doverstreetmarket.

com
london tokyo beijing
artist oscar murillo
VOLUME 2
NUMBER 7
goincase.com/clarerojas
LITTLE JOE
The last time I was in Berlin I stumbled upon a small, London-based, film magazine called Little Joe. At
first I was attracted to the way it was printed, using a Risograph, which is a vintage photocopy machine
that prints in multiple colors. It is rare to see any publication done this way now. However it was
only after opening it up that I decided this was going to become one of my favorite contemporary film
magazines. Inside the issue of Little Joe that I picked up were articles titled, Hollywood Hallucinations:
Parker Tyler, Myra Breckenridge and Mae West, a video library by John Cameron Mitchell, as well as
a set of inserts containing a short essay called Modernism Watchin’, a concise addendum to Evil People
in Modernist Homes in Popular Films, all printed on bookmarks. Upon further reading I came to realize
that not only was this a wonderfully researched and beautifully crafted publication, but that it is, as far
as I know, the first modern film publication that comes from a gay point of view. However, where many
magazines might play this up, Little Joe weaves its politics quite organically into its pages. The articles
are interesting to anyone with a love of both new and old cinema, Hollywood scandal, and pretty much by Aaron Rose
anything esoteric and transgressive. Kenneth Anger should be very proud. Images courtesy Little Joe

ANP: Where did the title Little Joe
come from and why did the idea come
to make a magazine about cinema from
a queer point of view?
Sam Ashby: I had always wanted to run a
magazine but for whatever reason never
quite made it beyond the idea phase. Then,
one drunken night a few years ago, I watched
Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s Flesh,
starring ‘Little Joe’ Dallesandro. It was one
of those incredible moments when a piece
of art breaks your head open and alters your
perception. It was the sight of seeing him
laying face down, naked on the bed and the
realization that there was no other magazine
out there discussing these kinds of films.
From that point on, I set about trying to craft
a magazine that would inspire the deep (and
not so deep) personal connections with films,
a queer response to most magazines focusing
on what’s new and upcoming.
ANP: Do you come from a cinema
background? Critics? Filmmakers?
Fans?
SA: I’m a graphic designer by trade and have
been designing film posters for about 6 years.
Michael Pierce: My background is in
exhibition, starting out in festivals, becoming
a projectionist, before running my own events
including midnight movie screenings. But
I’d say we are both frustrated filmmakers at
heart! Isn’t everyone?
ANP: While there is definitely a
through line in your publication that
deals in homosexual topics, the films
you write about are not necessarily gay
films. How do you choose which films
and directors to write about?
SA: When I thought up the subheading “a
magazine about queers and cinema, mostly”
to describe our focus, I was using the term
“queer” in the more archaic sense, a way
to describe someone that did not fit in,
was different somehow, as well as nodding
towards the more appropriate contemporary
meaning which is more plural. Neither does
it necessarily have to relate to sexuality. I find
so many of these other definitions around
sexuality restrictive, but using “queer” is a
way to celebrate that dissidence.
MP: I think the magazine has always
attempted to avoid the simple tick box style
definitions of sexual orientation. In terms
of choosing the content, we often have a
haphazard approach, stumbling across
directors we haven’t heard of through
screenings and old texts. We also create a
connection with our various contributors and
trust them to pitch and research topics that
interest them.
ANP: While you do write about
modern filmmakers, you tend to have
a distinct fascination with films from
Hollywood’s heyday. Where does this
come from?
MP: For me, Little Joe is about turning away
from the fetishisation of the new, and instead
placing the emphasis on what we share and
connect with in the past, without overdosing
on nostalgia. In this sense, universally we
all share some kind of inherited, response
to the classic Hollywood era: the iconic film
stars, the lifestyles and the locations, but
we, as a society, are also fascinated when it
is subverted through the pre-Code films and
expose texts like Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood
Babylon. It’s like unearthing some secret
history, uncovering the real lives behind this
heavily orchestrated facade.
ANP: What are the differences in your
opinion between films made today
and films from the past? Both positive
and negative.
SA: Most stuff we get to see at the cinema now
is shit. We get fed so much crap by the big
studios, but if you look around you can find
some amazing alternative programmes, often
discovering films from the past that feel fresh
and still have a contemporary resonance.
MP: I think it is too hard to generalize
between old and new films because there
are just too many titles that will remain
unseen, but what I think has changed is the
exhibition landscape, and the lack of diversity
in cinemas. It’s fine if you live in a big city, but
there are many places that you’ll have to drive
for miles to see a decent film in the cinema.
ANP: The first thing that I noticed
about your magazine was that it is
printed on a Risograph. This is a
painstaking process. Why did you make
this decision?
SA: I wouldn’t say it’s painstaking, but
depending on the print run, it can be a
laborious and therefore more expensive
process. We actually printed the third issue
with a normal paperback printer but the
aesthetic of risograph suited the feel of the
first two magazines, which dealt with slightly
more underground topics. We wanted to
marry the feel of a professional journal with
the vitality of a fanzine, which risograph
perfectly exemplified. Risograph is also more
environmentally friendly so we use it for all
our other print work including posters, flyers
and the recent Clubhouse reader.
ANP: Speaking of that, besides
publishing you also run a small
clubhouse and film club. Can you tell us
about these projects?
MP: As a film magazine, it made sense to
try and exhibit some of the more obscure
films we discuss, especially as some are not
commercially available. At the start of this
year, we were lucky to be awarded Film
London’s Community Pilot Fund, which
started our A Little Film Club screening
programme. We hold monthly screenings
at two fantastic London venues, the Rio
in Dalston and the Cinema Museum in
Kennington. In April, we created a Clubhouse,
a temporary screening structure, in a gallery
as part of the Fringe! gay film festival, inviting
previous contributors to select films for us to
show. We also created the Clubhouse reader
to give each film a context and is available to
purchase on our website.
ANP: What are your future dreams for
Little Joe?
SA: Obviously, we are working towards
making all our projects fully sustainable
and continuing with the magazine but since
organizing the screening programme and
building the Clubhouse, we have realized
the need for the publication to actively build
communities, bringing people together in a
shared space. We hope to build on this in
the future.
MP: After finding out that many of the
films we discuss are not available on DVD,
we have often thought about moving into
distribution, but for now, we want to focus on
local activities to help build a community of
readers and supporters.
www.littlejoemagazine.com

RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 6

 KEITH
ARNATT by Francesca Gavin
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY THE ARTIST’S ESTATE
& MAUREEN PALEY, LONDON

breathing invisibly through a tube. There is a sense of

slowness as the artist sinks. He walks the line between
exposure and the hidden. There is something again very
melancholic about the images beneath the absurdist
laughs. A metaphorical representation of ashes to ashes,
dust to dust.

‘Self-burial’ was originally transmitted as an

interference project on German TV; an artwork
inserted amongst the regular programming. How the
television connection emerged is not definitely known
but is suspected to be through his friend, the artist
Charles Harrison, and perhaps funded by a collector.
The images could only be taken by another individual,
questioning Arnatt’s feelings about creation and what
it was to be an artist. Off TV the work was presented as
a group of 9 photographs. Their scale was surprisingly
tiny—10 x 8 at the largest. If things were later enlarged
by curators for specific shows, Arnatt himself had little
input. The British Council would tour badly printed
laminated versions around the world. Yet the original
scale gives a sense of intimacy to the images. An artist
removed, working privately on a small scale, examining
his place in the world.
The nine images feel firmly like a set. Grouping
and placing things together grew to define Arnatt’s
practice—with series ranging from cans to images of dog
piss to crawled notes. It was a way of making sense of
the world, highlighting its unexpected beauty, its innate
poetry, and often its ironic comedy. “It wasn’t that he
developed a kind of a wit as a defensive entry into the
work. It might have just been a pragmatic thing. In
the period of say Monty Python there’s a slightly John
Cleese-y aspect to him as a whole. The nature of what
he was doing that was picked up on and faintly weird,”
Matthew notes. Arnatt’s pieces don’t come across as
one-liners. It’s almost the humour is masking layers of
serious thought.
As Arnatt’s work moved on – just as he erases himself
from the work in the self-burial – human figures are
removed. “He probably didn’t realize what he was
In 1961 Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days was published and performed revealing about himself, relationships with other
for the first time. The story, in the Irish writer’s typically absurdist strange style, focuses on an older people, issues to do with the way he felt about his body.”
woman Winnie, buried to her chest in the earth. At first cheerful, as the play continues she becomes Matthew considers. “He was plagued in the later part
increasingly morose. She is sinking into the ground. Only her head rests above the earth. Speaking of the of his life from his middle ages on by certain types of
play, Beckett said, “I thought that the most dreadful thing that could happen to anybody, would be not to depressions and anxieties. His own unhappiness. The
be allowed to sleep so that just as you’re dropping off there’s be a ‘Dong’ and you’d have to keep awake; work wasn’t a vehicle for him to address issues to do
you’re sinking into the ground alive and it’s full of ants; and the sun is shining endlessly day and night with how he felt about people or bodies or physicality
and there is not a tree … there’s no shade, nothing, and that bell wakes you up all the time and all you’ve or the human experience. I never heard him talk about
got is a little parcel of things to see you through life.” those things.”
The play and Beckett’s ideas are an interesting pairing with Keith Arnatt’s artworks from the same Although it can be melancholic, as his work developed
decade. The late British artist began working with the idea of burial in the late ‘60s. Although he later there was also a deep sense of beauty. Arguably his most
became labelled as a photographer, at this time his focus was on sculpture and land art. Around 1967 haunting series was ‘Pictures from a Rubbish Tip”
he began to dig shallow holes in the ground and place boots in the ditches. “At the time he was living on (1988-9). Ideas around 18th century romanticism,
the Yorkshire Moors,” he son Matthew explains. “If you came across the crest of the hill, you’d see this Samuel Palmer and William Blake emerge in these
faint pink light or green light. Once you came closer you’d realize they were a pair of workman’s boots vibrant color photos of garbage. There is something
with light tubes. There was a combination of things to do with light and stringing things out across the quite obsessive or personal about Arnatt’s focus. His
landscape, then burying things inside the landscape.” This developed into mirrored boxed placed within images are intensely beautiful, with their painterly
the soil so they were entirely disguised until you stumbled across them - reflecting the ground and the sky sense of fluid disintegration. His son agrees, “When he
in their sunken linear beds. becomes able to control the surface of the photograph
At some point these insertions transformed into works about burying things deeper. Whilst working as they become very immaculate things. You have this
an art teacher in Liverpool, Arnatt got his students involved. He lined up around 100 people along the fantastic obsessive control of detail. He’s making these
beach in Formby, burying them up to their necks. The surviving image show their faces lifted as they tried images that come from noticing the quality of light
to breathe. What at first appears humorous, also has an understated violence. Humanity trapped and playing over the surfaces of ponds the fact that they’re
helpless from the encroaching waves. “I don’t think he was a great reader of fiction,” his son recalls, “but I full of rubbish is almost irrelevant.”
think he probably read a book by JG Farrell called ‘Troubles’. I think it starts with a recreation of the Irish Although often accessible, there is nothing straight-
troubles during the 1940s. It starts with something that apparently the IRA used to do, which was to take forward in Arnatt’s world which is perhaps the point.
people who had assisted the British government out of their homes, and bury them at the tideline on the Despite our greatest attempts we can never really hide
beach and wait for the tide to come in.” Dark inspiration indeed. from reality or organise the world before chaos sets in.
Two years later Arnatt buried himself. In a series of images documenting the 1969 action, Arnatt is
depicted in the deserted British countryside. In the murky landscape, the artist stands looking directly at Keith Arnatt 1930-2008
the camera. In each consecutive photo he drops, until at the end, he is absent beneath a mound of dirt, His estate is represented by Maureen Paley

RVCA .COM / 7
 ANP: How did Castle Face start?
Brian Lee Hughes: I started Castle Face Records with my
friend John Dwyer. He’s basically my favorite artist and we
met when I was filming Rock Star Scars back in 2003 in San
Francisco. He was in the film and gave me music for it from
Coachwhips, his band at the time. I loved that band and I
filmed some live performances for the Coachwhips for their
film Double Death. I was super bummed when they called it
quits. He was experimenting with lots of bands before and
after that. My fave of those is Thee Oh Sees (aka OCS). We
then collaborated again when he gave me Oh Sees songs for the
skate film I co-directed with Ada Bligaard Søby in Denmark
for a Faile collaboration called Lavender Or Danish Skater
Perfect Fantasy Death. His music made the film special and we
liked how it came out so we kept looking for more stuff to do
together.
John Dwyer: I asked Brian to fund an Oh Sees record because a
certain mid-to-big size label had strung me along with possibly
putting out Sucks Blood (the first CF release). When the time

CASTLE
came and they flaked we had no one to release the record.
Castle Face was born out of frustration with labels who want
you to sign over all your rights to them and then turn their
back on bands when they aren’t willing to sign over everything.
BLH: Basically I was dreading the thought of The Oh Sees
going the way of Coachwhips so I offered up so we just started
a label to put out records for them. We put out Thee Oh Sees’
Sucks Blood record and we were off.

FACE
JD: The label just grew from there. San Francisco is a miasma
of creative energy and at the time a lot of our friends were
making fantastic sounds and we facilitated the release of these
tunes. It’s been an interesting project, but I can safely say
that the label has derived equal strengths from all three of us
working together. I love it.
Matt Jones: Around 2006 John and I met at a party and we
started talking about records. My day job since 2005 has been

RECORDS
in sales for a vinyl manufacturing company called Pirates
Press. I told him he could come by and scan his art and get
it set up, and I’d help him put the whole thing together. Sort
of voluntarily, I ended up doing all the layout, painstakingly
photo shopping the labels for “Sucks Blood” so that the A
side and the B side said different things, but in the same
handwriting, laying out the type, that kind of thing. John and I
became closer and closer friends and from that point forward
I was the go-to guy as far as getting things made. I think I’ve
cracked Photoshop on every Castle Face release so far. Later
on John dug the Blasted Canyons stuff I was doing and put out
the record. I guess it was about a year ago that Brian and John
asked me to officially be a part of the label but I was already
pretty much there.
ANP: How did you guys come up with the name for
your label?
JD: “Castleface-ing” was a term Patrick Mullins and I used to
describe a person’s face when they got too high….hence
Castle Face.
BLH: The alternate advancement of the Castle Face meaning
came, for me, from when we we’re editing the 40+ hours of
live footage and endlessly amazing stories that we filmed in
between locations for the LP/DVD Thee Hounds Of Foggy
Notion. It was a mind-bending avalanche of non-stop Dwyer
comic gold, and original drummer Patrick Mullins never, ever
cracked a smile. He maintained the most magically numbing
straight face. When you’re editing, you notice. That to me is
Castle Face.
ANP: Is there any kind of philosophy behind
the project?
JD: I like to think that we get to put out a young band’s early
work locally, and if the relationship continues from there then
that’s great. We are friends with all the people we work with
and they are mostly Bay Area (with the exception of Total
Control). We love homegrown.
MJ: I’m just here to facilitate John’s vision and make it
possible, and that’s an honor. Someone said “FUBU for
stoners” once and I’ve always liked that.
BLH: John cooks up most of it in his head. For me it’s a DIY
rally cry to fight boredom, which I have to thank him for. My
first John Dwyer meeting came in 2003 when I just landed in
SF from Denmark where I was living and occasionally working
with Lars von Trier. The darkness of divorce was looming
for me and I was hunting for distractions. After a hot tip that
Coachwhips were going to perform at the serene, scenic San
Francisco Twin Peaks overlook on Flag Day, I was hooked.
It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. Powered by a
generator in an out-of-commission ambulance, they destroyed
my mind and the minds of dozens of Chinese tourists, the
Mexican vendors and the North Beach wedding photo crowd.
They had this art joke crew Double Dutchess in fake pregnant
outfits jumping rope while drinking water from gallon-sized
Popov bottles and their pitbull was shredding plastic baby dolls
and a stroller. It was a life-saver. I wanted more of that. I try
to keep that Flag Day in mind whenever we make anything. So
yes, Fight Boredom.
ANP: I see that Castle Face is really a multi-media
project. Incorporating records, books and videos. Was
that always the idea from the beginning?
MJ: Dwyer’s always cooking up something fresh and out-there,
we’re just trying to keep up...
by Clark Rayburn Castle Face Records is John Dwyer, BLH: We all do arty stuff and I’ve done vids for Thee Oh Sees
PhotoGRAPHy BY matt jones Brian Lee Hughes and Matt Jones. and Ty Segall but I don’t think any of it has been Castle Face
specific. We make vinyl and sell vinyl. 
JD: Really it just started out as a way to put out LP’s and CD’s,
but the growth is very, very welcome and very satisfying.

RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 8

ANP: Tell us about Group Flex. I was under the impression that flexi-
discs were dead and gone. What was the concept and how did you get
it made?
JD: I gotta give credit where it’s due. Matt Jones is truly the flexi king. We hope
to issue one book a year for as long as it’s fresh. We just have to put the sticker on
the new ones that say “DON’T TEAR MY PAGES OUT!”
MJ: As part of my job at Pirates Press, I’ve been working on making flexis for
the past three years. I worked with engineers on what was necessary to outfit
machines, and then experimented with different production processes to
make them work. Since we’ve been making them work I’ve been pushing the
boundaries as to what you can make them do...besides the mean task of selling
them, of course.
BLH: The flexi-book of singles was where Matt Jones came in. He has a day job at
Pirates Press making all our candy colored vinyl when he’s not melting faces with
his band Blasted Canyons. We wanted to make a Castle Face singles collection
and wanted to make it like those National Geographic Bird Song and Whale Song
spiral bound books of our youth. 7” square with a spiral binding and card stock
alternating with flexis from each band and a center cut hole all the way through
it. You can flip the pages to a record, drop the whole book on the turntable, place
the needle and it plays.
MJ: Dwyer was like “can we do this?” and I looked at the National Geographic
book for a while and said “yes!” but, with a nervous foreboding. As with any
process you’re trying to jerry-rig along the way, it was a bumpy ride. The first one
I had all bound up, I took it by John’s house so he could check it out, and I was all
proud, like “check this out”...and it wouldn’t play because it was too wide! I had
to cut them all down and then round the edges off because I didn’t account for
certain turntables that follow the outside edge of a record in their construction...
we had prototypes hanging off the edge that played fine back in the office...eesh.
We learned a lot of lessons with that one.
BLH: Retro-Nat Geo reborn with William Keihn art and two songs from each
from Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall (with Mikal Cronin, covering Bowie’s Fame and
Suffragette City!) and The Fresh & Onlys and Bare Wires and Blasted Canyons
and a hidden track from Here Comes The Here Comes pressed into the laminated
cardstock inside the back cover. Yum.
ANP: The art direction on all your releases is really fantastic.
Does one person do all of your designs or do you work with
different people?
BLH: Coming from you that’s some high praise! Thanky. We’re all pretty lusty
about art and each band is responsible for all their music and art. All the bands
RVCA .COM / 9
are Bay Area and that comes with a built-in aesthetic and that vibe feeds well with
the posse of like-minded SF art stars. I helped to get the V1 Gallery off the ground
in Denmark, but John is the true artist and most of our friends dabble at a high
level. Artists all seem to be up for collaborating and Matt always has orgasmic
colors for our vinyl. We want to make stuff that transcends the stuff level and
becomes treasure. 
MJ: There’s been a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but I think it all hangs together
pretty well.
JD: Its mostly local friends of ours, and we’re proud to showcase their work.
ANP: What projects are you working on for the future?
MJ: We’ve got a few things cooking right now, but the big news is that we’re
working on Group Flex Vol. 2. It’s going to be even crazier than the first one, and
we’ve been promised tracks by Total Control, White Fence, Mikal Kronin, Burnt
Ones, as well as the old gang, Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, Fresh And Onlys, Blasted
Canyons, and Warm Soda (Matthew Melton of Bare Wires’s new band).
JD: The Mallard Too!!!! They will destroy us if we don’t mention them. They’re all
UFC fighters.
MJ: Art for the next book is going to be by Joe Roberts, he’s a total madman. New
tricks up sleeves. Start doin’ reps now, we’ll all be flexin’ soon...
BLH: I’ve still got Blasted Canyons’ 2nd Place on repeat. One-sided clear vinyl EP
with a Joe Roberts etching on the B-side. It rules and when you slide it out of the
sleeve it’s fun to watch even the most jaded record collectors dribble a lil spittle.
And The Mallard!!! Seriously ‘Yes On Blood’ is an amazing debut.
MJ: I’m excited to be doing a split between Blasted Canyons and Running (from
Chicago) as well. They’re one of my favorite bands in a long time and I’m stoked
to finally get something together with them.
ANP: Do you ever feel like you’re screaming into the void?
MJ: Never with Castle Face! It’s probably Dwyer’s fault, but there seems to be a
lot of goodwill towards this label and its releases...cheers to keeping that up.
BLH: I’m the quiet one. Besides, this is like Fantasy Island without the morality
tale ending.
JD: Hopefully the void yells back…or at least echoes...or has a little reverb on it.
www.castlefacerecords.com
FULTON
RYDER
by NORA ATAPOL
Photography by Fabiola Alondra / Fulton Ryder

For the last few months I can’t tell you how many people
have told me about this new space in New York City
called Fulton Ryder. Part gallery, part bookstore, part
publishing house, rumor has it that within its walls
contains the best collection of exclusive publications,
ephemera, and objet d’art in the city. The store is
essentially a collector’s dream. But there’s a catch. The
location of Fulton Ryder is kept completely secret and it
is not open to the public. It is one of those places that is
shrouded in mystery, and as a result of course becomes a
heavy topic of conversation. So in the interest of trying to
uncover this mystery, us here at ANP decided to do some
independent research. Well readers, you are in luck. Our
efforts paid off. Unfortunately we are not able to disclose
the location, and reading this article won’t necessarily get
you into the store, but at least one layer of the onion has
been peeled away. Also, on a further note, Fulton Ryder
recently published, “Notes From A Revolution” about
the legendary 1960s activist group The Diggers. We were
able to obtain a short interview which follows here:

ANP: How did the concept for Fulton Ryder come about?
Fulton Ryder: Context is content
ANP: Would you consider it a bookstore? A gallery? A cabinet
of curiosities?
FR: Boundaries overlap and unify, combining the high and the low, “the
sacred and the profane,” as John McWhinnie would have said. From
sexy pulp paperbacks to unique artists’ books and top shelf literature
to Malcolm X air fresheners, Dan Colen whoopee cushions, Wallace
Berman collages. All of these things live together, harmoniously, as
cultural artifacts of our time. 
ANP: Is there an overarching theme to the curation?
FR: Not exactly, but we do have one wall with only paperbacks on
display: naughty nurses and librarians, lesbians, orgies, drugs, rock
n roll and film. And our literature section is organized alphabetically,
but for the most part we arrange and move things around in all sorts of
ways, always juxtaposing opposites. 
ANP: What separates Fulton Ryder from other
establishments in the city?
FR: One of the things that makes Fulton Ryder unique are the pieces
that we have hanging on our walls. These are called “Untitled Originals”
by Richard Prince. The pieces reunite the original illustrations used
for paperback covers, framing these illustrations side by side with the
original publications.  It is fascinating to think that behind every pulp
paperback there was a painting first..It elevates a low form of art to a
higher one. And it also frames a painting side by side with the book, as
two inseparable art forms. 
ANP: How do you think an establishment like Fulton Ryder
fits into the overall creative landscape of New York City? 
FR: Our location is secret and always will be. Without mystery there’s
no need for imagination.
ANP: Can you tell us your top five favorite things that are on
offer in the store?
FR: “The Pope’s Butler” by Howard Johnson and “Bob Crane: He Got
It Coming,” by John Dogg both published by Fulton Ryder. A beautiful
first edition copy of Flannery O’Connor’s book “A Good Man is Hard to
Find.” “New York Is” by Robert Frank, a beautiful supplement he did
for the New York Times in 1958. And an anonymous French scrapbook
from the 1940s-50s of black and white pornographic photographs. 
ANP: Why do you think people have such an intense desire
for 20th Century nostalgia? 
FR: Nostalgia, a longing for something that no longer exists ..I’d like
to believe that is simply part of human nature to have this sort of
longing…It is also a desire and curiosity for something that we didn’t
experience firsthand and wish we had…It’s a very romantic notion, a
fantasy of our own making. However, places like Fulton Ryder preserve
objects, such as the paperbacks from the 1940s and 50s…which awakes
this kind of desire for 20th century nostalgia. Walter Benjamin: “Every
passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on
the chaos of memories.” 
ANP: Why did you opt against having regular business hours?
FR: Because we are not a regular business. 
ANP: If a person were to want to visit Fulton Ryder what
would they have to do? 
FR: We would have to meet by chance, strike up a conversation, bring
up Fulton Ryder and eventually give you my card to invite you over for
a visit. 

www.fultonryder.com
 POUPI WHOOPY by Clark Rayburn / Images courtesy Poupi Whoopy

