swing above a reflective concave bowl made from fragments of stainless steel. Various objects, as well as materials that were used in the process of creating the sculpture, will be placed in this installation, giving the impression that you are observing a work in progress. The installation will also include videos showing these same materials in transformation, such as molten metal, as well as videos of the sky captured at different moments of the day. Sarah relishes when something threatens change and teeters

Are dedicated spaces, to truly look at images, such as galleries, more necessary as a result? We’re going so fast, flitting from one task or image to another, that it’s incredibly important to stop and properly look. The pandemic has been an opportunity for many to do exactly that. How will Jean Nouvel’s iconic building complement the show, and vice versa? Sarah will play with the transparency of the architecture, transforming the building into a magic lantern by projecting moving images onto the glass walls. As they circulate around the viewer and their shadows, it will recall the zoetrope, the pre-cinematic animation device. Nouvel’s building can already be experienced as a kind of mirage that confuses the senses, not exactly knowing where it starts and ends, so the works will enhance the spatial and perceptual ambiguity inherent in the design. Night into Day runs from October 2020 to March 2021 at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris 57

Right: Eduardo Paolozzi – ‘Wittgenstein at the Cinema Admires Betty Grable’ from As Is When, 1965

SHARED Vi ViSiON By Dylan Holden. Persol and Stone Island take to the skies

Turin, 1917. A year before the end of the war to end all wars. Whilst working at his family’s opticians, Giuseppe Ratti would converse with exhausted fighter pilots who frequently complained of blinding sun glare. From his small courtyard in Via Caboto, the young photographer began experimenting with round smoked-crystal lenses made from silica, eventually producing a state-of-the-art frame that would launch a thousand flights. The technically brilliant Protector glasses were soon adopted by the Italian airforce, Formula One racers, athletes and legendary aviators such as Francesco de Pinedo, who donned them on his transatlantic journey from Europe to the Americas. So it was that Ratti’s company, Persol – per il sole or ‘for the sun’ – was born. Stone Island, established in 1982, is a kindred spirit – an Italian company defined by the military, exploration

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and innovation in textiles. Its first collection consisted of seven jackets made from Tella Stella, a two-tone tarpaulin-like fabric used by the army to cover trucks that was so hard it had to be pumice and enzyme washed for hours before it could be worn. Honouring their origins, the two style icons have created the limited-edition PO2470S Pilot Frame – head firmly in the clouds. Unearthed from the Persol archives and last seen in the 1970s, the collaboration’s bold profile is finished in gunmetal, its bridge hand-brushed and adorned with visible screws. Luminous temples and yellow tips feature both brands’ Freccia and Wind Rose logos respectively, while its Meflecto stems lend the industrially elegant spectacles a welcome flexibility. Each light blue polar lens is engraved with their symbols, a reflection of their shared vision.

Photography Crista Leonard. Set design Lisa Jahovic

WiTTGENSTEIN AT THE CiiNEMA THE C By Matthew Turner. Eduardo Paolozzi’s philosopher-inspired screenprints

Rather than enduring the usual application process for the University of Cambridge, Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein arrived unannounced at Bertrand Russell’s rooms in Trinity College. Soon after, he started to dominate Russell’s lectures, quickly becoming exhausted and revolted by them. As a salve, immediately after they finished – his classmates’ chairs still scraping across the floor – he would rush to the cinema with a pork pie to munch on while he became lost in the images. He favoured the front row so that the screen would flood his entire field of vision. As the film started to roll he would be cast away on an artificial island formed by the projector’s light, his torturous philosophical thoughts quickly slipping away. His distaste for English culture and mental habits in general cultivated a preference for American films. One of his favourite actresses was Betty Hutton, and he fantasised about being introduced to Miss Hutton when he visited America. The print, ‘Wittgenstein at the Cinema Admires Betty Grable’, made by Eduardo Paolozzi in 1965, reacts to Wittgenstein’s time at the movies as well as leitmotifs of affluence and conspicuous consumption. Taken from a set of 12 screenprints entitled As Is When, as with the others in the series, Paolozzi uses texts from the philosopher’s Notebooks and Philosophical Investigations, which he combines with collaged images taken from weaving patterns, advertisements, comics and even wrapping paper. The print initially appears jovial with its bright colours, flowing forms and depiction of a pop icon. Something, however, has gone wrong. The German bomber plane jumps out with clarity in the top right corner, and the two Mickey Mouse outlines are lost and deformed in the camouflage of crosshatched barcode markings; bringing to mind the ironic Mickey Mouse marching song from the finale of Full Metal Jacket, the constant presence of hypnotic television test patterns in Don DeLillo’s Libra and multi-coloured stripes of sickly sweet candy cane. Many of the prints in this series reference cinema, but it’s always dysfunctional – the projector is broken; regardless, it continues to cascade discordant imagery across the screen, turning the familiar into something foreign. Unlike Wittgenstein, at the time of printing Paolozzi had already become disillusioned with America, ‘the American dream’, and was aware, along with his friend and collaborator JG Ballard, of the sinister substrata under the gleaming chromium surfaces of technology. Courtesy of The Paolozzi Foundation

ME AND MS JONES By Harry Langham. Remembering the great and troubled painter

Painting was, for Jean Jones, a practice undertaken as if by strict medical prescription (only in the morning and always in front of the real subject), one that she carried out with all the religious consistency of a monk taking morning prayers – physic, perhaps, for a troubled mind. The novelist Iris Murdoch once declared that Jones would one day be as famous as Van Gogh, a prophecy mocked by each passing year. Hers was a life coloured by rejection and mental affliction. It wasn’t until Jones was in her fifties that a doctor explained to her why it was that she fluctuated so violently between fits of mania and depression; why there were times when she was unable to do so much as feed her two young children. Her self-portraits, of which there are many, survive as an archive of self-reflection; relics of the artist as she saw herself through times of increasing psychological difficulty. Her diagnosis was something she would seldom discuss, but throughout her self-portraiture she provides fleeting glimpses of the struggle within: a downturned gaze, a drooped expression, two bloodshot eyes. Amongst her most striking is the 1976 self-portrait, ‘Me’, in which she addresses the viewer with a sideways look of haughty disdain, posturing with one arm aloft like the swaggering bailaora of the flamenco. A highly disorienting work, it is a confusion of birds-eye and front-on perspectives, in which the body is rendered almost comically out of sorts. Her legs appear giant beneath a seemingly truncated torso; her arms swell and narrow unnaturally; whilst her clothes appear to blend into their background, evoking a sense of dissociative porousness between the self and the world beyond. In another, titled ‘First Autumn Portrait’, she is conventionally unfeminine – broad-shouldered, sitting with knees wide apart, in a polo shirt and trousers, her thick forearm draped listlessly over a strong thigh. This is the Jones that the GP’s psychiatric report, upon her second sectioning in 1995, would describe as “a woman who wears man’s clothes”. Jones’s recognition as an artist was without doubt a case of what might have been. Fortunately, this year, a team led by her grandson is striving to reclaim her legacy from the depths of obscurity, holding the first exhibition of her work in over 20 years. Jean Jones’s retrospective will take place in early October at The Brownston Gallery, Devon 60

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Artwork Jean Jones

iNTO THE BLUE By Alex Doak. Rolex’s little brother comes of age

Clever Mr Hans Wilsdorf had as much of an eye on a marketing opportunity as he did on the future of modern watchmaking. As well as founding a little horological concern by the name of Rolex in London, back in 1905, his passion for British culture extended to his watches’ collection names, even after he upped sticks to Switzerland 14 years later. Prince, Windsor, Princess. . . and too-good-to-ignore Tudor, registered decades before he could figure out how to use it; until it hit him, in the ’40s: a whole separate brand for upwardly mobiles, capitalising on Rolex’s clout. Initially, Tudor mirrored its big brother – same design, same legendary Oyster case, even the same model names, just a different logo and a more ‘industrial’ movement. This solid waterborne pedigree – but with a cheaper price tag – meant Tudor’s own Submariner diving watch was catnip to bootstrapped military outfits; including, most famously, France’s Marine Nationale (MN), whose endorsement by its elite frogmen made the renamed Black Bay the poster boy for Tudor’s breathless modern renaissance. Yes, it’s a greatest-hits cocktail of retro details, such as the MN Submariner’s ‘snowflake’ hour hand and the ’50s-era oversized crown. But, much like the Mini car, the Black Bay has grown beyond mere vintage tribute to become a fully fledged sub-brand. Marine-grade bronze, steel and gold; steel on its own; red or blue rotating bezel; no bezel at all; on a bracelet or woven fabric strap; 32mm ladies’ size; 42mm beefy size. . . the Black Bay has something for everyone (assuming everyone’s happy with as-standard 200-metre water resistance and chronometer-precision self-winding mechanics, expertly made at Tudor’s own factory – which everyone most definitely should be). This year’s Black Bay update – in a year of cancelled trade fairs and stuttering, reined-in unveilings – feels fresh as a daisy and perfectly poised. The Fifty-Eight Navy Blue is named in tribute to the year in which Tudor’s Subs were uprated to 200 metres, and painted precisely in keeping with the French navy’s preferred colourway back in the ’70s. It’s a versatile size, at 39mm diameter, and, in that spot-on-trend satin-brushed hue, just the most perfectly elegant sports watch on the market. 62

The Porter

Photography William Bunce. Styling and set design Paulina Piipponen

FOOD FOR SOUL By Massimo Bottura. Building community through shared meals

I have always felt that cooking meant more than simply feeding people. That’s why, when I was asked to contribute to the World Expo in Milan, I decided to open a refettorio (refectory) with the charity Caritas Ambrosiana. We wanted to express that cooking could be a call to act: a tool to change the mind, culture, society. Chefs from all over the world joined our community kitchen to cook the surplus food coming from the 2015 expo. Every day we had to be as creative as possible to

Paris Refettorio, photography JR

serve our guests, who were vulnerable people from the local Greco neighbourhood. Afterwards, it was clear to me that food could not only be a bridge between hunger and waste, but a way for people to create new communities around nourishment. I would have never imagined what started as an opportunity could become a movement; this is how my non-profit, Food for Soul, was born. In our refettorios – of which there are eight – guests are invited to sit at a communal table and are served a

full meal by volunteers. This kind of hospitality comes directly out of my experience of running restaurants for the past 30 years; I believe there is more value in a meal shared at the table than one eaten alone. Beyond providing something to eat to those in need, we conceive nourishment in a more holistic sense: feeding the body and the soul. That’s why we converge the know-how of architects, designers and artists in the setup of our spaces – we want to create unique environments full of art, design and beauty. Isolation is a real problem in cities, especially for immigrants and the elderly. If you build something beautiful, however, it can become a shelter and hub for inclusion. I truly believe in the power of beauty; it is an indivisible good that never needs to be divided, only shared. By creating these safe spaces, we are encouraging people to bind their communal identity and restore a sense of belonging. In an increasingly individualistic world, cooking and eating together can become an act of love. One of the first things that Ferran Adrià asked when he entered the kitchen of Refettorio Ambrosiano was, “What’s in the refrigerator?” He wanted to know about the leftovers from other chefs’ preparations – broths, ragouts, ice-creams, sauces – that were in excess. From there, he would begin to create his dishes. That is what this kind of cooking is really all about, putting aside your ego and working with what is available; not wasting a single ingredient, while challenging your creativity. One day when we were serving at Ambrosiano, we decided to do pasta al pesto using the week-old basil left in the kitchen. The leaves were not enough, however, so we thought about adding other aromatic greens, like mint. Then, when it turned out there were also no pine nuts, I said, “What about breadcrumbs?” It’s the best way to recover a precious ingredient like bread, and we do this at least once a week for our staff meals at Osteria Francescana, which are like a real family meal to me. To this day, it’s still one of our favourite recipes. It is a way of looking at the world, at your pantry, and finding inner beauty in the humblest ingredient. As told to Tom Bolger Massimo Bottura is the chef patron of Osteria Francescana and co-founder of Food for Soul, together with his wife Lara Gilmore

Clockwise: Refettorio Ghirlandina, photography Stella Laurenzi / Massimo Bottura, photography Callo Albanese e Sueo / Pasta with Mint and Breadcrumb Pesto, photography Riccardo Lettieri / Refettorio Gastromotiva, photography Angelo DalBó

The Porter

The following ‘Pasta with Mint and Breadcrumb Pesto’ recipe is from Bread is Gold and serves six Ingredients Mint and Breadcrumb Pesto 200g

basil leaves

50g

parsley leaves

120g

mint leaves

25g

stale bread, finely crumbled

garlic cloves, chopped

tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

50g

freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

tablespoon sea salt

Pasta

tablespoon sea salt

600g

fusilli pasta or other short pasta

Freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, for serving

Method In a blender or food processor, combine the basil, parsley, mint, breadcrumbs, garlic and five ice cubes, and pulse until finely chopped. Add the olive oil, Parmigiano and salt, and pulse to incorporate. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil over medium heat. Add the fusilli and cook until al dente. Toss the pasta with the pesto. Sprinkle with the grated Parmigiano and serve.

KAIJU: OF MONSTERS AND MEN By John Harris Dunning. Seventy-five years after the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, investigating the birth of a monstrous legacy

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” — Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb.