There is definitely something new in the air when it comes to erotic photography, yet somehow it’s been a bit hard to define.
We’ve been thinking about this quite a bit over here at ANPQ. We’re constantly doing research, looking at all these new
approaches and trying to define exactly what it all means. It was during one of these searches that we came across Poupi
Whoopy magazine from Belgium. The publication is really like no other we’ve seen. Entirely handmade and combining
multiple printing techniques in one publication, we really thought it was something to be celebrated. We got a chance to speak
with the editors and to learn a bit more about how this particular collaboration came to be.
ANP: Who are the main editors of your magazine? everybody wanted to be Bettie Page with a dice tattoo. We of you, and it will not come out without contractions, blood,
Jan Lemaire: I’m a photographer and printer. I created the thought we could try to do something a little different, with sweat, tears and laughter! When it’s finally there, you hold it,
magazine with my then-girlfriend, Sky van der Hoek, who witty humor and through different print techniques in one name it, show it around, and feel really proud. Or do I sound
does wonders with hairdos and is also a professional magazine lift it above your average glossy magazine. really lame right now?
make-up artist. UB: After three editions Jill came up with the idea to do a JM: Haha, I guess the putting-the-book-together part is
Ulrike Biets: I’m a photographer. male issue. Jan was a bit uncomfortable to stand in front of comparable: we quarantine ourselves in a damp little room
Jill Mathieu: And I guess I kind of function as the glue naked guys, shooting their packages, so that’s when I joined manically performing the same actions over and over again.
between all the artistic impulses. I help where I can fixing the crew as a photographer. After that, we stayed together and We fold pages, cut pages, stack pages and staple pages until
models, applying eyeliner, DJ’ing at our release parties with continued making new issues. we’re all cramped up and covered in paper cuts. And when
Ulrike and writing press releases. ANP: Is there a mission statement behind we’re done, we boast about it on Facebook.
ANP: Can you tell us a bit about your backgrounds? Poupi Whoopy? ANP: You are part of what seems a whole new
What did you do before starting your magazine? JL: We love boobs? Haha. movement in erotic magazines. There seems to be a
JL: I have a masters degree in graphic design and free UB: That includes man boobs. changing of the tides. How do you feel about this?
arts, and I studied art history and art critique. But mostly ANP: Your visual content is so visually diverse. Do JL: That it was about fucking time! I try to keep looking for
I’m a print and photography enthusiast who loves screen you work with many collaborators or do you do it all alternative erotic magazines, I don’t know about the U.S., but
printing, stencil printing, offset, xeroxing, collages and in-house? here in Europe they are still spread thinly.
graphic design. I make artwork for small record labels like JL: I come from a DIY punk and hardcore scene in Antwerp UB: It’s a real trend these days to shoot naked people. As
Conspiracy Records, and I often roadie for bands such as where you do everything yourself within the limited budget if clothes are the new taboo. I think what distinguishes us
Earth, Isis, Keelhaul, Knut or Alabama Thunderpussy. I was you get. So we do everything ourselves: concepts, scouting from lots of other photographers and publications is that we
part of art collectives like Rotkop (underground publications of models, styling, location hunting, hair and make-up, welcome every one. You don’t have to look like a model, you
with Dennis Tyfus, Kati Heck, Michèle Matyn) and Building photography, photoshopping, printing, the actual fabricating don’t have to have great skin or perfect sizes. Far from! For
Transmissions sound performances/architectures at Haus der of the books, selling and distributing, bookkeeping... us, you have to have personality. We want to show people that
Kunst Munich, Venice Biennale, and Porto Alegre Brasil (with everything. The visual diversity is something we aim for, we’d feel good about themselves.
Nico Dockx, Peter Verwimp and Kris Delacourt) hate to repeat/rehash the same thing over and over again, it ANP: Each issue has a very handmade element to it.
UB: After I graduated university as a master in philosophy, can’t become a drag. It has to stay fresh and innovative and How do you think this adds to the overall experience
I started working on film sets as a production manager for fun to do. of the magazine?
full-length movies. But quickly after that, I rolled into being a UB: By now, we’ve gathered a great fan base. Amongst them JL: I think it’s key. You can tell a lot of love went in the
photographer on a professional level. I’ve been taking photos are a lot of creative people we can count on to work with on a creation of every issue. We all handled each issue at least ten
for as long as I can remember, so I guess it was inevitable regular basis. It sometimes feels like one big family. times in the process of its creation through folding, stapling,
that one day this would become my ‘job’. Besides my personal JM: Models often come along with great ideas too, or with screen-printing or whatever. The downside is that we can
photography work, I’m also collaborating with different crazy costumes they want to wear. Meanwhile, we jot down only realistically make about 500 copies max of each issue. To
magazines and publications. our dream photo shoots in a Google doc, and we’re pretty make more would be a logistical nightmare.
JM: I’ve been spending most of my days writing all sorts of good at actually realizing those ideas too, even if they involve UB: You need to feel it to really read it! Half of the experience
things that somehow involve young people and all kinds of public nudity in tourist-crowded areas. of Poupi Whoopy is the touch,
culture. I was the editor in chief of Vice Magazine in Belgium ANP: How does an issue of Poupi Whoopy the textile, the ink on your hands after glancing through it.
and now I organize retro themed parties and burlesque revues come together? That’s also why we call it a really dirty magazine!
all over the country. JL: One shoot at a time, we come up with an idea, find a JM: Unlike naked girls on a screen, you can actually touch
ANP: How did the concept to start a magazine about model, do the shoot and repeat the process until we reckon naked girls in print!
sex/sexuality begin? we have enough for a book. Or sometimes we come up with a ANP: How did you come up with the name
JL: I was looking to do a project together with my then concept for an entire issue, like the Casting Issue, for which Poupi Whoopy?
girlfriend and mother of my son Louis. She is a hair and we did a nude model casting and photographed everybody JL: Poupi is like a cuddle name I called my ex-girlfriend and
make-up artist, I was doing some photography but mainly that showed up and signed a waver. 34 people showed up that Whoopy is as you know a cheesy exclamation of joy. It just
print. We both had a great interest in old pin-up images day, anything in between 18-year-old girls to 65-year-old men, sounds funny and it gets misspelled all the time, which is
but thought that the whole aesthetic of modern pin-up or which makes for a funny and pretty diverse magazine/book. always funny too...
burlesque was just a cheap rehash of ‘50s-styled images UB: I’m not going to speak about a book as if it’s a baby, but I
combined with rockabilly and tattoo parlour influences. Like do think you can compare it with giving birth. It grows inside www.poupiwhoopy.com

RVCA .COM / 11
BURGER
RECORDS
INTERVIEW & PhotoGRAPHy by Kyle Thomas

One night in the winter of 2009, in the middle of band practice, I received a phone call from Burger Records. I’d never heard of the label
before and my band mates were really pissed at me for picking up the phone in the middle of a song. Whatever. I didn’t know it at the
time, but it was a life changing phone call. They wanted to put out my album, King Tuff Was Dead on cassette. Seemed like it couldn’t
hurt so I said, “Fuck yes, do it.”
I didn’t end up meeting them in person until about a year later, at SXSW. I was instantly charmed by their good looks and enthusiasm,
and I felt my world opening up. Here were all these cartoonish rock n roll characters from California, with goofy smiles and cassette
tapes spilling out of every pocket. The two masterminds appeared to be Sean Bohrman, a long blonde blue-eyed beauty of a man, and
Lee Rickard, whom I’ve described more than once as a perfect piece of spaghetti. These were my kind of dudes.
Nowadays you can’t throw a rock without hitting someone wearing one of those big ass Burger Records buttons proclaiming anything
from “I’m A Burger Babe” to “I’m A Burger Punk” or “Fuck Burger Records”. Their positive energy, compassion, creativity, and prolific
work ethic is something to be admired, releasing hundreds of cassettes a year with no sense of stopping any time soon. Burger Records
is truly a family and I’m extremely thankful to be a part of it. Thank God I picked up my phone in the middle of stupid band practice.

Kyle Thomas: To start things off in a normal interview kinda way, can you give
me a quick backstory of Burger?
Lee Rickard: Well I recently put on a normal pair of pants cuz my backstory was falling
out. (laughter) But as far Burger, in the 2000s we started writing Burger productions and
Burger Inc. on everything and eventually we started Burger Records. Our first release was
a single for our own band, Thee Makeout Party, in 2007. We just thought, you know, The
Beach Boys had Brother Records, the Beatles had Apple, and the Kinks had Konk, and we
were Burger Boys till the day we die so we started Burger Records.
Sean Bohrman: And for our second release we did the Audacity LP. (Audacity are a local
band that Burger started working with when they were still in high school.)
KT: How many releases are you at now?
SB: We are at #255 right now.
KT: How many did you release last year?
SB: About 100. This year we’ll probably do 200.
KT: BOOYAH.
LR: Burger believe it.
SB: This month alone we’ve released 20 tapes and two LPs.
KT: Insane. Why do you guys think foods like burgers, pizza, ice cream, etc.
play such a prominent role in the rock ‘n’ roll scene of today?
LR: ‘Cuz it’s like simple food for simple people, I mean it’s like handheld...
SB: ...and it’s FUN. Rock ‘n’ roll is fun and those are fun foods. They taste good and...
LR: ...and you can still rock out while you’re holding them!
SB: And when you have a party you eat pizza and ice cream and...
LR: SWEET STUFF. For dessert. And the good stuff for dinnertime.
SB: And no vegetables.
KT: Oh yeah do you hate vegetables?
SB: Vegetables are not rock ‘n’ roll.
KT: TRUE. You two are definitely a dynamic duo, kind of a yin and yang. Can
you describe the roles each of you play in the business?
LR: Ike and Tina baby.
SB: I deal with the internet, all the multi media, emailing, talking on the phone to
business people...
LR: The tangled web of the inter-land. And I’m like the freak on the streets, the cosmic
mind wanderer...

RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 12


SB: Cosmic Mind Wanderer. That’s his official title on the
business cards.
LR: I’m a dreamer and a believer and Sean’s a doer and a go
getter and together we hustle and flow and rock and roll and
boogie everyday bouncing burger ideas of the wall until they stick
to some shit man that’s bubblegum music 101 and we just love it
cuz it’s so much fun yeahhhhhh...
SB: And me and Lee have been friends since high school,
collaborating on stuff and...
KT: What are your favorite things about each other?
SB: I like hanging out with Lee ‘cause he’s a weirdo.
LR: I think Sean is really smart and attractive and...
SB: Yeah there you go!
LR: ...and funny and...
SB: Right when we started talking to each other for the very
first time I just started making fun of him for having long hair.
Sometimes you meet people and just hit it off. So we started
bands together...
LR: Our first group was The Noise and we just broke stuff on each
other’s heads and started fires, ever since I met Sean he’s had a
laptop and been savvy, I’m more or a hillbilly...
SB: He’s a lil’ bit country...
KT: What is your ultimate dream for Burger?
LR: I really think we can have our own land, like Disneyland,
Burgerland or Burgertown, where we can have our own stage and
dance floor and burger shop and a place where we can have a sock
hop and serve a gourmet burger and have like a hangout spot or
museum or just somewhere you can go at any time.
KT: A Museum?
LR: Yeah! A rock and roll museum. You can go there any time and
the doors are open and rock and roll museums are cool.
KT: And as far as the label?
LR: Just putting out the best music and documenting the neighborhood. Just doing the best we can in our own
neighborhood and others, acting locally thinking globally, you know, even beyond the globe, we really want to
embrace far out ideas and expand on our technological advancements and achievements. That’s what Sean is
wrapping his brain around, and I can just eat all the good burgers and say, “This burger tastes good let’s let’s let’s
bring this burger to the people.” So I’ll just keep on biting and eating all the burgers I can and...we just eat a lot of
burgers around here.
SB: From the very beginning it hasn’t slowed down. It started off kinda slow, then it was like we were jogging, and
now we’re sprinting and I can’t see us stopping.
LR: All of ourselves are immersed in this.
KT: What’s the best thing about having a record store?
LR: Just having a ground zero. We’re open every single day and you can come here from anywhere on the planet
and we’re here.
SB: Having a place where people can come and listen to music and talk about music.
KT: I feel like it’s a classic record store in the way that people are always hanging out here. You
go to a lot of record stores and they’re kind of stale, but I grew up working and hanging out at a
record store and all my friends were always around and I think that was an important part of my
teenage years.
SB: Yeah and the best part is that this is our job and we got here through hard work and being good people.
Like Elmo.
KT: Like Elmo!
SB: Like Elmo!
KT: You guys seem to put your faith in the universe to help you out, which I do too. Can you talk
more about this? Can you describe some of the things that have come together cosmically or
almost by strange coincidence?
SB: We pray to the space gods every morning.
LR: Just by thinking good things and relying on karma, it seems to work. It’s like when you think about someone
and you run into them the next day or they call you and its really a trip...
SB: If your a bad person, if your negative, if you let that rule your life, then that’s what’s going to surround you.
If your positive and if you believe good things are going to happen, like not saying, “I want this to happen” but
saying, “this IS going to happen” just putting that out into the universe is all it takes. I remember telling people
“I’m going to open a record shop” like out of the blue, like of out of left field, but once you say it you’re like, ok, it’s
out there, it’s out in the world, and you’re opening a record shop now. And it’s just like that with anything else...
LR: Manifest destiny.
SB: And we found you by coincidence! You’re old friend Allen was playing in a band with Devon Williams
(another Burger band) and Devon gave us your phone number, and we called you out of the blue. And now here
we are years later! And that’s just one story. We have 200 bands and there are 200 more stories just like that.
LR: Connecting the stars.
SB: Nick Lowe was Johnny Cash’s son-in-law. Everyone is connected!
KT: How is Burger different from other record labels/ record stores?
LR: We’re not strategic in planning our release dates and schedules. Some labels are really concerned with
their schemes...
SB: They’re planning 2014 right now...
LR: We’re like one day at a time. We’re like oh shit, these people are goin’ on tour...
SB: ...and they need merch right now...
LR: Next thing you know we’re head high in tapes and doing mail order for weeks on end just to keep up with
the demand.
SB: And the fact that we don’t really know what we’re doing, we’re kinda just inventing it as we go along.
LR: Trying to be positive and helpful as much as we can.
SB: And helping out bands that are just starting out, helping them book their first tours, etc. It’s inspiring to us.
LR: We get off on that, just turning kids on to the outside world, cuz it’s so easy.
KT: Why did you start releasing cassettes? What do you like about them?
LR: It’s analog, they’re handheld (Lee loves things that are handheld), they sound good...
SB: Cheap to make and the turnaround time is super quick.
LR: We got lucky with a good duplicator.
SB: Mike McKinney at m2com. He’s probably doing burger tapes with all his spare time.
KT: I like tapes ‘cause they have two sides, it’s the only other format other than a record that has
sides. And sides are an important aspect to a record...
LR: It’s also just cool to cover all the bases, LP, CD, cassette, mp3, pillowcases...
KT: One last question: Why is the letter B so powerful?
LR: B is the best. It’s a banger. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
SB: I don’t know why but all these bands that have written these songs that affected our lives like the Bee Gees,
Big Star, The Beatles, The Beach Boys... there’s something about that letter that’s...
LR: BOHRMAN!
SB: Bohrman! Just kidding. There’s something behind that letter that sticks in peoples heads I guess.
Who knows?
KT: Who the fuck knows!
Burger Records
645 S. State College Blvd., Fullerton, CA 92831 

Open 11AM - 9PM everyday
www.burgerrecords.org
RVCA .COM / 13
SARAH SOPHIE FLICKER
& MAXIMILLA LUKACS
ANP: How did you both get into making films?
Sarah Sophie Flicker: Maximilla and I had been circling
each other for years before we met. We both had
been working independently in film, me as an actor,
photographer and experimental filmmaker. As a kid I
was a serious dancer and did a lot of acting in theater
and film, these were the building blocks of my work
now. We officially began to work together in New York
City in 2001. Our first film was a meditation on love
entitled Kill Your Darlings. We worked out of Times
Square and insisted on wearing white lace throughout
the process. We made quite an impact on the
unsuspecting tourists. Since then, we’ve become only
slightly more practical in our work attire. Maximilla
usually ends up directing in anything from a swimsuit
to a rainbow cape and sparkly turban.  when you see an especially good one. So to me the idea
Maximilla Lukacs: I originally started out as a painter. I
went to the San Francisco Art Institute where I started
taking experimental film classes from the likes of Larry
Jordan and George Kuchar. So my introduction to
film was very much from an experimental viewpoint.
Basically from an attempt at creating moving paintings
(to some extent I still try to think about it that way).
When I met Sarah I had begun to build a small body
of experimental films but I had never attempted to do
anything narrative. I had also gotten pretty good at
editing because to me that was always the funnest part.
It still held a connection to painting and drawing. Very
hands on. Sarah went to law school and was amazing
with research and was incredibly well read and had
more of a performing arts background. We were a great
match for each other.
ANP: What is it about the medium of film that
inspires you? Why do you think you didn’t
follow the path of another kind of artist? As a
painter or dancer for instance?
SSF: I think I have been every kind of artist...never
a painter though. I find that having even a modest
vocabulary in dance, film, acting, music, fashion,
photography, writing, aerial arts, make-up, theater,
informs everything I do. It’s interesting how limited we
are asked to be in our definitions of ourselves. I find
by AARON ROSE
images courtesY THE artists
that the more I “am” as far as a label goes, the better my
work is. Film is inspiring to me because you can truly
create an out-of-time, never-never land, magical realist
explosion. Only in film can I create the worlds that exist
in my head. In theater I can come close, but film allows
you to control a world and really become immersed in
it. Then in post, with editing, color correction, sound
design, etc., you can sink deeper into that world and
flesh it out further. I love that about film. I am always
curious about filmmakers who show a realistic version
of the world as it is so far from what I lean towards. I
want to get as far away from reality as possible when we
are shooting.  11 years down the pike, we read each other’s minds
ML: I have always thought that films were like magic
spells and you can certainly feel them working on you
of being a director was always essentially becoming
a magician. Film really gives you the opportunity to
take the visions that you have within you and give
life to them. I think that is super magical. My favorite
filmmakers create worlds that you simply do not want
to leave. And once you have had the chance to enter
those worlds you see everything in a slightly different
way. You have been put under their spell! I am total
film nerd. I love Tarkovsky and Woody Allen and
Antonioni, Maya Deren, Vera Chytilova, early Milos
Forman, Cassavettes, Bergman, Kustirica, Jodorowsky
so many master magicians all working spells in their
own very specific way. I think at this moment in time
we really need to have a prismatic world-view. We need
to let in visions from every possible culture and try on
many different sets of eyes. Film is a huge part of that.
And we have never had more access! My two loves
throughout my life were music and painting so in a way
film really brings those two elements together. Music
has always been so inspiring throughout my life. I grew
up in a very DIY music scene and even played in a few
bands when I was younger. And for me it really plays a
huge part in the filmmaking process. A piece of music
can inspire a whole film or completely change the tone
of it in an edit. It is so essential to how you feel as you
are watching a film. Sarah and I always have someone
Lay Down Lean, 2006
Film still
(opposite, from top)
Spells, 2009, Film stills
First Aid Kit, Emmylou music
video, 2012, Film stills
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 14
do an original score for us whenever possible. It really
is the final stage of bringing an idea to life. Film to me
is basically a perfect marriage of everything I love.
That is why I feel so grateful to get to do what I do for
a living.
ANP: How did your collaboration come about?
SSF: It was in the stars! Truly! Maximilla and I were
two panthers circling each other in a cage for years. I
can’t count the number of times people said we should
meet before we actually did. I remember one friend
saying, “Maximilla and you exist in the same magic
world. You need to know each other.” At this point,
and finish each other’s sentences. I walked into a
Lower East Side bar in late 2001 (Sweet and Vicious...
remember that one?) and Maximilla was on the floor
wrestling some guy. By the end of the night we were
working together and formed our production company
The Belles Of The Black Diamond Field (named after
the first female coal miners). 
ML: Haha! Sweet and Viscious. Yes…that is the fated
moment where it all came together.That was a super
fun time in New York and I feel like it was the birth
of a lot collaborative projects. Sarah and I met and
started working together and I remember shooting one
of our first scenes together and looking at the footage
together and her saying “You are the only person that
has ever been able to make things look like the way I
see them in my head.” So I guess the glue that holds our
collaboration together is simply that we see the world
in a similar way. Or rather that we see the things that
we want to bring into existence through the language of
film in a similar way. It really is a magical collaboration
and I feel like our strengths and weaknesses really
complement each other. My eyes are more trained
for the visual story telling elements and Sarah has a
great background in acting and theatre and dance so
she is super great with the performance aspects. It is
a great marriage of a very special sort. We started our
collaboration with a manifesto about feminizing the
language of film. There are so few female directors to
look to for inspiration but each one I can think of really
 enriches the whole language of cinema so much. Female
voices are really absent from this medium so I feel very lucky
to contribute something to that legacy for younger girls that
are just getting into it now.
ANP: What is the most rewarding part of working as
a team?
SSF: I’m very proud of our collaboration. Working with
another person can be difficult. It takes communication,
vulnerability, honesty, and struggle. You have to leave
your ego behind to work as a real collaborative. I believe
that working with other people and learning to efficiently
collaborate is humanity functioning at a very high level.
Ultimately, life and happiness, boils down to our connections
with other people and how well we nurture those
connections. Maximilla is my everything, my family, my
other brain, my creative outlet. I’m very proud of our work
together and our relationship. I also love our visual language.
When putting an idea together, we speak mostly in images. I
love having this shared language with her. 
ML: For me the most magical part is in the initial forming
of the idea. So many times when we start a project we are
already thinking the same thing and have literally sent each
other the same photo for inspiration. Sarah and I have two
fundamentally different sensibilities but the place where
those two sensibilities meet I just love so much. It is like
when you play two notes together and they create a beautiful
third together that is greater than the sum of its parts. I think
collaboration is fundamentally about challenging each other,
pushing each other into new, sometimes uncomfortable,
places and experimenting. Sarah and I are so brutally honest
with each other after all these years and I think it keeps the
work that we make honest and really from the heart.  The
most rewarding thing really is the bond that forms when
you have to work so intimately with another person. I really
value the incredibly unique friendship that has come out of
our collaboration.
ANP: Your films are generally quite experimental.
Do you think there is still a logical venue for avant-
garde films in the 21st Century?
SSF: I think the internet is really opening up the arena
of what film can be. I look at it as very exciting. Film had
become so fixed and defined in the last decade. Even
indie film. The Internet has opened a whole new world to
filmmakers. I’m also excited about the upsurge in fashion
films and Internet series and webisodes. All this creates
endless possibilities for gals like us! 
ML: Yes. I think you could make the argument that there are
the best venues there have ever been for avant-garde films.
The internet is a perfect venue for short films. You can do a
whole lot with that short amount of time. I also think that
what people thought of as avant-garde 50 years ago is just
totally regular to a teenage kid in 2012. The way that we see

RVCA .COM / 15
Sandy Toes, 2009, Film stills

(opposite, from top)

Karen Elson, The Truth Is in the Dirt Music Video, 2010, Film stills

Lay Down Lean, 2006, Film still

I think has evolved. Art and life in general has gotten way
crazier. We are exposed to so much more visually. So yes, I
think it’s an exciting time for film in general. More people
have access to the tools to make films than ever before so I
think we will be seeing some exciting stuff probably from
the most unexpected places.
ANP: Can you tell us a bit about your process?
How do you conceive and execute ideas start to
finish on a project?
SSF: We usually start with just one image and build from
there. I love to research images and drum up fantasy
worlds. Maximilla is great at fantasy but also with order
and structure. We lean on those strengths and often send
ideas back and forth. She lives in L.A. and I live in NYC.
We have a great team that we work with that speak in
our “Belles” language as well. After we have finished a
treatment or shooting script we open it up to the team for
more ideas. 
ML: Yes that is basically how it works. Sarah and I usually
start by sending images back and forth, which is how
we communicate best, out of which arises a story and
characters. Once we arrive at a treatment we are happy
with we open it up to our Dream Team. We are lucky
enough to have put together a Dream Team in both New
York and L.A., which allows us to work in either place. On
set I focus more on the cameras, lighting and story telling
aspects and Sarah works more with the actors, styling
and art direction. We are both involved with every decision
but we usually divide and conquer on set. Since all of it
has usually been illustrated with painstaking detail in
our treatments it usually flows pretty seamlessly. I also
edit all of our films so that is the part where it returns to
my painting roots and I get to do the Wizard of Oz job of
putting it all together. Sarah and I sometimes send cuts
across the world to each other so she can be involved with
the edit even if I am in another country. Gotta love all the
new technology for that!

RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 16

 ANP: That’s so interesting, which other ways has the digital
revolution changed the way you look at making films?
SSF: I was very wary of it all at first. Being an old fashioned gal who
loves film, the grainier the better, I was nervous about digital. I do miss
film, a lot, but it’s not feasable anymore. I’ve come to love how digital
looks and how flexible it is. It has also forced me to become more open
than I would have been if the digital revolution hadn’t happened. In
general, in life, it seems best to be malleable. I now love what we can
achieve visually with digital cameras.
ML: I used to be a film purist and not until the Red camera came out
did I think I could be wooed to go digital. But since you get to have so
much control over the image with that high of a resolution you have
infinite possibly. Color grading has actually become my favorite part
of the process. That is where we essentially “expose” the film. It is
amazing what you can do. It really is like painting sometimes. Our first
films together were all on Super 8 and I do really love the romantic
quality that it has but we have tried to bring some of that feeling into
the new technology. I do miss the chaos and unpredictability aspects of
working with film. You really can’t reproduce the chaos!
ANP: What are you working on now??
ML: We have had a really busy past few months. We got to shoot Tavi
Gevinson and that was super fun. She is such an amazing young lady.
I wish I was as together as she is at her age. What an inspiration. We
also just finished a short web piece for a skincare company called Fresh
that we are really excited about and are in the process of editing a
music video for a band called Sweet Tooth from the U.K. We shot some
amazing slow motion prism-vision footage. It’s a 1930s psychedelic
Busby Berkeley-inspired video. Very excited to see that finished. I also
just shot a music video for a band called Peaking Lights this week that
I really love. Very excited about that as well. I am also in the process of
beginning work on a Surrealist play for 2013. I am hoping to wrangle
Sarah into helping me with that as well.
SSF: We just shot five short films in a month and a half so we still
editing some of these. That was a whirlwind! We have some fashion
and beauty films in the works. We have an annual August film we try
to do out in the Northfork every year with Lula Magazine so that what
we dreaming of next! Maximilla and I also work separately, she directs
and edits a bunch on her own and I am The Creative Director of The
Citizens Band, the Editor-At-Large for Lula magazine among other
shenanigans. The Citizens Band has a political, pro-voting, anti-apathy
album coming out this summer entitled Grab A Root And Growl. The
Citizens Band will be super active leading up the election which I’m
really excited about. I’m hoping Maximilla and I can do something in
tandem with The Citizens Band soon. I also have a small role on the
HBO series GIRLS which I’m shooting this summer. I’m in the process
of writing a piece for Rookie magazine and Lula magazine as well. I’ve
got some great collaborations of the design variety coming up as well,
which I will, of course, rope Maximilla into in the film capacity as well.
Everything’s coming up roses!