Right: A dragon ascends towards the heavens with Mount Fuji in the background in this 1897 ukiyo-e print from Ogata Gekkō’s Views of Mount Fuji

Rain lashes a Japanese village at night. A man stands in a doorway, probing the darkness for the source of a pounding that cuts through the howling wind. His face suddenly contorts in terror and he stumbles back into the interior, throwing himself over his wife as the walls collapse in on them. A giant scaly shape lumbers past. . . And so audiences caught their first glimpse of Godzilla, king of the monsters. Released in 1954, Godzilla spawned the kaiju film, a genre that enjoys global popularity to this day. Kaiju can be translated from Japanese as ‘strange beast’, an accurate description of Godzilla. Although generally referred to as ‘he’, Godzilla’s creators were careful to avoid specifying the creature’s sex. The name has its roots in the words gorira (gorilla) and kujira (whale). Godzilla seemed to burst fully formed from the anxieties surrounding the birth of the atomic age. Japan was still reeling from the recent bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and its subsequent defeat. Its domestic film industry was operating at a fraction of its normal capacity, its cinemas glutted with American product. This cross-pollination with Hollywood was to become an important ingredient of the kaiju film. A hugely successful rerelease of the 1933 version of King Kong put giant monsters at the forefront of the Japanese popular imagination. The forgettable B-grade monster flick The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) – which bears unmistakable parallels to Godzilla – further supplied the blueprint for the kaiju phenomenon. But if science fiction gave this Frankenstein’s monster flesh, then actual events brought it to life; in early 1954 Japanese-American diplomatic relationships were brought to boiling point by America’s flagrantly irresponsible nuclear testing in the Pacific Bikini Atoll. The crew of the Japanese tuna trawler Lucky Dragon was exposed to deadly radiation, despite earlier American assurances that they would be well within the safety zone. This event is clearly echoed in the first scenes of Godzilla, when deep-sea explosions herald the coming of the king of monsters. Coming only two years after the end of the American occupation, when open criticism of America in the media was virtually impossible, this thinly veiled portrayal of the incident was clearly recognised by audiences. Godzilla’s city-flattening antics – so reminiscent of the American annihilation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima – also allowed for an otherwise impossible cathartic release. The Porter

Godzilla – and the innumerable kaiju who followed in its huge footsteps – will always be linked to the dawn of the atomic age and related ecological concerns. But like all truly powerful mythologies, the figure of the kaiju resists any easy reading. This quintessentially modern pop-culture icon also has roots reaching back millennia. The Japanese have a long tradition of fantastical beasts and monsters, many of which can be traced back to the influential 4th-century Chinese text Classic of Mountains and Seas. Like Godzilla and other kaiju, the classic dragon can traditionally be both benevolent and malevolent – and also has a strong connection to ecology and the wellbeing of the planet. The islands that constitute Japan sit at the juncture of three overlapping tectonic plates, making it the most volcanically unstable nation on Earth. Overwhelming natural catastrophes are part of the natural consciousness. The very creation myth of Japan tells of goddess Izanami, co-creator of the archipelago of Japan, dying while giving birth to her child Ho-musubi, causer of fire. Godzilla – and many of the kaiju – are not malevolent by intent. The damage they do to humanity and its cities is mostly unintentional; they are simply not important enough to warrant the monsters’ attention. The kaiju genre shares this characteristic with the work of influential American writer HP Lovecraft, whose work set the blueprint for contemporary horror; his story cycle centres on an immense cosmic monster Cthulhu, who, significantly, also slumbers in the depths of the ocean until the unwise actions of humanity awaken it, effectively ending man’s dominion over the earth. Both Lovecraft and the kaiju genre operate at the intersection of horror and science fiction, presenting a universe in which man plays an insignificant role. This very postmodern view can be perceived as terrifying, but it’s also a kind of antidote to a relentlessly human-centric worldview, and chimed nicely with the increasing understanding of ecological issues in the 20th century. After the huge success of Godzilla, the formula was quickly copied, and a host of kaiju fluttered, slithered and crawled across the big screen. Monsters like Mothra, Gamera and Rodan were so popular that they spawned franchises of their own. By 1967 each of the five major studios in Japan had at least one kaiju film, kick-starting the domestic film industry’s recovery. These films were then exported to America where they earned big box office. Badly edited, with cheaply shot footage inserted to appeal to the Western audiences, for decades they were critically ignored and labelled camp or B-grade. They’ve been re-evaluated in recent years as restored versions have been made available in English and other European languages. Ongoing franchises like Cloverfield, Pacific Rim and the Legendary MonsterVerse films like Kong: Skull Island and the upcoming Godzilla vs. Kong make it clear that the kaiju genre is alive and well, and still wreaking havoc across the globe.

The Porter

Left: Godzilla Japanese film poster, 1954 Right: Mushroom cloud after Fat Man exploded over Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, Charles Levy U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

Paapa Essiedu He made his name playing Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company and stunned audiences with his nuanced performance as Kwame in the groundbreaking I May Destroy You. The Ghanaian-British actor talks to PortÂ about lessons learned from his mother, the stories he wants to tell and the pull between humility and ego

Words Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff Photography Liz Johnson Artur Styling Mitchell Belk

PAAPA ESSIEDU WEARS AMI PARIS THROUGHOUT

“It’s about the fundamentals that I’ve learned from my mother that I want to implement in the adult that I want to be, in the father I’d like to be one day”

Paapa Essiedu bleeds a self-effacing familiarity that I suspect is part of his gentle charm. Heart-shape faced and speaking often with his heart tucked up just past his sleeve, the actor becomes, in the space of an almost two-hour dinner on a late summer’s night in north London, something like a friend. You too should know Essiedu by now. He is canonised – the lead male in undoubtedly the most talked about TV show of 2020; caught in a perfect storm of mutual genius and circumstance. The 30-year-old’s friendship with I May Destroy You writer and director Michaela Coel led him indirectly into her light, and the perfectly placed role of Kwame, a beautiful gay man struggling with self-esteem issues throughout the course of the series. Though this role feels like a defining one at this time, he’s also currently starring in Gangs of London as brainy gangster Alex Dumani and is well known in theatre circles for his turns in Shake74

speare plays; dazzling as a youthful Romeo in 2015 and, notably, playing Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company the following year. His lead role on Press in 2018, a TV miniseries centring around tabloid journalism, may be less infamous, but is nonetheless, as it turns out, one of the shows that got me through early lockdown. “I find it really difficult to relish it or to even talk about it or feel it,” he tells me of his successes. “You know? I’ve got such a fear of things being taken away from me. A fear of loss. I think it’s my instinct to downplay or trivialise even incredible things that have happened.” Essiedu is caught in an all-too-familiar pull between humility and ego and the subsequent worry that the former is actually just a more covert type of the latter. His biggest fear, he tells me, is “getting carried away with himself ”. He would never want to become conceited, like other actors he knows who think they’re better at their craft than they are. “I think constant self-reflec-

tion can protect you from doing that,” he adds. But his success at this stage is undeniable, and, thanks in part to his therapist, he knows that he needs to move forward in a way that allows him to address it without spiralling into worry. “A lot of what I’m trying to do now is to recognise that I’ve been so fortunate and relish the pride of it,” he says. “This addiction to humility at the expense of even experiencing joy or fortune is actually mad.” He also credits Coel with making him face the magnitude of his acting achievements, as they sat down together to watch episodes of I May Destroy You. “She was just like, ‘Look, especially when it’s going out live, you actually need to feel the madness of the fact that those many million people are doing the same thing at this precise moment because of you. Don’t get lost in the minutiae of your own ego. Just put that aside and enjoy it.’ She really taught me that.” His humility, however you want to look at it,

seems genuine. Throughout two courses of Thai food and a large glass of white wine, he checks in often about using the correct phrasing in his answers to questions, is quietly spoken – apart from a gurgle of a laugh – and, when we stand up to leave, looks genuinely abashed when a fan jumps up from a table to shake his hand. Brought up in Walthamstow, east London, Essiedu was surrounded by the fierce love of his Ghanian mother, who was his protector and the initiator of his cautious ambition. “My surroundings were always kind of at odds with the future she was painting for me. It’s a weird kind of psychological mathematics to be doing from a young age, you know?” Looking down at his plate, he chuckles. “I’ve come from a background where nothing’s ever been promised, and, really, things have been quite hard. We’re here right now at a Thai restaurant which, I mean, for me, is mad. I remember I used to have the option of having rice and stew or rice and butter – and I’d be buzzing about it!” In his teenage years, he decided to become a doctor but changed his mind before he donned the scrubs. “Obviously, when you’re a kid you’re like, ‘What the fuck is a job?’ I thought maybe I’d be a doctor; that seems like a nice thing to do – you help people; maybe you’ll get rich and earn money,” he says. “I think even I didn’t realise being an actor was really a job. I thought it was something that you did at school for a laugh or to hang out with girls.” In the end though, having dabbled in acting at school, he somewhat nonchalantly decided to give it a shot, auditioning for Guildhall and graduating as part of the class of 2012. Despite being described as a “strong singer and dancer” on Guildhall’s website, drama school was not always a song and dance for Essiedu. “I just felt like I was playing catch-up with every single aspect of it,” he explains. He was thrown into a crisis of confidence – caught between thinking he wasn’t good enough, trying to figure out how to be more like his received-pronunciation (RP) peers who had attended Sylvia Young’s school, and his own desires. He speaks of one particular experience at drama school with a touch of well-earned bitterness. A teacher, “definitely racist”, picked him out of the entire group of trainees to practice a line from a David Hare play. He focused, read out the line in his very best RP and waited for the response. “All of my friends were like, ‘It was fine,’ or, ‘It was good,’” Essiedu says. “[But the teacher said], ‘No no, it sounds like he’s got a piece of cake in his mouth.’ It was basically her saying, ‘You’re trying to ascend to this type of language, but it’s not for people like you: He can do it; she can do it; you can’t do it.’ So yeah, basically, fuck her.” It was at Guildhall that he met Coel. “I was her friend before any of it. We’ve got a very specific type of friendship that’s very divorced from acting, really. We used to go jogging together. . . not jogging, running. And for me it’s always seeing the effect she has on other people. I’m like, oh shit, it’s real, you know? People are really deep in this. She’s held in such a particular regard which is so overwhelmingly positive, 78

In the future, he hopes to write and direct his own projects, to tell Black stories, but also to change the expectations of those kinds of stories on both screen and stage. He references Lovecraft Country and Moonlight as inspirations

at least for now. Please, long may it continue. Very rarely do I get anyone chatting shit about her, and so often I’m like, ‘She’s a god.’ Obviously, she is like sensationally, uniquely her, and that’s why I really love her.” Essiedu’s dad died when he was 14, and his mum passed away from cancer when he was 20, in the midst of his studies. He thinks she would be proud of where he is now – though, he adds, laughing, “For her, and a lot of my family, the question was ‘But when are you going to be in EastEnders?’ Like that was the pinnacle. Fuck winning an Oscar or any of that – when are you going to be in EastEnders?” You get the feeling he wouldn’t be against a stint on the soap on principle. He adores acting; loves the feeling of storytelling, connecting with audiences. “It’s about sharing. It’s not about you; it’s about you and someone else – you and people,” he says. “I feel like, if ever the attention is about how my. . . what my experience is of 80

doing it, that’s so self-effacing and, like, actually divorced from the experience, which is to tell a story and connect with someone.” Later he adds: “It fucks you up – your personal life; but it also feeds you, it teaches you a lot. I’ve learnt a lot about myself, acting.” In the future, he hopes to write and direct his own projects, to tell Black stories, but also to change the expectations of those kinds of stories on both screen and stage. He references Lovecraft Country and Moonlight as inspirations. “As soon as I watched it, I was like, ‘I’ve never seen a single Black person in this kind of genre of story,’” he says about Lovecraft Country. “I’m actually not that big a fan of that sort of genre, but it’s incredibly radical to see that. I thought that Get Out was a real trailblazer, in terms of taking a genre and flipping it – making you think it’s a film about something else, but it’s actually still ticking all the boxes of your classic horror film. Or even something like Moonlight. That’s the kind of thing that

Production: The Production Factory

I’m interested in as an artist; actually stretching the limitations of stories that we tell.” This is a man deeply committed to remembering his roots; not for a crass desire to “keep it real”, which he deems “clichéd”, especially when it’s across class lines, but for the type of person he can be. “[It’s about] the fundamentals that I’ve learned from my mother that I want to implement in the adult that I want to be, in the father I’d like to be one day like; the kind of person, friend.” Essiedu is a great listener as much as he is a talker, a proud second-gen Ghanian, an actor who thinks the joy of his craft is not found so much in how it makes him feel, but how it makes you feel. Watch his work with that in mind. Essiedu will tell you that he’s not able to be objective about himself, nor his brilliant catalogue of work, but my subjective opinion is that he doesn’t always need to be: He has plenty of people who have his back.

Grooming: Carlos Ferraz @ Carol Hayes Management using ecooking

Bags of Style A dialogue between past and present is crucial for Berluti and Globe-Trotter, two luxury brands who have collaborated on an impressive new travel capsule

Words Jamie Waters Photography Luca Strano

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Craftsmanship is essential for a luxury house, but at Berluti the focus is on reinterpreting it in a highly modern way. I like to illustrate my work here as a constant dialogue between past and presentâ&#x20AC;?

Martino on Post Mundus Chair, (2012 Gebrueder Thonet Vienna)

The collaboration includes hard-backed suitcases, shoe trunks and briefcases

“To be honest, I’m not so crazy about collaborations; I feel there is a terrible overload of them going on!” says Kris Van Assche, Berluti’s creative director, as refreshingly outspoken as ever. “I think they can feel a little forced or unnatural sometimes.” Yet there are exceptions to every rule, and, in this instance, he has found a worthy partner. Berluti have teamed up with Globe-Trotter on a special travel capsule collection of bags that spans suitcases, messenger bags, shoe trunks and briefcases. Collaborations, as Van Assche points out, have indeed been overdone in recent years, especially with the streetwear boom era, and can often feel like a gimmicky decision by brands who want a headline. But, when they involve a meeting of complementary minds, they can create powerful and exciting new products. The similarities between this luxury duo, an Italian-French leather-goods house and a British luggage maker, are obvious. To begin with they were founded just two years apart: Berluti in 1895 by Alessandro Berluti, a young Italian shoemaker who came to Paris to try his luck; Globe-Trotter in 1897 by David Nelken, a British entrepreneur who experimented with making suitcases from innovative materials such as vulcanised fibreboard, a light yet surprisingly hardy synthetic fibre. Over the proceeding decades, each has remained steadfastly committed to high quality, and attracted a glittering clientele in the process. Berluti is famed for its lustrous leather lace-ups and boots, which are made in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy and have graced the feet of the likes of Jean Cocteau and Andy Warhol. Meanwhile, Globe-Trotter’s cases, which have accompanied explorers including Captain Robert Falcon Scott and Sir Edmund Hillary, are made by hand in Hertfordshire in the south of England, where a team of artisans use oldschool manufacturing methods and machinery dating back to the Victorian era. “Both brands have incredible heritage and savoir faire, which has become very rare elsewhere,” says Van Assche. “[With this partnership we] were able to dive into hundreds of years of craftsmanship.” This collaboration fits neatly into Van Assche’s vision for Berluti.A waifish Belgian who studied at Antwerp’s prestigious Royal Academy in the late 1990s, the now 44-year-old designer is a long-time member of the LVMH family, having served as artistic director of Dior Homme

from 2007–2018 (before that he worked with Hedi Slimane at Yves Saint Laurent). He has become known for his pin-sharp tailoring, slick minimal aesthetic and ability to woo style-conscious urbanites. His intention since taking the Berluti reins two years ago though has been to celebrate the brand’s heritage and craftsmanship, working alongside its CEO (and LVMH scion) Antoine Arnault. He made this clear from the outset: One of his first moves was to overhaul the brand’s logo, presenting the words ‘1895 Berluti Paris’ in a font mimicking the way Alessandro Berluti had once carved his name into a shoe tree. Yet there have been complications. This is a formative time for Berluti: Although it has been a world-leading shoemaker for more than a century, it only launched ready-to-wear in 2012, so is still a relatively young entrant to the men’s apparel market. Berluti is simultaneously old and new. (It is also the sole menswear-only brand in the LVMH stable.) Plus, its archives are lacking; at times it has felt like the brand’s history has been pushed to one side. In previous interviews Van Assche has admitted to feeling “paralysed” by the lack of archive material. “Initially the brand was all about custom-made special orders, so often no archive was kept,” he explains. “There is the iconic pair of Alessandro shoes from 1895, but there is no archive of clothes as such.” This lack of historical pieces to draw upon, he says, initially inspired feelings of “freedom and fear: the freedom to be able to create a silhouette from scratch, but also the fear of not having a clear reference to start from,” he says. “In the end, I realised the real heritage at Berluti is one of know-how and traditional craft.” So that’s precisely where he’s focused his gaze. The Globe-Trotter collaboration is emblematic of Van Assche’s vision for the future of Berluti. For starters it’s among the first products to feature his Signature monogram, which combines the new ‘1895 Berluti Paris’ logo with the flowing lines of Scritto (a calligraphic motif that was conceived by former creative director Olga Berluti, who based the cursive characters on handwriting from an 18th-century letter she purchased at auction). An ornate insignia rendered in dove grey and set against a charcoal background, the monogram reflects Van Assche’s desire to fuse past and present. “It’s not 85

A flask to keep thirsts quenched Opposite: The bags feature Berluti’s new Signature monogram, a dove-grey insignia on a charcoal backdrop

a graphic that will change every season; it is going to be installed as a new part of the Berluti offering, which is why it looks so traditional,” he says. It manages to achieve a tricky thing: “It’s a logo designed from scratch but feels like it’s always been there.” The monogram features in Berluti’s mainline AW20 collection, yet it’s truly the star of the Globe-Trotter collaboration. It is omnipresent. It has been stamped onto a series of eight hard-backed suitcases: some have wheels and all are sturdy and featherlight. They are works of great artisanship, created via an intensive process of compressing 14 layers of Japanese paper to form a shell. These are then furnished with hand-patinated Venezia leather handles, corners and straps, in a rich chestnut hue, and jazzed up with shiny engraved nickel hardware. Crafted in Hertfordshire, the trunks are a handsome assemblage of greys and chocolate browns that recall old-fashioned adventures (you can almost feel the dust and smell the tobacco from 19th-century Orient Express carriages), while also feeling somehow modern. Their sharp lines and sombre palette would look perfectly at 86

home in both an 18th-century Parisian parlour and a contemporary Manhattan hotel. The monogram has also been stamped onto a shoe trunk (which can hold six pairs of footwear) and a shoe-care kit, both nods to the brand’s footwear-making heritage. It’s there on a watch box. And it’s emblazoned across everyday accessories, including a mini-messenger bag and a briefcase. There’s a carrier for every occasion. The travel industry is obviously in a state of flux and many of us may not be embarking on long-distance flights for the time being. That doesn’t make luggage pointless. One of these bags could prove a handy companion for a quick trip across town, another for a weekend away or perhaps a meandering overnight train journey. And, given that these suitcases are rolling into the future while keeping one eye on the past, they’re not going to go out of style anytime soon – if ever. As Van Assche puts it, “Craftsmanship is essential for a luxury house, but at Berluti the focus is on reinterpreting it in a highly modern way. I like to illustrate my work here as a constant dialogue between past and present.”