RVCA .COM / 17
 PER-
SONAL
UTOPIAS
For proof that humans have an innate desire to create their own environment, look no further than
a teenager’s bedroom. Walls are scrawled upon and collaged, collections are hoarded, and with an
explosion of dirty laundry, even the floor is camouflaged. The room becomes an external representation
of the internal spirit, and the more those two match up, the better the angsty mind feels.
But as most of us get older, our desire to create our own world gets buried in the face of having to
survive and thrive in the one created for us. We decide that it is easier to change ourselves to fit the
world than to change the world to fit us. It’s a rare kind of person who can set all of this aside. Usually
these people are called artists. When they’re not called artists, usually they are called crazy.
In a 1965 New Yorker article about the Watts Towers, Calvin Trillin wrote “If a man who has not
labeled himself an artist happens to produce a work of art, he is likely to cause a lot of confusion and
inconvenience.” Simon Rodia, an immigrant tile setter, labored for more than 30 years to create the
Watts Towers. He worked in his spare time, and he worked alone. Once the towers were completed, he
moved away and never came back. And thus, we are confused.
Works like Rodia’s—where someone has endeavored to create their own personal utopia—exist outside
of the value system that we as a society have agreed upon. They don’t offer money or prestige, and the
gratification of a job well done is far from immediate. Most of us can’t understand this, even if we wish
we could. Around the world, there are many places that are similar to the Watts Towers in spirit, spots
of wonder where an individual endeavored to create something entirely unique for reasons entirely
their own—often in the face of opposition and setbacks, and with few resources.
These places, and these people, seem to tap into something pure and almost innocent, and represent an
outpouring of creativity of the most honest kind. “The great revelation of vernacular art environments
is that when artists have the space and freedom and time to creatively explore art entirely on their
own terms, they create encompassing works of art that are truly transformative and utterly original,”
says Leslie Umberger, a senior curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI, who
wrote a book on the subject, called Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds. “Art environments convey
the validity of being a unique individual, and convey the reality that it does not take a pedigree to
transform the lives of others.”
Recently, I was in the California desert for Coachella, and woke early one morning to go out to
Salvation Mountain. The Salton Sea landscape there is bleak and harsh. It’s so dry that your lips parch
and your mouth cottons, and everything you see is colorless, as if the sky, the sand and the people have
been bleached by the sun.
But then, coming around a curve, Salvation Mountain suddenly pops into view in a rush of reds and
greens and stripes and flowers. Leonard Knight built the mountain with donated paint, and as I
climbed his handmade ‘yellow brick road’ staircase up to the top, I couldn’t help but think about how
much paint a $400 ticket to a music festival could have bought. It didn’t seem like I was just seeing the
mountain, but that I was feeling it, too. It was human ingenuity, determination, creativity and devotion
in its truest form. And it was free, unregulated, and in the middle of nowhere.
Later, in Indio, as I waited in line to scan my wristband to get inside and wait in more lines with
thousands of other people, all of us paying to be a part of something that we had been told was
important, I kept flashing back to the colors of the Mountain and thinking about how this was so pale
in comparison.

by Kate Williams
Salvation
Mountain
photography by cali thornhill-dewitt
One of the only things visible, aside from
miles and miles of dusty parched
landscape, from the top of Salvation
Mountain is Slab City, a transient town of
mostly homeless drifters that has dubbed
itself “The Last Free Place in America.” It
was Slab City that initially brought
Salvation Mountain creator Leonard
Knight to the area, because Knight figured
the last free place in America would be a
good place to launch his hot air balloon.
A Korean War veteran who had been born
and raised in Vermont, Leonard Knight
never had much interest in God until a trip
to San Diego at age 35. Knight was there
visiting his sister, a devout Christian, and
one morning, while sitting in his van,
Knight began repeating a sinner’s prayer
that went “Jesus, I am a sinner, please
come upon my body and into my heart,”
over and over. Suddenly, he was saved.
He began to think about a way to show his
devotion to God, and when he witnessed a
hot air balloon pass overhead in 1970, he
decided this was the perfect way. Knight
worked on his hot air balloon, including
building his own inflation furnace, for 14
years, relocating to Slab City in the process.
The balloon eventually stretched 10 stories
high, but never sailed, and Knight finally
admitted defeat.
Frustrated, he began to use cement and
paint to construct a small hill, on which he
painted his sinner’s prayer and the words
“God is Love.” He planned to stay a week
and finish it, then take off, but what he
soon began to call a mountain kept
growing, and Knight stayed for four years.
Then, the mountain collapsed.
Rather than getting discouraged, Knight
instead viewed the mountain’s collapse as
God’s way of telling him that it wasn’t safe,
and he simply started again, determined to
make it stronger this time. He did so with a
mix of adobe and straw, layering in coats
and coats of paint to make it stronger. At
first he would scavenge the dump for paint,
but as word of the Mountain spread,
people began donating paint. Knight would
use the drab colors for underneath, and
save the brighter, prettier ones for the top.
He liked to coat the flowers in high-gloss.
Salvation Mountain stretches more than
100 feet wide and four stories high, and
Knight has used more than 100,000
galloons of paint on it. He worked on the
Mountain for almost 30 years, well into
his seventies, all the while living in the
back of a truck parked at its base. The
truck didn’t run, and Knight gathered
materials on a moped.
In 1994, the county government labeled
Salvation Mountain an environmental
hazard, citing a fear of what lead paint was
doing to the soil, and wanted to destroy it.
But people rallied around Knight, and
independent soil test revealed that the
Mountain wasn’t toxic, so Knight kept on
building. In a 2004 documentary called
Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea,
Knight talks about his life’s work. “I just
believe that God really built this mountain,
I didn’t,” he says. “I’m not really capable of
being an artist. I’m just not capable of
doing anything, but God almighty can do
anything. I talk to God a lot, and I keep “I painted the
mountain
saying almost every morning ‘God, use me
if you can. I want to work for you, God.’
And look at the Mountain: It’s going better
than 10 churches put together.”
Leonard Knight is now in a nursing home,
because I love
and thus the future of Salvation Mountain
is uncertain. Currently, volunteers and God and I love
people.”
Slab City residents protect it from vandals.
Many church groups have approached
Knight over the years, offering to ‘adopt’
the Mountain, provided they could also use
it for their own purposes. But God must
—Leonard Knight
have not liked this idea, because Knight
always refused.
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 20
 Watts
Towers
In 1895, Sabato Rodia—called Simon or Sam in English—emigrated
to the United States from Italy. He settled with his brother in
Pennsylvania, where the two worked in coal mines until his brother
was killed in a mining accident. After that, Rodia headed West. He got
married in Seattle, then moved south to Oakland, where he and his wife
had three children. There, according to some, Rodia became an abusive
drunk and left his family and traveled about, hopping trains.
When he reappeared in Southern California, he was sober again. Rodia
worked various jobs in construction and manual labor, and in 1920, he
bought a triangular residential lot in the Watts neighborhood of south
central Los Angeles.
In the 2006 documentary I Build the Tower, archival interviews of
Rodia reveal him to be a colorful character who believed that people
were either purely good, or that they were bad. Perhaps wanting to
do something to atone for what he saw as his previously ‘bad’ ways,
Rodia started building the towers on his lot, inspired by Italy’s Tower
of Pisa and ‘good’ men such as Galileo, Marco Polo and Michelangelo.
He called the project “Nuestro Pueblo,” which loosely translates
into “Our Town.” The lot was a 10th of an acre, and over the next 30
years, in the evenings and weekends, Rodia covered the lot with 17
sculptures including freestanding towers, walkways, plazas, fountains
and a gazebo. “Rodia is a great example of how the work of vernacular
environment builders is so central to evidencing the American melting
pot,” Leslie Umberger says. “They are the places where old world meets
new, and crossroads of personal vision and cultural heritage.”
Rodia always worked alone—saying that he didn’t know what he was
going to do next, so how could he instruct someone else to do it?—and
built the towers one level at a time. He never used scaffolding, even
when one of the towers reached almost 100 feet tall, and instead
climbed the sides with a window-washer’s belt and buckle. The towers
have a structural steel core, which Rodia then wrapped in wire mesh,
often chicken wire, and then covered in mortar, and he never bolted,
riveted or welded joints. He then decorated his creations with broken
tiles, pottery shards, pieces of glass—7-Up bottles being one of his
favorite materials—and seashells he collected himself from nearby
beaches. He signed the towers with imprints of his hammer and chisel,
and his initials.
As Rodia’s towers grew, so did suspicion of his motives. During
World War II, rumors spread that the Towers transmitted secrets to
the Japanese. Later, the rumor evolved into transmitting secrets to
the Communists. In 1954, Rodia left Watts for good, and deeded the
property, and his creation, to a neighbor. That neighbor soon sold
the lot, for $1,000, to a developer who hoped to turn the site into a
Mexican restaurant.

“You got to do In 1957, the City of Los Angeles declared the Towers a public safety
hazard, built as they were without following construction codes, and

something they announced plans to destroy them. But supporters rallied, and the city
conceded to a stress test. If the towers, built with their chicken wire,

never got ‘em in

could withstand 10,000 pounds of lateral pressure, they would be
spared. People gathered to watch, and as Simon Rodia’s towers
withstood the equivalent of 76 mph winds, they did not bend, but the

the world…” testing apparatus did.

—Simon Rodia

RVCA .COM / 21
 “If the Garden
of Eden is not
right, Moses
is to blame. He
wrote it up
and I built it.”
— S. P. Dinsmoor
GARDEN
OF
EDEN
A Civil War veteran who served in 18 battles,
including the one that lead to the capture
of Robert E. Lee, Samuel Perry Dinsmoor
settled in Lucas, Kansas, in 1891, when
he was 48 years old. Sixteen years later,
he finished his first major architectural
achievement, his notorious log cabin home.
Dinsmoor had a fondness for tromp l’oeil,
and therefore log cabin wasn’t actually
made of logs at all, but massive 27-foot-long
carved pieces of limestone which Dinsmoor
dovetailed so that they would fit together
and look like wood. The cabin had 11 rooms,
with no two doors or windows of the same
size, and once it was completed, he filled it
with furniture also of his own design, and
more than 3,000 feet of oak, redwood and
walnut molding. After completing his house,
Dinsmoor turned his attention to the yard,
and began erecting concrete sculptures
that illustrated his beliefs in the populist
movement and the Bible. By the time he
finished, almost 20 years later, Dinsmoor
had created more than 200 sculptures that
he believed to illustrate the entire history
of mankind.
The west side of the house was what
Dinsmoor believed to be a literal depiction
of the Garden of Eden, and the north side
represented modern life, which included
Union soldiers, girls, big business, the
food chain and the government. “Message-
wise, you can see a narrative grow and
evolve throughout the environment.  This
3-D political cartooning seems a little
overwhelming or bizarre at first, until you
see that there’s a linear narrative going on
that leads you through,” says Erika Nelson,
a Garden of Eden board member who also
happens to live in the house right next door
to it. “Some of the inspiration that happens at
the garden comes from the initial recognition
of scale and form, some inspiration happens
after the realization of the timeline and
narrative. Drive-wise, Dinsmoor’s scope
and vision are amazing—inspiring not just
artists, but any visitor who starts to mentally
calculate both the time and the sheer weight
of the environment. Literal tons of cement,
all put in place by a retired person!”
Dinsmoor documented his work in his self-
published Pictorial History of the Cabin
Home in Garden of Eden, Lucas, Kansas:
“The porches, side walks, fence, strawberry
and flower beds, fish pool, grape-arbor, three
U. S. flags, Adam and Eve, the devil, coffin,
jug, visitors’ dining hall, labor crucified, two
bird and animal cages, and wash house are
all made with cement,” he wrote. “Up to this
date, July 1, 1927, over 113 tons, or 2,273
sacks of cement has been used.”
Dinsmoor was surprisingly delicate in
his concrete work. He fashioned cement
flags that were molded to look like they
were fluttering, and mounted them on ball
bearings so they would turn in the wind. He
built cement trees that were 30 to 40 feet tall,
and draped them with leaves and vines. He
fashioned Adam in his own image, and when
the townspeople of Lucas complained about
Adam’s prominently displayed genitalia,
Dinsmoor added an apron to cover him up.
“I think some of the interactions between
the townspeople and Dinsmoor shaped the
narrative, and may have sparked a little bit
of his belligerent nature,” Erika Nelson says.
“The initial Garden of Eden section was in
direct reaction to the culture of the time—
railroads acting as land developers in the
New West, promising groups of immigrants
that Kansas was the new Garden of Eden.
Dinsmoor was a part of the local debate
society, ran for office on the Populist ticket,
and I’m sure the conversations in and around
these topics greatly shaped his desire to
express his views in concrete form.”
Dinsmoor advertised the Garden as “The
most unique home, for living or dead, on
the earth,” and he built his own limestone-
log mausoleum in a corner of it. In 1917, he
interred his first wife there, after causing
a scandal by digging her corpse up from
the Lucas cemetery. His own death was
something he regarded with a wink and a
smile. He made souvenir postcards from a
double-exposed photograph that showed
him standing next to a coffin in which he was
also lying, and for a small fee, he would let
visitors photograph him in either position.
He joked that once he did kick the bucket, he
planned to slip out of the coffin at night to
watch over his strawberry beds.
But Dinsmoor did not become so obsessed
with death that he ceased to enjoy life: At the
age of 81, he married a 20-year-old and they
had two children. Nor was he particularly
concerned with where he would end up in the
afterlife. “Some people know they are going
to heaven and those they do not like are
going to hell,” he wrote. “I am going where
the Boss puts me. If I get to go up, I have
a cement angel outside, above the door, to
take me…If I have to go below, I’ll grab my
jug and fill it with water…I think I am well
prepared for the good old orthodox future.”
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 22
Forestiere
Underground Gardens
Baldasare Forestiere came to the United States in
1902, at the age of 21. The son of a wealthy Sicilian
fruit grower, Forestiere could speak no English,
and got work in New York digging tunnels for the
subway system. After two years of this, he moved
to Fresno, California, where he would combine the
two things he knew best, fruit and digging, and
began creating what is now called the Forestiere
Underground Gardens.
Upon moving to Fresno, Forestiere had bought
70 acres of land with the idea that he would
begin planting, but as soon as he began to dig,
he discovered that the land he had purchased
was thinly veiled rock that would hardly support
crops. Rather than forsaking it, though, Forestiere
began using his hand tools to start tunneling and
by 1923, he had carved out an underground maze
of more than 10 acres of connecting rooms and
passageways. Forestiere’s dream was to turn the
space into an underground Mediterranean resort,
and he carved patios, fireplaces, benches, grottos, a
large room that he envisioned as a restaurant, and
a small, modest home for himself. Legend has it
that Forestiere once fell in love, but that he woman
refused to marry him unless he built her a house
above ground, so he remained a bachelor.
He worked primarily alone with picks, shovels, and
his two mules, Molly and Dolly. Forestiere wanted
to create not just a series of caves, but a beautiful
oasis. He would often fall asleep at the spot where
he was working, and said the visions in his mind
sometimes overwhelmed him.
He built a glass-bottomed pond for exotic fish that
was visible from above and below. He installed
skylights, and begin to fill his underground world
with fruit trees, myrtle, rosemary, and vines
covered with red and green grapes. Forestiere
was not content to plant just regular trees, and by
combining inherited knowledge from his father with
some experimentation, he began to graft species
together. On one citrus tree that reached 22 feet up
to a skylight, he grew navel and Valencia oranges,
tangerines, sweet lemons and sour lemons, and
grapefruits. He also grew pomegranates, dates,
almonds, persimmons, mulberries, and even
strawberries on trees.
Lyn Kosewski, who runs visitor services at the
center, says the most magical sight at the garden is
the citrus trees in late spring, when they are raining
down perfumed white blossoms on the courtyard
floor, but that everything about it inspires awe.
“They were created at a time in history where if
you could dream it, you could do it!” she says.
“Today, there are so many building restrictions
and unspoken rules about how we are to live that
our imaginations have become complacent and we
are content with the mundane. People who visit
it today are deeply touched by the tranquil purity “I have been doing
and innocence of the site, and the passionate
commitment and vision of its builder. It is a true this for fun. Money?
earth-friendly, earth shelter that demonstrates What do I want with
how humans can live in harmony with nature.” money? I am broke but
In 1998, 52 years after his death, The New Yorker
published a T. Coraghessen Boyle short story, the cavern and all the
entitled “The Underground Gardens,” in which the work it represents are
author tried to imagine what Baldasare Forestiere’s worth more than a
motivations really were. Boyle imagined that that
Forestiere did it all for love, which seems as good a million dollars to me.”
reason as any. —Baldasare Forestiere
Philadelphia’s
Magic
Gardens
Unlike all of the other artists mentioned here, Isaiah
Zagar is a trained artist, having studied painting and
graphics at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. When Zagar was
19, he discovered Clarence Schmidt’s House of Mirrors
in Woodstock, New York. A plasterer who built sets for
silent movies, Schmidt worked for three decades to build
a house with 30 rooms, spread across seven stories,
all constructed out of mirrors, window frames, rubber
masks and whatever else he could find. Soon after, a 1961
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
called The Art of Assemblage, presented the work of
Schmidt and Simon Rodia alongside that of artists such as
Picasso and Duchamp, and it inspired Zagar to incorporate
these ‘untrained’ artists into his mental catalog of what he
considered to be fine art.
After serving in the Peace Corps in Peru, Zagar and his
wife, Julia, moved to Philadelphia in the mid-1960s. Julia
opened an art gallery on shopping thoroughfare South
Street, and Zagar began trying to beautify surrounding
run-down buildings by covering the facades with mosaic
murals constructed from tiles, glass, pottery, and
broken mirrors.
“They bought a really fucked up house and it needed
fixing,” says Jeremiah Zagar, Isaiah’s son and a filmmaker
who chronicled his parents and their work in the 2009
documentary In a Dream. “And he didn’t know how to fix
it, but he was an artist and he did know how to make it
look cool and beautiful with his own tools. So he couldn’t
fix it the way a house builder could fix it, but he could give
it structural integrity with cement. He needed something
to do, and they needed to fix that house.”
Since then, Zagar has completed more than 130 murals
across the city of Philadelphia, most of which he has
done free of charge. According to Zagar, he returned to
Woodstock in 1970, to visit Clarence Schmidt, and Schmidt
said to him “I hear you are copying me in Philadelphia.”
In 1994, Zagar began to turn the vacant lot next to his
studio into a labyrinthine half-block mural maze called
the Magic Gardens, which incorporates thousands of
mirrors, glass bottles, handmade tiles, bicycle wheels, folk
art statues, even a few Kohler toilets, and a quote from
Edward James, another of Zagar’s inspirations. In 2002,
the owner of the lot decided to have the garden destroyed
so that they could sell the land. The community protested,
and eventually formed a non-profit to raise the money to
“I think that a
buy and protect the lot.
lot of my ideas
As Jeremiah Zagar’s documentary revealed, Isaiah has come from temple
been a complicated and sometimes difficult person, in complexes…places
many ways the blueprint of a ‘trained’ artist. He did where you are
performance pieces covered in body suits of mud and pointed toward
paint, much to the chagrin of his children, attempted the sky, pointed
suicide, cheated on his wife, and had stays in mental toward eternity.
institutions. All of these ups and downs are represented,
if sometimes only metaphorically, in his mosaics. As he
It’s something I
writes, “My work is marked by events and is a mirror of
want to do. My
the mind that is building and falling apart, having a logic pointing is mostly
but close to chaos, refusing to stay still for the camera, and toward beautiful
giving one a sense of heaven and hell simultaneously.” women’s butts, but
I’m trying to get
pointed towards
the sky.”
—Isaiah Zagar
RVCA .COM / 25
Las Pozas
Unlike the other artists mentioned here, who built paradisal worlds with their
own two hands and materials that other people threw away, Edward James spent
millions of dollars, and enlisted 40 full-time laborers, to create his world.
James was the only son of an American railroad baron and a Scottish socialite,
and thus, he was born very, very rich. When Edward James was only four, his
father died, and James therefore inherited the family’s 8,000-acre estate, West
Dean House. James attended the best schools England had to offer, and as an
adult, became an author, poet and ardent supporter of the arts who hobnobbed
with the likes of the Mitford sisters, Sigmund Freud and Aldous Huxley.
James published books of poetry (including some of his own), commissioned
Balanchine productions when he fell in love with a dancer, and became a friend
and patron of surrealist artists such as Picasso, Magritte and Noguchi. West Dean
House, which James decorated in a Surrealist manner, was the first home of
Dali’s Mae West Lips Sofa and Lobster Telephone, and Dali liked to proclaim that
Edward James was crazier than all the other surrealists combined.
In the 1940s, after his messy divorce rankled English society, James made his
way to Mexico, specifically in the jungle in Xilitla. He settled on a particular spot
there one day when, while sunbathing after a swim, a swarm of blue butterflies
descended and covered his naked body. James took this as a sign that he was in
the right place to freely nurture his passion for orchids and exotic animals—of
which he had everything from parrots and flamingos to monkeys and ocelets.
He traveled with his pet boa constrictors, only staying in the nicest hotels where
they were permitted, and according to legend, once hired a composer to write a “I built this
requiem for his dying crocodile.
In the 1960s, after a frost had killed his orchids, James traveled to Los Angeles, sanctuary to
be inhabited by
where he visited Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers. He returned to Mexico with a
new idea—he would rebuild his garden, this time out of cement. Over the next
25 years, in a 50-acre jungle landscape 2,000 feet up in the mountains, James
would create more than 200 concrete sculptures, each of which he would carefully
design on his sketch-pad before hiring workers to build them. He gave many of
my ideas and my
his sculptures surrealist names, such as The House With Three Stories That Might
Be Five, The Stegosaurus Colt, The Temple of the Ducks, and The House Destined
fantasies.”
to be a Cinema. He dubbed the garden Las Pozas, after its centerpiece of nine-
concrete pools fed by a natural waterfall, and the garden is filled with walk-ways, —Edward James
animal shapes, towering columns, flying buttresses, and a stairway that ascends
straight to heaven. This was a signature of James’: doors, gates, and stairways
that lead to nothing.
Many people seem to interpret many of James’ acts and behaviors as motivated
by his desire to be not just a patron of the arts, but as an artist himself, and with
Las Pozas, he finally achieved this. Though James he had devoted his wealth
to Las Pozas in life, even selling his collection of Surrealist works to pay for its
construction, when he died in 1984, he failed to leave behind proper funding to
pay for its upkeep. What a typical artist.

RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 26

RVCA .COM / 37
 by Alexis Georgopoulos
All images courtesy of Suzanne Ciani Archive
SUZANNE CIANI
To drop the needle on Suzanne Ciani’s retrospective
LP collection Lixiviation is to be suspended in time.
Soft tones beckon, synthesizers cascade, all looping
gently but persistently like streams of analog rain.
These are the sounds that would preface what
would come to be called New Age music, that often
maligned genre which, in the name of Spiritual
Well-Being, led to some of the most insipid sounds
ever committed to wax. But this is not your Yoga
instructor’s New Age. As endless arpeggios fold
into one another, Ciani conjures future worlds:
transparent grids, infinite desert scapes, blinking
lights, visions of otherworldly possibility. One
thinks of the far out sounds of David Behrman,
Franco Battiato and Terry Riley, the imagery of
Italian utopianists SUPERSTUDIO, that heightened
cultural moment when philosophy, science and
mysticism merged for a few peak years.
Shortly thereafter, a voice enters the room. “Atari
video games,” a woman’s kind but authoritative
voice announces, matter of factly. A lovely,
optimistic assortment of sparkling sounds
suggesting an early 80s jingle follows, evoking that
moment when the word digital was new and alien.
We learn this piece soundtracked a short advert
for a ‘”Chip facility” showing men in spacesuits’,
introducing the world to what has become the norm:
a world animated by computers.
As in most realms, the world of Electronic Music,
and more specifically, synthesizer-based music—
whether it be as composer, programmer or
instrument builder/inventor—has been typically
seen as a man’s world: Bob Moog, Stockhausen,
Eno, Pierre Henry, Raymond Scott, Manuel
Göttsching, Kraftwerk, et al. The archetypes
of the synthesizer maven tend to, not unlike a
circuit board, follow a certain pattern. There’s the
archetypal late ‘50s/early ‘60s image of the bookish
gentleman in his ‘40s or ‘50s, likely bespectacled,
undoubtedly in a white Lab coat. The Cosmic
Traveler: the long hair who turned on in the early
‘70s, conjuring the black hit of Space with his 30–
plus minute excursions onto the Astral Plane. And of
course there’s the asymmetrical New Wave dandy, to
umbrella the various waves of the era (the brutalist
futurism of Cold Wave, the out-and-out refutation
that was No Wave, and the Synthesizer as symbol of
Post–Rock Pop, i.e., New Wave). Though this last
example did include a feministic strain, women’s
contributions (Mathematiques Modernes, Antena, et
al.) were, as usual, overshadowed.
Even today, as synths drive not only the
Underground but the Overground—from so-called
Hypnagogic Pop to Radio R&B, House, Techno and
just about everything else going—history is only
beginning to reappraise itself. Thankfully, through
the benefit of reissues, which in the best hands
cast an eye forward as they look back, Ciani and a
small but select group of women—the BBC’s Delia
Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, Italian producer
Doris Norton, New Yorker Laurie Spiegel, and the
more academically minded Eliane Radigue and
Pauline Oliveros—are getting their just due as
essential Electronic pioneers.
Ciani is undoubtedly the most upbeat and endearing
synth nerd of the lot. Take a look at her appearance
on Letterman where, to a stupefied Letterman,
she delights in a sound world she might joyously
describe as ‘simply wondrous’. You get the sense
she’d be the perfect person to teach children to use
synths. Meanwhile, Letterman, eyes big as walnuts,
looks like he’s just dropped acid. Ciani defined
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the sounds of Atari and Coca Cola—her entirely
synth-fabricated sounds of a Coke bottle fizzing
in a carbonated mist were realer than real—and
sprinkled her sound effect wizardry on top of Meco’s
cheeky, chart-topping disco version of the Star Wars
theme. These were iconic sounds of the era and
made Ciani the go-to for logotones of the time and
earned her five Grammy nominations.
But Ciani wasn’t simply responsible for the sonics
of adverts, impressive though they were. She
also had a foot in the Avant Garde. Most often
using Buchla synthesizers—Ciani, in fact, worked
with Don Buchla’s synths almost exclusively at the
Mills College Center for Contemporary Music—
these extended pieces had more in common with
Gruppo NPS, Luc Ferrari or Vangelis (with whom
she would collaborate on 1984’s The Velocity of
Love). Her 1982 album Seven Waves, recently
reissued by Finders Keepers subsidiary Bird upon
its 30th anniversary, was a defining moment of early
New Age music, before the genre turned to sallow
caricature. Other recent reissues, such as Voices for
Packaged Souls (Dead Cert), her collaborative sound
sculpture with sculptor Harold Paris, originally
released in a private press run of 50, illuminate
Ciani’s work in ways that have been up to now
overlooked. Taken together, these three recent
reissues—collecting pure synth experimentation,
brief commercial vignettes and long form, far out
synthscapes, create a newly minted portrait of a true
innovator for a new generation that will, like her
own, find it difficult to resist her charms.
ANP: You grew up studying classical piano. Did your parents
hope you’d pursue that as a career?
Suzanne Ciani: I grew up in a big Italian family, five girls and one
boy...and according to my father, an orthopedic surgeon who was the
youngest in his class at Harvard, all a woman needed to know was
how to shave a man and polish his shoes. I think that this philosophy
of low expectations gave me the freedom to pursue my own dreams
and not to feel the pressure to become a doctor or lawyer. Though
we do have a lawyer, an architect, an engineer, a visual artist, and a
composer amongst the siblings. I was lucky in that we had a beautiful
Steinway piano in the living room. My two older sisters were taking
lessons and I started playing their lessons on my own. I taught myself
to read music by knowing that middle C was under the “S” of Steinway
and figuring out the rest. I quit after one year of studying with the
teacher because he would not teach me classical music, just pop
standards. So I played on my own for 10 years until high school, when
I found a proper teacher at The Longy School of Music in Cambridge. I
am grateful for the gift of having my music develop privately and
naturally in my younger years. But I had a bit of catching up to do in
classical piano technique.
ANP: Do you remember first hearing a synthesizer, or a
sound you knew didn’t come from a traditional acoustic
instrument? Was Musique Concrète your first experience
with synthesized sound?  composer, it was the promise of independence, not to be dependent on
SC: My first experience of this sort was while I was a music student at
Wellesley College. One evening we visited our “brother school,” MIT
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and a professor there was
using funds from a grant to program a computer to make sound. This
was in about 1967. I empathized completely with his excitement
at actually producing something audible from this machine and at
that moment I knew this idea was part of my destiny. But I didn’t
run into it again until I went to Berkeley and met Don Buchla, the
consummate electronic instrument designer, whose loft was next door
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to sculptor Harold Paris. I was studying for a traditional Masters in
music composition at U.C. Berkeley, but ended up spending all my
time outside of the department, chasing this new dream. Thinking
of Musique Concrète, I did have an early pivotal experience: I had
chronic earaches as a child and always had to wear a bathing cap while
swimming. One day I couldn’t stand it anymore and I ripped off the
bathing cap and the pure sound of the water was overwhelming. After
the muffled sound, hearing all of the sparkling high end was
transformative. I did use some Musique Concrète techniques on
“Voices of Packaged Souls,” the limited edition LP I recorded in 1969-
70 for Harold Paris’ show at Galerie Withofs, in Brussels. Working
with tape machines and splicing blocks was second nature back then,
but my true love was pure electronic sound.
ANP: Was it the quality of limitless-ness of what you heard
what attracted you? The idea that through amplitude and
filters you could make the rustling of leaves, as you once
said, sound like something you’ve never heard? Was it using
a language that wasn’t bound to traditional notation?
SC: It was so many things. It was the quality of sound, how the ears
were treated to a sonic spectrum that seemed so much larger than
normal acoustic sounds—especially the high end of the spectrum. It
was the promise of the unknown, a new frontier to explore that
seemed intimate and personal because no one had been there. As a
the political process of getting music performed, knowing that most
composers died without ever hearing their compositions. And it was
the promise of freedom, working in a place that had no rules and no
expectations, but with total control: you could create the composition
exactly the way you wanted without depending on other performers
and you had constant feedback during the process of composing. It
was that a note could go on for days, a timbre could change instantly,
“notes” could be played faster or more slowly than humanly possible
and in rhythms with the steadiness of a perfect machine or in patterns
so complex that it made the academic fascination with complexity seem
simplistic. I was always more fascinated with the way notes could move as
opposed to a static timbre of sound. 
ANP: Was your first time playing a synthesizer at Mills College?
Is it true you could pay $5 to play a Buchla synthesizer by
the hour?
SC: Yes. Mills College housed the San Francisco Tape Music Center,
which had moved from the city and was funded in part by the Ford
Foundation. One could rent time to play a Buchla 100 series, a Moog, or
experiment with military surplus parts. I spent many a night there, playing
by candlelight. But because I went to work in Don Buchla’s “factory” right
after graduate school, I also got to play in his gigantic studio, which had a
towering number of modules and a swing hanging from the ceiling where
you could take a break and listen to the sonic space. 
ANP: Your first teacher was Max Matthews, the person to
essentially invent digital synthesis. Quaint as it may seem
now, his computer version of “Bicycle Built For Two” was
revolutionary. 
SC: I was very fortunate to take a course at the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Labs with both Max Matthews and John Chowning, who was
soon to “discover” the FM techniques that Yamaha made famous. Max
had a childlike excitement about his work: his passion and energy were
extraordinary and continued unabated until he died just last year. We
designed modular tone generators on paper and then fed punched cards to
be processed for the PDP-10 computer and, voila, the next day out would
come a short musical recording. In other words, the process was not “real
time.” It was all a wonderful education in understanding the fundamentals
of sound and separating out the individual parameters that contributed to
a sound.
ANP: Were you or Max privy to what Delia Derybshire or
Daphne Oram were up to at the BBC? I think (Finders Keepers
head) Andy Votel referring to you as the “Delia Derbyshire of the
Atari generation” is quite appropriate.  
SC: Actually, I had never heard of Delia or Daphne until a couple of months
ago…oddly. I am absolutely thrilled to discover them, though, since I have
always felt that women are naturally suited to the refinements of electronic
music. I love seeing the gracefulness and delicacy of their hands on the
machines. I have no idea whether Max was aware…and now I cannot ask
him, sadly.
ANP: They, along with Eliane Radigue, Laurie Spiegel, Doris
Norton and a post-Op Wendy Carlos—as Votel mentions in
his Lixiviation essay—make up the very small group of women
in the field. That must have crossed your mind at some point... 
SC: I don’t think about the gender of music very much, unless I am
specifically investigating and then I am shocked at the paucity of women. I
do think that the electronic medium does allow more opportunity
for women, since the politics of traditional performance are male-
dominated. When I first looked for record label support, it was assumed
that I was a singer. In the film world, I am credited with being the first
woman to be hired to score a major Hollywood feature, and for that
film and my subsequent big films I was always hired by women, a small
minority in the film world. 
ANP: Did you feel that you wanted to incorporate things that the
primarily male field was omitting? 
SC: The male studio engineers in New York City, for example, already
had fixed ideas about sound and tried to fit electronics into that history.
I preferred working with female engineers: Leslie Mona and Vicki Fabry,