Material Boy: Philippe Malouin The British-Canadian designer, who has worked for Tom Dixon and taught at the Royal College of Art, invites creative limitations to conjure his eclectic and soulful works – from chairs to buildings – into being

Words Deyan Sudjic Photography Taylor Lyttleton

Previous page: Brick lamp for Umbra Shift Above: Alexander Street chair for Man of Parts and Group chair for SCP

“Design works well when you set constraints,” says Philippe Malouin, who has worked in London since 2009. “We are always being told ‘Do what you want’ by the brands that come to see us, but no-limit design does not give good results. I would much rather be asked to design a chair in wood, with a given height and no arms, than to have no limits.” If the client won’t spell out a limit, Malouin finds a way to do it for himself. The kind of constraints that he sets for himself range all the way from making a mass-produced mirror using only a single piece of standard stainless steel tube, to a limited-edition vivid yellow desk, entirely made out of nylon by casting it in a mould. (The trick with the mirror is to press the top two thirds of the tube flat very carefully, and then polish it until you really can see your face in it, while leaving the tube intact at the other end to allow the finished object to stand upright on a table. It’s yours for £125.) The desk and a number of related pieces are collectively known as Industrial Office. The group includes a storage system, some smaller 90

Above: An unused spring in the studio Right: Malouin in the studio

accessories – such as steel hooks, desk tidies and a hat stand – along with a nylon telephone and a desk chair made from hollow steel sections that seems to be channelling memories of the 1960s seen through the filter of cubism. They are available from the New York artgallery owner Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn at her Salon 94 Design offshoot. The constraint of making a mirror out of stainless steel tubing is, conceptually at least, not unlike the one involved in making a desk out of a single material and without fixings. But there are other things going on with the Industrial Office project too; not least that Malouin loves nylon. “It has a low friction coefficient, so you can make a sliding drawer without bearings; you can get fantastic colours; its hard wearing and if it comes to it, fully recyclable.” He is well aware that to confess enthusiasm for plastic of any kind is about as transgressive these days as to go elephant shooting; but this is not some Trumpite attempt to deliberately offend. He is asking us to see this demonised material in a different way. By making it into a gallery piece he is doing the exact

opposite of designing disposable single-use plastic bottles. “The desk will never be thrown away. Used in this way, the meaning of the material is completely changed,” he says. Industrial Office can also be understood as an epitaph for the kind of workplace that was once universal, but which had already taken on the wistful quality of an endangered species even before COVID-19 finally consigned it to history. The searing colour serves to dissipate the sense of melancholy. The mirror and the desk are two very different kinds of object. One is made in relatively large numbers, the other has the aura of an editioned piece. But they both reflect Malouin’s belief in the continuing relevance of physical things that we can touch and feel. Malouin, who was born in 1982, studied industrial design in Montreal and Paris, before moving to the Netherlands where he was a student at the Eindhoven Design Academy. He showed Grace, the inflatable table initially made for his graduation project, at the Cologne Furniture Fair. When fully inflated on its folding

“We very often make things, badly, here at the studio in order to allow a design discovery to happen, and then it influences the industrial process”

Previous spread: Scirocco chair made for Volkswagen in 2008, with smaller Hardie Stools underneath

Enamel samples, ongoing works

Above: Prototype for Nude Glass

wooden legs, it’s big – able to accommodate 10 people – and sturdy enough for Malouin to be photographed standing on it. However, let the air out, and it packs away into a duffle bag. It was an inventive-enough idea to get him an internship in Amsterdam with Frank Tjepkema, one of the Dutch designers associated with the Droog group. Then Tom Dixon offered Malouin work in London, which allowed him to move to Britain in 2009 and set up his own four-person studio. He designs objects and furniture under his own name, but has also established a parallel architectural and interiors practice called Post-Office, which is responsible for, among other things, Valextra’s London flagship store and the Aesop HQ. In 2011, Vienna Design Week teamed him with Lobmeyr, Austria’s long-established glass maker, which still produces the whisky tumblers and champagne flutes designed early last century by Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann respectively. Malouin designed an installation piece called Time Elapsed, made by Lobmeyr’s technicians. It involved a ceiling-mounted rotating arm fabricated from brass, slowly 94

releasing the contents of a hopper full of sand onto the floor beneath, leaving a roughly circular trace. It could be understood as a chandelier of a kind, but it is also a reference to the use of sand in glass-making, and the act of time-keeping itself. “The flow of sand through an hourglass is traditionally used to keep track of elapsed time. It is also a physical representation of the fine line between the past and the future. Through the machine in this room, the deposition of sand forms, not minutes and hours on a clock face, but abstract and changing patterns, illustrating the link between time and decoration,” Malouin explains. In the same year, Malouin became interested in the techniques used to make chain-mail armour. His researches eventually resulted not in the piece of furniture that he had originally considered, but in a rug, made from galvanised steel wire, painstakingly put together by hand; it took 12 people a total of 3,000 hours to finish. The starting point was a near-endless supply of pre-coloured galvanised wire, of the kind used to make agricultural fences. One of the

team focused on tightly coiling the wire around a metal rod, on the end of a power drill, in a timber jig. The coils were hand cut into small rings and then riveted together one at a time in a traditional Japanese pattern that makes two rings, one on top of the other at the centre of twelve more rings linked into them, and radiates outward. The result is a deep textured metal rug that has both the quality of a woven fabric, but also of a three-dimensional object, an effect emphasised by the use of different colours for some sections. Malouin sees himself primarily as an industrial designer, with a training that has equipped him to work for mass production. He is dismissive of his own skills as a maker, but uses them as an essential part of the design process. “We very often make things, badly, here at the studio in order to allow a design discovery to happen, and then it influences the industrial process.” For the Industrial Furniture collection it was different. “Half the things were handmade by Julian Komosa and me. We taught ourselves to weld. We made cast rubber chairs.” But for

Bowls for Ensemble

Malouin making is more often a tool rather than an end in itself. His energetic commitment to tactility, combined with his interest in giving objects qualities that go beyond innocent utility, make him an attractive choice for a certain kind of company. A surprising number of Malouin’s clients are brands such as Lobmeyr that have a long tradition of craft skills, but are also interested in finding ways of reinventing themselves. 1882 Ltd, established only recently but continuing a five-generation family tradition in the English pottery town of Stoke-on-Trent, is one such brand that is attracted to Malouin’s sensibility and enthusiasm for new materials: His Dunes collection is a series of plates and bowls of various sizes that makes the most of those skills. The pieces have pitted, textured surfaces that are achieved not by Malouin making conscious decisions about every detail, or with a fully worked-out drawing. Instead the model from which the mould is made is shaped by what he calls analogue three-dimensional printing. Like Time Elapsed, the installation he made for

Detail of Scirocco chair

Lobmeyr that, within limits, distributes sand at random in a given radius, a Dune plate shows the traces of the accidental placement of material from the ‘printing’ process. The end result is a plate has the quality of an individually made and precious object, and yet you can put it through a dishwasher or use it in a microwave oven. Malouin’s work displays two complementary themes. There is the work with 1882, and other companies such as Hem from Stockholm and SCP in London, which uses industrial techniques to make affordable and useable domestic objects and furniture. And there is the work with Salon 94 Design which has the space to operate on multiple levels simultaneously. Technique, such as the use of a single mould to make a translucent rubber chair, is important. But Malouin’s work is also full of sly, almost throw away, references. (He cast concrete aggregate for the Core stool making an explicit allusion to brutalism, which is clear enough. Naming one of his Gridlock chandeliers Powell, after Geoffrey Powell, a partner in Chamberlin Powell and Bon, the architects who designed the Barbican

estate, is however sending a coded message to those who know.) Sheridan Coakley of SCP has been working with the designer since 2017, when he was impressed with one of his chandeliers in a hotel. The first result of their collaboration was the Group sofa, the Barrell table and a range of swivelling armchairs. The most recent piece is Puffer, like a soft, generously down-stuffed jacket draped over a beech-framed armchair. It was launched at this year’s design festival in London. “I’m very proud of it,” Malouin says. “It reflects on the things I was pondering during lockdown. It’s about comfort, posture – I hurt my back during that time – and support.” In a world in which designers have come to question the relevance of creating objects of every kind, Malouin’s work, which is about material qualities as well as ideas, offers an encouraging sense of continuity. It shows the solace that is to be had in surfaces that are good to touch and objects that make us feel more secure, while quietly inviting us to think about what they actually are, and what they mean. 95

Project 1: Press Mirror

Client: Umbra Shift

A tabletop mirror exemplifies Malouin’s predilection for unexpected techniques and materials, and is what he calls a “design accident”. He was experimenting with stainless-steel tubes in his studio, intending to create a shelf bracket, when he rested a half-pressed piece upright and 96

Photography Name Surname

Location: London

was struck by the idea to create a mirror instead. Rather than glass, the surface of Press Mirror is formed from this flattened tube, which has been polished until reflective. The flat plane bellows out into a cylindrical foundation, which serves as either handle or base.

Year: 2017

Project 2: Puffer

Client: SCP

Aptly for a project born from lockdown, Puffer explores the idea of comfort as function, and the importance of human interaction to design. Having conceived a solid beech frame comprised of simple geometric shapes, Malouin considered the familiarity of a down-filled puffer coat, experimenting with pockets of feathers and a two-di-

Photography Name Surname

Location: London/Norfolk

Year: 2020

mensional pattern at SCP’s factory in Norfolk, England. The resulting ‘jacket’ is removable and washable, with four separate pure feather pads creating the chair’s continuous, undulating form, gently supported by a pocket-sprung seat and zig-zag sprung back. All materials used are 100 per cent natural.

Custodians Of Craft

Having remained under family control since 1934, Italian menswear brand Canali have diversified, expanded and grown increasingly sophisticated with each successive generation

Words Jamie Waters Photography Crista Leonard Styling & set design Lisa Jahovic

Martino on Post Mundus Chair, (2012 Gebrueder Thonet Vienna)

CLOTHING CANALI 1934 THROUGHOUT Previous page: Grey pure-wool suit with Prince of Wales check This page: Double-breasted Rain Protection cotton raincoat

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While reflecting on recent turbulent months, Stefano Canali, the CEO and president of Canali, appears unruffled. The pandemic has compromised manufacturing for the Italian tailoring firm, complicated the opening of its new London flagship and confined suits to the back of men’s closets. Yet, when we speak over Zoom in early September, he seems resolute. “It was a very inefficient moment of our industrial life of course,” says Stefano, dressed in a charcoal jacket and speaking from his sun-dappled office in Sovico, Lombary. “[But] even in difficult times, such as the past months, if you have tenacity and the will to think about the future and to lay down projects and pursue them over time, you can overcome the difficulties – even the most dire ones.” Presumably this sangfroid stems in part from the fact that Canali, the menswear brand founded by Stefano’s grandfather and great-uncle, has had to overcome countless obstacles before. It was started by brothers Giacomo and Giovanni Canali in 1934 after the cotton mill they worked for in the town of Sovico went bankrupt and they were left unemployed. The siblings garnered a loyal following for their impeccably cut suits before their workshop was destroyed during the Second World War. They rebuilt the business by turning to the hot new trends of raincoats and overcoats, before stumbling again in the late ’60s when those items fell out of fashion. It was then that the next generation (Stefano’s father and uncle) assumed the reins and took the brand back to its tailoring roots. Reinvention in the face of trying circumstances is woven into the company’s DNA. In September the brand, still owned by the Canali family, celebrated its 85th anniversary by launching its Anthology project, a dedicated website featuring archival footage, interviews and reflections on its colourful past. “We decided that the time had come for us to tell the story of Canali, which is about the real difficulties that a family company goes through over time,” says Stefano. “The desire behind this

Opposite: Single-breasted three-button Kei coat in doublefaced camel wool

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project was not to go through any self-celebration; it was to give a straightforward description of the successes and difficulties that the family has gone through.” And, also, he adds, to offer a much-needed note of optimism in the tough times we’re living through. Stefano, who has been CEO since 2019 and has worked in the family business for most of his adult life, has helped the brand overcome difficulties before. Over the past five years he has shepherded Canali, which specialised in formalwear, through the wave of casualisation that consumed menswear as the Silicon Valley uniform of hoodies and trainers swept through C-suites globally. He has helped the brand diversify: relaxing its tailoring; experimenting with technical materials such as Impeccabile, an ultrafine wool that is water- and stain-resistant; and launching its Black Edition line, a casual offering of easy crewneck jumpers, nappa bomber jackets and natty nylon trainers that appeal to younger guys. The brand now has three complementary lines: the classic Exclusive collection; the 1934 collection, which adds a modern twist to timeless designs; and the more urban Black. “What we are proposing these days is an offering that allows the customer to easily mix and match products,” says Stefano. He gestures at his own outfit. “For instance, the jacket I’m wearing right now, which is canvas, totally unlined and deconstructed, can easily be matched with a jersey shirt, with a drawstring woollen chino, and suede sneakers – all made according to the same Canali values.” And what are those values, exactly? “The quality of the materials, the details, and the fact that the garments are all Made in Italy, which is a guarantee of overall quality.” Everything is made in the brand’s three workshops – in Lombardy, Marche region and Abruzzo – or in a clutch of factories spread across Italy’s boot, from Veneto to Puglia. Given Canali’s long history and commitment to craftsmanship, it’s somewhat surprising to hear Stefano speak

about his excitement for embracing technology within manufacturing. Over the past seven years the brand has been developing a unique machine to automate “nesting” – the process of laying out fabrics in a way that reduces waste when they’re cut into patterns. “By doing so, we also sped up the process, increased the quality and reduced the cost,” he says. “We reached the highest quality, which could have never been reached through traditional equipment.” And what will Canali’s factories, and its high-tech machines, be making in the coming months and years? There’s been plenty of debate about how men will want to dress when we do finally come out of the pandemic. Will there be a renewed vigour for dressing up in smart attire – or will guys stay faithful to trackpants? Stefano anticipates two distinct responses. “On one hand, people will feel eager to dress up the way they used to before the pandemic, [but] on the other, they will not forget the way they dressed down while they were home,” he says. “That’s the reason we believe it’s important not to underestimate the need for casualwear in a very broad sense – but for a brand like Canali, it’s a matter of giving the right interpretation.” Shoppers can find the brand’s interpretation in its new London flagship, an impressive three-storey structure in the heart of Mayfair. At a time when many customers have been forced to turn to e-commerce, with many physical shops temporarily closed, it is a bold statement about the power of bricks and mortar. “Online is definitely picking up – it is very convenient – but as far as luxury brands are concerned it is complementary to the physical store,” says Stefano. “The personal touch, the advice from salespeople, the chance for the customer to feel garments – these are, and will continue to be, very important for every luxury brand offering a high-quality product. The physical experience is something that cannot be replicated online.” As always, Canali is adapting to modern realities while sticking firmly to its guns.

Windscapes Mishka Henner, the Belgian-born, UK-based artist, uses the tools of the internet age â&#x20AC;&#x201C; chiefly Google Maps and Google Earth â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to create highly detailed and aesthetic artworks. Turbines, his latest and unpublished series, tracks the unexpected upsurge of windpowered turbines across America

A few years ago, I produced a series on cattle feedlots across the USA using publicly available high-resolution satellite images. Initially I was searching for oil fields, but stumbled across these huge feeding facilities by accident. The resulting works were massive abstract images punctuated with the bold colours of toxic lagoons containing the animals’ waste. The series caused controversy in the US because in many states it was forbidden to photograph feedlots – the beef industry had lobbied lawmakers for years to stop people from photographing their facilities. I guess they didn’t want consumers to know where their meat came from. The irony was that imaging satellites had already captured the images and these were freely available on Google Earth. It was a kind of virtual loop-

hole which I exploited unknowingly. After making this work, I thought, ‘I’ll never use Google Earth again. I’ve said everything I can say using this technology.’ But five years later I revisited the fields out of curiosity and noticed something different. Thousands of wind farms had sprouted across the American landscape that weren’t there before. I’ve always been fascinated by how power and the energy industry manifest themselves in the landscape. Turbines are strikingly beautiful feats of engineering and what they do is beautiful too: harnessing this constant and invisible earthly resource. They seemed to be a very human response to climate change and a clear reflection of our civilisation’s attempts to find a better, more sustainable way of producing energy.

The series is quite abstract, with landscapes full of texture and colour, but I like to think there’s a rhythm to these images too. I decided each picture would have just one turbine in the centre of the frame, and would hang adjacent to nearby turbines in the same arrangement as in the physical landscape. How they’re arranged on the wall is therefore a reflection of how the winds blow. In my thirties, I had a revelation that the screen was just another canvas and everything that appeared on it could be material with which to make art. With everything being photographed and filmed 24/7, and with tools like Google Earth and Street View at our disposal, the world is an image of infinite detail. As told to Will Higginbotham

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Previous spread: Camp Grove Wind Farm, Illinois

This spread: Meadow Creek, Bonneville, Idaho

Nine Canyon III, Benton County, Washington

Montezuma Wind, Solano, California

Perrin Ranch, Coconino County, Arizona

American Beauty

The Nationalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Matt Berninger on recording his debut solo opus Serpentine Prison, the art of magical thinking and being taught pool by Neil Armstrong

Words John-Paul Pryor Photography Arianna Lago

Last month witnessed the release of the first solo album by Matt Berninger, frontman of multimillion-album-selling masters of melancholia The National, who have carved legendary status in the canon of alternative music over the last 20 years. His debut record Serpentine Prison comes replete with production by a legend of another era – Booker T Jones of Booker T & The MGs – and it is a far more pared-down affair than the sometimes grandiose drama of the band he has fronted for most of his adult life. The record is a beguiling and deeply personal collection of songs, recorded over a twoweek period at his home studio in Venice Beach, which effortlessly taps into the anxieties of the zeitgeist and the challenges of middle age, touching on everything from existential angst and weltschmerz, to the joys and challenges of parenthood. There is a warmth and nostalgia on Serpentine Prison that might originate from his decision to record with long-term musical friends and family; but it is no understatement to say that the writing here is highly accomplished, marking Berninger as a genuine American troubadour, at home in the company of Dylan, Springsteen and Petty. Inspired in part by an explosive argument with his father, and a lesser-known covers record by Willie Nelson, Serpentine Prison is art presented with haunting and vulnerable simplicity.

How has the global pandemic, which has defined this year, affected you? Well, The National was a non-stop trip for the past seven years, and the train was not going to stop itself, so it’s been kind of good for everybody creatively, and personally, but it’s also been totally fucked up. This whole pandemic has created so many traumas for everyone, on top of everything else. The state of the planet is also very much making itself known to all of us as well, and I think people are starting to finally pay attention to the earth choking, coughing, burning and crying out.

talk about him because he can go places and do things that no other artists can and probably ever will. He just goes further. I love ‘I Contain Multitudes’, and similar, on his new record. I haven’t totally absorbed the whole JFK thing yet, but some art takes a while, and you can only absorb so much art at a time – especially when you’re in the middle of making art – because it’s going to affect you too much, or knock you off your centre. The Kennedys were incredible, but I don’t know if I could write a song about JFK, because they were also kind of privileged, sexist, silver-spoon Ivy League assholes.

California certainly appears to be on fire. . . I’m not really too close to the worst part of the fires, but a lot of friends are, so yeah, it’s a tough moment – the sky is red and filled with smoke. It’s really important that we don’t look away from what’s happening. We’re just parasites on Earth. It’s a host, you know? I was talking to Dylan about all that stuff, and he was like, “Well, the earth is ultimately going to take care of itself one way or another, and it might be doing that by getting rid of us.” I think the generation behind us must be absolutely overwhelmed.

Gore Vidal certainly wasn’t a huge fan, but still. . . a vast improvement on Donald Trump?  I still find it hard to get my head around the fact he was elected. There was interference, but I don’t blame the Russians. I blame us for creating Trump. Trump is an American, make no mistake; and he is a reflection of the worst parts of the American psyche – a reflection of white male fear. He is a very sad man, and it sounds like he was never hugged, and he never learned how to tell the truth; he just learned how to manipulate those around him to get whatever power he needed to survive. He’s a tragic character and he has made everyone afraid of each other again. He sells fear. That is what Trump is selling, and that is what all the news channels are selling – that’s how the headlines get the clicks.

You and Dylan share a kind of classic lyrical exploration of Americana – is Dylan a big influence on you?  I still have a lot to learn from Dylan, and I always

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The 24-hour news cycle of Hunter’s Kingdom of Fear. . . Right. The news always begins with that big dramatic music that grabs you. It’s like the movies – The Running Man – and that has become politics. It’s all about fear of other people, and it all comes from patriarchy. Why do Americans have so many guns? Because we are so terrified of each other. It has got to stop. People have to vote, because I believe we can cure our system; we can cure our racism; we can even cure the planet. Serpentine Prison seems to contain all these zeitgeist anxieties, but its delivery is much more laid back than the kind of heavier melancholy of The National. . . Lots of the melancholia in The National comes from Aaron [Dessner] and Bryan [Devendorf ] loving lots of really melancholic music. The National plays a certain way, somewhere between Joy Division and The Grateful Dead, and that’s coming from a genuine emotional place – and mixing four guys’ emotions into a four-minute sonic experience is the DNA of the band. There was different DNA in the writing of Serpentine Prison, because it was a different family of friends, and, of course, Booker T, who has been in so many musical families, and has been in every studio with every kind of artist. He knows how to go into any artistic tornado and figure out what that tornado is trying to do.

Was it a more isolated experience to write and record an album with different musicians? I didn’t feel alone at all. I felt the opposite. Serpentine Prison is probably the most collaborative thing I’ve ever done. I will say this, and I don’t mean this as passive aggressive, because I love being in The National; I love it – I’m not abandoning anything – but, honestly, sometimes inside The National, I feel more alone than I did on this. The dynamic of a band with two sets of brothers means they can retreat to their corners with each other, and often I felt ganged up on by those guys. When you have five grown men – all with different intentions, needs and desires – together for 20 years, travelling the world and going through all sorts of shit, it really does take its toll – just like in any family; it can cause a lot of pain, and that pain can make people retreat. The National often retreats from each other, but we have to – sometimes you have to get away; you can’t talk to your family every single day, but you can’t break up a family, either. Was the writing process on Serpentine Prison different for you? I write in so many different ways. I used to write in notebooks and create multiple versions of a single song. I think for Alligator and Boxer, I had six different dog-eared notebooks, all with versions of the same songs, and it just became

such a giant sort of burden to find where I was. Over the past 20 years, I’ve started writing in new ways, real slowly. And now I’m at a point where all I do is email myself rhymes and lyrics and kind of stream of consciousness stuff from my phone. And sometimes I’m doing that while I’m listening to music that I’ve been sent by friends, or I’m listening to someone like Willie Nelson, Lou Reed or Nina Simone. You’ve said that Willie Nelson was a key influence on this record, and your relationship with your father. . . There weren’t that many records in our house beyond the Grease soundtrack when I was a kid, but one of the records that was played all the time was Willie Nelson’s Stardust. So, every time I hear that record, I feel comfort and optimism, and it reminds me of my dad. In 2018, after The National finished recording I Am Easy to Find, I decided it was time to make my version of Stardust. I wrote to Booker T Jones, who had produced the record, and his daughter Olivia who was managing him, and they liked the idea. So yeah, this record was kind of for my dad, because we had been fighting a lot. My dad and I have always had a lot of conflict because we’re basically the same person. I mean, talking to my dad is like looking in the mirror and arguing with a mirror – a mirror that is a little wiser, but that equally doesn’t know the world you’re living in.

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Image credit

Why do you think so many of our worst arguments in life are with our family? The people closest to you and that you care about the most are the people that have the most influence on you, because they are you, in a way – all these people made you, and sometimes the things you hate in yourself, you see in those other people, and maybe if you give to them, they give to you. So, it’s always the people you are closest to that you fight most passionately and most painfully with, because you’re always kind of fighting with yourself, right? I mean, it doesn’t sound like I’m fighting with myself when I’m screaming and shit, but I know that I am. I have problems with communication. I have a hard time letting other people express things they need to express to me sometimes, but I have no problem expressing myself to other people, and that can be a double-edged sword. I can be really hard on people, including myself. What makes you happy? I guess I am the most happy when I am rested, when I’ve had some sleep and I feel like I didn’t make too many mistakes yesterday and the ones I did make, I can actually get in there and fix them. I don’t meditate, but I see a therapist and all that stuff, and I think therapy should be free. Happiness is kind of an hour-to-hour practice. I mean, if someone cuts you off in traffic, do you give them the finger, or just let

them go and slow down? That choice is there in every little moment, and then, obviously, there are the big choices, like, what are you going to do today? Are you going to go out and vote, or are you going to let someone else do those big jobs for you? Would you describe yourself as a spiritual person?  I believe in connection and art. To me, Nina Simone and Jesus are the same because I learned so much from both of them. I was brought up a Catholic, and I still consider myself a good Catholic, but I believe our whole paradigm of what God is is sexist and racist, and that permeates everything in the modern Western world. My late grandmother, Emily, went to church every morning and was the sweetest and most bubbly person, and yet she also had a real problem with gay people and Black people. I could never square those two things. But she was going to the wrong church – she should have been going to rock clubs, and to see Nina Simone, instead of listening to white men talk about a 33-yearold who was tortured to death by other white men. I remember I had conversations with her about abortion, and, you know, how many people of colour I know and how many gay people I know that she would love if she just ever met them and stopped paying attention to what her church was telling her all the time; because, whatever they said to her, that’s not what Jesus was.

So, all spirituality is a personal construct? Everything is kind of connected and part of the same organism. I mean, I think somebody like Nina Simone should’ve been as influential, and as much of a mogul, as Mark Zuckerberg – why not? What happened? I’m addicted to Instagram, but I’m addicted to Nina Simone too, and I post a lot about Nina Simone, or whatever, on Instagram; so it’s almost like it’s all the same organism, and you can change it – you can change the universe. You just have to imagine beyond what your observable world is – that’s what Galileo did, you know? There’s all this stuff about how when monkeys started eating mushrooms, and how once we got past basic survival, we started imagining what was beyond the stars, and what those stars were telling us. I mean, magical thinking is how we figured out how to land on the moon, whether that was a waste of money or not. And I actually met the guy who did that. Neil Armstrong was a friend of Uncle Howard, who was his local doctor in Ohio. He didn’t want to go to a big hospital when he had health issues, so he went through this little local quiet doctor who was discreet, and that was my great uncle. Neil Armstrong would come and play pool at Uncle Howard’s farm with us. He showed me how to hit a pool ball before I knew he had landed on the fucking moon!

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Commentary

Illustrations by Leanne ShaptonÂ

Portfolio

On the following pages, introduced by the authors themselves, are four extracts from some of the most exciting books of 2020.

In providing deeply unsettling X-rays of our times, with flashes of haunting brilliance and breakthrough moments of profound understanding, these

1 Red Pill by

authors and their characters explore micro communications, the evolving sense of self and the vast waves of change transforming society.