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who seemed to listen with the fearless new ears required. It was also very important to
me to reveal the sensuality of electronic sound, a feminine paradigm. My compositions
were called “Waves,” as in my first album, Seven Waves. Not only was I ideologically
attracted to the sea, but I felt the energy of a wave to have a very feminine form, building
slowly and then releasing, and this became the compositional shape of my pieces. 
Also, of course, I got to design my own ocean waves that were specific for each piece. I
also wanted my music to create a sense of security, safety, and peacefulness and I felt
that the steadiness of the machine could provide the perfect subliminal communication
of those feelings.
ANP: Advertising music, jingles, et cetera, are typically written off by the
higher brow but I’ve always found the whole idea incredible. Songs+sounds
are used to manipulate, and even though we’re very often aware of it, their
power over us is still very effective, which is quite fascinating. Your selling
something, yes, but to chase this essence of something, and to achieve this
psychological effect is worth examining. 
SC: I love the subliminal aspect of advertising…that notion that communication is
on unconscious levels. And music and sound are perfect subliminal communicators:
I could design a sound that might make you feel thirsty, or cold, or safe, or scared. It
was not evil manipulation, but a form of poetry. The sound of a crystal jewel, a crispy
potato chip. I do not subscribe to “higher brow” or “lower brow.” It is all apples and
oranges. Pointless comparisons. I might write a symphonic score or a logo for Columbia
Pictures that is three seconds long. Why compare them? I love all good music, whether
pop or classical or ethnic. 
ANP: You created the sound of bubbles for Coca–Cola. Did you have any
ethical dilemmas about doing commercial work or did you see it as a worthy
opportunity to explore the instrument?
SC: I loved doing commercial work, working in my own artistic bubble. I did refuse
to do music for products to which I was morally averse, such as G.I. Joe, a “war” doll
for kids. I was fairly unconscious of the real world of advertising, choosing to see each
project as an artistic challenge. I also had a nobler purpose in my own mind, earning
money to finance my record projects and I never lost sight of that goal. Once I was able
to launch my artistic career sufficiently, I quit advertising.
ANP: “Paris 1971” meanwhile, or “Lixiviation” suggest a link to other artists
like Ariel Kalma or Klaus Schulze, in the case of the former, and Laurie
Spiegel or Terry Riley, in the case of the latter. Your scores for the sculptor
Ron Mallory and David Wood gave you the opportunity to score more
extended pieces. Was there a particular medium you found particularly
alluring to score? Did you prefer one type of work over another? 
SC: I adored writing for dance, but never found as many opportunities as I wished.
The abstract film, Lixiviation, that I scored for Ronald Mallory, was a perfect match
for me...creating sound to “marry” the image and bring it to life. Working with Harold
Paris’ project, Voices of Packaged Souls, was a defining experience for me, exploring
the beginnings of sound design, interpreting specific images sonically. The piece called
“Paris” (nothing to do with the sculptor) was a type of composition that was an on-going
“automatic” composition: I would have the Buchla on day and night and the piece was
continuous, dependent on subtle interactions of the modules that were defined and yet
random, so that the piece was always new. It required constant “tweaking” to find the
right balance of interactions. I once did an installation in the University of California Art
Museum with the Buchla generating an ongoing piece. At the time, no one understood
where the sound was coming from. They all thought there was some sort of recording
being played.

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ANP: When I hear you started doing educational films, I imagine and we learned to think of sound in all of its separate parameters, whereas
shaggy-haired kids in corduroy flying kites and doing voice-overs younger musical technophiles have grown up in a “preset” world and
about what it feels like to make a kite stay up in the air. perhaps alter the presets, but rarely, if ever, have the experience of building
SC: The project I did was called “Towns and Cities” and introduced me to a sound from scratch. I do think Europe is leading the way in this revival. 
the concept that I could make a living in music! I think that was the first ANP: I think analog synthesizers appeal to players and listeners
time I was paid.  on many levels but what one can add to those now is a sense
ANP: You did sound effects for the original Stepford Wives? Did of cultural memory—one that draws on Classical Minimalism,
you care for any of the soundtrack work that you heard around Cosmic Synth Music, German Synth Pop, John Carpenter films,
that time?  what have you. There is certainly a trend toward nostalgia—
SC: I was not much of a film buff at that time—I was busy just surviving sometimes with an ironic glint, sometimes with an earnest
in New York City. But historically, I’ve always loved the scores of fascination with the process and the sound. What do you think
Bernard Hermann. of contemporary producers pursuing the sound/approach to
ANP: Had you been familiar with Finders Keepers? One of my synthesis you were working with 30 years ago?
favorite pieces from Lixiviation, “Clean Room,” reminds me of SC: I think it’s wonderful and I hope that this time around the full promise
some Sound Library music of the era. Did you always work by of electronic music is not “short-circuited” again. I remember that once
commission with particular companies or did you ever make a black and white keyboard was made part of the instruments, in order
recordings for Sound Library labels? to make the machines seem more familiar and “musical,” the future was
SC: It was a great surprise for me to be contacted by B-Music/Finders lost. And we also suffered the demise of quadraphonic sound, which was
Keepers Records. I was not familiar with them, but soon realized that they perfect for electronic music, but otherwise made little sense. So hopefully
occupy a unique niche. They are very passionate about discovering lost this time around spatial control will come back and new interfaces will
worlds and it has been a privilege to work with them, which happily lead make “playing” the machines more organic. But we do need women in
me to discover long-abandoned, though not forgotten, tapes in my vaults.  this endeavor. Really! Women can bypass the obvious and find the true
I have always worked by commission. I do vaguely recall in the early 1970s, sensuality of this medium.
when I first arrived in Los Angeles, being locked in someone’s studio with
my Buchla to create a syndicated radio ID package for a Philadelphia Radio
station. I did background music for good weather, bad weather, heavy
traffic, news, etc. But basically I was a gun for hire in the advertising world,
where I worked as a mercenary artist to make the money to produce my
artistic albums.
ANP: Didn’t you create some crazy sounds for a Kung Fu Film?
SC: That does trigger some vague memory, but too vague to be able to
amplify upon!
ANP: How did you first link up with Atari?
SC: My company in New York, Ciani-Musica, Inc., became the number
one hi-tech music production house. The Atari agency was Young &
Rubicam and the music director, Hunter Murtaugh, was a big fan and
hired us for many major campaigns, including Merrill Lynch and Lincoln
Mercury. Atari provided us with one of their games and from that I took the
“vocabulary” of the sounds, recreating them into a track for the TV spots.
I also was featured in an educational film Atari made for schools called
“Computers: Expressway to Tomorrow,” in which I demonstrated sound
design techniques. I was never very good at playing the games, though.
ANP: In your description of the piece “Second Breath” you
say you always referred to a synthesizer as “the machine” not
“the synthesizer” because “it had strange and inappropriate
connotations.” Can you explain what you meant?
SC: The term “synthesizer” was unfortunate, because it had connotations
of “synthetic” or “imitation.” Many people thought the purpose of such
a machine was to replicate existing acoustic instruments, like flutes
or strings, etc. This was definitely nothing I wanted to do. In fact, the
musician’s union in New York was so wary of “synthesizers” that they were
not allowed in the union, the fear being that “real” musicians would be
replaced and made obsolete. To discourage the use of these evil machines,
the union required that synth players be paid double scale and paid again
with each overdub. This, of course, benefitted me. Don Buchla had first
made me aware of the inappropriateness of the synthesizer term: he never
ever called his instruments synthesizers, but “electronic music boxes.” It
was important to establish the instrument as a new and independent
possibility and not something derivative.
ANP: In 1979, you started recording what would be Seven
Waves and you became one of New Age music’s early success
stories. Certain elements of Seven Waves remind me of
Vangelis, who you knew, right? Were you privy to the “Cosmic
Synth” music coming from Germany and Japan and elsewhere
in the 1970s—I’m thinking of Popol Vuh, Cluster, Eno, Deuter,
Tangerine Dream, Kitaro and the many smaller label artists.
SC: I met Vangelis during the recording of my second album, The Velocity
of Love. I met him first in London and then in New York. He overdubbed
percussion and CS-80 melodies on three of the cuts. He was larger than life
and so amazingly musical. Oh my. And yes, I knew of Tangerine Dream and
Kitaro and Tomita and Eno but did not know Popol Vul or Deuter.
ANP: Have you caught wind of the renewed interest in this
music over the past few years, with increasing numbers of young
people making music with synths and sequencers? 
SC: Yes, I’m actually just becoming aware of this and I think it is because
there is a new generation of kids that are just beginning to realize that there
was an analog world prior to the digital world. Analog was very hands on

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Shakespeare
and Company Lisa Rovner
images COURTESY SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY

Jerry Seinfeld says, “A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people a saint among his books, lending them, housing penniless friends upstairs, not eager to sell,
are still thinking.” in the back of the store, in a small overcrowded room, with a desk, a small stove. All those
who come for books remain to talk, while George tries to write letters, to open his mail,
The Kate Tempest poetry reading I recently attended at the Shakespeare and Company order books. A tiny, unbelievable staircase, circular, leads to his bedroom, or the communal
bookstore in Paris supports this position. The bookshop was jam-packed with people bedroom, where he expected Henry Miller and other visitors to stay.”
who seemed utterly consumed by thought. Outside, a speaker amplified the young British Readings and meetings would take place regularly in the back room of the store. Legend has
poet’s voice. It was full of resonance. A group of us stood silently still, listening carefully it that it was at Le Mistral that William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch was “written,” sourcing
as Tempest declared: material from Whitman’s personal library. It was also where the book was first read in
“Look, we’re not flesh, public. From its inception and still to this day, the bookshop has hosted countless readings,
We’re all energy courses and debates. Back in the day, these were often followed by a communal meal
I care about genius prepared by Whitman himself.
I don’t care about celebrity In 1964, Whitman renamed the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, in celebration of
We only build them up Sylvia Beach’s legendary bookstore and lending library with the same name. Beach, an
To burn their effigies expatriate from New Jersey, had befriended, guided, supported, and lent books to the first
And there’s more generation of expat writers, among them Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce.
And I can feel it so raw She famously published Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, when no one else would. Her store became
And it’s calling me back to before.”  the home of literary culture and modernism in Paris. These writers, also known as the
“Lost Generation,” had come to Paris in search of beauty, culture and permissive attitudes,
In the ‘60s, at this very same location, Allen Ginsberg had recited his infamous poem and had found refuge at Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. When the Second World War
Howl. I imagined the audience then, I wondered if they too had felt like privileged hit Paris, Beach was forced to close down, and despite the rumor that Hemingway had
witnesses, as I did now? I noticed the blooming cherry blossom tree in front of the shop “liberated” the bookstore at the end of the war, she never reopened.
was already loosing its petals. “Wait,” I told the tree. Behind it, just across the river, the Beach’s literary oasis was the inspiration and model to Whitman’s “rag and bone shop of the
Notre Dame Cathedral towered as Tempest’s voice continued to provoke: heart” as he called it, and so when she died, he renamed the bookstore after hers. Whitman
“…I don’t care about the surface would later describe the bookstore›s name as “a novel in three words.” I always liked the
I care about the infinite sound of that.
I carve a niche
And I hide within it
I lay down in the garden of your spirit
Asking pardon from the elders
They tell me, Kate,
Every minute is the minute to begin it…”

Shakespeare and Company was opened in 1951 by an American, George Whitman, but
originally under a different name: Le Mistral. Le mistral is a French regional wind but
the bookstore was in fact named after Whitman’s first French love. A conversation with
Lawrence Ferlinghetti about the importance of free-thinking bookshops and a 500 dollar
inheritance prompted Whitman, who was studying in Paris thanks to the GI Bill, to buy a
bankrupt grocery on the Left Bank at 37 rue de la Bucherie, meters away from kilometer
zero, the official center of Paris. As Whitman explained: “Like many of my compatriots
I am something of a tumbleweed drifting in the wind. I drifted into bookselling for no
better reason than a passion for books except for the classical reason of all booksellers
who are self employed because they doubt if anyone else would employ them.”
Very quickly, the English language bookstore became the nucleus for Anglophone literary
culture in bohemian Paris, attracting many expat writers from Henry Miller to James
Baldwin to the Beat Generation writers, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William
S. Burroughs. As Anaïs Nin recorded in her Paris diaries of the 1950s: “And there by
the Seine was the bookshop... an Utrillo house, not too steady on its foundations, small
windows, wrinkled shutters. And there was George Whitman, undernourished, bearded,
The bookstore is of course many novels in 3 words. The shop’s walls are entirely
covered from floor to ceiling in books. Downstairs, on the main floor, you have all
the new and used books that are for sale. Science, French history, philosophy, fiction,
non fiction, art, cooking, science fiction, mysteries, world history, biography and all
the way in the back, next to the music and cinema section, in it’s very own room,
lies the poetry section. A wooden staircase leads up to the children’s section and 2
more rooms, filled with books that are not for sale, but for reading. The library is a
collection of Whitman’s books. Many are them are first editions, many of them are
signed, and all of them are interesting. A typewriter hidden in a small alcove invites
visitors to write, and leave a poem. A piano in the other room wishes for nothing
more than to be played by all, regardless of talent, but most of all, upstairs in the
library rooms, you find readers browsing, reading and writing.
Beyond just selling books, the bookstore’s history is punctuated with publications.
The first was an avant-garde literary magazine called Merlin that published 7 issues,
between 1952 and 1954. Merlin was the first to bring light to Samuel Beckett’s
writing. The second, the Paris Magazine, which Whitman dubbed “The Poor Man’s
Paris Review”, was first published in 1967 when the bookshop was closed down by
the French authorities because the store’s papers were not in order. The first issue
included works by Laurence Durrell, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Paul Sartre, an interview
with Marguerite Duras and pictures of Vietnam at war. Only 3 issues were to see the
light under his direction. As Whitman remarked ”I am ready to admit I may have no
more vocation as an editor than as a bookseller and will gracefully resign if someone
like Mary McCarty would like to be it’s editor and financier.” In June 2010, more
than 40 years after the first issue was published, Sylvia Beach Whitman, George
Whitman’s daughter, and Fatema Ahmed, the former editor of Granta magazine,
published the 4th edition. The new issue’s theme is storytelling and politics, and
includes works from Luc Sante, Michel Houellebecq, Rivka Galchen and many
others, and is illustrated with memorabilia from the bookshop as well as drawings
from Daniel Arsham, Nigel Peake and Gregory Blackstock.
Over the decades, thousands of writers have lived in the shop. As Sylvia recounts
“George always welcomed traveling writers or tumbleweeds as he affectionately
called them to bunk up between the rows of books.” The bookstore website boasts
that more than 40,000 writers have lived in the shop, some staying for just one
night, others for as long 6 years, evidence gathered by the one page biographies each
visitor is asked to write. On the 2d floor, if you look carefully, you’ll see the writers’
makeshift “beds” that double as benches during business hours. As one journalist
put it, “The deal then is the deal now: sleep in the shop, on tiny beds hidden among
the book stacks; work for two hours a day helping out with the running of the place;
and, crucially, read a book a day, whatever you like, but all the way through, unless
maybe it’s War and Peace, in which case you can take two days.” To this day, the
Tumbleweed Hotel’s creed remains: “Give what you can, take what you need.” And
as the writing on the bookshop wall proclaims: “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest
they be angels in disguise.”
Whitman described his bookshop as “a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore”.
On one of the walls in the bookshop, a drawing insists: “My country is the world, my
religion is humanity.” While Whitman often said he was a communist, in reality he
was a humanist, in other words, an optimist who believed in people. On December
14th, 2011, two days after his 98th birthday, Whitman passed away at home in the
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apartment above the bookshop. He had suffered a stroke two months earlier. According to
the bookstore’s website, he “showed incredible strength and determination up to the end,
continuing to read every day in the company of his daughter, Sylvia, his friends and his
cat and dog.” While he is no longer seen, his spirit remains, thanks to Sylvia, who has been
presiding over the bookshop since 2004. While she has brought the place some modernity,
repair and polish, she has managed to do so without altering any of its charm or character.
Sylvia was born in 1981 and spent her early years in the bookshop with her father. She
remembers the bookstore being theatrical and the beautiful pictures of her as a child,
dispersed throughout the shop, capture a time full of laughter, light and books. After
university, where she studied drama, in an attempt to reconnect with her estranged father,
she returned to Paris and started working beside him in the bookshop. While she had no
intention to stay longer than a summer, sure enough, she fell in love with the bookstore
and is now gracefully running the show. George Whitman is quoted on the outside of the
shop: ”In the year 1600 our whole building was a monastery called la Maison du Mustier.
In medieval times each monastery had a frère lumpier whose duty was to light the lamps
at nightfall. I have been doing this for fifty years now it’s my daughter’s turn.”
She is dedicated to keeping the bookshop’s philosophy intact and also importantly,
to making it relevant again. Since she’s taken hold of the torch, she has created a
literary festival, a literary prize, all the while continuing to host Monday night readings,
Wednesday night performances, Saturday workshops for writers and Sunday tea with the
Mad Hatter, Pam. It’s bustling more than ever and with the right kind of electricity.
Shakespeare and Company is a place that reminds you of the power of dreams and
generosity. People now come from around the world to bath in the Whitman family
magic, leaving their mark with love notes and poems that completely cover the wall in the
children’s section, also known as “the mirror of love”.
In 1997, the French Ministry of culture declared Shakespeare and Company as one of the
historic monuments of Paris. It’s not only a monument but also “a monastery of the word,”
as one tumbleweed poet put it. It has become, as George Whitman had always wanted, an
institution. And thanks to Sylvia, the sanctuary is here to stay.
George, bless your soul. And Sylvia, thank you for hiring me when I needed work and most
importantly, thank you for keeping the dream alive for all of us to experience. Shakespeare
and Company is open every day of the year, even on Christmas, from 10am to 11pm on
weekdays and 11am to11pm on weekends.
“The bookstore
in which dreams
come true.”
MARK COHEN by AARON ROSE
IMAGES COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ROSE GALLERY, SANTA MONICA

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The world of contemporary photography can be so
predictable at times that it is always an honor to be able to
explore the work of a legend. That excitement is exaggerated
when it is the work of someone whose oeuvre is not as
widely known as others in their field. You can imagine my
elation then, when Mark Cohen agreed to participate in
this feature. It’s not that Cohen hasn’t has his fair share of
acclaim in photography circles, it’s just that due to his unique
approach to image-making and his refusal to live in a large
cosmopolitan city, he has somehow managed to maintain
certain a purity in his image-making that others from his
generation have not. Mark Cohen was born in 1943 in Wilkes-
Barre, Pennsylvania and with the exception of a small stint
in Europe, he has continued to live there his whole life. The
majority of the work for which Cohen is known has been shot
in the neighborhoods of this and surrounding towns, bringing
a highly unique backdrop to the works of a photographer
who spares no intimacy in order to capture his pictures. Like
other photographers from his generation, Cohen worked for
many years as a portrait photographer. His days were spent
shooting catalogues, portraits and children at his studio in
Wilkes-Barre. However, his approach to his personal work
could not be more different from the slick commercialism
of the studio. Out in the streets, Cohen becomes a one-man
documentary machine. He can be seen out walking for hours
in search of the truth of the human story. His technique is
also completely original in street photography. Part thief,
part dancer, characteristically Cohen shoots in close up. He
approaches his subjects quickly, racing forward, coming in
very tight and then in the blink of an eye, snaps his picture
and exits the scene. His shooting method is more akin to a
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Blonde Woman with Red Lips,
Scranton, PA, 1987
(opposite)
Mark Cohen in Flash Tee Shirt,
Photograph by Harold Jones,
Tucson, Arizona,1977
purse-snatcher than that of a contemporary photographer
and his style is immediately evident in the final images.
In the photographs, his subjects often turn their heads,
run away or throw their hands up in self-defense. The end
result is a completely unique take on the human condition.
The reluctance, shyness, and sometimes fear in the faces of
those he shoots give us a glimpse into their inner lives. It is
interesting to note, however, that even though the means to
the end may be obtrusive to personal space, there is a subtle
poetry in his final images that rarely illustrate this violence.
Cohen is simply catching people on the sly, at times slightly
voyeuristic, but always extremely honest. In all of my years
of following photography I have never seen a photographer
who shoots like Cohen. Often using a wide-angle lens and
flash, he frequently crops the subjects’ heads from the
frame. He concentrates his lens instead on small details and
moments. In the process he has created a signature look
that is unmistakably his. Though quite beautiful, Cohen’s
pictures are often unsettling. They show us a world filled
with anxieties, fears, dreams and desires. There is a sense
of humor in his work, but it is always subtle and though his
shooting methods might be intrusive, it is obvious that he
has enormous respect for his subjects. Yes, Cohen invades
what would otherwise be considered people’s private worlds.
However the results of this invasion act like secret glimpses
into moments that are not unlike those of our own. They are
archetypical images of the human condition as seen through
the eyes of the most common man. Like a mirror they reflect
back at us the things we may all be seeing anyway, but with
a sense of style, grace and downright chutzpah that we could
only dream to possess.
Aaron Rose: When did you first pick
up a camera?
Mark Cohen: When I was about twelve,
my cousin Sylvia gave me a black plastic
camera. It took 127 film. I had trouble,
at first, loading the tank, so I got the film
developed at the drug store. Then the
enlarging was done in the cellar. My father
helped me make a darkroom there and my
uncle showed me how to use the enlarger.
AR: What was it about photography
that initially hooked you?
MC: I was hooked on it right away.
Everyday. When I was young I jumped
off my grandmother’s back porch and
took pictures as I went down, just to see
what those looked like. Maybe it was the
darkroom? The sense of magic in the
dark or in the orange light. The pictures
emerging from the blank paper must have
had an effect on me too and then there
was the feeling of positioning myself in
the world. I made the picture, I was the
actual focal point. By the time I could
drive I was taking pictures for the local
newspaper and under each one was a
credit line. Then, while I was still in high
school, I saw The Decisive Moment (Henri
Cartier-Bresson’s highly influential 1952
book of photographs) and understood it.
It was very important to have that book
as a model. I got a Leica M-3 and then
had some of the pictures published in a
local magazine. Then I went to Penn State
and was the yearbook photographer and
exhibited there and then I went to Spain.
Just like Henri Cartier-Bresson.
AR: You’re self-taught...did you ever
consider school?
MC: Yes. As a high school senior I took
a portfolio to IIT in Chicago and was
accepted but it was very expensive so
instead I studied engineering at Penn State.
There I took some great art history classes,
which were important because they made
art a more visible thing. That combined
with the little I knew about Cartier-Bresson
resulted in a mix that set photography
high in my mind. Street photography
and symbolism working together to trip
the unconscious.
AR: What are the pros and cons of
teaching yourself?
MC: The main con was that there was no
supporting cast of professors to establish
a credential. An Ivy-league MFA is still
taken pretty seriously in Chelsea. The main
“pro” was that I could go very fast alone.
There was no politic to endure. I taught
some grad level courses for a while and the
critique time, the discussions, the built-
in audience, formed the basis of a whole
tricked out aesthetic for each student
and teacher. Photos are put up and an
amazing defensiveness sets in. All kinds of
theories are then attached to each student’s
pictures. It’s color-roll film one semester
and black and white 35mm the next. So a
distinct personality gets lost in format and
media changes.
AR: Why have you stayed in Wilkes-
Barre? Do you think you would be a
different photographer if you lived
somewhere like New York or Paris?
MC: I like New York City but never could
see how to live there. So I started a photo
studio in Wilkes-Barre. I mostly took
portraits of children. Black and white
16X20’s were my main item and I did
that for forty years. I was not able to keep
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going to Spain and so I stayed in Wilkes- Three Boys Posing,1975
Barre and in that way I made, almost
(opposite & clockwise from top left)
unconsciously, a very unusual body of Girl with Bat and Ball,1977
work. I went out to take pictures almost
Boy in Yellow Shirt Smoking, 1977
everyday. I went into the “projects” part of
this little city and made an original kind People on Porch: 65, 63, 1977
of picture there. I kept getting closer and
Legs and Boy in Pool, 1977
closer to the subjects. Then I was in my
first museum show called, “Vision and Shirtless Boy with Chain, 1975
Expression” in Rochester in 1968. That
led to my being in the first group of
photographers to exhibit in the LIGHT
gallery. This was in the early days of
“Photography in New York.” There were
only three galleries showing photography
at the time. If I had figured out a way to
live there I think I would have been in
some state of hyper-distractedness! There
is so much going on. Out here there is
nothing. I work in an isolated situation
but see a lot of the work. If I lived in Paris
or New York I can’t imagine that I would
have made these same pictures. It is as if I
am working in a studio the size of Luzerne
County and Lackawanna County (Scranton,
PA) and I can stop the car in alignment
with my mood. The pictures can only take
on a certain psychological depth if they
are made at hand; it is not travel
photography. In New York and Paris
every sight is so fresh. Here I know where
each dog is barking.
AR: Who are your biggest
photographic influences?
MC: Cartier-Bresson, William Klein,
Robert Frank, Kodulka and Winogrand.
AR: How much is proximity
important to you in photography?
MC: The proximity is very important. I
can just go out the door and start to work.
RVCA .COM / 39
(clockwise from top left)
Family Station Wagon, Hazleton, PA,1976. Family Walking, 1977.
Playing in Courtyard, 1987. Woman in Scarf, 1975.

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The territory is always familiar but there is
an infinite set of possibilities and variations
each time. My mindset, the lens, the scene. I
went to Mexico City about ten times and was
shocked with the extreme visual stimulation.
I was there about ten days each time. It is a
wonderful place. But after a while I started to
feel like I needed to see what was going on on
a certain street near Scranton. So I need to
be near the scene and then near, close, with
a 28mm lens, one foot away. Really close to
the subject. There I create a certain thrill by
interjecting myself into the action that is right
next-door. All with the strangers in the street.
AR: Your shooting style is sometimes
very invasive. Have you ever been in
a verbal or physical altercation as the
result of this?
MC: Many times. I have no press pass from
a newspaper so I am out as an artist and that
is hard to explain. Especially now after 9/11
and this whole new “See Something/Say
Something” advice. There is more suspicion
about photography. I was very close to people
and no matter that the time I spent with a
subject was only a few seconds as I walked
by, the typical case, there was often an angry
reaction and in the poorer neighborhoods this
could lead to a chase, or a push, or they wanted
the film. It is not this way on Fifth Avenue,
where there are hundreds of people and you
are really pretty safe taking any kind of picture
Man in Dark Raincoat,1987
(opposite, clockwise from top left)
Karate Stance, 1977
Young Limbs, 1981
Girl Holding Blackberries, 1975
Improvised Beach, 1975
Two Boys and Open Car, 1977
you want. It is the same in Paris. I was taking
pictures there once and the people, the French,
who suppose they invented photography,
would pose for me! They were so used to
“street photography.” But in these little towns,
in the alleyways that I am in—there is often a
distinct danger in this seemingly inappropriate
activity. But of course, the ‘danger’ transfers to
the picture.
AR: You consider yourself a primarily
black and white photographer, but
many of your color images are quite
well known. What is the difference
between shooting black and white vs.
color for you?
MC: There is not much difference. Some of
my color pictures need the color film. Many
do not. I made a color picture that I call “the
improvised beach.” It is an image of two kids
lying on some newspaper pages and they are
laughing and pretending to be at the beach. It
is a very strong picture of these kids. The type
of film in the camera was not important for
this picture. But formally, there is a key patch
of green that I really like and did not see at the
time. The two kids overwhelmed the scene; the
color was added by chance. The kind of film in
the camera is not the issue for me. It is the idea
about taking pictures that are the strongest
and then the possible interaction and change
in the scene that my interjection causes and
then records. This is a bigger event than the
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emulsion detail. But there is no question that
if there is color film inside then I am much
more aware of the color in the scene. In my
photo studio I used color film all the time and
it was processed in a lab and it was basically
about portraits and annual reports. Then at
some point there was a 35mm film that was the
same speed as Tri-X and then it was possible to
use the camera in the street the same way for
both films. So in 1977 I first experimented with
Kodak Vericolor II film.
AR: How has the digital revolution
changed the way you look at
photography?
MC: I think more and more pictures get their
start on laptops. Not long ago I looked at some
student work and it was all on the computer.
The was no interest in actually printing out the
pictures. There was no object. The image went
from the three-inch screen on the camera to
the eleven-inch screen on the laptop and then
I guess if it created enough peer excitement,
some digital prints might be made. Facebook
and Google carry billions of pictures in clouds
and the idea of putting twenty together in
a gallery might be obsolete. Plus, you need
mattes, frames, and glass. Tyler Hicks is very
modern. His terrific pictures go from Syria to
page one of the New York Times in minutes I
bet and that is the key point of digital capture.
AR: Do you still shoot primarily film?
MC: Yes. Only Tri-X now.
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 44
Red Fence,1987
(opposite & clockwise from top left)
Shoe and Ankle, Mexico City,1981
Ring, 1974
Woman Wipes Porch, 1974
Young Girl at Beach, 1977
Teens with Car, 1973
AR: Though you have a very
original and signature style, your
work is easily grouped with the
images of William Eggleston and
Steven Shore. Do you consider
them your contemporaries?
MC: We are in the same time and I am
grouped with them because of the color
film. My color work has become a lot
better known because of the dye transfer
portfolio and its exhibition in LA. at the
Rose Gallery and from the website of
the George Eastman House. I just don’t
think we make the same pictures. We are
all driven different ways. Different levels
of psychological heat.
AR: There’s a photograph of yours
titled “Young Girl at the Beach.”
There is something so beautiful yet
sad about her face in that photo.
Can you tell me a bit about that
image?
MC: That picture was taken in
Mantoloking, New Jersey. The girl is
walking by and sees the camera and is
naturally shy and maybe frightened, too,
and as she goes by I take the picture.
She keeps her head and eyes down and
this is a very natural reaction. The steps
on the right leading to the dark porch
balance this out as if it is all about a trap
of some kind. Punishment and guilt are
in the air.
AR: In addition to images of
people, you also focus quite often
on architectural details or small
glimpses of the smaller worlds
around us. For instance your
wonderful photo of broken glass.
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Is there a distinction between
the ways you shoot people vs.
inanimate objects?
MC: It is much, much safer to
photograph an object. There is no
harmful personal trespass. Still if you
make an object’s picture in the rain or at
night or on the run then those elements
of atmosphere or disturbance are
encountered in some unexplained way.
It is hard to imagine sneaking up on a
piece of broken glass, but if it is in an
abandoned building it is a little like theft
and this can give the picture a visible lift.
AR: You mentioned that you
are a fan of William Klein. Have
you ever considered fashion
photography?
MC: I always thought I could do fashion
photography and looked at Vogue
for years but it is a thing that is only
possible in a city. Plus it is a thing that
requires lots of people cooperating
and that is just not what I am able to
understand.
AR: You spoke about how the web
contains billions of photographic
images. It is almost as though
photography is slowly becoming
simply a way of exchanging
information...somehow devoid of
artistic expression. This landscape
is so different from when you
started taking pictures. In your
opinion, how does this affect the
way our culture views the art form.
Has it influenced the way you
approach your recent photography
at all?
MC: I think art in a room with one door
is the best way to ‘get it.’ Something
like an aesthetic pressure chamber.
A white room, with white mattes and
white frames, and then in this setting
there are a series of pictures that have
been made from a selected group of
negatives and this is the way to see the
point of the photographer’s work. A
simple book of the same pictures works
in the same way. There is the intimacy
of the undistracted first sight. It has
the same excitement of the frame in
the dark movie theater. The screen is
the fixed part of the experience in the
same way that the pictures are lined up
on the walls or sequenced in the pages.
An iPhone photo moving from phone
to phone or screen to screen makes a
silver print look like a Vermeer. I live in
a house with a darkroom and can still
get all the materials overnight from New
York so the whole digital revolution is
only alongside me. I work in exactly the
same way but keep a little more distant
from the subject. Now I use mostly a
50mm lens.
AR: Have you ever shot a photo
you regretted?
MC: Yes. Once about ten years ago I took
a picture of a kid playing with a truck
in the dirt in his front yard. I was just
walking along the sidewalk. His mother
was on the porch, watching at the time,
and she called the police. It was Kafka
for a year.
 CLARE ROJAS
by Chris Lux / Portraits by damon way

Clare Rojas is painter, musician, and writer, living in San

Francisco. She records and performs music under the name
Peggy Honeywell. Rojas has exhibited internationally,
showing paintings, installations, and performances. She
is, needless to say, a very busy woman. She also has an
amazing family to top it off. Clare’s work has recently
shifted from being very figurative and narrative based,
to becoming more open, more abstracted. After recently
visiting Clare’s studio, I was struck by how her new
collection of work forms an expression for a thing difficult
to articulate, navigate, or portray: the vibrancy of human
feelings and interactivity in a vast, engulfing world.

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(prior page)
Untitled, 2012
Oil on linen, 60x48 in.
Courtesy the artist
Untitled, 2012
Oil on linen, 60x48 in.
Courtesy the artist
Untitled, 2012
Oil on linen, 60x48 in.
Courtesy the artist
(prior page)
Untitled, 2012
Oil on linen, 60x48 in.
Courtesy the artist
Chris Lux: Your new abstract works and new portraiture works
I saw in your studio the other day seem like big departures. That
said, they still use a language that is present in your older paintings.
Almost like the figurative elements and the abstract elements of
your past work have separated and demanded your full attention.
How did you get to these paintings?
Clare Rojas: Here is an appropriate narrative from, ‘The Wisdom of No Escape
by Pema Chodron’ that seems to sum it up for me. There is a story of a woman
running away from tigers. She runs and runs, and the tigers are getting closer
and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines. Looking
down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that
a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees
a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump
of grass. She looks up and she takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and
enjoys it thoroughly.
CL: How important do you feel it is for artists at every stage in their
career to be able to follow new paths and reinvent themselves?
Phillip Guston’s infamous 1970 show at the Marlborough Gallery
has always served as big inspiration for me. He was shunned after
that show because it marked a change in his work, from abstract
expressionism into more figurative approach. Your new work
seems much less of a departure, but still a change. Do you ever feel
like change in artist’s practice can be extremely difficult?
CR: How could someone’s lifetime not change their work or their practice?
How could the arch of time not change your perspective, your influence, your
growth and personal truth? I don’t know that it’s possible for change to NOT
be reflected in your work. Change is the only thing one can do. I also think
most respectable galleries, support the artist no matter what manifests in their
work, and if they don’t support the artists then they usually they part ways. I
think that is true for any relationship. I also think that people just miss what
they don’t have anymore...and if someone stops making something you like,
one feels loss.    they would want to engage in that violent display of objectification, even if she
CL: From the sheer size of your work, to performing music on
stage, not to mention the “controversial” naked men paintings, I
must say you don’t seem to be afraid of much in your practice. You
seem so comfortable following your way. Have you always been
able to feel so comfortable? Was there anyone or work that you
remember really strengthening your drive?
CR: I think at a very early age I had a sense that what my friends were feeling,
a carefree, experimental, innocence, I was not feeling. I had more feelings
of protection, anger and frustration, and knowledge of a darker harsher
reality. As I grew up into my late 20s, I watched people a lot. I was very quiet.
My personal library expanded and I read a lot of feminist literature. I had
a motivation that was about survival, and trying my best to protect myself
from being shut up, let down, and objectified. Being angry is very powerful,
fear, also, to say the least, can be powerful. I feel like for a brief moment in
my career I was able to harness those emotions and use them for good. But
for now, I feel like the woman about to be eaten by the tigers, I fought a good
fight, the outcome, meaning death, is inevitable. I might as well enjoy the
strawberries. The body of work that you refer to as “naked men” was a very
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interesting experiment for me and I learned a lot. This idea manifested out of
the animation called “the manipulators” where I collaborated with Andrew
Jeffery Wright while living in Philly. We animated fashion magazines, in a very
juvenile funny way, and this satirical laughter was one remedy to breaking
the spell these images had on women and men. It was fun to take their power
away by just simply making someone fart. All of a sudden you were not looking
at a complex advertisement that embodied manipulation and consumption
or a model selling perfume half naked and starving. You were laughing at a
massive animated fart explosion coming from her bum. My politics were in
place, and I took it further in these paintings of just naked men. I basically
wanted to see what it felt like to see all the ads of women in submissive stupid
degrading positions plastered on buses, billboards, TV ads, magazines, all
men, naked in those positions. Would it be socially acceptable then? Would I
think less of men? The problem was, the majority of men’s vulnerability did
not lie in their bodies, like it does for women. A silly drawing of them naked,
is not going to take away the fact that men run our country, are the majority
on the supreme court, get paid 30% more than women. It was like fighting
fire with a flower. I found most women didn’t really want to wear the t-shirts I
made out of these drawings, they didn’t find my humor that funny, and if they
did, it was a select few, maybe women felt empathy, maybe the pain goes so
deep that it doesn’t matter who is in the image, what is reflected is the same. I
was even told to try drawing from porn by a professor in graduate school.
But this is the entire point - this wasn’t derived from porn, from an extreme,
this wasn’t about sex. This was about sexuality, what it means to be a female
human, or male human, a pornified mainstream, every-minute-of-everyday
bombardment, brainwashing, social conditioning. It was a trivial response. But
at least it was a response. The conversation CAN NOT BE ONE-SIDED and it
felt that way to me. Men got a kick out of it. Not one man I knew was offended
by these images. Yet when I saw a man wearing some stupid t-shirt of some
topless woman peeing, wasted, or something, and yes I have seen this, I am
traumatized. I feel physical pain, and hurt and sadness. I can’t understand why
is doing it to her self. Did they feel this was a great way to define masculinity?
I made myself laugh, that was it, and at the time, I needed to laugh or I was
constantly crying. Performance, Peggy (Honeywell - Rojas’ stage name), a
stage, it was a challenge for me, still is. But the idea, the visual, of a woman in a
world she created on her terms, full of women who fight, are warriors, support
each other and have the entire wisdom of the women who came before them,
standing alone, singing narratives about pain, loss, love, resilience. That was
power. I wanted to own my world. I was going to stand and sing because I was
fortunate enough to have a voice for us all, and I wasn’t going to take any of
that for granted.
CL: Narrative has been a big a part of your work for a long
time. From the narrative paintings, to your music career, writing
and story telling seem to be a driving force in all your work. It feels
like with this new work maybe you have become the protagonist
now? Can you talk about how narrative has and continues to
influence you and how that factors into your abstract works?
CR: I have always been attracted to narrative. I love all forms. Everything is a
story.  Somewhere along the way, I developed a coping mechanism that helped
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Untitled, 2012
Oil on linen, 96x120 in.
Courtesy the artist
(opposite)
Untitled, 2012
Oil on linen, 96x120 in.
Courtesy the artist
Untitled, 2012
Oil on linen, 96x120 in.
Courtesy the artist
me navigate hard situations. When found in one, usually any social situation
for me, I pretend I am watching a T.V. show. Real people become character
actors and the script is already written. The shift in my painting practice
came after a two-year period where I just stopped painting. I couldn’t
paint anymore. I was burned out and my story, my personal narrative was
destroying me, and everything around me, my marriage, my home, my
friendships. I rejected hair, cut mine very short, no make up, nothing that
made me feel like I gave in to what “they wanted me to be”. My story was,
the world is a dark dangerous place for women, everywhere you go, someone
wants to destroy you and de-humanize you, take away your rights. My story
was that I had to fight for everything. I decided to write. It started out as
me writing a T.V. show. I got so many books on how to do this, and became
frustrated. I took a class on line from Stanford continuing studies. This was
the ah-ha moment for me. A turning point. I was in control of my story in a
different more profound way. And if I wanted to change my perspective, I
could.  If I wanted to have memories I could, or re-write history. It was all up
to me. I know this may sound simple, and lame, especially since I thought I
was in control in the past, but this was finally something I understood in my
bones. I would sit for hours in my house, which is where I worked, alone and
shut out. I became a bit of a recluse, sorting this shit out.
I stopped surfing, and ran instead because I could be alone. I wrote, I wrote
my life out. One of the exercises the teacher had us do was to take out all
the nouns.  He was illustrating how important the person place or thing
was, and how boring a story was if you did not give this enough description.  light in the corner of someone’s mouth, or in their tear duct. I can’t help but
But I found that what I had left was this amazing backdrop, this abstract
place. The spaces in between the story we tell our selves and what is left? I
wanted to explore this space. I explored it domestically first, politics always
start in the home, and I wasn’t comfortable giving up that yet. The domestic
space. It begins to fold in on you, the space becomes a character, sometimes
harmonious, sometimes betraying, or oppressive. I had to keep pushing
further until I didn’t tell myself a story anymore, and I could only see shape
and color. It was like a narrative cleanse.  influenced these pieces?
CL: Looking at the piece, Red Black Yellow I see it as
autobiographical, yet autonomous as a formal painting. The
colors are primary and the shapes reference folk art, are quilt-like
in their placement. Upon further noticing, it moves away from
historical, folk references and fold in on itself. There is motion in
the blocks and they seem to shake, the white sliver cutting into the
center red square gives it an uneasy tilt. The dark red “L” shape
in the foreground attempts to ground the painting, yet the white
and grey in the center make all the other shapes hover above it.  It
flattens space while using shapes that slowly give off an unsettling
depth. The tunnel effect created doesn’t stop at any location,
your eyes move all over its surface. Was your construction of the
shapes quickly laid out or did you come back in and make changes
to them in order to add a vibration to the whole painting? Can you
talk about your choice of colors for this piece?
CR: Red Black Yellow is actually a simmered down version of the pastel
piece. It’s a reduction of the pastel piece, which is derived from a domestic
space. I like to stare at space, until everything becomes one surface, and
there is always a moment out of the corner of my eye when I see a shift, or
shake, something moving. I want to capture that life. The yellow is the light,
the core and fire. There is always a source of light that is like a magnet for
more light. I love red, black, yellow and various grays. These are the perfect
colors to me. When I want to reduce a piece to its essence I rely heavily on
this palette. But I love all colors. Squeezing a tube of paint, any color and
mixing it to perfection is the same feeling I get when I am eating chocolate.
CL: Do you feel like these pieces are still informed by
representation? Do you approach them as familiar forms
RVCA .COM / 53
that then become abstracted or do you feel like they start off
abstracted and then find semi-familiar forms? Can you talk about
your process of working abstractly and how you come up with
these compositions?
CR: My approach to every piece depends on my intention. With Red Black
Yellow for example, my intention was to express a balance, a harmony with
push and pull in one composition in its simplest form. Sometimes I think
it’s like writing songs, sometimes the lyrics come first and the music follows,
or sometimes the music forms the feeling I write words to. Sometimes it
happens all at once.
CL: In your painting, Blue Light C. Crop, I can’t help but be
reminded of Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. The composition
is so reminiscent of that painting, however the void is even more
pronounced. Had you thought of that painting at all? Do you ever
use other paintings a reference points or do your compositions
come about more naturally? I find this painting to hint at absence,
the way the light blue, yellow and orange bars are so boxed in.
However you can look at the composition in another way as well,
almost like a flag, the grey bar as the pole and the stripes of color
as a flag. Is it important for people to be able to see these works in
multiple ways?
CR: I don’t like to reference other paintings. The only time I do this is for
portraiture to study the way the old masters handle that little puddle of
reference architecture though, and literature and the way space is described.
This piece was all about the source of light. The way your eye followed
layered color and space to get there. I don’t even think about people seeing
these works, not when I’m painting them.  
CL: Many of your old works were created with house paint, acrylic
and gouache. These new paintings are solely oil, can you tell us
about what its like for using oil paints and how you think has
CR: I wanted to capture light and shadow, and get the most saturated hues. 
Nothing compares to oil. I used to paint in oils a long time ago...I am coming
back to something I used to know. The other thing about oil is the time you
have to spend with a piece. It’s a different kind of time. With oils there is
less control and you can set out with a plan and the oils are more alive and
have a different temperament. You have to coddle the process. With acrylic
and gouache, I had a formula that worked and worked fast. Fast isn’t as
important to me right now.
CL: Geometric patterns and shapes have always featured pretty
heavily in your work along side powerful figurative images. With
the figures removed and geometry taken center stage it becomes
more playful and more open. Less like you have some message
to convey to people and more like you are exploring your world.
With the large size of these paintings its almost as if you and the
viewers are the figurative elements that featured so prominently
in your works from a few years ago. Do you ever feel like you are
creating an actual space for yourself within these works at all or is
it all more removed than that?
CR: These are all about space. I remember once cleaning out our very
cluttered kind of hoardy living room. I made a space that was just for space
sake. I told my husband and daughter it was a sacred space and NOTHING
WAS TO GO THERE. That space was held, and commanded respect as
if it was an armoire or table. I since have put some chairs there, because
the space was being exploited, but it’s clear of anything. It’s my space. I
am exploring my space, my world, without the story I had in my past. And
it’s wonderful. There is so much beauty I feel I have missed, just seeing
things for what they are, out of my head. Changing my story, seeking out
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 54