122 Hari Kunzru 2 Real Life 126 by Brandon Taylor 3 Diary of 130 a Film by Niven Govinden 4 The 134 Surviving Child by Joyce Carol Oates Oklahoma 137 by Rahim Fortune

Red Pill

By Hari Kunzru “‘I am,’ says the narrator, ‘the first to admit that I’m usually a hectoring and difficult writer, given to obscurity and torturous sentences.’ Nevertheless he’s been given a prestigious residency in Berlin, where he plans to write a magnum opus about the experience of the self in lyric poetry. He’s hoping for solitude, a chance to think without having to interact with other people. Unfortunately, he’s discovered that there will be other fellows in residence, and he is expected to work with them in a communal space. As a result, he’s in a terrible mood…”

At breakfast, I saw signs that other people had eaten before me. The empty cups and cereal bowls triggered all my most misanthropic impulses. Furtively, I looked around for a tray. When I couldn’t find one, I filled my pockets with fruit and bread rolls and carried a precariously piled plate and a mug of coffee out of the dining room. As I was going back upstairs, the friendly porter, Otto or Ulli, emerged from his lodge. He frowned at the plate of food I was carrying, as if he wanted to say something. “You are going back to your room to eat?” “Yes. Why?” “No reason. Please, go ahead.” Upstairs I pushed back the books and papers on my desk to make room for my breakfast. As I ate, I looked at the notes I’d made on “Wanderer’s Nightsong II.” They did not seem useful. By day, the poem might as well have been a shopping list. I sat for a long time with my coffee, looking out of the window at the lake. Not sure how to proceed, I listened to an old radio play by the French writer Georges Perec, called The Machine. It had been broadcast in 1968, when the new discipline of cybernetics, which promised to regulate and mechanize all sorts of messy human activities, seemed to be ushering in a sinister and rather antiseptic future. The play imagined a computer that had been programmed to perform endless algorithmic operations on the words of “Wanderer’s Nightsong II.” Recorded in German, the actors enunciated with robotic formality. The machine’s “controller” had a female voice, and the three “processors” sounded male. They recited the poem at various speeds, omitting, shuffling, doubling and negating lines, adding and removing syllables and eventually rewriting the text in various styles (epic, humorous, comic) and adding extra material to explode it into “encyclopedic diversification.” Despite the computer’s fancy voice interface, it also seemed to be necessary to press buttons and feed punch cards into a slot, like operating a nineteen-sixties mainframe. As drama the play

was a failure, but all the same I listened intently. Perec’s wit disguised a deep anxiety. He was performing a sort of autopsy of the poem, hunting for something among its entrails. Logically, if you’re afraid of death, you must feel you have something to lose. Perec was frantically shuffling the words of the poem, looking for this special something. By night I thought I’d found it. Now I could have taken a scalpel to my deepest feelings, and cut and cut until I was left with nothing but scraps. That night I went down to dinner and found that my table by the window had been pushed together with another table and covered in a white cloth. A candle had been lit. Four place settings were laid around a small floral arrangement. Staring at those four place settings, I felt a twinge of panic. I had, in some way, fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the Deuter Center. There would be no meditative solitude. If I wanted to eat, I would have regular and unavoidable company at the end of every day. I was, admittedly, “on a fellowship,” and there is no getting round the incontrovertibly social meaning of that word. I’d even been sent some kind of list, though of course I hadn’t read it. Suddenly, the thought of human interaction was horrifying. As if summoned from the pit, my three companions entered the room. I had the completely unfounded suspicion that they’d been watching me from the library, an oak-paneled den on the other side of the hall. I backed towards the row of windows that looked out on to the lake, baring my teeth in a fake smile. It was a terrible, brittle situation. It was like a scene from a violent computer game. We made introductions and sat down. Finlay, the young black American art critic shot his cuffs and offered me his smooth dry hand. He was a formally dressed bird, pecking at the table, arranging his feathers and fixing his beady eye. He said almost nothing during the meal, surreptitiously checking his phone. He’d been at the Deuter Center for two months, and I formed the impression

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of a man in the trenches, a survivor of some heavy bombardment. He seemed on good terms with Laetitia, the elderly scholar of Chinese, who had the same shell-shocked fragility. A tiny Frenchwoman, possibly Eurasian, with an evident weakness for silver jewelry, she fussed agitatedly, almost knocking over a glass of water with a trembling bangled hand. The big guns belonged to Edgar the Neurophilosopher, an Endowed Chair in his sixties with the air of a prosperous pirate. He sported—that would be the word—a spade-like salt-and-pepper beard and had a physical bulk that somehow factored itself into the intellectual reckoning, as if his immense body were some kind of sign or metaphor for his mind. His every word and movement conveyed an overbearing practicality: a man like a hammer looking for a nail. He took an arch and combative tone with me, firing off questions, playfully letting on that he suspected there was more to me than met the eye. “I haven’t seen you in the Communal Workspace,” he said. “No.” “Your station is untenanted, the bookshelves bare.” He made an unlikely fluttering motion with his stubby fingers, as if the books had flown away like little birdies. The effect was horrific. I told him I preferred to write in my room. “Protecting the sacred mysteries?” I didn’t know what to say to that, so I nodded thoughtfully, as if acknowledging a cogent point. He tried again. “Not wanting to show the class your workings?” Laetitia summoned a wan smile. Beneath the lacy collar of her blouse, a tiny vein throbbed in her neck. “You’re very daring,” she said to me. Daring didn’t sound so good. Daring meant I’d made myself the object of gossip. Finding no suitable reply, I performed a sort of conversational lunge. “What do you work on, Laetitia?” Dutifully she began, in a quiet and rather circumspect way, to tell me. As she spoke, Edgar affected wolfish interest, dabbing his beard with his napkin and shifting in his chair, movements that made her flinch. Though nominally an archaeologist, she was essentially a textual scholar. Other people dug, she “merely interpreted the findings.” I couldn’t decide whether this modesty was genuine, or a plea to be allowed to slip back into silence, to remove herself from Edgar’s line of sight. The ancient Chinese aristocracy used ritual objects when making offerings to ancestral spirits. She was studying the inscriptions on these objects, mostly bronze vessels and bells. She was, she said, particularly interested in a group of artifacts that seemed to have come from the household of a royal functionary of the Western Zhou period. “Which is?” “Roughly the ninth century BC, Edgar.” I see, he said, in the tone of a rich uncle bestowing a shiny penny on a young relative. The starter arrived, a little arrangement of smoked fish on a bed of salad. For a few blessed moments everyone concentrated on the food, but Edgar dispatched his portion in a few ruthless bites and resumed his interrogation. “You say a royal functionary of—what was it?—the Western Zhou. You’ve never told me what function.” “You’ve never asked. He was a shanfu. He transmitted the king’s commands.” “I see.” I couldn’t decide. Did Edgar not realize that Laetitia saw how transparently uninterested he was in her work, or did he just not care? He struck me as a man who might have trouble picking up on other people’s emotional cues. I could tell he was itching to turn the conversational spotlight on me. I was virgin territory, an unextracted natural resource. The dinner was already intolerable, more gruesome than I’d anticipated. I considered my options. Flight, the most attractive. I could be direct. Do it quick, 124

like tearing off a plaster. How rude would it be just to push my chair back and leave the room? I hesitated too long. Cutting off Edgar’s half-uttered question (“and how about …” ) I hurriedly asked Laetitia more about her inscriptions. What kind of thing did they say? Were they extensive, or just a few words? I said fascinating a couple of times. The inscriptions sounded fascinating. The Western Zhou were fascinating. She gave me a pitying look. She understood that I was pleading. “They usually describe the events that led to the vessel’s casting, usually a war, the rendering of some notable administrative service or the performance of a religious rite.” “Fascinating.” “And you? What about these hermetic scribblings of yours?” His blunt white fingers splayed on the table, Edgar had the bland but purposeful look of a farmer at the wheel of a tractor, surveying an unplowed field. “What aspect of the poetic oeuvre are you working on, up there in your attic?” Irritated by the Frenchified sneer of “oeuvre,” I told him: lyric poetry, a textual technology for the organization of affective experience, a container in which modern selfhood had come to be formulated, and so on and so forth. I remember I said something about the tyranny of utility and something else about the relentless pressures of self-preservation. I tried to model my speech on Laetitia’s, speaking quietly, using a certain amount of jargon, making no wild claims. I hoped that Edgar would be bored enough to allow the conversation to move on elsewhere. Instead, to my dismay, he clapped his meaty palms together in glee. His scoff was physical, an ejection of air. “Oho! We have a mystic on our hands!” “I’m actually an atheist.” “If you are, sir, I suspect you’re an atheist of a somewhat heretical stripe. I’m afraid I can’t give you a pass just because you say you’re not infected by the virus of religion. While I accept that there is a domain of literary language that uses words in, let’s say, a non-denotative way, I am a scientist, and as a man of science, I can’t allow anyone to plant weeds in the conceptual garden.” “The what?” I wanted to say to him, what are you talking about? I wanted to say, I’m not doing anything to your fucking garden. Instead, I stumbled on with my explanation. I tried to sound as technical as possible, defensively striving for a kind of ultra-rationality, the tone of a man speaking to another man out of the firm authority of his disciplinary manhood, but I could hear myself tripping up, giving garbled explanations of ideas that I usually found useful and clear. Edgar called the waiter and had his wineglass refilled. He toasted me as he took a sip, a gesture that not only failed to be Falstaffian, but came across as actively prim. “Why don’t we leave aside your use of the word technology. The idea of writing as a technology does have semantic content for me. But really, even if one accepts the continued cultural importance of poetry, as opposed to some mass medium, say television or social media, even radio, any of which would surely be more powerful and effective—if only in terms of reach, numbers participating—even then one has to ask about the mechanism by which poetry would do anything as powerful as, how did you put it, ‘reformatting contemporary selfhood’? I assume the use of a computer term is a metaphor, which I may discount?” He appeared to be waiting for a yes or no. I nodded mutely, in the throes of a sudden physical crisis, a painful muscular spasm that was constricting my neck and shoulders. He took my silence as a sign that he’d already won the argument and could take his time to deliver the coup de grâce, allowing himself a few matadorial flourishes on the way. “I could accept the possibility of a machine consisting of language, words assembled in a particular order which would act,

perhaps via the dopamine system, to do measurable neurochemical work. I’m talking off the top of my head here, the exact mechanism is unimportant. But I wonder, wouldn’t the words be less a machine than a set of instructions for building one?” Here, in the absence of some word or gesture from me, he inserted his own preference, doing a little dumb show of a person (presumably me) having a eureka moment. “Now he gets it! The real machine would be the array of neurons in the brain! So we can rescue some meaningful thinking from what you said, but I’m sorry to say that for me the real problem starts much earlier. The “self ” is just a folk notion. I am not trying to humiliate, simply stating a fact. The self is what we might call the elephant in the room when it comes to discussing the value of your sort of, what would you call it, cultural study? Before one starts to make wild claims about how to reprogram something, one is forced to ask, what is it that we’re reprogramming? This self that according to you, changes through history, and can be reconfigured by the unlikely means of poetry? To you, I mean, specifically. What do you imagine you are speaking about when you say the word self?” I know people throw around the phrase “my worst nightmare,” but several years earlier I had actually suffered from a recurring anxiety dream about being at a thesis defense, with a panel of sarcastic hectoring men—men like Edgar—as the examiners. When you’re angry, you’re at a disadvantage. You ought to be marshaling your materials, formulating your case, but you can’t concentrate

because you’re vividly imagining your dinner companion swallowing bits of his wine glass. I spluttered something about Being, the quality I found in myself that was more than the sum of my parts. I used the word Gestalt. I couldn’t believe the garbage that was coming out of my mouth. “So is it a little golden chap, sitting at the controls of that big mechanical body?” “What are you talking about?” “The self! Where is it? Where is it located?” “Well, obviously when it comes to lyric poetry, it’s in the field of the poem. On the page.” Edgar looked puzzled, and I congratulated myself on executing the postmodernist version of spraying mace in his eyes. Where is the self ? What did he think I was going to say, the pineal gland? Recovering, he began to wonder aloud, in a tone that mixed pity and reproach, whether I understood that consciousness was essentially epiphenomenal, and my experience of having a self was perhaps not causal in the way I imagined. My “self ” didn’t run things, Edgar told the table, like Poirot revealing that I was the one who did the murder. It was merely a sort of passenger, allowed occasionally to comment on the action. Experimental psychology and neuroscience had rather got ahead of the liberal arts, in Edgar’s opinion. My “lyric I” or whatever I wanted to call it, might, he granted, have value in the realm of intellectual history, but only as a poignant artifact of a period that was drawing to a close

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Red Pill is published by Simon & Schuster

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Real Life

By Brandon Taylor “Real Life opens with one of those idle Friday evenings in late summer. I wanted to capture what’s beautiful in the ordinary rhythms of the lives of graduate students in a Midwestern college town. I also wanted to explore the crackling tensions of these really charged friendships and alliances that you make with people who are under equal pressures in the same program. What begins as this idyllic but unremarkable lakeside meet up between friends gives way to the complicated dynamics of race and class and sexuality, all of which will have lasting consequences as the rest of the novel unfolds.”

It was a cool evening in late summer when Wallace, his father dead for several weeks, decided that he would meet his friends at the pier after all. The lake was dimpled with white waves. People coveted these last blustery days of summer before the weather turned cold and mercurial. The air was heavy with their good times as the white people scattered across the tiered patios, pried their mouths apart, and beamed their laughter into each other’s faces. Overhead, gulls drifted easy as anything. Wallace stood on an upper platform looking down into the scrum, trying to find his particular group of white people, thinking also that it was still possible to turn back, that he could go home and get on with his evening. It had been a couple of years since he had gone to the lake with his friends, a period of time that embarrassed him because it seemed to demand an excuse and he did not have one. It might have had something to do with the crowds, the insistence of other people’s bodies, the way the birds circled overhead, then dive-bombed the tables to grab food or root around at their feet, as though even they were socialising. Threats from every corner. There was also the matter of the noise, the desperate braying of everyone talking over everyone else, the bad music, the children and dogs, the radios from the frats down the lakeshore, the car stereos in the streets, the shouting mass of hundreds of lives disagreeing. The noise demanded vague and strange things from Wallace. There, among the burgundy wooden tables nearest the lake, he saw the four of them. Or, no, more specifically, he saw Miller, who was extraordinarily tall, the easiest to spot. Then Yngve and Cole, who were merely tall, and then Vincent, who just scraped under the bar of average height. Miller, Yngve, and Cole looked like a trio of pale, upright deer, like they belonged to their own particular species, and you could be forgiven, if you were in a hurry, for thinking them related. Like Wallace and their other friends, they had all come to this Midwestern city to pursue

graduate studies in biochemistry. Their class had been the first small one in quite some time, and the first in more than three decades to include a black person. In his less generous moments, Wallace thought these two things related, that a narrowing, a reduction in the number of applicants, had made his admission possible. Wallace was on the verge of turning back – he was uncertain if the company of other people, which just a short time ago had seemed somehow necessary, was something he could bear – when Cole looked up and spotted him. Cole started to flail his arms about, as if he were trying to elongate himself to ensure that Wallace could see him, though it must have been obvious that Wallace was looking directly at them. There was no turning back after all. He waved to them. It was Friday. Wallace went down the half-rotten stairs and came closer to the dense algal stink of the lake. He followed the curving wall, passed the hulls of the boats, passed where the dark stones jutted out of the water, passed the long pier that stretched out into the water, with people there, too, laughing, and as he walked, he glanced out over the vast green water of the lake itself, boats skimming its surface, their sails white and sure against the wind and the low, wide sky. It was perfect. It was beautiful. It was just another evening in late summer. An hour before, Wallace had been in lab. All summer he had been breeding nematodes, which he found both boring and difficult. Nematodes are free-living, soil-dwelling microscopic worms, only about a millimetre when fully grown. His particular project was the generation of four strains of nematodes, which then had to be crossed together very carefully. It involved, first,

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the induction of a genetic lesion that was to be repaired in such a way as to yield a desired modification – the termination or amplification of genetic expression, the flagging of a protein, the excision or addition of a segment of genetic material – that was to be shuttled from one generation to the next, handed down like a gap or freckles or left-handedness. Then there was the simple yet careful math required to combine that modification with other modifications in other strains, changes that sometimes required a marker or a balancer: a tweak to the nervous system that gave the creature a rolling rather than sinuous behaviour, or a mutation in the cuticle that rendered the nematodes thick like miniature Tootsie Rolls. There was also the dicey prospect of generating males, which always seemed to result in animals that were too fragile or uninterested in mating at all. And then, as always, the dissolution of the worms and the extraction of their genetic material, which had a way of revealing, after weeks of careful breeding and tracking of multiple generations, that the modification had been lost. Then it was a mad scramble, days or weeks spent backtracking through old plates trying to locate the modification among thousands of teeming progeny, the wild and fevered relief of locating – at the last possible moment – the golden nematode in the mass of wriggling animals, and then the resumption of the slow, steady breeding process, herding desired chromosomes and wicking away the undesired ones until the sought-after strain emerged at last. All through the beautiful days of summer, Wallace had been working and failing to breed this one strain. An hour before, he had been in lab, removing from the incubator his boxes of agar plates. He had been waiting three days for this generation to roll into the next, just as he had been waiting months for this result. He would gather the babies, the fine, almost invisible hatchlings, and separate them, until at last he had his triple mutant. When he checked the status of his nematodes, however, the tranquil blue-green surface of the agar, uncannily like human skin in its soft firmness, was not so tranquil. It looked disturbed, he thought. No, not disturbed. He knew the word for it. Contaminated. Mould and dust, like one of those horrible recreations of a volcanic event – whole civilisations frozen in ash and soot and coarse white stone. A soft pelt of green spores covered the agar and concealed at first an oozing bacterial film. The gelatine looked as if it had been scoured by the end of some rough brush. Wallace checked all of his plates in all of his plastic tubs and found shades of horror on all of them. The bacterial contamination was so bad that it leaked through the lids and onto his hands like pus from a wound. It was not the first time his plates had become contaminated or mouldy. This had been common in his first year, before his technique and cleanliness improved. Before he knew to be vigilant, cautious. He was different now. He knew enough to keep his strains safe. No, this level of carnage seemed beyond the scope of mere carelessness. It seemed entirely unaccidental. Like the vengeance of a petty god. Wallace stood there in lab, shaking his head and laughing quietly to himself. Laughing because it was funny to him in a way that was difficult to clarify. Like a joke leaping unexpectedly from an entirely random arrangement of circumstances. In the past few months, for the first time in his four years of graduate school, he had begun to feel that he might be at the edge of something. He had gotten to the perimeter of an idea, could feel the bounds of its questions, the depth and width of its concerns. He had been waking with the steadily resolving form of an idea in his mind, and this idea had been pulling him through all the unremarkable hours, through the grit and the dull ache when he woke at nine to return to work after going to sleep at five. The thing that had 128

been spinning in the brilliant light of the tall lab windows, like a speck or a mote of dust, had been hope, had been the prospect of a moment of brief clarity. What did he have to show for all that? A heap of dying nematodes. He had checked them only three days before, and they had been beautiful, perfect. Into the cool darkness of the incubator he had placed them to sit undisturbed for three days. Perhaps if he had checked them the day before. But no, even that would have been too late. He had been hopeful this summer. He had thought, finally, that he was doing something. Then, in his inbox, the same as every Friday: Let’s go to the pier, we’ll snag a table. It seemed to him as good a decision as he was capable of making at that moment. There was nothing left for him to do in lab. Nothing to be done for the contaminated plates or the dying nematodes. Nothing to be done for any of it except to start again, and he did not have it in him to take the fresh plates from their place on the shelf, to lay them out as if dealing a new hand of cards. He didn’t have it in him to turn on his microscope and to begin the delicate work necessary to save the strain if it wasn’t already too far gone, and he wasn’t ready to know if it was already too late. He did not have it in him. To the lake he had gone. The five of them sat in a curious, tense silence. Wallace felt like he had interrupted something by showing up unexpectedly, as if his presence somehow shifted the usual course of things. He and Miller sat across from each other, nearest the retaining wall. Over Miller’s shoulder, a veil of delicate roots latched to the concrete, dark insects teeming in its recesses. The table shed burgundy paint like loose hair from a mangy dog. Yngve pulled grey splinters from bald patches left by the paint and flicked them at Miller, who either didn’t notice or didn’t care. There was always something vaguely annoyed in Miller’s expression: a subtle snarl, a blank stare, narrowed eyes. Wallace found this both offputting and a little endearing. But tonight, resting his chin on his hand, Miller just looked bored and tired. He and Yngve had been sailing, and they still wore their tan life vests open over their shirts. The tassels of Miller’s vest dangled like they felt bad about something. His hair was a tangle of damp curls. Yngve was thicker and more athletic than Miller, with a triangular head and slightly pointed teeth. He walked with a permanent forwardcanting posture. Wallace watched the muscles in his forearms tighten as he dug out more shards of weathered wood, rolled them into little bundles, and flicked them from the end of his thumb. One by one they landed on Miller’s vest or in his hair, but he never flinched. Yngve and Wallace caught each other’s eye, and Yngve winked at him as if his mischief were a private joke. On Wallace’s side of the table, Cole and Vincent had brought each other as close as possible, like they were on a sinking ship and were praying to be saved. Cole stroked Vincent’s knuckles. Vincent had pushed his sunglasses back across his forehead, which made his face seem small, like that of a needful pet. Wallace had not seen Vincent in some weeks, maybe not since the barbecue that Cole and Vincent had thrown for the Fourth of July. That had been over a month ago now, he realised with a thrum of anxiety. Vincent worked in finance, overseeing chunks of mysterious wealth the way climate scientists tracked the progression of glaciers. In the Midwest, wealth meant cows, corn, or biotech; after generations spent providing America with wheat and milk and poultry, the Midwestern soil had given rise to an industry that built scanners and devices, a harvest of organs, serums, and patches sprung from genetic mash. It was a different kind of agriculture, just as what Wallace did was a different kind of husbandry, but in the end

they were doing what people had always done, and the only things that seemed different were meaningless details. ‘I’m hungry,’ Miller said, sliding his arms open on the table. The suddenness of the gesture, his hands sweeping close to Wallace’s elbows, made Wallace flinch. ‘You were right there when I ordered those pitchers, Miller,’ Yngve said. ‘You could have said something then. You said you weren’t hungry.’ ‘I wasn’t hungry. Not for ice cream, anyway. I wanted real food. Especially if we’re drinking. And we’ve been in the sun all day.’ ‘Real food,’ Yngve said, shaking his head. ‘Listen to that. What do you want, asparagus? Some sprouts? Real food. What even is that?’ ‘You know what I mean.’ Vincent and Cole coughed under their breath. The table tilted with the shifting weight of their bodies. Would it hold them? Would it last? Wallace pressed against the slats of the tabletop, watching as they slid on slim, dark nails. ‘Do I?’ Yngve crooned. Miller groaned and rolled his eyes. The flurry of easygoing taunts made Wallace feel a little sad, the kind of private sadness you could conceal from yourself until one day you surfaced and found it waiting. ‘I just want some food, that’s all. You don’t have to be so obnoxious,’ Miller said with a laugh, but there was hardness in his voice. Real food. Wallace had real food at home. He lived close by. It occurred to him that he could offer to take Miller home and feed him, like a stray animal. Hey, I’ve got some pork chop left over from last night. He could caramelise onions, reheat the chop, slice bread from the corner bakery, the hard, crusty kind, soak it in grease or batter to fry. Wallace saw it all in his mind’s eye: the meal made up of leftovers, converted into something hearty and fast and hot. It was one of those moments in which anything seemed possible. But then the moment passed, a shift in the shadow falling over the table. ‘I can go to the stand. If you want. I can buy something,’ Wallace said. ‘No. It’s fine. I don’t need anything.’ ‘Are you sure?’ Wallace asked. Miller raised his eyebrows, scepticism that felt like a slap. The two of them had never been the sort of friends who traded kind favours, but they saw each other constantly. At the ice machine; in the kitchen where they took down abandoned plates and bowls from the shelves to eat their sad, brief lunches; in the cold room where the sensitive reagents were kept; in the hideous purple bathrooms – they were thrown together like surly, unhappy cousins, and they needled each other in the amiable manner of enemies too lazy to make a true go at violence and harm. Last December, at the departmental party, Wallace had made some offhand comment about Miller’s outfit, called it something like the folk costume of the Greater Midwestern Trailer Park. People had laughed, including Miller, but for the next several months Miller brought it up whenever they were together: Oh, Wallace is here, I guess the fashionista will have some comment, then a flash of his eyes, a chilly, crooked smile.

In April, Miller paid him back. Wallace came into the department seminar late and had to stand near the back of the room. Miller was there too. They were teaching assistants for the class before the seminar, and it had run over, but Miller had left early while Wallace stayed behind to answer questions for the undergraduates. They stood against the wood panels, watching the slides crawl along. The visiting scholar was famous in the field of proteomics. Standing room only. It pleased a petty part of Wallace to see that Miller hadn’t gotten a seat either. But then Miller had bent down close to Wallace’s ear, his breath damp and warm, and he’d said, Didn’t they move your people up front? Wallace had felt a cool, reluctant thrill at Miller’s proximity, but in that moment it turned into something else. The right side of Wallace’s body went numb and hot. When Miller looked down at him, he must have seen it on Wallace’s face – that they were not this kind of friend either, that the list of things they could joke about did not include his race. After the lecture, among the jostling line for free coffee and stale cookies, Miller had tried to apologise, but Wallace had refused to hear it. For weeks thereafter, he had steered clear of Miller. And they fell into that chilly silence that comes between two people who ought to be close but who are not because of some early, critical miscalculation. Wallace had come to regret the impasse, because it precluded their discussing the things they shared: They’d both been the first people in their families to go to college; they had both been cowed upon arrival by the size of this particular Midwestern city; they were both unusual among their friends in that they were unaccustomed to the easiness of life. But here they were. Miller’s surprised silence, the dark caution on his face, told Wallace everything he needed to know about his offer. ‘Well, all right then,’ Wallace said quietly. Miller put his head down on the table and groaned with exaggerated plaintiveness. Cole, who was kinder than the rest of them and could therefore get away with such gestures, reached over and ruffled Miller’s hair. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said, and Miller grunted, then swung his long legs out from under the table and stood up. Cole kissed Vincent’s cheek and shoulder, and another cold shard of envy darted through Wallace. The table behind Yngve was filled by a league soccer team in cheap nylon shorts and white T-shirts on which they had drawn their numbers, loudly discussing what to Wallace sounded like women’s tennis. They were all fit and tan and covered in dirt and grass. One of them wore a rainbow headband, and he pointed aggressively at another man, shouting at him in Spanish or maybe Portuguese. Wallace tried to make out what they were talking about, but his seven years of French gave him no purchase on the flurry of diphthongs and fragmented consonants. Yngve was on his phone, his face caught up in its glow, more pronounced now that night was coming on. Darkness seeped into the sky like a slowly spreading stain. The lake had turned metallic and ominous. It was the part of a summer evening just past the blue hour, when everything began to cool and settle down. There was something salty in the wind, a charged potential

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Real Life is published by Daunt Books

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Diary of a Film

By Niven Govinden “This novel is a love letter to cinema, and a desire to inhabit the inner lives of the great auteurs. I’m thinking of Visconti, Rossellini, Ozu, Cocteau, Wenders, Varda, Cassavetes, Melville, Rohmer, Almodóvar and Fassbinder – all strong storytellers with an equally powerful visual language. Coming from a filmmaking background at Goldsmiths, the book is partially born also from a long-held desire to make a film, but in the only way I know how to do it competently – through writing. The opening, narrated by a director about to premiere his latest film at an Italian festival, explores both the egotism and perennial uncertainty involved in making work, and the importance that chance plays in its creation (as with life).”

I flew to the Italian city of B. to attend the film festival in late March. Our entry into the competition, a liberal adaptation of William Maxwell’s novel The Folded Leaf, had been officially confirmed, and I was expected to participate in three days of interviews and panels to promote the release, with a jury screening on the second evening. My co-producer Gabrijela had arrived at the start of the week to prepare; also the cast, who were busy hawking other projects, about which I was both curious and jealous. It’s hard to think of actors, good actors, as anything other than your own once you’ve worked with them. I knew they would be expecting me to see their films while I was there, wanting their betrayals to be blessed, and I anticipated that it would hurt as much as watching them with other lovers; a feeling especially pronounced when the new film was still warm on my lips. Eight months had passed since the production had wrapped and I missed their company, particularly the two leads, Lorien and Tom, who had a youthful ease that blended seamlessly into our production family. Nothing of the film could be changed at this point and I had made my peace with it, absorbing the heightened pressure of meeting strict deadlines in order to screen in this competition. There were other festivals through the spring and summer, but this was the one that mattered to me, having previously brought me luck and with it a sense of calm. But for all my confidence I arrived in the city feeling apprehensive. The trip had the air of both a working holiday and a funeral. There was excitement for the next stage in the film’s journey, one in which I envisioned only good things, but also a finality, for with it my participation would cease. It was for Gabi, the actors and their publicists to take the baton and run for the glory they dreamed of. I could return to my home town of S., regroup, and retreat into my ideas. My first impulse on arriving at the airport was to have the car take me directly to the hotel, so keen was I to see Lorien and Tom again, to hear their voices and to feel their

breath. I wanted to suffer their tender, respectful mockery, typical of young Americans who had been brought up well, but I was also aware that this would be the last time that I would play their loving God, and I wished to delay that. They had not yet seen the completed film so therefore a realm existed where they could not be disappointed in me. It wasn’t the first time that I explicitly sought the love of my actors. There’s an almost supernatural aura of openness, risk-taking and safety present in the shooting of some films that does not exist in others. As always we had been pressured by a tight shooting schedule and insufficient money, but The Folded Leaf was nourished by magic. It informed the breaking-light-of-dawn shooting and held its power over us until the end of the day. Drunk on its potency, it interrupted my sleep for much of the principal photography, so keen was I not to lose this holy atmosphere, fearing the mist would clear on waking. I am not a superstitious man – there is no room for the Ouija in filmmaking – but we were all touched by the same feeling, and simply wished this gift to stay. It was something I hoped was honoured in the final cut, and by which Lorien’s and Tom’s faith in me would be justified, as mine already was with them. I asked the driver to take me to the harbour where the fishermen were delivering their catch, with the strict instruction to collect me at the same spot in half an hour. My late grandparents lived in a fishing village, so there was something resolutely familiar in watching the boats come in. Fishermen from the one trawler docked carried a procession of buckets to a line of trestle tables holding large polystyrene boxes loaded with ice. I was taken back to childhood and the surprise of seeing what was there, watching now as the buckets were swiftly upturned, a shower of fish clattering in their new ice boxes. Then, as now, there was something depressing about being unable to compete with nature, and how much of its infinitesimal wonder could outsmart the camera. My film was set in the Italian countryside, and