(below)
The artist’s studio, 2012
Photograph by Laura Flippen
(opposite)
Untitled, 2012
Oil on linen, 48x60 in.
Courtesy the artist
Untitled, 2012
Oil on linen, 48x60 in.
Courtesy the artist
the strawberries, enjoying what I can when I can, changing what
I can and not taking it personal when I can’t change something
or someone. It’s not my job. My job is to live my life in the best
way I can.  My mom said to me while making this work “Clare, an
empowered woman, is a happy one—forgiving, empathetic, open,
at peace.”
CL: There is this painting of yours called Lightning, It’s
one my favorites for sure. I don’t know why it feels really
punk to me, in like a Belgian new wave kind of way.
It’s so “Modernist.” It reminds me of some of the Les
Disques du Crepuscule record covers designed by Benoit
Hennebert in the 1980s. It’s some of my favorite art. The
fluctuating green and white bars have such a great stance
on the canvass and almost look they are standing pigeon
toed. The painting seems tough. Like it just came out,
done. The black line with grey stripe beside it gives it just
the tiniest bit of depth. Can you talk about what you were
thinking when you painted it? Do you ever find yourself
coping an attitude at a painting you’re working on? I
always know a painting is going well for me when I just
start cracking up, like, “Whose is painting this? What is
going on?”
CR: This is one of my favorites too, and this painting took me the
longest to sketch out. I was having physical anxiety painting this
piece, like I was going to mess it up.  The yellow is magnetizing
the other yellow because there is space to do, to attract itself and
become even more powerful.  This one got a little “narrative-y”, as
if the colors are like different characters. I sometimes feel ornery
when I’m painting, and my instinct is to hide certain pieces where
I feel rebellious from people because I think I did something
wrong. I swear by the time I am 80, if I am around that long, I will
be burying my paintings in my back yard.  much fun. I am working on a body of work for another project
CL: You frequently talk about what it is like to be a
woman in the art world, and in the world in general. It is
a very important part of you work. How does that apply
into this work? Is it still a part of it? I mean obviously you
are a woman creating these works, but with a narrative
structure in your work that story seemed to take center
stage. Without the narrative now how has that changed?
CR: Again, this work is a different perspective on what it means
to me to be a woman, my sexuality, my feminine spirit. Being
empowered by being happy. None of these pieces form a narrative,
RVCA .COM / 55
because they don’t have to. I am just free from my own self-
imposed rules.  I am trying hard to not be concerned with other
people’s preferences or politics, I am trying to not live in the past,
be present with every color, shape and composition.  I am trying.
These works are my practice.
CL: You have worked a lot with large-scale installation.
Your amazing show at the Craft and Folk museum in
San Francisco in 2010 comes to mind as well as your
show at Prism Gallery in Los Angeles in 2011. How does
installation factor into your process? Do you come up
with a total idea of what the space will look like and then
create the paintings or is it more organic and use the
installation to further the depth of the individual works?
Where do the paintings end and installation begin? 
CR: These two spaces in particular were amazing to work with
architecturally. The people there were amazing to work with
also. These were at the beginnings of my transition so I still took
into account the space I was transforming as whole. Every space
is so different. But usually I feel a space has a beginning, middle
and ends that taper off. At the MOCFA in San Francisco and Prism
gallery in Los Angeles, the architectural spaces really allowed me
to create connectedness through perspective if one stood at my
height. The lines of the paintings would align and connect into
one flat space. During my performance the lines on my dress
connected to the lines I painted behind where I stood, everything
connected if you could see from my point of view. From my height.
CL: So what are your plans for the future with painting?
In your studio it looks like you are having a lot of fun
with these. Where do see your work headed and do you
have any projects coming up that you are excited about?
CR: I am just painting as much as possible and I am having so
with Prism in Los Angeles, a show at Kavi Gupta in Chicago in the
Fall, and an exciting project with Incase, a bag collaboration, and
some music videos!!! Thank you Chris for your thought provoking
insightful questions. 
LA PUNK GANGS
OF THE 1980s
As a young, young punker from the San Fernando Valley, one thing you didn’t
yet know was that being punched in the face by grown men was going to be
common, and business as usual. Picture this, you’re 12 years old, and someone
with a car is going to drive everyone to Fender’s Ballroom. Thrilled to leave your
North Valley neighborhood, thrilled to be a part of this thing, you get to Long
Beach (a world away) and all eight of you climb out of the 1964 Dodge Dart
beater. It seems like you hadn’t walked twenty paces through the door before
an adult man, a man with a mustache, who seems like he’s 40 but was probably
in reality no older than 25, saunters up to you and head-butts you right in the
soft center of your fat baby face. What the fuck?!! You retreat to the safety of a
corner, checking your face for blood, really scared. You look around the room
and take in your surroundings. The place is huge, low-ceilinged, fucked up and
packed. There are clusters of skinheads, there are clusters of cholos. The vibe is
menacing—much more so than you had imagined or are ready for at that age.
Over the course of that night you see one fight after another. Sometimes there
were four fights going on at one time, and they were brutal. Like kicked in the
teeth, unconscious brutal. By the end of the night there were clearly a new book
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 56
of rules for you to learn. Suicidals, L.A.D.S., FFF, South Bay Skins. Apparently
there were hundreds of people that you now needed to be able to identify and
avoid. For the next few years, until the gang presence in the LA punk scene died
down you always had butterflies in your stomach on the way to shows. (It would
never occur to you not to go. Nothing could keep you away from this). Would
you get jumped tonight? Would this Cro-Mags show end early for you? You
never know. Now, 25 years later, you wonder what made it such a violent period.
Why were Southern California’s (mostly) white young people so fucking stupid,
hateful and ready to go to war with each other? And for every gang that had
high numbers, there were three or four more in each neighborhood, smaller but
ready to do as much damage as possible. You loved the chaos and possibly still
do. You can relate to that part of it. You will always love the sound of breaking
glass and the heat of the fire. To wake up one day and want to burn it all down
is a grand tradition for young people everywhere. Hopefully everyone gets the
privilege of waking up with that feeling some day, and that they get to hold
on to that attitude. The trick is surviving those stupid, violent years, and the
senselessness that comes with them. This was LA Punk in the 1980s.
L. A. Death Squad (L.A.D.S.), Hollywood, Ca., 1981
Photograph by Ronna Pearl
Safety in numbers, an enemy to beat
Let’s overturn cars and rip up the street
I’m tired of being a peaceful citizen
Noise and destruction are in my vision
We’re just a wrecking crew bored boys
with nothing to do...
– Adolescents
RVCA .COM / 57
 By Cali-Thornhill Dewitt and Aaron Rose
Southern California in the late 1970s was a suburban utopia filled
with mellow vibes, short shorts, roller skates and feathered haircuts. The airwaves
were ruled by the likes of Boz Scaggs and The Captain & Tennille and the suburbs
were filled to the brim with nuclear families with 2.3 kids living the Sunshine State
dream. But behind those well-manicured lawns and beautiful sunsets, there was
trouble in paradise. The fantasy lifestyles portrayed by Hollywood were often a far cry
from the realities on the streets of L.A.’s inner city. Suburban sprawl stretched in all
directions, becoming home to ghetto-fearing families who would do anything to keep
the California dream intact. It was against this backdrop that Los Angeles’ punk scene
exploded. The LA punks were for the most part the product of failed hippy parents
who had graduated to a vapid middle life of cocaine, Quaaludes, yoga and soft rock.
They were latchkey kids who had too much time on their hands. By 1982, however,
what had started out as a fairly innocent rebellion was taking a very distinct negative
turn. Early Los Angeles punk was centered mostly around Hollywood, and included a
diverse scene of men, women, homosexuals and basically any kind of freak that didn’t
fit in with the rest of the world. However when it spread to the suburbs things changed
dramatically. Suburban kids were not as sophisticated as the city punks, had little to
no interest in art or politics, and their primary motivation for becoming involved in the
scene was to go to shows and get in fights. Punk turned into Hardcore, punk’s faster
and more aggressive cousin, and mosh pits at punk shows soon became a full on war.
Reputed violence at punk concerts was featured in episodes of the popular television
shows CHiPs and Quincy, in which Los Angeles hardcore punks were depicted as
being involved in murder and mayhem. By 1980 the Los Angeles Times had begun to
“expose” punk and the danger it posed to youths. In a representative article, Patrick
Goldstein reports: “They don’t just dance anymore. They mug each other. It’s part
of a new ‘dance’ craze called the Slam, whose popularity, especially with organized
gangs of punk youths, has led to numerous incidents of violence at many area clubs.
The accounts of senseless violence, vandalism and even mutilation at some area rock
clubs read like reports from a war zone.” A little known fact about the scene in LA, and
perhaps one that separates it from any other city was the development of Punk gangs.
For those of us that grew up in Southern California at the time, these gangs posed
a real threat. With names like L.A.D.S. (Los Angeles Death Squad), FFF (Fight For
Freedom), Suicidals, BPO (Burbank Punk Organization) and Circle One, membership
sometimes numbered in the hundreds. The real Punk gang presence materialized at
shows, where warring factions actually fought for control of clubs such as Fender’s
Ballroom in Long Beach or the Olympic Auditorium in L.A. Shows sometimes drew up
Punks and Riot Police, L.A. Street Scene, 1985. Photographs by Jennifer Finch
Punk flyers, 1984. Art by Jaime Hernandez
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 58
to 2,000 kids. Fenders Ballroom has been described as like a weekly UFC fight in the
1980s. The gangs would all gather there and beat the shit out of each other.
Some Punk gangs formed as early as 1977, but they really reached their peak in the
mid-1980s. The groups partied or squatted at communal punk houses with names
such as Hotel Hell, Poontang Palace and Skinhead Manor. Some say the gangs were
justified, as being a punk in suburban Los Angeles was a bit treacherous. Public high
schools in Los Angeles sometimes numbered over 2,000 kids and there were maybe
about ten of fifteen punks there at the most. Former members say the gangs were
primarily a way of being anti-social but also provided safety in numbers. In the early
to mid-1980s, anyone who was punk in Los Angeles was either affiliated with or knew
someone with Punk Gang ties. Most groups were fairly un-organized and by regular
gang standards and these groups functioned much more like social groups than any
form of organized crime. Unlike traditional gangs, the Punk gangs did not seem to
be defined by either neighborhood loyalty or criminal enterprise. In fact, with a few
exceptions, other than fighting at shows, it seemed like the function of most groups
was quite simply to intimidate other Punk gangs. But by 1985, the Los Angeles punk
gang scene had began to deteriorate. Many of the original members had discovered
drugs, and as their habits grew, so did a marked disinterest in all things unrelated
to getting high. Additionally, punk had suddenly become “popular” with the jock
crowd mostly because it was a place to get into fights. As a result of this, local law
enforcement had taken notice of the growing “punk threat.” It got to the point where
if you had a punk band name on your shirt, you were immediately identified by police
as a member of the “Black Flag” or “Circle Jerks” street gang. Tales of punks getting
detained by the police and threatened were common. Police even started “punk files”
on mostly innocent kids. The Los Angeles punk scene (along with the gangs) really
died out though when the girls left the scene because of the violence. Venues didn’t
want to book shows anymore and what had been a massive youth revolution faded
out as quickly as it arrived. That said, in the interest of keeping this lost moment of Los
Angeles’ countercultural history alive, if only for the novelty, here lies a brief primer
on L.A. Punk Gangs.
Note to reader: While we have done our absolute best to best to confirm information
in this article and identify sources as much as possible, please understand that the
history of Los Angeles’ punk gangs from the 1980s is mostly an oral history. Beyond
our personal words, we do not present any of our reporting as absolute fact. We
prefer to paint this history with a light brush. We welcome all comments and/or
ammendments to our texts, which we can perhaps publish in a future issue. Thanks.
Punk Gang Drawing, (Anonymous), from Teen Angels magazine, 1984

Venice Suicidal, Venice, Ca., 1983
Photograph by Glen E. Friedman
(following spread)
Suicidal Shirts, Venice, Ca., 1983
Photographs by Glen E. Friedman
SUICIDALS
The Suicidals (aka Suicidalx13 or STx13) were a Venice Beach, Santa Monica and Long Beach based group
that grew out of the fan base of the local band Suicidal Tendencies. Mike Muir, the lead singer of the band
was the younger brother of Jim Muir of the famed Dog Town skate crew, which also included Tony Alva
and Jay Adams. Suicidals mostly came from working class backgrounds and at one time in the 1980’s their
membership was rumored to be up to 500 kids. They were mixed racial which made them stand apart from
other punk gangs in Southern California that were primarily white and suburban. They had ties to local
Venice gang V13 (Amery Smith, original drummer for Suicidal Tendencies was a Venice 13 gang member,
this is proven by looking at their original band lineup photo in which Smith is wearing a flipped up hat with
the marking “V13” underneath), as well as the local Venice skateboarding scene.
“Their look was straight Cholo/Skate/Punk, with defining
features including their trademark blue bandanas worn tight
over the eyes, Dickies pants, Vans or Winos shoes, flipped
up hats with the words “Suicidal” drawn under the bill and
long tailed men’s button down shirts, buttoned tight at the
top and covered in hand done logos and skulls drawn with
Sharpie pens.”
They used to hold haircut parties in Venice where kids would shave their heads and draw on shirts. Some
L.A. Punks mark the beginnings of the Suicidals when Mike Muir (leader of the band) and Jay Adams
(legendary pro-skater) started dressing in the cholo style. Some in the scene didn’t even consider Suicidals
punk because they didn’t wear the typical “English” style of leather jackets and studs. Their look confused
the police as well because they looked more like a classic gang than other punk groups. Some thought at
first glance that they were Crips, but Suicidals had no association with the Crips. Suicidals rarely contended
with typical gangs such as Bloods, Crips, Surenos, and Nortenos. Suicidals really only fought with other
punk gangs. Mike Muir could be described as Suicdals unofficial leader, but unlike Ranger from the FFF,
Muir really did care about their music. The success of Suicidal Tendencies as a band is testament to that. In
their heyday, the Suicidal Tendencies were one of the most dangerous punk bands around. The band was
blamed for many violent outbreaks at their shows and were actually banned from playing in Los Angeles
for almost 10 years because of their presumed “Suicidal” following. Pro-skater Jay Adams, back then quite
punk and drug addled and on his way back from a Suicidal Tendencies show reportedly stopped at Oki
Dogs, a notorious punk hang out in Hollywood. Supposedly a gay couple walked by where they were met
with typical catcalls from the drunken Punks. The couple decided to shout back which provoked Adams and
a friend to supposedly beat the guys up before quickly exiting the scene. Unfortunately, the rest of the crowd
moved in after them and didn’t stop until one of the guys was dead. Jay Adams was arrested on suspicion
of murder, however only ended up serving a six-month sentence for felony assault as he had reportedly left
before the actual murder took place.
FFF
FFF (Fight for Freedom, Tres Efes, 3fs, 666) started around 1981 and were probably the most
notorious punk gang from the San Fernando Valley. With supposedly over 300 members at its
peak, the group started as pure Punk gang but then by 1985, had quickly become infiltrated by
jocks. The FFF guys went for the classic punk look with a Cholo twist. FFF’s leader, Richard
Yapelli Jr. (otherwise known as Ranger) grew up in Sun Valley near the foothills of Northern
Los Angeles County. Sun Valley was a mostly a Hispanic, blue collar area. Soon enough, Yapelli
was running with the local Chicanos, and he was the first non-Hispanic initiated into Sol Trese,
the area’s dominant gang. This legit street cred served him well once he gravitated towards
the rich white kids of the Valley. Through natural progression, the group of young punks
that surrounded Ranger grew and a band was started. The band, Fight for Freedom, was a
hardcore band with Ranger as front man that made no bones about its Nazi beliefs. Ranger
soon formed an inner circle of like-minded angry teenagers. In the beginning, members of
FFF almost took on the persona of Ranger. They were basically young thugs, albeit with some
street smarts and a funny go-for-broke intelligence. They preached a strange form of white
supremacy, but ironically were loosely allied with the Chicano gangs that Ranger had grown up
with. They were also the sworn enemies of other hardcore punk gangs, primarily the Suicidals,
Burbank Punk Organization (BPO) and L.A.D.S. (Los Angeles Death Squad). In 1985 there was
a notorious brawl between FFF and the LADS at the Olympic Auditorium. In an article from a
1985 issue of the Los Angeles Times, some L.A. punks were quoted as saying about FFF,
“What they like to do most is take drugs and
get crazy. When they’re crazy, they beat up
people on the streets, attack homosexuals
in North Hollywood Park, rumble with other
punk groups in Hollywood and Burbank and
go to parties where they sometimes smash
up the place. They call them ‘bring your own
sledgehammer’ parties.”
Whatever their motivation, in the minds of FFF, hippies, jocks, metal heads, mods, surfers,
and homosexuals (real or suspected) became fair game for a beat down. Ranger authored
a four-part code that they adhered to: 1. Be yourself.  2. Live your own life. 3. Fuck social
values. 4. Fight for freedom. They were said to reflect the philosophy “If it feels good, do it.”
FFF also attacked property, including a series of break-ins at North Hollywood Presbyterian
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 62
Original FFF, North Hollywood, 1983. Photograph courtesy Can Control
Church. In one of them, at the Wachs Senior Citizen Center, the church building was defaced.
They wrote graffiti on the wall. Dumped records out onto the floor, took the fire extinguishers
and let them loose over the floor, then supposedly threw instant coffee over the water. North
Hollywood High School was the FFF command center, with Ranger usually holding court at a
donut shop across the street. There they would gather for marching orders and instructions.
Other hardcore guys were recruited and FFF’s reputation grew. Many members came from
tough, non-white areas, working class areas, and suburban neighborhoods. Even though
they were mostly white, FFF had affected the posture and mannerisms of East L.A. Cholos
and called one another by Chicano gang names. Apparently, Spanish slang and phrases were
sprinkled into their conversations. This wasn’t done to mock or emulate Hispanics, but rather
it was meant to confound authority figures like parents, teachers and police. FFF fought mostly
against neighboring jocks and scrapes with the football teams from Notre Dame High School
and Grant High School were common. Rumor has it that without even throwing a punch, they
forced the North Hollywood High School football squad to back down. According to the Los
Angeles Times, A Fight for Freedom member’s sketch that was confiscated by police showed
a swastika, a pistol shooting a bullet through a detached head and a punk rocker choking
someone so hard the skull pops out of its skin. By 1983, FFF had become even more notorious
for violence and the band was banned from every venue in Los Angeles County. Police gang
units had begun to hear complaints and the “gang” was under investigation. In order to throw
the police off the scent, the gang stopped dressing in the punk/cholo look. They replaced this
by donning by military-style flat tops, flannel shirts, khakis, and tennis shoes or heavy black
brogues. It was a deceptively clean-cut look. In August 1985, the story of FFF took a very
distinct turn. 15 year-old Mark Miller, a high school jock who had recently been running with
the gang was fatally shot after an argument outside of Hot Trax disco in Van Nuys. The murder
apparently took place after 16 year-old Tony Nguyen admired and touched the purple, punk-
style hair of Miller’s girlfriend. Miller didn’t like this and a fight ensued with Miller ending
up dead in the parking lot. Another youth on the scene wrote the letters FFF in blood next to
Miller’s body. The murder at Hot Tracks drew much media attention and with that increased
heat from the LAPD. The police finally sprung into action to eradicate FFF once and for all.
They started to methodically identify all members, the group was designated as a gang and
every associate was now a known gang member. Ranger was arrested after he brandished a
gun and punched a woman in the face when he was refused admission to a private party. He
was promptly brought up on weapons charges. After this, the core members of the gang drifted
away, and by 1986 FFF was a memory.
 L.A.D.S.
The L.A.D.S (or Los Angeles Death Squad) were a Hollywood-based gang active
from approximately 1981 to 1986. Many of the L.A.D.S. were students at both
Fairfax and Hollywood high schools. Their ground-zero hangout was Oki-Dog,
a run down late-night hot dog stand on Fairfax that hosted groups of runaways
and punk youths almost every night. Shaggy (aka Punk Rod Todd) writes from
his punk gang history essay,
“I can remember seeing ‘punk death squad’
painted in the alleys in the neighborhood
between the Starwood and Oki-Dog. The
Metz brothers lived in this neighborhood,
as well as Alex, who I think was their
founder. Arnel and Bonehead lived nearby
also. These initial LADS were stylish and
charismatic dudes who were always
out and got their pictures taken a lot. I
remember seeing Alex and Louie, decked
out at Okidogs, in matching LA Death Squad
jackets (Eisenhower type jackets as Cholos
would wear, with iron-on ‘Olde English’ style
lettering)...”
Other fashion staples included black Dickies, creepers or winos and hand-
drawn arm-bands with a skull and crossbones. Droog styles like the characters
in movie Clockwork Orange were also popular. Supposedly the L.A.D.S. never
considered themselves a gang, and were actually started as kind of an inside
joke. At least at their beginnings, they were much more about a communal
fashion style than any kind of organized thuggery. However, the group became
slightly more organized when rival groups from Orange County and the San
Fernando Valley started showing up in Hollywood and starting trouble at
shows. The seminal punk group Bad Religion was also loosely affiliated with
the L.A.D.S. alongside other local bands, but the gang never had an official
group. As the Los Angeles punk scene changed, the L.A.D.S. supposedly began
to drift more and more into the Hollywood drug life. The punk scene became
less important to the members than getting the next score. By the late 1980s
the group had pretty much diminished. However members still get together for
reunions to this day.
Kenny from the L.A.D.S., 1985. Photograph by Jennifer Finch

L.A.D.S., Hollywood, Ca., 1982. Photograph by Ronna Pearl

The scene at Oki-Dog, Hollywood, Ca., early ‘80s. Photograph by Jennifer Finch

Raynard Gleeson (1965-1988), Hollywood, Ca., 1982

Photograph by Ronna Pearl
RVCA .COM / 63
 Circle One Family was a group lead by John Macias who sang for the band Circle One. A fearless skinhead with
a huge smile, he was known for being one of the most aggressive front men in the Los Angeles punk scene. He
formed and organization called P.U.N.X., which was known for promoting shows dedicated to never charging
more then $5 admission. They had a base of operations in Hollywood at a place called the Wig Factory on La
Brea. Circle One rehearsed there and it also served as a makeshift crash pad for runaway punks. The large group
of followers of Macias and the band, who many labeled as a gang, became known as The Family. Writer John
Albert says in the LA Weekly,
“I was walking along a darkened side street heading for the
Cathay Da Grande nightclub. Gathered under a street light,
was Macias and about fifteen muscular sidekicks, their faces all
painted in camouflage like a scene from The Warriors. When I
later asked about it, a friend told me it was ‘Circle One’.”
Members of Circle One Family dispute that they were ever a gang and describe their scene as more of a loose
affiliation of friends. However there are numerous stories from back then of members showing up to shows in
full face paint and army gear ready to rumble. The ironic thing about Circle One was that contrary to other gangs
in the punk scene at the time, their foundation lied in Christianity. Many of Macias’ lyrics dealt with religious
themes. This confused many people on the scene as there was an inherent contradiction in the violence Macias
would dole out at shows and his so called Christian beliefs. He was known for having no fear of police and was
said to have on more than one occasion to have knocked one of L.A.’s men in blue out cold using only his fists.
At the same time he was using funds he raised through PUNX to get troubled youths off of drugs and the streets,
and into God. In 1985, Macias disappeared from the punk scene and The Family scattered. He was rumored to
have grown a long beard and reportedly spent some time in Egypt. After a brief reunion in 1988, Macias again
disappeared. He ended up one day in 1991 preaching on the Santa Monica Pier. After a run-in with a passerby
and a security guard, and after refusing to cooperate with police, Macias was shot to death on the pier.

CIRCLE ONE

Circle One members

(opposite)
John Macias from Cirlce One , 1980
Photograph by Jennifer Finch

RVCA .COM / 65
BURBANK PUNK
Burbank Punk Organization (or BPO) was started in Burbank
junior high and high schools around 1979. The gang was
originally founded by punk transplants from Orange County
whose families relocated to Burbank around that time. Their

ORGANIZATION
headquarters was a makeshift tree house in the middle of
Forest Lawn Cemetery. At their peak they are rumored to
have had up to 500 members, with 200 active and about 30
who could be called on to fight at any time. The original BPO
uniform was very simple. Drawn from more of a punk/skate
aesthetic rather than British punk, the first dress code was
basically Converse high-tops and a hoodie. One of their other
distinguishing traits were bleached-blonde flat top haircuts
worn with pride in the summer months. That said, contrary
to other gangs coming from the San Fernando Valley area,
one of the most distinguishing factors in BPO’s membership
was the fact that they were entirely multi-cultural. They also
had a distinguishing number, “22,” which came about because
twenty-two of it’s original members all burned crosses into
their arms. Like other gangs from this time, the gang was
formed essentially for protection at shows. However, as
numbers grew the group became a major force in the Los
Angeles area and were active both at shows and in the streets.
Early on drugs didn’t play much of a part in the BPO story...
primarily because the group was very much skate-based
and drugs would interfere with their ability to skate well.
(this page) Burbank Punk Organization (BPO) Members, Burbank, Ca., 1982
Rumor has it that there was a chicken-hawk cab driver in the
Burbank/SFV area that would cruise junior high schools, pick
up young punk boys and drive them to shows. Supposedly
the spread of BPO in the early days was directly linked to this
man. Early on, Burbank Punk Organization was loosely linked
to FFF, and even shared members at times. However, as the
years went on this was not always the case, and the two gangs
were later known for very public rivalries. In a July, 1985
article from the Los Angeles Times, titled “White Punks a New
Puzzle in Gang Scene,” an FFF member says the following
regarding BPO,
“I keep a loaded gun in my
bedroom 365 days a year, I’d say
everybody in FFF owns a gun.
What’s going to keep BPO from
driving by and shooting up the
house? You don’t want somebody
hurting your mom for something
you did.”
Like other groups from the era, BPO had their own band,
ironically called Tres Flores, which bares a striking
resemblance to FFF when translated from Spanish. Around
1988 when high school football teams began to get involved
in the punk/violence scene the image of Burbank Punk
Organization became decidedly more Cholo. At this point
many of the original members fled the group. Around 1989
they changed their name to Burbank Primera, a group that
bore little association with its original punk roots.

RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 66

 VICIOUS CIRCLE Like other punk gangs of the time, Vicious Circle also began as the name
of a band. Based in Orange County, Vicious Circle was started by Jack
Grisham who later became the front man of the popular group, TSOL.
They were rumored to have formed as early as 1978. The Vicious Circle
following were known to wreak havoc in the form of senseless acts of
violence and vandalism all throughout the beach communities. They were
some of the wildest kids from the entire Southern California scene. Jack
Grisham writes in his autobiography An American Demon.
“Our friends were just as fucked-
up as we were, so we had a whole
bunch of crazy fuckers running
around, and if you were in the area,
and you liked punk rock, well, then
you’d better like a band like ours
that was surrounded by a bunch of
crazy mean motherfuckers, whatever
the logic, the Vicious Circle was a
maniac attractor.”
A young punk named Darrin, who lived in Orange County at the time
writes, “I had just moved from Newport Beach to Long Beach in 1980.
I didn’t know anyone locally and I was hanging outside this liquor store
asking people to buy me some beer. Some Vicious Circle gang members
pulled up and bought me some beer. I invited them back to my house
not knowing their rep. Pretty soon they were calling their friends. Next
thing I know there are 40 people ransacking the house and kicking holes
in the walls. They peed in the mouthwash. Here I was trying to make
them stop which was to no avail. I had just wanted to make some new
friends.” Infamous VC gang member, Pat Brown, would be immortalized
by the Vandals in their song “The Legend Of Pat Brown.” It told the tale
of an incident that happened in the Coockoos Nest parking lot in which
Pat Brown tried to run down police officers with his car. It was not the
only time VC members would use their cars as weapons. Andy Perrin
(Crewd) writes, “There was this one Vicious Circle gig in Signal Hill at
a place called Frenchie’s Machine Shop. This fight started between two
guys but then the Vicious Circle gang guys jumped in and there were
way more of them than us. My bandmate Smitty got stabbed and Kevin
from Secret Hate was hit by a car. I got off lucky with only a black eye.
Jack from Vicious Circle was actually our friend and was trying to stop
the fighting that night.” Secret Hate wrote a song called ‘Frenchie’s
Machine Shop Massacre’ about that incident.” Gangs of longhairs were
often on the prowl looking for punk rockers to punch or stab with a
bottle. One notorious group of such individuals were known locally as the
Cropdusters. But when longhairs went sniffing around for trouble with
Vicious Circle and their pals, they were barking up the wrong tree. Kregg
Zellner from the Screwz writes, “In the summer of 1979 Bruce Kramer
threw a house party on Huntington Beach in the only house on the beach
where his dad was the head lifeguard. It was us, the Klan, and Blades
playing. Guys from Vicious Circle were trying to spear this overhead light
outside with a huge metal rod. Twelve longhairs and their girlfriends
walked by and started hassling us while we standing out front. They were
warned but would not leave. Someone whistled and within a few seconds
no one was watching the Blades. Fifty or more punks came tearing out
after the longhairs. Some got chased into the surf and beaten severely.
Others took their lumps in the middle of Pacific Coast Highway. Two
really unlucky guys were chased onto the Santa Ana River Jetty, where
one of the longhairs was thrown off the bridge. It made the front page of
the Orange County Register.” Corey (Outsiders/Blades) “There was this
tension between Huntington and Long Beach, but after the hippy got
thrown off the jetty we were friends. The common goal of killing hippies
brought us together.”

(clockwise from top)

T.S.O.L., 1980
Courtesy the artists

Vicious Circle Patch, 1981

Courtesy Can Control

Vicious Circle Early ‘80s, Orange County, Ca.

Photographers unknown

Cuckoo’s Nest

Other Punk Gangs from Southern California in the 1980s: HB’S, MERCENARIES, SOUTH BAY SKINS, MICKEY MOUSE CLUB, SOUTH BAY SEX RATS, T/C (THE CONNECTED),
HOLLYWOOD RAT PATROL, PENI DEATH SQUAD, PIG CHILDREN, SOS (SONS OF SAMOA), THE LEAGUE, LA MIRADA PUNKS (LMP), MOTHER MALICIOUS, WHITTIER KACTIS BUNCH,
KAOS (KIDS AGAINST OUR SYSTEM), PARIAH BOYS, POSEURS, SACRED REICH, BUCKO BOYS, PKL (POOR KIDS ON LSD), PIER PUNK RATS, ESP (EAST SIDE PUNX), HRP, URBAN
PUNK ASSAULT, KFL, SEX JERX, WEST SIDE CRAYZIES, LBSB (LONG BEACH SUICIDAL PUNX), CFP (CRAZY FUCKING PUNX), VALLEY CIRCLE, HUNGRY GANG, DOG PATCH WINOS,
THE DRUNKS, THE X MEN, LA WITHDRAWNS, STB (STOP THE BULLSHIT), FULLERTON PUNKS, DUFFY BOYS, BEER NUTS, MID-CITY PUNKS, NORWALK INSANE PUNX, BEOWOLF
BOYS, LOD (LORDS OF DESTRUCTION), SOUTHBAY SKINS, NORTHSIDE FIRM.