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though the gardens were lit by angels, the fruit trees fulsome and glowing, they did not contain the life that tumbled before me. I thought of parental disappointment when a child follows a lesser path, only the state of the film was entirely down to my hands; I was no bystander, but responsible for all of it. The woman on the other side of the table was shouting at me for blocking the view of others who were waiting to buy. I was awake then to the laughter of the grounded fishermen as they sluiced the blood and guts from the cobbles with buckets of fresh seawater, and the attack cry of the gulls that hovered above. Get a move on, came one man’s voice. What’s he doing? asked another. Make your decision somewhere else, mate. I seemed to move further back into the crowd, but I knew that I would not leave without buying a fish, eventually taking what was left in the box, a grouper and a sickly looking grey mullet, and going back to find the car. The bag was of the thinnest white plastic, gossamer to the touch, which allowed the rough texture of the grouper’s scales to graze my palms as I walked. I could have held the bag by its flimsy handle, but instead, I held out the package horizon- tally before me, as if making an offering to anyone who would stop and acknowledge my presence. My film was offered on similar terms. By walking into the hotel and the suite reserved for my first meeting with Gabi and the cast, and then subsequently with journalists and potential distributors, I too was making an offering, as pure and sincere as the catch turning rigid in my hands until I suddenly felt embarrassed, dumping the package in the gutter before we drove away. I looked at my gesture rotting in the sun until it was out of sight, hoping the gulls would sense that it was there and quickly destroy the evidence. Talons tearing through plastic to reach flesh and bone; pecking and chewing until nothing remained. The hotel, a grand palazzo converted in the early sixties, always felt like home. It was a repository for both my successes and my failures; rooms where I had celebrated with abandon or cried bitter tears when the work was misunderstood. Once I stepped into the lobby and made myself known the process would begin, unstoppable in its certainty and form. I had no memory of why I wanted to make this film, what impulse had driven me to push this project above all other contenders, or what it was in Lorien’s and Tom’s previous work which had spoken to me of their potential as leads. I was unable to pinpoint the hour of shooting when I first saw magic and was compelled even more to push through, so sure of the story I was telling; fearful, of course, but determined. If anything, I wished to run from it. I knew of an espresso bar a short walk away, where I could drink coffee at an outdoor table, smoke a cigarette, and give myself some final space before the onslaught, and in walking I felt a purpose regained. It was tucked deep in the backstreets where the district changed into a working hue, an important factor in me wanting to go there, for to be away from the tourist throng was to be among the living. In finding the place I grew more certain of myself. I heard the strength in my voice as I caught the barista’s eye and ordered a double; assurance in my posture as I leaned forward slightly, my palms lying flat on the counter. The craving for a cigarette did not fade but I was aware of the corrosive effect it would have on my voice, which needed to hold up for hours of interviews. I took my cup and found a space in a broken line facing the road, where it was possible to inhale the smoke of those sun-chasing customers: two men in their seventies, and a woman closer to me in age, middle fifties, each in their own space, minding their business. The sanctity of the smoker and the beauty of neighbourhoods, of pals and familiarity; the satisfaction of being in your corner of the world. I fought to have my film edited in my home town of S. as I had done with previous films, but the new financial backers had insisted I worked in a larger city, vetoing the expense of shipping prints and other masters from labs and sound studios to the set132

up I had spent years building. I lived for three months in a nondescript apartment block ten minutes’ walk from the edit suite, a mostly business district that turned to a ghost town in the evenings. Twelve weeks of regimen, forensic and all-consuming, away from my family for longer than I would’ve liked, in an artificial environment where the pleasure of gentle neighbourhood repetition was cast aside for something greater. This was working life, one which I was used to, only I had felt more withdrawn than before; a mixture of my lonely domestic arrangements and the luxurious sterility of my setting. Standing outside here eclipsed the blue of the edit suite; the silence that could be found through a city’s white noise, the simple pleasure of coffee, with dappled sunlight hitting your face. This was where prosperity lay, not in the artificial nature of what I had filmed and submitted to the festival jury. I had to stop thinking this way: I’d made something beautiful but was struggling to accept this simple truth. Not for the first time; I’d had difficulty throughout my life with this. Do you want a cigarette? the woman asked. I have one here if you need. Am I making it that obvious? I said. I’m trying to be good, but the smell always gets the better of me. Ah! You’re an ex-smoker! There’s a saying that there’s no one worse than one who’s reformed, she said. In which case, I am profoundly guilty, I said. The woman was of a similar height and held my gaze as she spoke. When she reached into her pocket before holding a crumpled cigarette carton before me, she laughed, but in a way that was gently conspiratorial rather than disparaging and judgemental. She looked capable of that, too, in the flash of her eyes as a trail of teenagers on scooters thundered past, but in our interaction she was a nicotine comrade-in-arms; it was an international code that I had relied on many times over the years to break the ice. I could’ve spent the day at this spot, alternating between a bar stool at the counter and catching what sun there was outside. I felt something toxic being drawn out of my system the longer I stayed there, my mood lifting, fears waning. The woman was good company, and we covered everything from the price of coffee to the gentrification of the city. We talked of the lack of street signs in the area and how that was both a curse and a blessing, keeping the tourists away, but also creating difficulty for those genuine guests of the vicinity. My mother is a very proud woman, she told me. When she came to visit my new apartment she walked in circles for over an hour rather than ask a stranger for help with directions. We lamented the spiralling graffiti though we appreciated the art of it, and the city’s failure to tackle the mountain of dog shit. I had a boyfriend in the eighties who was a graffiti artist, she said. He was one of those lost kids who wanted to disrupt. Disappear all night, and in the morning you’d hear of a new wall being covered in the city. He wasn’t one of the vandals you see now, those kids on bikes who tag their names or stupid slogans on the shutter of their local pharmacy or whatever. He was an artist without the knowledge or means to break into art. The streets were all he had. What happened to him? I asked. Some of the guys in New York and London who were doing that became superstars, no? He killed himself, she said. He was closer to his paintings than I thought. Preferred being in darkness. I’m sorry to hear that, I said. It was a long time ago, she replied. Another life. I can show you where a couple of the murals still exist, if you’re interested. She spoke with bravado to show that she had moved past her grief, but a shine in her eyes indicated how much the work still meant to her, and her incipient need to keep it remembered. I accepted immediately, from both curiosity and a sense that something greater would come from the invitation, whether in terms of the art or the ease of the woman’s company. My nervousness as a child had made a nervous adult. It had taken me until my mid-twenties to learn how to cast this aside; how my filmmaking would never flourish until I lost my shyness and was open to

possibilities beyond the security of a film set. If a stranger asked you to see something new, you went without question, even if terrified. Finding the courage to talk to people who interested you, romantically and in other ways. You learn these things as you grow comfortable in your own skin, but for me it was a conscious process to leave the safety of my head, and I was unexpectedly reminded of this in the woman’s offer. The opportunity had not presented itself in a long while. Or another time if you’re not sure, she said. Just giving you a chance to escape in case you’ve changed your mind. I have no idea what your plans are for the day. You look as if you’re expected somewhere else. What gives you that impression? I asked. You’re the only one here wearing a suit, she said. That’s not to say that no one owns a suit here. We’re not savages. But yes, the cut of your suit, and the fact that you keep looking at your watch. A man who’s either missed an appointment or is planning to miss one. It’s all the same to me. I won’t take it personally. I’m inundated with offers. She was neither sour nor frosty as she spoke, just straightforward with a dry sense of humour which made me like her even more. It was something the younger actors had to learn, to not take themselves so seriously. In my production company there was no room for hesitants, and in that regard she felt like a kindred spirit. I could almost see her working there, even though I knew nothing about her. We dinosaurs need to stick together, she said. Show these hooligans that they’re not the only ones who know how to live. In leaving the bar, she offered her hand to reflect the business nature of our transaction. I’m Cosima. When I attempted to reply she cut me off with a smile and gentle wave of her wrist. I know who you are, she said. We have televisions in

these parts, maestro. We visit the cinema. You’re not so bad, raising her eyebrow as she spoke. Not so bad. I laughed in a way I hadn’t for a while. We left the bar and walked along the narrowing street which squeezed traffic out completely, and through a residential square flanked by a domed church and a butcher’s shop. The heart of Italy in twenty metres, she said, stretching out her arms. Prayer and blood. And food, I said. Yes, that too, she replied. This is a country that is never far from its guts. Past the butcher was an alley that wound behind the back of the church and its small graveyard – bones piled upon bones – and from there down a row of steps that led to a longer road. We were moving away from the residential area, towards the domain of garages and workshops, abandoned factories and boarded-up office blocks. In time, this too would be cleared, adding to the myth of the city – a reflection of the modernity it wished to embody, as well as the romance of what was left behind. We live in a medieval picture book, she said. You of all people should appreciate that. It’s why I enjoy coming here, I said, but this is more than a museum. The city has a pulse, you can feel it; the tensions and contradictions inherent in living somewhere with so much history. It’s a zoo, she said. And we’re the animals. Everybody gaping as you go about your business. You’re having a row with your lover on the way to work and everyone takes pictures, because a pretty girl crying on a bridge is the European cliché. You go for an eye appointment but you can’t get into the doctor’s office because a tourist has vomited on the front step, the handle and, somehow, the doorbell. So much beauty, so little time. Again, the raised eyebrow, and my prolonged laugh. She was special, this woman

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Diary of a Film is published by Dialogue Books

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The Surviving Child

By Joyce Carol Oates “The Surviving Child is a story of a special sort of ‘haunting’: the rippling effect of suicide on survivors, and also upon those who are drawn into the orbit of survivors. Just as there are ghosts in all cultures, so too there are haunted places. In The Surviving Child, the second wife comes to live in the very house in which the first wife had committed suicide not so many years before. In the extract here, she is drawn to the sequestered room where the suicide poet had hidden herself away from the family to brood, dream, write poetry and keep a journal.”

“This house is not ‘poisoned’—not by her.”  Not to Elisabeth has Alexander uttered such words, but she has overheard him on the phone, speaking with Wainscot relatives. His tone is vehement, contemptuous. Who has been spreading such rumors of—hauntings… He will not be driven away from this property, he has said. Hendrick House will endure beyond individual lives. It will endure long after her. Elisabeth never has to wonder who her is. Sometimes, the contemptuously uttered pronoun is she. Bitterly Alexander says, “Nicola came here with a pretense of wanting a ‘quiet’ life, and she never made a home here. Her clothes were in suitcases. Her books were in boxes. Ana did most of the unpacking, shelving books. Nicola couldn’t be bothered. She was immersed in her poetry, her precious career. She had her lovers, women and men. She’d promised that she had given them up when we were married, but of course she lied. Her entire life was a lie. Her poetry is a lie. When she was sick with depression, her lovers abandoned her. Where were they? Hangers-on, sycophants. And her ‘fans’—they were waiting for her to die, to kill herself. The promise of the poetry. But they hadn’t anticipated that their heroine would take her own daughter with her. That, they hadn’t expected.” Alexander speaks defiantly. Elisabeth listens with dread. Like holding your breath in the presence of airborne poison. She doesn’t want to breathe in hatred for the deceased woman. She doesn’t want to feel hatred for anyone. How beautiful the house is, Elisabeth never tires of marveling. But beware. Beauty’s price.  Sucking your life’s blood.  Strange, wonderful and strange, and uncanny, to live in a kind of museum. Classic Cape Cod architecture, period furnish-

ings. Especially the downstairs rooms, flawlessly maintained. Of course such maintenance is expensive. Much effort on the part of servants and on the part of the wife of the house. Polished surfaces, gleaming hardwood floors. Curtains stirring in the ocean breeze. High, languidly turning fans. (No air-conditioning in any of the landmark houses of Wainscott, so close to the Atlantic!) Long corridors, with windows at each end looking out (it almost seems) into eternity. Rot beneath, shine above. Rejoice, love. Lines from one of N.K.’s chanting poems, “Dirge”—Elisabeth hadn’t realized that she’d memorized it. Does the door lock? No?  Still, the door can be shut. Though no one is likely to follow her here, except (perhaps) the child, Stefan, who is at school on this rainy, windy autumn day. Alexander is in Boston for several days, and even if he were home, it isn’t likely that he would seek her out in this part of the house, in which he has little interest. On the third floor, up a flight of steep steps, Elisabeth has discovered a small, sparely furnished room in what had been, in a previous era, the servants’ quarters. Here there is no elegant silk French wallpaper as in the downstairs rooms. Not a chandelier, but a bare-bulb overhead light. A single window overlooking sand hills, stunted dun-colored vegetation, the glittering silver of the Atlantic. In the room is a narrow cot, hardly a bed. A bare plank floor. No curtains or shutters. Not a closet, but a narrow cupboard opening into the wall, rife with cobwebs and a smell of mildew. At a table in this little room, at a makeshift desk, Elisabeth sits, leaning on her elbows, which have become raw, reddened. Much of her skin feels windburned. For here at the edge of the ocean there is perennial wind: gusts rattling windowpanes, stir-

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ring foliage in tall pines beside the house. Elisabeth has brought her laptop here, but she often leaves it unopened. Her work on the Imagist poets beckons to her, as if on the farther side of an abyss, but—she is afraid—she is losing her emotional connection with it. Reading and rereading passages of prose she’d written with conviction and passion as an eager young scholar at the Radcliffe Institute, and now she can barely remember the primary work, let alone her enthusiasm for it… The spare impersonal poetry of H.D. seems so muted set beside a more impassioned and heedless female poetry. Elisabeth strains her eyes, staring toward the ocean. Windstirred waves, pounding surf frothing white against the pebbly shore. Overhead, misshapen storm clouds, and in the pines beside the house, what appear to be the arms, legs of struggling persons—naked bodies … Promiscuous life rushes through our veins. Unstoppable. An optical illusion of some sort. Must be. Elisabeth can see the thrashing figures in the corner of her eye, but when she looks directly at the agitated foliage, she can’t decipher the human figures, only their outlines. The impress of the (naked) bodies in the thrashing branches, where they struggle like swimmers in a rough surf. Turning her head quickly to see—if she can catch the figures in the trees. “No. You can’t catch them.” Behind her, beside her, a throaty little laugh. It is Stefan, who has crept noiselessly into the room. Very quietly, though very quickly, like a cat ascending the steep steps to the third floor of the house, Stefan must have come to join her. Hadn’t she shut the door to the little room? He’d managed to open it without her hearing. Elisabeth is startled but tries to speak matter-of-factly. For she knows children do not like to see adults discomforted. “Catch—what?”  “The things in the trees. That never stop.”  Stefan speaks patiently, as if (of course) Elisabeth knows what he is talking about. “You can see them in the corner of your eye, but when you look at them, they’re gone. They’re too fast.” But there is nothing there. In the trees, in the leaves. We know that. Elisabeth’s heart is pounding quickly. Almost shyly she regards

the stepchild who so often eludes her, seems to look through her. Stefan seems never to grow, has scarcely grown an inch in the months since Alexander first introduced them. My new, dear friend Elisabeth. Will you say hello to her? Smile—just a bit? Shake her hand? Oh, Stefan’s curly hair is damp from the rain! Elisabeth would love to embrace him, press his head against her chest. Droplets of rain like teardrops on his flushed face and on the zip-up nylon jacket he hasn’t taken time to remove. Something very touching about this. Has Stefan hurried home from school, to her? “Stefan! You’re home early…” Stefan shrugs. Maybe he hadn’t gone to school at all but simply hid in the house somewhere, in one or another of the numerous unused rooms. Or in the forbidden place, the garage. Stefan ignores his stepmother’s words, as he often does. Knowing that the words that pass between them are of little significance, like markers in a poem, mere syllables. He is at the window, peering out. Wind, rain, thrashing pine branches, an agitation of arms and legs almost visible … Convulsed with something that looks like passion, we tell ourselves, Love. Whose words are these? Elisabeth wonders if Stefan can hear them, too. It is true, she thinks. The convulsions in the trees. Our terrible need for one another, our terror of being left alone. To which we give the name Love. “She taught me how to see them—Mummy. But they always get away.” Elisabeth isn’t sure she has heard correctly. This is the first time that Stefan has uttered the word Mummy in her hearing. “Now Mummy is one of them herself. I think.” For the remainder of the long day, feeling both threatened and blessed. The child had come unbidden to her. A wraith may not be approached, for a wraith will retreat. But a wraith may approach you. If he wishes. Stefan darling. Try to forget her. I have come to take her place, I will love you in her place. Trust me!

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Extracted from Cardiff, By the Sea, published by The Mysterious Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

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Commentary

Oklahoma

By Rahim Fortune

The Oklahoma-raised, New York-based photographer Rahim Fortune talks to Port’s photographic director Max Ferguson. Max Ferguson: I’m really interested in the fact that you grew up in rural Oklahoma, and the landscape features heavily in your photographs. Perhaps you could start by talking about what it was like growing up there?

Rahim Fortune: Growing up in Oklahoma was great as a kid; we had access to wide-open spaces and animals all around, in a pre-smartphone era. Much of our time was spent outside using our imagination, making treehouses or playing games in worlds of our own creation. It wasn’t until I got older that I was able to process the problems the small community faced – better understanding the hardships of my mother, grandmother and extended family. This work was extremely personal, so I chose to focus on the landscape and my remaining family in Oklahoma.

There’s a photograph of yours that I keep going back to: It’s a gas heater against a wall, with a painting of a glass above it; a paraffin lamp sits on a little shelf and there’s also an electric lamp with a crooked shade. So much going on in the image; perhaps you could speak a bit about it?

The photo you mention appears in Oklahoma vol.2, and is one of my favourite photographs in the series. The photo, titled ‘Propane Heater’, was made inside my grandmother’s home near Coalgate, Oklahoma. The image features multiple items typical in an old home. In Oklahoma we do not have commercial gas providers, so individual propane tanks are filled and used for hot water and heat. The kerosene lamps are dated but kept on hand for tornado season, which brings frequent power outages… All of this accompanied by a few picture frames and walking sticks. Though my urge to photograph the heater was instinctual, upon editing, the photo really struck me for its graphic quality and also for the fact that it shows so many small nuances of life in rural Oklahoma.

You now live between New York and Texas. How do you find taking photographs in New York?

Working in NY was very informative to my work; I was introduced to a world of art and internships that taught me valuable lessons both as an artist but also as a business owner. Upon arriving, there was a bit of a culture shock. Up to that point all of my work was about the American South and my family. It was at this time, while attending a community college in Manhattan, that I began to look at my surroundings as the focus of my work. I realised that my fellow students and friends were valuable realms of cultural production. I generally tend to be a positive person, and so I apply that same outlook to how I portray the spaces I photograph. A lot of my early photos in NY show my classmates, neighbours and people I encountered in the city as a skateboarder. I love people, and in NY folks are in the streets much more, as opposed to Oklahoma where folks are a bit more closed off or tucked away. I am grateful to share space with so many creative and inspiring people.

There’s a classical style to your work, and it’s hard to think about photographs of the American landscape without thinking of tropes of the ‘road trip’ and the early American photographers, but you’re not really an outsider in Oklahoma – this is/was your home I’m curious as to what your references are and what it’s like photographing a place you’re so familiar with?

I worked on this project over the course of four years. When I was first approaching making photos it was a bit of a buffer between myself and the experience of returning to Oklahoma for the first time since my mother passed away a decade earlier. It was interesting walking the line of inside/outsider; there is a particular feeling that comes from being in the landscape that raised you after a 10-year absence. My initial approach was a bit naive, though I often go back to those photos for inspiration. As I developed the work over multiple trips to Oklahoma, I was much more moved by artists like Robert Adams, William Christenberry and Ron Tarver. I think a lot about visual language when sequencing this work.

Is this work finished yet?

I plan to continue exploring stories and themes in Oklahoma, but for this chapter of the work it is finished. The photographs were expressions of a part of my life that I’m no longer in; now I’m more interested in seeing how these photos function in the world. Next year I will be showing these photos for the first time in an Oklahoma museum, which I’m very excited for. 139

Styling Mitchell Belk

Photography Jeff Boudreau

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Hair: Hiroshi Matsushita Creative production: Roxanne Doucet, Agence Triptyque Casting: Lea Gugler Talents: Ousmany, Sehn, Siyi, Nader, Enzo, Alex

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Left: SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO RIght: MARGARET HOWELL

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ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA

FENDI

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BERLUTI

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Left: Red knitted jumper and orange leather trousers, both by BOSS, Brown puffer coat by TODâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S Right: Knitted jumper by BOSS

CELINE HOMME BY HEDI SLIMANE

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NANUSHKA

BURBERRY

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CARTIER

BOTTEGA VENETA

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GIORGIO ARMANI

LOUIS VUITTON

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BERLUTI

From The Rooftops

Styling Mitchell Belk

Photography Daragh Soden

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DIOR

GIORGIO ARMANI

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LOUIS VUITTON

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BOSS

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BOTTEGA VENETA

GUCCI

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Full looks MARGARET HOWELL Boots TODâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

HERMÃ&#x2C6;S

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SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO

CANALI

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ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA

FENDI

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Hair: Tommy Taylor using R+co Make Up: Anna Inglis Hall using Oskia skincare & Glossier make up Model: Reece @ IMG, Myles @ Kult London & Akeem @ Select Casting: LG Studio Production: The Production Factory Umbrellas throughout supplied by London Undercover www.londonundercover.co.uk

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PRADA

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prada re-nylon

words jamie waters

Photography Jesse Laitinen

Set Design Paulina Piipponen

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CLOTHING AND ACCESSORIES PRADA RE-NYLON RANGE THROUGHOUT

Nylon owes a great deal to Prada. Back in 1984 Miuccia Prada, the brand’s creative director and co-chief executive, unveiled the Vela, an unfussy black-nylon backpack that instantly changed consumer perceptions of the synthetic material from cheap to covetable. It challenged long-held ideas of what a luxury item looked like and inspired a new era of minimalist, practical dressing. It was also Prada’s first ‘It’ bag, catapulting the family-run brand to new heights of fame and desirability. The textile has remained a linchpin of Prada collections ever since. So it makes sense that, more than three decades on, the Milanese house has made clear its intentions to reduce waste and tackle sustainability by zeroing in on nylon. Re-Nylon, launched in 2019, is a line of classic Prada pieces redone in a special type of recycled nylon. It started out with six bag styles for men and women, yet the plan is to go big: Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada Group

head of marketing, has said the company is aiming to replace all of its virgin nylon with recycled nylon by the end of 2021. For a company that uses 700,000 metres of nylon annually, it’s a massive aim. The latest step in Prada’s Re-Nylon venture is a collection unveiled in September at Selfridges. Part of Project Earth, a new sustainability initiative by the Oxford Street department store, the Prada pop-up features accessories like bucket hats, cross-body bags, totes, belts and hightop trainers – plus ready-to-wear collections for men and women. In this ground-floor space, you’ll find agenda-setting Londoners poring over clean-lined jackets with studded buttons, slim-cut trousers, Bermuda shorts and puffer jackets. Rendered in a strict palette of black or white, these eco-friendly garbs look much like Prada’s beloved mainline pieces – which is precisely the point. This monochromatic medley

is presented against a backdrop of short films produced by National Geographic that spotlight sustainability pioneers, including a Chinese factory specialising in upcycling garments, a fishing-net-recycling enterprise in Cameroon and a factory in Arizona transforming old carpets into high-end materials. All Prada’s Re-Nylon designs are made from Econyl, a trademarked ‘regenerated nylon’ created via a complex process of recycling fishing nets and bits of carpet, rope and other synthetic cast-offs. Aquafil, a family-run Italian textile firm, is behind the material; after years of producing virgin nylon, it worked with scientists to figure out how to break down synthetic waste to its core chemical elements and rebuild it into a greener substance. Spun at a factory in Slovenia’s Vipava Valley, the resulting yarn is basically the same as virgin nylon – in how it looks and feels – but is a chemically different 243

material. Crucially, unlike regular nylon, Econyl’s manufacturing process doesn’t produce enormous nitrous oxide emissions; plus, the fibre can be endlessly recycled without its quality diminishing. It’s a noteworthy – albeit more expensive – alternative. In recent years, as sustainability concerns have skyrocketed, Econyl has become a darling of the fashion industry. The fibre is now featured in the collections of luxury and sportswear brands alike, who appreciate its light footprint and striking likeness to regular nylon. Rather unusually for a textile, Econyl has become a powerful brand in its own right. Designers advertise its use in their collections and, according to the hype-tracker Lyst, in 2019, internet searches for ‘Econyl’ were up 102 per cent on the previous year. 244

Nonetheless, Prada’s Re-Nylon project is surely the most high-profile embrace of Econyl seen to date, and it promises to springboard the fibre into a new level of public consciousness. The initiative fits into a broader effort by Prada. Last year the house made its green intentions clear, publishing a sustainability strategy that’s guided by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and covers environmental policies (including the footprint of stores and clothing production), as well as social issues such as diversity in hiring and promoting art and culture. Furthermore, in a first for a luxury brand, it inked a €50 million sustainability-linked loan with Crédit Agricole Group, meaning the interest rates will change if it hits certain eco targets. It also joined the environmentally focused

G7 fashion pact initiated by French president Emmanuel Macron and banned fur from its collections. More recently, Prada launched Sea Beyond, an educational programme created in partnership with UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, and funded by Re-Nylon proceeds, which involves presenting webinars about ocean waste to high-school teachers and students from cities including Berlin, Johannesburg and Shanghai. Viewed together, this phalanx of projects signifies Prada’s intentions looking forwards. Green is the goal – and Re-Nylon is the most emphatic emblem of this commitment to change. By swapping the brand’s signature material for an eco-friendly alternative, it’s showing that it is determined to shift its mindset from the inside out, one thread at a time.

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H i s D a r k M a t e r i a l s

S t y l i n g A d a m W i n d e r

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P h o t o g r a p h y B a u d P o s t m a

CLOTHING Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello THROUGHOUT

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Grooming: Yumi Nakada-Dingle @Management artists using Leonar Greyl Casting: Lock Casting Retouching: IMGN Studio Model: Mats Vandenbosch Van Mil @ Supa

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STOCKiSTS

ABC ACNE STUDIOS AMI PARIS APC ARMANI/CASA B&B ITALIA BEN SHERMAN BERLUTI BOSS BOTTEGA VENETA BURBERRY CANALI CARTIER CELINE CRAIG GREEN COS

acnestudios.com amiparis.com apc.fr armani.com/casa bebitalia.com bensherman.co.uk berluti.com hugoboss.com bottegaveneta.com burberry.com canali.com cartier.co.uk celine.com craig-green.com cosstores.com

KLMO KIKO KOSTADINOV LANVIN LEMAIRE LOEWE LONDON UNDERCOVER LOUIS VUITTON MANOLO BLAHNIK MARGARET HOWELL MARNI NANUSHKA OLIVER PEOPLES

kikokostadinov.com lanvin.com uk.lemaire.fr loewe.com londonundercover.co.uk louisvuitton.com manoloblahnik.com margarethowell.co.uk marni.com nanushka.com oliverpeoples.com

DEFGHI DIOR DRIES VAN NOTEN DUNHILL ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA FENDI GIORGIO ARMANI GLOBE-TROTTER GUCCI HERMÈS ISSEY MIYAKE

dior.com driesvannoten.com dunhill.com zegna.co.uk fendi.com armani.com globe-trotter.com gucci.com hermes.com isseymiyake.com

PRSTV PAUL SMITH PER GOTESSON PERSOL PRADA RALPH LAUREN RAPHA X ROBYN LYNCH RENE SCHEIBENBAUER ROLEX SAINT LAURENT SALVATORE FERRAGAMO STONE ISLAND TOD’S VIU EYEWEAR

paulsmith.com pergotesson.com persol.com prada.com ralphlauren.co.uk robynlynch.co.uk renescheibenbauer.net rolex.com ysl.com ferragamo.com stoneisland.co.uk tods.com shopviu.com

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THiNGS I LiKE / THiNGS I DiSLIKE

Susan Sontag’s diaries reveal a witty fondness for the humble list, as a way of conferring value and exploring the realms of her knowledge. Her lists of likes and dislikes have become justly notorious. Here, visionary publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove picks up that baton.

Being a Queer Black woman / My family / Motherhood / Crying with laughter / Reading / Dancing / Talking on the phone / My bed / My bed before, during and after sex / Being naughty / Being nice / Deep friendships / Music / Red wine / White wine / Crémant / English sparkling wine / Champagne / Amplifying brilliant people / Trees / Debating / South London / South Londoners / Protesting / Independent bookshops / My grandma’s cooking / Standing up for rights / Sleeping / Bass lines / Intellectual minds / Grilled prawns in garlic and chilli / Creativity / House plants / Maldon salt / Cellos / Scotch bonnet peppers / The works of John Berger / Girls skateboarding / Nike trainers / Late nights / Self-expression / Laughter / Chicken / Open fires / Self-exploration / Listening / Thinking / Sharp pencils / Beautiful scratchy handwriting / Roast dinners with a big table of friends / Everything about Jamaica / Excellent, caring medical professionals / Open minds / Understanding Black and African heritage and history / Enquiring attitudes / Toni Morrison / Water / Good lighting / Inclusivity / Drums / Pantry cupboards / Curry / ’80s EastEnders / Ethical fashion / Singers / Cuddles / White rice / The ’90s / Working from home / The arts / The Obamas / Grilled fish / Simple holidays / Humility / Carnival / Culture pages in newspapers / Europe / Readers loving my books / Photography / Painting / Cleaning my ears / Carbs / Boozy afternoons / M&S knickers / Warmth / Scotch eggs / Afro hair / Rappers / Berlin / Our pets / Books / Being independent / Eating / Soul and R&B singers / Magazines / Calm / Twitter

Dislike

Boris Johnson / Donald Trump / Fascism / Racism / Transphobia / Sexism / Slavery / Inequality / Hierarchy / Brexit / Prosecco / The Royal Family / White privilege / Lime pickles / Metropolitan Liberal Elite / Poverty / Abuse / Trauma / Entitlement / Privilege / Ignorance / Bitterness / Anger / Violence / Ear wax / Terrible lighting / Division / Sirens / Hoarding / Current EastEnders / Designer sunglasses / Waste / Chintz / Show-offs / Wild rice / Working in an office / Not being able to draw / The Tories laughing to prove a point at someone else’s expense / Selfishness / Smartphone addiction / Housework / Team bonding exercises / Tabloids / Multiple cats / Injustice / Horror films / Indecision / People saying ‘but they are really nice’ when someone fucks up / Ketamine / Mediocrity / Divisions / Smoking / Bossiness / Black squares / People trying to finish off your sentences / People making you choose between kittens and babies / Drinking from plastic cups / Plastic / The price of capitalism / Books as a fetish / The cold / Victorian dramas / Exercise / Being sick / Bad teeth / Celebrity without achievement / White girls thinking they are ‘more black’ than me / Lying / Twitter