RVCA .COM / 67
ANA
KRAS
The world of furniture design can sometimes
be perceived as separate from other artistic
practices. Like fashion or architecture, long
periods of research and development go into
putting a piece of furniture into production.
Because of this, sometimes the great works
never make it onto the pop culture radar.
Enter a young designer named Ana Kras.
Though she is now living in New York, Kras
grew up in Belgrade, Serbia during the height
of the political turmoil there. It is quite
special that a young person coming from
such a situation could grow to become such
an innovative designer. Her creations employ
all of the characteristics of high design, but
incorporate a fragile and organic quality that
is supremely unique and separates them from
the norm. Perhaps her most popular creations
are a series of lamps she has designed called
Bonbons, which are basically a wire frame
with delicate strips of yarn and other material
stretched over them. She has also designed
tables, chairs and clothing racks. Though she
is relatively young in her career, there is no
doubt that Ana Kras is going places. Over a
late night skype conversation between Los
Angeles and Sweden we asked Ana to tell us
her story.
by Aaron Rose
Portrait by INGRID SOPHIE SCHRAM
ANP: I would like to ask you about growing up
in Belgrade. I think it’s a very special story. Can
you speak about what it was like there when you
were young, the creative scene in Belgrade and
how that has influenced you?
Ana Kras: Yes. Well I grew up in a very turbulent time
of a very turbulent country and I can only assume it left
some marks. I mean, it surely influenced a lot the way
I think, speak, and work. The first war started when I
was around five and since then there has always been
some kind of war around, even up to today. When I was
an early teenager the borders were closed for years, and
the country was pretty disconnected from outer world
and influences. I was lucky enough that I was still kind
of young when it changed a little for better so I could
move and see other things, because what was around
me was very sad, deeply sad.
ANP: Wow. I cannot even imagine...
AK: I was fifteen when NATO bombed Belgrade and the
same year later I went to Japan. I remember I had to
take a van to Budapest, Hungary to get a flight because
planes were not flying from Belgrade. The van was
packed with people and bags, and the driver of the van
would take some village dust roads to avoid paying the
fee for using a normal road. How do you call that, the
road fee?
ANP: The toll
AK: Ah yes. Toll. That means great in German
I think?
ANP: Haha. It’s not so great in the USA.
AK: When I think about how the situation in Serbia
influenced me, and also influenced my work later,
I think that the chaos and the politics were there to
teach me how the world is pretty mad and how easily
from one day to another you can lose all you have for
no reason. My family was there to teach me how you
can find a way to be happy with so little and how to use
those skills for whatever you do.
ANP: Okay. That’s really interesting. Which I
can completely see in your work. There’s also
something very fragile in your creations. Not
so much that they are breakable, but in your
use of materials to tell stories. They are
emotionally fragile...
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 68
AK: Thank you, that sounds very nice.
ANP: Do you not agree?
AK: I don’t disagree. It’s just hard to see that in your
own work. I always wonder if those influences are
visible in the final result. I think that it has more to do
with how you approach your thinking, and what keeps
your attention and how you solve problems.
ANP: For you it’s more pragmatic. What you can
make with what you have?
AK: Yes. What I can make with what I have. That is
what I was taught at my university. Not by teachers,
but by the circumstances and the lack of possibilities.
The university was there to push me to be self-taught
because there were almost no classes and lectures
and no workshops and not a single computer in the
entire furniture design section. When the country is
poor, destroyed and corrupted, the universities are the
same way. Growing up in such a place feels a bit like
having a very wise mentor. Can you imagine? Not a
single computer? That sounds like a joke. It’s crazy. So
everything was measured by hand but that’s why we
had to learn ourselves. We had to teach ourselves all
the 3D programs and do all the work on our own time,
without any supervision.
ANP: All trial and error...
AK: Yes, but that somehow worked for me because I
love to work and I love to work on my own. But there
were a lot of kids that needed that push and support,
and they didn’t get it.
ANP: Have you seen a lot of creative people in
Serbia have to give up their dreams?
AK: Hmmm. I don’t think there can be anything to
make you give up your dream.
ANP: Good answer.
AK: If you do, then that’s not big of a dream.
ANP: Exactly. I want to talk about how you work
in different mediums.
AK: Okay.
ANP: You draw. You take photographs and
design furniture. How do they all relate to
each other in your opinion? Do they influence
each other?
AK: I think they are a family! To me it is all pretty much
the same. I mean, it all comes from the same place in
me. The dynamics of each one of them are of course
very, very different and thank god I can combine them.
Furniture, let’s say, my most proper job, is a slow, long
difficult thing. First you think of it and that’s the easy
and lovely part. Then you play with making a prototype.
That’s another lovely part. It’s you getting to know your
thoughts in a very practical way, in reality. When you
figure it all out and you have a prototype there is a new
object that you made, but it still doesn’t exist as a piece
of furniture. Putting it all into production, available for
people, is a such a hard and long thing, that I am still
struggling with. But then I take photographs, which is
the opposite. It’s so easy and instant, depending on me
and on what is around.
ANP: So the photography works as kind of
an antidote to the intense conception and
production of furniture?
AK: Yes, photography is a hobby. It’s just memorizing
what’s around in the way that I see it.
ANP: How many prototypes do you usually
have to make before you finally get something
that works?
AK: That depends, I don’t like to overwork projects. I
like to keep it as close to the first thought as possible
and move to the next thing. Overthinking can be
dangerous, it makes you lose the joy and charm and
you get stuck in wanting perfection, and perfection
shouldn’t even be the goal.
ANP: Sure.
AK: So, it depends. I usually make one prototype and
hopefully it works. I mean one prototype in the real
material, but before that I play with paper or something,
trying to simulate it.
ANP: Have you ever conceived of a project that
just didn’t work no matter how hard you tried?
AK: Haha yes! ANP: Terrific. I think we are good for the
ANP: Give an example... interview Ana. It’s pretty late for you...
AK: The first thing that comes to my mind is starting AK: Okay
to have a diary. Man, I’ve tried a hundred times in my ANP: Thanks again.
life and after I write once, I am just so lazy I never write AK: You are welcome
anything again. I gave up. I will never try it again. ANP: Sleep well.
ANP: Why? It can’t be about the work. Maybe AK: And you have a nice evening.
you don’t want to remember? Maybe the
photographic memories are safer?
AK: There are many things that are hanging out in my
mind for years and I always want to try them but there
is never enough time or there is that stupid idea that it’s
just not the right moment.
ANP: I get it. Sure.
AK: It’s like painting. Oil painting is what I am dying to
do and there is always some excuse I make to myself.
No time or no space, it’s like my mama starting a diet
from next Monday. It’s sad.
ANP: I have that with choreography.
AK: Choreography?
ANP: Just kidding.
AK: Why? I just imagined you being a choreographer
and sixty people following your moves!
ANP: It actually is kind of a secret dream...
AK: Sweet.
ANP: Anyway, what are you working on now?
What can we expect?
AK: I am working on putting some furniture pieces into
production and making them available. It’s been a long
time because I was finding a way to make it properly. I
am also working on some new objects and making some
bonbon lamps and taking photos of some beautiful
Swedish girls.
ANP: That sounds like fun!!!
AK: So that’s what I’ve been up to these days.
RVCA .COM / 69
LIARS
When assessing the musical output of a generation
sometimes we need hindsight to truly understand the
myriad levels of innovation held within. That said, if there
is one musical project from the last decade that should be
celebrated then it is the Liars. If you know who the Liars are
and are aware of their output, then this feature needs no
introduction. However if this is the first time you’ve heard
of them, then get ready for a treat. Here’s a short primer.
The group consists of Angus Andrew (vocals/guitar), Aaron
Hemphill (percussion, guitar, synth), and Julian Gross
(percussion, drums). Liars have had a strange and twisted
path to success. The band originally formed in Valencia,
CA (30 minutes north east of Los Angeles) where Angus
and Julian (who would join the band after their first album)
were enrolled at CalArts. They met Aaron who was then
employed at the local record store. They began creating
four-track recordings together, but once they had completed
art school, they relocated to New York together. Once in
New York, Liars aligned themselves with other Brooklyn
bands and collaborators such as TV On The Radio and
Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They were a large part of that seminal
movement of New York bands that defined a particular sonic
aesthetic of the time. From their first album, They Threw Us
All In A Trench and Stuck A Monument On Top (2001), it was
clear to those who followed that a new sound and vision
was on the market. Liars’ next full-length album, They Were
Wrong, So We Drowned (2004), was recorded in a cabin in
the woods in New Jersey, the band immersed themselves
in accounts of witch trials and folklore and created a
atmospheric fairy tale album. Dubbed a “story album” as
opposed to “concept album”, the record re-defined Liars as
a band that was creating their own musical agenda rather
then continuing with the sounds made popular from their
first record only a few years before.
It was clear by many that Liars were a creative force to
watch. However, unlike their contemporaries who stayed in
by Aaron Rose & Brian Roettinger
Portrait by Zen Sekizawa
Airbrush testing and logo sketches for WIXIW album, 2012
RVCA .COM / 71
the USA and catapulted to mid-range success, Liars saw a
different future for themselves. Just when their collective
star could have burst onto the scene, they decided to leave
New York and relocate to Berlin. Favoring experiments
rather than compliments, the band embarked again on a
completely new sonic journey. Their next album, Drums Not
Dead (2006), was again a total 180-degree turn from their
previous works. Based almost completely on experimental
drum sounds, the record was recorded in a disused East
German broadcast center that allowed them a multitude of
different acoustic environments for recording. On Drums
Not Dead, Liars capitalized completely on the wild dance
energy of Berlin. While the record could never be considered
a dance record, the unique energy of the city was contained
throughout the recording. Their next album, the self-
titled, Liars (2007) continued this approach. This approach
to music making has been key to Liars legacy. Rather
then following a formula of success like most successful
acts would pursue, Liars have always trudged their own
path. The group functions more like a conceptual art
performance piece than a typical rock act. After Berlin, Liars
relocated back to Los Angeles to record Sisterworld (2009),
a sweeping masterpiece of a record that was recorded
entirely in the forests above Los Angeles. Push ahead to
2012 and Liars released their sixth album entitled, WIXIW
(pronounced ‘wish you’). The album is heavily influenced
by electronic technology and most of the instrumentation
on the record was created using digital and/or electronic
instruments. Like previous recordings, it was written in
an isolated cabin north of Los Angeles with the aim of
removing themselves from the distractions of extraneous
stimuli. The record was then recorded in a slightly derelict
office block on the eastside of Los Angeles where, amongst
various pieces of strange equipment and their respective
operating manuals strewn about, the following interview
took place.
ANP: Maybe we should just start at the beginning with
your first album Trench and how that came about?
Aaron Hemphill: That actually makes sense because we really do
feel like with this new record we’ve come full circle from that.
ANP: Exactly. There are elements of the new record that
actually remind me of 4-track stuff that you guys gave me
from that time period. There’s a similar sensibility.
Aaron: That makes sense.
Julian Gross: Where exactly was that cover drawn from? Was it
created for the cover or had you done it before?
Aaron: No, it was just some dumb drawing. I had an idea to make
some video and that drawing was supposed to represent a scene
or something.
ANP: It’s very reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock
storyboard frame, was that and idea.
Aaron: I just used to doodle a lot. Angus and I were living together
at the time and we would just think of things for stickers or
whatever. Maybe that was originally a sticker idea? The label said
that either we could get tour posters made or a four-color record
sleeve. So there was a limitation on what the cover could be. Angus
picked it and did all the type. We did it pretty quick.
ANP: Sometimes when you have less time to think about
things they’re more immediate and natural.
Aaron: Yeah, I mean it almost felt like to me that we’d be able to
re-do it at some point or something. Like maybe no one would buy
the record, so when we re-did it there would be a better cover. It’s
the same way we came up with our name.
ANP: Was it a unanimous decision to call yourselves
Liars?
Angus Andrew: Oh no! That was just us trying to think of something
really generic or something. I don’t think we were really ever that
excited about it.
Aaron: It was always backwards for us. Like when Brian and I
played in a band in when we were teenagers, we had a million
stickers and no songs. But with Liars we had like a ton of songs
but no name. We just wanted to start playing shows so we realized
we needed a name. We had all these shows booked, so we had to
think of something quick. We always thought we would think of a
better one.
Angus: There were lots of elaborate names at that time.
ANP: Do you remember any of them?
Angus: I remember that was the time when that band And You’ll
Know Us By The Trail of the Dead came out. We were just like, “Oh
man, we gotta do the opposite of that.”
ANP: It’s funny because your song titles at that time we are (above)
always really long. Live in Europe, 2006. Photos by Paul Drake
Angus: Yeah.
(below)
ANP: Your titles definitely generated some discussion Photo shoot for They Were Wrong So We
for a moment, because of their length. Were you trying Drowned, New Jersey, 2004
to interject more meaning in them, by having them
(opposite)
so lengthy?
Contact sheet from recording sessions for
Aaron: Some people were actually disappointed when we came out self-titled album Liars in Berlin, 2007
with normal length song titles.
ANP: So were long song titles something that you guys
discussed?
Angus: No. It was just like the first time we had the opportunity to
write something there on a record, so why not take up as much
room as you can. With that first record it really felt like no one was
going to look at it or listen to it anyway, so none of the decisions
were big decisions. We were excited about the possibility of just
having it on vinyl. Being able to play our music back.
Aaron: That was before we even had computers that could burn a
CD. I remember being really excited the first time we burned a CD
of our music. We kind of didn’t even think the record was real so we
just kind of titled them without thinking about it too much.
ANP: Do you feel the visuals that accompany an album are
equally important to the music?
Angus: Yes. Even more so today with the internet.
Julian: We have the leeway now to create an entire visual platform
and generate interest before anything even happens.
Angus: Now you kind of have to...
ANP: That’s a pretty big change since Trench came out.
Angus: You have to come up with a whole visual component,
sometimes like a year before the record comes out. When we started
making this record we met with the label and they were pretty keen
that we start to do something more internet-based. That’s
something that we had never been interested in, so that was
something that we’ve had to learn to deal with. It was really a
question of us starting early on to think about some kind of
conceptual way for us to attack that medium, you know something
different than the simple day to day, here’s what we’re eating.
ANP: You almost have to invent a whole separate world.
Angus: Yeah. Otherwise it’s just this kind of mundane overload of
information, which I think is the biggest problem with the internet
sometimes. There are so many mediums and platforms that people
are accessing now that it’s not that thing anymore where you get
that record and you’re like, “Weird! Who are these people? How did
they do it?” Now you just mainline their entire history and back
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 72
catalog and that’s what that interaction is about. It’s
about feeding people more and more information.
So we needed to figure out a way where we weren’t
doing that.
ANP: Well that kind of happened with
Sisterworld, but not to the same degree.
Angus: That was all done in hindsight. We had
already come up with the album title and the visual
direction. We created the online element after
everything was already made. Then we had to try to
translate it into a visual web thing. So it was much
lighter. It wasn’t like with this record where we were
recording at the same time.
Julian: We had to figure out a way to let people into
our world without doing what Angus was talking
about and subscribing to some cliché idea. We
weren’t interested in putting our personal lives out
there. We didn’t want to give that away. But at the
same time you want to let people in, so the
challenge was how to do that in a way that was
interesting for us as well.
ANP: When you are in the process of making
an album I know you guys are very cautious
about letting anyone get
an early listen. Are you the same with
the visuals?
Angus: As far as I’m concerned the visuals are the
same issue as it is with regards to music.
Traditionally we make full songs before we give
them to each other. That helps us establish the
zones of confidence in what you’ve personally done.
Instead of saying, “Oh I’ve got this vague idea.” For
me, it’s the same with the visuals. Just trying to take
it as far as you can yourself before you want to show
it to anybody. That’s why we sometimes run into
troubles with things like this. On this record we
really made a point that we wanted to be more
collaborative. We wanted to show each other things
a lot earlier. But it’s not easy. It actually makes it a
lot harder. You have to allow for other opinions.
ANP: The other way allows you to present
something in a more finished state.
Angus: Yeah. You are at a point where you can say,
“I’m super happy with this!” So then I’ll show it to
Aaron and he’s gonna know that I’m super happy
with it and there’s a small discussion about maybe
doing this or that—but it’s not like a complete
structural discussion. When you do it the way we
did it on this record it turns into a real thing where
maybe it doesn’t need to. When Aaron is talking
about the first album cover, it’s like, just sort of
allowing for that thing to happen and not getting
too far caught up into the discussion of it. I think in
some instances that is beneficial. Definitely in
hindsight on this project it has been beneficial to be
more collaborative. In the end you do feel more
comfortable with the work. But it doesn’t make the
process easier.
ANP: You have to be willing to kill your
babies.
Angus: Exactly. Which is hard.
Julian: Visually it becomes difficult to try to create
one image to represent all of our ideas. There are
all these songs to think about and then you’re
doing everything yourself so it becomes even
more difficult.
ANP: It would be an interesting experiment
to see if you released the same exact record
with completely different packaging if your
audience would hear it differently.
Angus: Obviously it again brings into question how
much the visuals matter.
ANP: I like to see a similarity between the
visuals and the sound. When a band’s
identity can be influenced by both factors.
That said it seems with you guys that there is
always a germ at the beginning of a project
that kind of influences everything else.
Would you say that the initial process of
developing that grain of an idea is pretty
much the same on every record?
Angus: It’s always a very natural process. It’s not
like we ever need to sit down before everything
starts and really decide on everything. It mostly
happens naturally over the course of touring the
record before somehow, and it’s pretty remarkable,
I think that our interests all start to point in a
similar direction.
RVCA .COM / 73
Julian: I think you’re right and it’s pretty incredible.
Angus: Take for example our last record. We were
like, “Ok, we’re gonna make a record now for the
first time in Los Angeles.” We were in Berlin before
that. It wasn’t like we said that we needed to make
this record about Los Angeles. But when we started
to write separately and then subsequently started to
talk about what we’d done it was obvious that we
were all really interested in that. So we took that
further...kept going with it. Then with this record
we were all ready for a stylistic and sonic change. If
there was any method to the madness it was mostly
in a reactionary way to what we’ve done before.
ANP: It seems like that’s a consistent idea
from record to record to make a stylistic and
sonic change.
Aaron: There’s like a moment that I can usually
pinpoint on each record. We’ll go through some
kind of similar experience at a time. Then we’ll have
a quick conversation and it kind of sparks. We
actually have a conversation like this before every
record and that allows us to continue forward in a
particular direction. This time we were in London
and we played this big festival and I remember just
this brief comment. It was only like a couple of
sentences long. Something like, “I’m sick of
microphones” Oh really? “Well I’m also sick of this.”
This conversation happens every record and it’s
quick, but once it happens we know. Then we can
start writing within those parameters. Because we
have common interests but then we also are
different. So I try to write with Angus’ input in
mind. I’ll write what I like but then I think about
what can be added. So yeah, it’s just a short
conversation, but it happens every time.
ANP: Is that a nerve-wracking process?
Angus. No, it’s actually really exciting. Like Aaron’s
saying those conversations really are so brief.
They’re just like opening a door. After that you
know that the whole landscape is available. It’s
never any pressure. It’s more like the possibilities
are exciting.
Aaron: It’s after that I think it gets more difficult.
When those conversations happen it’s like “Wow!

We’re thinking the same thing” We have these common interests and there’s this common thing we
want to express. But when you’re alone and you’re banging your head against the wall you have to
suddenly condense all these ideas into one thing that exemplifies what we spoke about.
ANP: One of the things that I feel about your records and why they always work so well is
the beauty of the edit. Being able to curate what makes a record.
Angus: Yeah, that’s one of the hardest parts. Conceptually it’s got to be part of it. Depending on the
record. With Sisterworld that was a big determining factor. Does this song speak to this overarching
thing? Then, with this one, the hard part was that we made such an effort experimenting with sound
that we just developed this huge catalog of really interesting noises. Then we had to apply those and
make songs out of those sounds. They almost became sonic decisions really. You know where we would
develop a song that has that interesting sound and work on that song more because we want to have
that sound.
ANP: You were looking for sonic diversity.
Angus: Yeah, and because we were all so in love with particular sounds we didn’t want to give them up.
There was some point where we just had so many songs going and we just had to make ourselves
physically stop making anymore interesting sounds. We had to really concentrate on the ones that we
really liked the most. Actually, what helped me was at some point saying, “OK. We’ll just release a
second record.”
ANP: How do you judge whether a sound is interesting?
Angus. It’s just that we like it.
Aaron: Maybe it’s the same for Angus but I spend days just looking through sounds and making an edit
of which sounds I am going to use as an arsenal or palette. It’s so time consuming that when a sound
pops up it just happens where something about it excites me to make a song. I want to feature that
sound in a song. You know that’s the challenge. Can I write a chorus around that sound? It’s this whole
long process to write a song around a sound.
Angus: Which is completely backwards to the way we would have done it in the past. Usually, we
would start with a melody and make some interesting things happen around that. This way is a lot
more difficult.
ANP: But after listening to the record it still always fits within a Liars sensibility.
Angus: I think that might be. There are certain things that we’ve toyed with in the past, but never had to
time to focus all of our attention on.
ANP: But that’s how you can make something new without forgetting everything
you’ve learned...
(from top)
Still from Plaster Casts Of Everything, video shoot directed by Patrick Daughters, 2009
Liars live at Monster Island, Brooklyn, New York, 2001. Photo by Emily Wilson
(opposite)
Liars, John Weiss, and High Places show poster, 2011. Artwork by Julian Gross
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 74
Aaron: Well, we had a ton of songs for WIXIW. We could have chosen a group
of songs that were of really good quality that would have made a very distinct
statement. Like making a totally electronic record...something that has no
semblance to sounds that we’ve used in the past. After a couple of listens it
would still sound like Liars, but we could have assembled a more shocking
group of songs. But I think it’s that whole idea of looking hard at what the song
actually was. The songs that we chose are maybe a bit less of a break in terms of
experimentation, but they just had more of a certain mood or sentiment that we
thought was expressing our idea more. I think people just expect us to do
something different every time.
ANP: Well it’s really a refining process.
Aaron: It seems like people were surprised that this record was as not much of a
break as they had originally hoped.
ANP: Which brings it back to the artistic process and looking at
Liars not just as a band, but also as an overall concept. You guys
take that risk knowing that you’re constantly reacting against your
old work.
Angus: Well, I don’t know. At the same time I think we all feel that because of
where we’re are at creatively any given time. We admire people who are able to
be more linear with their work. It’s like almost surreal. It would be nice to be
the kind of people who could just refine a sound and get better at playing guitar
over ten years and just be a shredder. It’s almost as though each time we make a
record we go backwards maybe?
Aaron: It’s not just backwards it’s more like running into walls and building
walls that we then have to climb over and hurdle because we’ve never seen
it before.
ANP: Well it’s kind of like all these manuals for electronic gear that
are lying all over the place here.
Julian: Yeah, well that’s kind of what we do these days. We just look at manuals
and try to figure out all this gear. We give ourselves all this homework. We
literally leave the studio and say like “OK, your homework for tonight is this,
this and this.”
Angus: Every time we just try to forget what we just figured out and try be
completely naive about it all again.
Aaron: With our first lineup, when we were a four-piece, we had songs that we
had written as a band prepared so that we could have had a second record with
those guys. If we were to have recorded that, it would have been the only time
we would have experienced not refinement but a sense of familiarity. Like that
we had done that before. But we’ve never really had that every time it just
seems so scary.
ANP: Do you have a sense that you are free-falling or that the feeling
of being lost in space is part of what make Liars who they are?
Angus: If it were different we wouldn’t be a band anymore. It would not have
been interesting enough. If part of being in a band had to do with refinement as
a state of purpose I don’t think we would have done it. In terms of a sort of
conceptual thing or the fact that this is a multi-media thing, I think that’s what
has kept us excited. We have the opportunity to do the next record about
whatever. We can use mandolins. There’s never been any kind of box or
restriction on what we do and that’s what makes us excited. I want to do the
next record because there is always still the possibility that we can forget
everything that we’ve ever done.
ANP: Your next record should be a hip-hop record then.
Angus: I think that even if we did try to tackle a hip-hop record that it would
end up sounding like a Liars record, just with different tools maybe? That’s
what we’ve always banked on. When we started playing together, I definitely
was not very adept at playing. We’d say, “Lets see what it’s like if we try to make
a Black Sabbath song.” You know it’s not going to work like that, but it then
becomes what we are. That’s where things get interesting. So it seems to be the
case that it doesn’t really matter what the idea is or what the approach is. The
result is gonna be somewhere in line with who we are. We could do a bossanova
record and go to Brazil but people would still say it’s a Liars record.
Aaron: Yeah we’re always floating it. We’re not pro at that.
Angus: Yeah, it’s not like we’re going to employ all the right producers and that
sort of stuff. We’ll probably get some piece of software or equipment that
apparently people use to make that music and then play it really wrong! That
result is always what’s interesting though.
ANP: That’s possibly a top-level concept of your band. Using the
expected in an unexpected way.
Angus: Yeah, and lets do it even though we don’t know how to.
Aaron: We’ve always emphasized mistakes. The very first time we wrote songs,
very early on, we would never stop. Even if we messed up terribly, we knew that
it would always turn into a really neat part. In some of our early songs there
were times when we would record Angus leaving the room and there was just
no sound for two minutes. Then he would come back and that became the
middle part of the song. We don’t have the attitude of needing to freak people
out by doing a hip-hop record. Its always more about saying we really like
hip-hop, and we could in our heads be trying to make a hip-hop record by the
numbers, but it will always be a Liars record.
Angus: I think that’s where we started to run into a bit of an issue with
overbearing conceptual stuff. Where we would project to people, “OK. We’re
doing this record about witches or whatever.” You know this is drama and this
is a heart attack and we’d have to go through this whole period of heavy
discussion amongst ourselves about that thing...as opposed to the music. At
some point we realized that that thing is great for us. We like that thing because
it helps us to write what we want to write. It helps us concentrate, but in terms
of relating it to people, that’s not really the biggest issue. Often it’s best if too
much emphasis isn’t put on that.
Julian: Yeah, sometimes the music can get lost in the conceptual story and
that’s not the right tipping of the scales.
Angus: It’s just our tool to make what we want to make. It’s cool to have a
subject matter to give us focus, but it doesn’t mean that when people listen to
the record that they have to research that subject.
ANP: How do internal visuals play in your composing process?
RVCA .COM / 75
Selected Discography 2001 - 2012

(opposite)
Studio image of wax dipped and embossed WIXIW special edition LP, 2012

RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 76

Julian: This time it seems like it was leaning towards the
visual side, the way we experimented with sound, you
know Angus dripping rags onto a metal pan with just
simple microphones. So it’s a bit of a mix this time where
we are using the visual side to create the sound.
Angus: I’ve always liked that idea. You know of people
writing in colors and stuff like that but it’s not really how
I work.
Aaron: I just kind of more and more accept that I’m not a
visually oriented person. I think how we make songs and
how you’re kind of forced to visually compose things, like
in pro tools where you are looking at sounds as waves, but
I think that’s just more of how I would hear things anyway.
If I want to make an interesting beat, that idea is always in
my head of where there is sound and where there is
silence. But I guess there are certain things. Like when I
used to play guitar or drums I would visualize the action.
Like if I wanted an angry beat or an aggressive thing I
would imagine playing it first.
Angus: If anything, as a sort of a rule, more and more it’s
come to the point where we really know what we want to
do ourselves and then the struggle is to keep stuff out.
Going back to what we were talking about earlier on,
there’s just so much information and stuff going around
visually and sonically, it’s just becomes really important to
learn how to not take any of that in. Even just subliminally.
You know, not to be influenced by Lady Gaga or other
kinds of things that you hear every day. You really hope
that’s not affecting what you’re doing. But it’s a reality!
Sometimes it’s really hard to shut that out.
ANP: Listening is stealing.
Angus: Yeah. It’s people’s business to make music that’s
gonna stick in your head. So the question becomes about
how you can get away from it. You know you watch a
basketball game and there’s a Nicki Minaj song in the
background. You always find yourself acknowledging that
and really how do you shut that out? It’s the same with any
kind of influence...visual or not. You’ve really got to pick
and choose. Otherwise it’s hard to trust yourself.
ANP: I’m sure some influences from your other
records come in as well.
Angus: Yes! It’s equally the same with really good music
too. I can get intimidated and freaked out if I hear
something really good. That can have a negative influence
too. That’s one of the reasons we went out to the woods to
record Sisterworld. Before that I was just kind of
mainlining all this other music, but then we reached a
point where we didn’t want to that anymore.
Aaron: I guess that would affect how visuals influence us as
well. I do think that it’s something that we can turn on or
off. Again, for me it would be hard to say that I’m visually
influenced, it just depends on the concept. You know when
we were making the Liars record we watched a lot of
movies about witches just to try to get that mood.
ANP: All of your records seem to be about moods.
Aaron: Well, with WIXIW it was hard. We really tried to
shut all that down and see what comes out. It’s was
interesting for us.
Angus: Because of it we ended up with a lot of doubt
and uncertainty. Also that was really multiplied by the use
of this new landscape of technology. It was really daunting
at times. This was the first time we let that out, where
usually it would be veiled by this idea that it’s all about
something else and projecting yourself onto this other idea.
ANP: I wonder if that’s a direct reaction to all of
the technology.
Angus: Yeah, you would make this song and be all excited
about it but then you spend the rest of the day reading a
manual and you really start to doubt whether or not you’re
gonna do this or if it’s the right thing at all. It’s not the
same as just picking up and instrument and hitting it.
There’s this whole detachment from the sound. It’s all in
this computer and you wonder how you actually made it.
You don’t have the connection physically with anything.
Aaron: What’s funny though is that it all happens when we
haven’t been able to write songs for a while. Especially
after we’ve been touring. There’s this huge feeling that you
can’t do it. I can’t overemphasize how scary it is! That
period when we first started writing on this record
especially with all this new software we really had no
excuse. You have everything you need to make songs on a
computer and the first batch was just so nerve-wracking.
All of them really were really difficult to make. Then when
you have to write lyrics for a song that whole experience
kind of forces things more. Maybe I was just too tired at
that point.
ANP: One thing I noticed when looking at all of
your albums is that even though everything is all
quite different there is still a visual thru-line just
like sound in the music. There’s obviously a
sensibility. There’s a heavy dose of academic
sarcasm. There’s a challenge in the work.
Aaron: I’m really curious about that.
ANP: For every image it always seems like there’s
an idea there. There’s a narrative behind each and
every image.
Angus: It ties back to that same discussion about the
difference between us and the people who are able to just
do things over and over again. Some people are just like,
“OK here’s a picture of a tree” just because it looks kind of
cool they go with it. It would be kind of great to be that
carefree. We don’t necessarily have that when it comes to
visuals. That’s perhaps why there’s a sense of a common
aesthetic or energy in all of our imagery. There are a lot of
RVCA .COM / 77
discussions behind each image. When we started talking
about the cover for our new record, we did look at other
people’s covers you know? We looked at what was going on
and a lot of times I’d come in and say,”It’s really nice just
this photo of something” But at the end of the day that just
won’t stand up.
ANP: Well then you start categorizing yourself.
You have to be careful.
Angus: Yeah and that makes it a lot harder.
Aaron: Yeah, I’ve tried to imagine being a band like AC/DC
or something where our rules are defined and we made this
distinct brand of music that people looked to us to
produce. Like, “Oh, my guitar playing is the stamp on our
music.” We could also kind of fall back on imagery like that
if we wanted. But instead with every record we try to add
more information. We want it to be interesting. I think
sometimes it even goes back to our insecurity about it that
we try to give them more.
Julian: I think it’s also about challenging ourselves in the
same way as we do in the music. It’s not about just saying
“Oh those songs are good” we always ask why. I think it’s
that same sort of thing of taking the harder road
sometimes to produce the thing that makes the most sense.
Aaron: But to me it just seems that the way we do it is the
best way to make our songs. I’m always amazed that more
bands don’t work the way we do. You know sometimes
you’ll read an interview and the band will talk about how
they feel trapped. Or they feel the pressure of repeating
themselves. I never understood that. I mean, “Whose the
boss?” When we first started writing songs we just wrote
whatever we wanted to. But I think some bands really have
a fear of not being able to make music anymore.
ANP: I think a lot of artists really need direction.
Without that they can feel lost. They need someone
to tell them where to start. That said, at what point
do you guys know when something is finished?
Julian: Deadlines.
Angus: You know, you just feel like you could work on it
forever so you have to set yourself a limit. You only really
know it’s done when the record comes back from the
mastering and you’re happy with it. All the way up to that
after you’ve gone through the writing and the recording,
the whole post-production part is really just about refining
that finishing line. Listening after listening to detail after
detail. At that point it starts to feel done just because
you’ve heard it so many bloody times. Even so it’s still not
done. There’s always something in your head that’s saying
things like, “Oh god, should that snare be a little louder?” I
think that in the end it’s never actually done until we get to
start the next record.
FEMALE GAZE
There has been a debate raging for decades about the way that women are portrayed in photography and how it is almost always men
who are defining that image. In response to this, we here at ANPQ have decided to ask six of our favorite female photographers to send
us images that represent their particularly female take on male sexuality. We’ve found it quite striking to see the differences between what
men and women generally find to be attractive in the opposite sex. In that regard these photographs are quite telling.

MELODIE McDANIEL
RUTH SWANSON
DEANNA TEMPLETON
ANGELA BOATWRIGHT
CHERYL DUNN
THE
NEW
AESTHETIC
James Bridle and The Mythology of a Pixel
by Liz Armstrong / Portrait by Pat Graham

Glitches are seams that reveal where stuff gets interesting. So says Londoner James Bridle, somewhat accidental father of the New Aesthetic, an
intellectual movement that attempts to apprehend the experience of living in a world where the digital and tangible experiences overlap. In many
ways, seeing with our eyes is secondary; we look at what we’ve designed machines to show us. So then what are we trying to say to ourselves? Or
has the digital interception changed the information and is giving us insight we wouldn’t otherwise have the ability to perceive?
In May 2011 Bridle spilled a handful of seeds on Tumblr—pixilated and tessellated art in the physical world as sculpture or pattern on fabric,
images of real humans navigating digitally-rendered architecture, Google Earth’s unintentional sense of humor, the sociological subtext of
several types of facial recognition, etc.—and a thousand of its babies were quickly identified. Animated gifs re-animated as zoetropes, DIY
drones, composite imagery app revelations, Facebook app-branded ice cream, a descriptive camera that generates and prints out a written
description of what was shot rather than capturing an image, a sound wave transformed into a chair, on and on and on…so many things we
previously noticed or made or used but didn’t really stop to think about, were now being recognized and collated under one large descriptor.
Then last spring at South by Southwest, New Aesthetic blew up. From there, academics at Harvard, artists and art critics, and tech writers
started chewing on it, and it still hasn’t lost its flavor.
Thing is, it’s not really art, nor is it technology or networking, nor does it provide enough boundaries for its own philosophy. Describing New
Aesthetic is like describing being human: You know exactly what that means, but how do you define it? Bridle, a learned fellow in artificial
intelligence and philosophy, maintains a logical, categorical approach to his own offering that at this point describes how this isn’t art, or
technology—it’s more about the linguistics of understanding, creating a universal sub-code where all metaphors coalesce. New Aesthetics, for
intellectuals, is an evolving amoeba that lets us watch its organelle development, an ever-dilating and constricting conversation that will consider
anything and naturally eject what doesn’t belong without suffering a disembowelment. To romantics, it’s a visual, semi-tactile poem about how
we create life within an idea. It breathes. It generates information about itself. And it might know.
Assigning sentience and meaningfulness to theory is how you create myth. It explains not only itself but other things around it too: it has a life of
inflection. So is Bridle’s initial proposition an aesthetic, or is this something else entirely? We talked to him in an attempt to understand.

Drone Shadow, Silicon Car Park, London 27/02/2012. James Bridle & Einar Sneve Martinussen

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Graffiti of Getty Images Watermark, 2012. Photo by Jerry Hsu

ANP: I’m curious how you started coming up with New Aesthetic.
James Bridle: It started from a couple of positions, two things that are very closely
connected. I was increasingly frustrated with the so-called cultural dominance of
retro and vintage. Where everyone’s got interesting facial hair and wears braces and
has this idea that there’s something authentic in the past that we’ve lost, and that
authenticity can only be located in the past. Which is fine, but it seems to have become
so overblown that we’ve lost all sight of any possible futures. And that’s very connected
to the fact that indeed these potential futures seem to have failed us. The future that we
believed in for so long—where we’re living on other planets—that’s not the future we’re
getting, right? That these two are connected are evident in all kinds of things—many,
many things. At the very simplest level, I set out to find things that felt genuinely
new. Things that would be inexplicable to someone 20 or even 10 years ago. I usually
start off these projects with the idea that something I’m looking for must be out there
somewhere, in some form. And if you look for it hard enough, it’ll appear. In this case,
the imagery at least, that you might see in some of the manifestations of New Aesthetic
are what I’ve found.
ANP: What you just said—if you look hard enough it’ll appear—makes me
wonder how much you think the intent of our consciousness informs our
mundane reality.
JB: I’m very interested in consciousness but I’d be loath to tie it too closely to what
I’m talking about. I oscillate massively between the positions that the internet is a new
form of human consciousness and the idea that that’s probably complete bullshit. At
times I want it to be true. I think there are aspects in which maybe it is, but I’m more
interested the fact that the network gives us new ways of seeing things that we simply
didn’t have before. It doesn’t mean they didn’t exist before, it didn’t mean they didn’t
sufficiently work. They weren’t accessible to us before, but we suddenly have this
ability to see so much further than we did, which is one of the aims of consciousness.
I don’t necessarily believe that the network gives us anything particularly new, but it
does reveal things that previously were a lot harder to see.
ANP: It also could be what we do as humans, which is project our own
experience on animals or plants or inanimate things, such as a network.
Where we’re saying maybe this network has consciousness because we
do too.
JB: Again, I’m nervous about ascribing consciousness to it, but I am interested in
ascribing consciousness to it as a framing device to try to understand it. I studied
classical AI. I did a final work on creativity in artificial intelligence. And I left that
course with a profound disappointment in what was possible. That’s another one of
those futures that has failed us, of god-like creative artificial intelligence—it turns out
machines don’t work that way, and we don’t work that way. But it can be kind of useful.
So one of the things I was doing a lot with New Aesthetic was attributing intentionality
to a lot of non-human actions. That doesn’t mean I believe they have intentionality, I
just think that’s sometimes an interesting and useful way to talk about them.
ANP: Do you want to tell me more about your background?
JB: I was in computer science and artificial intelligence, and psychology and
linguistics, which all sort of built toward attempts to understand. In particular
computer science and cognitive science, which is one of the ways to approach artificial
intelligence, is a way of looking at the brain as if it’s a computer. So you hypothesize
that the brain is a black box, like an unmarked computer and you give it inputs and
you see what comes out, and you try and reverse engineer how the brain works by
doing that. It’s tied to things like evolutionary psychology, which presupposes that
a lot of our newer hardwiring is how it is because it’s how we were on the savannah
millions of years ago. I don’t really buy that anymore. But it’s an interesting way of
approaching the problem. It’s a solving technique by which you break down everything
that’s possible, the most algorithmic way you can because you’re coming at it from a
computer science background. It’s an interesting approach; it works in some ways and
it doesn’t work in many other ways. It’s really good if you’re interested in language and
psychology and newer biology. But I studied that for years and by the time I got done
and qualified in it, I hated computers so much that I went to work in very traditional
book publishing. So I was a publisher and an editor publishing contemporary fiction
for a few years.
ANP: That’s amazing.
JB: I figured that’s somewhere I could go where I wouldn’t have to worry about
computers so much.
ANP: It’s a bit of a more analog form of communication.
JB: That’s what I thought, but I was wrong. It turns out that what literature and
the publishing industry and fiction and everything else needed was a far better
understanding of what the network was bringing. Slowly, my specialty became what
happens when literature meets technology, what happens when literature meets the
network, and the strange forms you see emerging at those points. The New Aesthetic
emerged from what happens when all of culture does that—when things become digital
and fundamentally changed by that. It’s something that we’re really bad at addressing;
we’re very good at picking metaphors for why digital things are like physical things,
but we’re bad at examining the ways in which they’re not. But it’s the ways in which
they’re not that seem to be important and interesting.

Dutch Landscapes by Mishka Henner. When Google introduced its free satellite imagery service to the world in 2005, views of our planet only previously accessible to astronauts and surveyors were suddenly
available to anyone with an internet connection. Yet the vistas revealed by this technology were not universally embraced.

Governments concerned about the sudden visibility of political, economic and military locations exerted considerable influence on suppliers of this imagery to censor sites deemed vital to national security. This
form of censorship continues today and techniques vary from country to country with preferred methods generally including use of cloning, blurring, pixelization, and whitening out sites of interest.

Surprisingly, one of the most vociferous of all governments to enforce this form of censorship were the Dutch, hiding hundreds of significant sites including royal palaces, fuel depots and army barracks through-
out their relatively small country. The Dutch method of censorship is notable for its stylistic intervention compared to other countries; imposing bold, multi-coloured polygons over sites rather than the subtler
and more standard techniques employed in other countries. The result is a landscape occasionally punctuated by sharp aesthetic contrasts between secret sites and the rural and urban environments surrounding
them. www.mishka.lockandhenner.com

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The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text
description of the scene. Created by Matt Richardson. www.mattrichardson.com

ANP: You talk about how much you love Spambots. I wonder if this love
and the attempt to parse what part of them might be human or attempting
to truly communicate with humans, I wonder if you’ve found any difficulty
in talking to people as a result.
JB: I don’t know. If I take it a step back and understand how these digital things are
affecting the way we see the world, the one thing spambots don’t do very well is they
don’t have any sense of memory or experience. They seem incredibly naïve. Which
is charming, right? It’s something nice and makes them seem vulnerable, like a
puppy. But that quality of memory and experience is exactly what humans seem
to struggle with.
ANP: When you put it that way, it seems like humans and spambots aren’t
so different. I guess these are universal concerns.
JB: I’m incredibly sensitive to the ways in which we attempt to manipulate memory
and experience. I see it in the ways in which we try to present our experiences online,
the way in which we relate. In my own work it very much came out in trying to
understand why our experience with books is different when they become ebooks.
I see exactly the same process happening with the way that we deal with digital
photographs online—for example, the spread of the retro-filter movement in
Instagram—and also in huge numbers of other things. Seems to me to be a way
that we’re trying to impose emotions and memories that we understand as almost
physical onto very digital things.
Then I start to see that in terms of how easily constructed a lot of those memories
are. Take the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. There’s a whole effort of collective memory
creation going on where we’re trying to implant in the consciousness of the country a
memory of what those 60 years have been like. Now, I don’t remember any of those
things. I wasn’t there. I haven’t taken part in any of these street parties that they
say are one of the cultural signifiers of the nation. But we construct them through
television and advertising in order to recreate them. Now take that and project it
forward into the future and it feels to me like that’s what we’re trying to do with a lot
of our online activity. Because we have this whole network sphere in which we spend
a vast amount of our time and yet we have no memory or experience in it. And we still
have to work out how we have lasting memories and experiences, and for me it’s all we
have, it’s what makes us. How do we construct those in the digital world? What do they
look like? What does a digital souvenir look like? Can you imagine a digital souvenir
that has no substantiation? I’m increasingly sensitive to it.
ANP: That’s really interesting, and you’re making me think two things
here. First, does the digital experience enhance authenticity? Or does it
falsify it if we can’t touch it?
JB: I don’t know what authenticity means. I say that with incredible seriousness.
Our ideas of authenticity have always been rooted in physical objects. But that’s been
a myth; I see it all the time, again with books. This idea that because something is
physically instantiated is therefore authentic, that’s simply not true, there have always
been fakes and heresies and ways of confusing this issue. The network reveals that
those things stand on very shaky foundations. We’re increasingly aware of that, though
I’m loath to admit it or deal with it in any kind of real way.
ANP: The other thing that this talk about our digital experience and
memory is making me think about is how it’s forcing a nostalgia for things
we weren’t old enough to actually experience. And it’s the same thing you
were talking about, which you formed or identified the New Aesthetic as a
response to. That idea that things were better in the old days, and a lot of
these kids aren’t even old enough to have experienced the aesthetic
they’re perpetuating.
JB: That’s always been the case. I grew up listening to music made long before I was
born and loving it and thinking it was the best thing. The network has made it obvious

Sebastian Schmieg & Sylvio Lorusso’s “56 Broken Kindle Screens” is a print on demand paperback that consists of found photos depicting broken Kindle screens. The Kindle is Amazon’s e-reading device which
is by default connected to the company’s book store.The book takes as its starting point the peculiar aesthetic of broken E Ink displays and serves as an examination into the reading device’s materiality. As the
screens break, they become collages composed of different pages, cover illustrations and interface elements. www.sebastianschmieg.com

RVCA .COM / 87
Black and White Coding Dots, 2012. Photo by Sebastian Schramm. www.bueroschramm.de
and untenable that I now know and I can find out exactly when records were made and
when their popularity was. I’m suddenly so hyper aware of my distance from them,
even though they’re closer than ever, because I can reach across the network and take
whatever I want from any period in history. That at the same time makes it quite clear
that there’s a kind of leak forming. I’m suspicious of notions that don’t even carry
on recycling that stuff. It seems ever easier to do so, and also an abdication of
responsibility to find the new thing. And the new thing has got to be where it
gets interesting.
ANP: Right. Sometimes I think the new thing is in the bridge of the
pastiche. Like what you’re talking about where you’ll grab things from
different eras or places and that becomes what’s meaningful to you. And
that bridge, that reveal of interstitial information, is what is the new thing.
JB: When I think about bridge, I think of the point at which something genuinely new
gets absorbed into something that we recognize and are comfortable with. So we can
take bits and make analogies or complex metaphors to explain new things in terms of
the things we already understand, but it doesn’t mean that we genuinely understand
them or that we genuinely change in any new way. The things that we were excited
about in the old visions of the future were things that were genuinely new experiences.
Space travel is like a genuinely new thing, way beyond air travel. Air travel, essentially
as we understand it now and experience it—going to airports and sitting on passenger
jets—is not much different from a fast train ride, or frankly a fast horse and carriage.
That is explicable to someone who lived hundreds of years ago, it’s just a faster way
of getting from point to point. We lose the ability to conceptualize the difference.
But I think with the network gives us the opportunity, if we face it head-on, to start
conceptualizing new experiences.
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 88
ANP: So then New Aesthetic is largely imaginary, right? It seems it’d
have to be in order to be self-evolving or self-perpetuating? Because then
wouldn’t it have an expiration date?
JB: At some point it should collapse into the real. It depends on what you mean by
imaginary. To me, New Aesthetic was always not about things themselves but about
the experience of living in a world where such things manifest. And are legible. What is
interesting is that even though we can’t explain them, really, we still experience them
on some level. They get through to us and make us realize there is something going
on here. What is interesting about a lot of the artifacts of the New Aesthetic is they’re
already everyday things, but we haven’t really noticed how strange and wonderful they
are. We’ve been so focused on the massive, vast experiences we’ve been expecting that
we haven’t noticed how the smaller things have crept in and become normal.
ANP: Like the pixilated camouflage drones and the funny Google street
view blurs. These everyday objects, and how out of place they are, but we
don’t even notice—I’m making a sort of awkward leap into thinking about
glitches, and how they seem to be alluring to you.
JB: The glitches of many of the artifacts of the New Aesthetic felt like seams in things
that reveal where it became interesting. There’s a lot of discourse in design around the
seams and the edges where stuff meets. For a long time I believed that there was a firm
boundary particularly between the physical and the digital, that there was some kind
of hard layer that things existed on one side and then others on the other side. I don’t
really believe that anymore. I think the two are overlaid upon one another, that they
extend in all directions and overlap. It’s incredibly hard to separate, if you’ve grown up
with access to the digital world; there are no hard and fast boundaries. The things that
are important—your memories and experiences—exist in both.
(left to right)
The Piranha USV “Sea Drone” is a long-range unmanned concept vessel designed to demonstrate today’s latest materials technology and design theory. Advanced unmanned vessels enable a broad range of
unmanned operations on the sea, reducing operational costs and unnecessary risks.

NATO plans to issue biometrically backed identification cards to 1.65 million Afghans by next May. Local and NATO forces are already compiling “biometric dossiers on hundreds of thousands of cops, crooks,
soldiers, insurgents and ordinary citizens. It’s a high-tech upgrade to a classic counterinsurgency move—simultaneously taking a census of the population, culling security forces of double agents and cutting
off guerrilla routes.” – Wired Magazine.

Frog Queen, or the Prisma Engineering Headquarters (a machine and motor technology company) is located in Graz, Styria, Austria. Its facade was designed by Splitterwerk and looks like one giant
pixelized box. Even the facade itself is practically a square. However, if you look very closely, you will see that each one of the pixels has circular patterns screenprinted on its face. Photography by
Nikolaos Zachariadis, Splitterwerk.

RVCA .COM / 89
(left to right)
Pixel Fashion by Kunihiko Morinaga for Anrealage. www.anrealage.com
Google employees recently began testing the company’s new augmented-reality glasses called Project Glass. The glasses are the company’s first venture into wearable computing. The glasses are not yet for
sale. Google will, however, be testing them in public.
Square Enix and Prada teamed up to promote the fashion giant’s 2012 men’s spring/summer collection by producing a CGI photoshoot, starring JRPG Final Fantasy characters. The images appeared in Arena
Homme+ as part of the 25th Anniversary celebration of the Final Fantasy series. Characters Lightning, Noel, Snow, Sazh and Hope are all wearing Prada gear. They were created by Square Enix’s Visual
Works studio in Japan, working alongside the Final Fantasy character designers.
So what is the thing that distinguishes between them? Or what is common to both
of them? That’s us. That comes down to human consciousness and perception that
must stretch across both of those things. I see us attempting to use the same models
and metaphors for things in both the physical and networked world. But something
else must be coming down and I’m trying to—well, I don’t want to pin down what
that thing is, but I definitely want to point to the things that make you realize it. My
favorite things of the New Aesthetic are the kind of images that you look at and you
genuinely struggle to comprehend, your brain goes, “I can not figure out how this thing
can come to be.” When you understand quite how many pressures must be operating
or how far various cultural images and ideas must have traveled in order to come
together into this thing, that sort of hints toward something. But that something, for
the moment, has to remain unknowable and unsay-able. When you start talking about
consciousness, I point toward the unsay-able, essentially.
ANP: You don’t seem to like to pin things down.
JB: No. I really, really don’t. I think that’s a mistake in idea. I’m deeply uninterested
in that.
ANP: Why?
JB: Because if the network reveals anything, it’s that these things are heterogeneous
but connected. They exist in a state that you can’t make some kind of concrete
definition of. Maybe we will, but the urge to do so destroys it instantly. As soon as
you try to nail these things down, it will escape it. I was having a conversation last
week—a couple conversations, actually. One was with an author; we were talking
about the process of writing a non-fiction book now, the idea of trying to write a book
about something. What you are trying to do in that state or action, is trying to ring-
fence something: Here is my opinion of it, and I’m going to stamp this with my own
particular view. While the argument will carry on, here is my position. I can’t do that
now. I’ve approached that issue from a number of angles and I don’t see why you
would attempt to do that now. And the other conversation was with a curator of an art
gallery who was quitting her job. She talked about curation in similar terms. In order
to be a curator you essentially have to have a strong opinion about something, and you
curate things that uphold that opinion. And that is how you make a name, practice,
career, or whatever. And she used the phrase, “That seems deeply non-contemporary
to me.” That simply is not the way in which we experience the world anymore. That
these things are more interleaved and more interconnected now. And therefore trying
AT&T and Boston Police anonymous crime reporting billboard in Boston. Photo by Adam Greenfield.
What Apple would like to know about you. Apple’s new security questions for iOS.
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 90
to put a neat circle around something is so obviously reductive as to be ridiculous. I’m
hoping that doesn’t mean an end to all kinds of cultural production, but that’s the bit
that I’m stuck in at the moment.
ANP: I think it’s about adaptation, right? It’s the same thing with
journalism—where the subjective experience is undeniable at this point,
it’s integrated into reportage and pretending otherwise is crazy. People
saying journalism is dead because there’s no way to get to objective truth,
in that way I am relieved. I like the idea that the experience is a process.
JB: Absolutely. It has historically always been that way. We’ve trusted those
experiences of the people who have the loudest voices. And that is starting to
break down.
ANP: Yes, as soon as you name something, it is gone. It’s the past. We’re
continuously putting things behind us as soon as we identify them in a
concrete way. Something I find exciting about New Aesthetic: You said it
all theoretically coalesces at a certain point, but it seems like actually it
would just keep racing ahead of itself.
JB: It should. That’s the sign that you’re onto a good thing, right? That’s definitely a
sign that there’s something going on here that’s worthy of attention. As soon as you
can stamp it and go, “I’ve got that thing,” it’s dead.
ANP: Exactly.
JB: Something is living here. So as long as you keep that door open to what it might
become, then it remains the interesting thing.
ANP: I wonder if it’s not even so much an aesthetic that you’re identifying,
then, as much as an archetype, or even a form of modern mythology. Am I
being too romantic?
JB: I hope not. The aesthetic was always the bits that fell off the back as you were
looking for it. You find these shards of evidence and you gather them together and go,
“Is this the thing? Does it look like this? Is this a bit of evidence for the thing that I’m
talking about?” But if you focus on the things then you lose it instantly. You can keep
picking up these things and they’re very interesting and they may be pretty or ugly or
whatever, but they are merely the artifact of the thing, they’re not the thing itself.
ANP: A taxidermied idea. This idea of exploring a seam: Do you think
there are seams in our “real world,” our physical experience?
JB: Do you know a book called The City & The City by China Miéville?
Face detection is a computer technology that determines the location and size of a human face in an arbitrary (digital) image. The facial features in the image are detected, and any other objects like trees, build-
ings, bodies, etc. are ignored. The human face is a rich source of information—by looking at the person’s face, we can immediately identify whether the person is male or female, the person’s approximate age,
facial expression, and so on. Face detection can be regarded as a more “general” case of face localization. In face localization, the task is to find the locations and sizes of a known number of faces.
http://demo.geotitles.com/face-detect/#server|default
ANP: I’ve noticed that you’ve referenced it before.
JB: Yeah, I reference it a lot because it’s so good at describing what I think you’ve
just asked about. One thing that’s so brilliant about the book is that it gives you a new
vocabulary for describing the world. It describes a city that is two cities overlaid, one
upon the other. So they’re sister cities, but they’re not next to each other, they co-exist.
And the citizens of the one city are culturated from birth to simply unsee the other city.
So you know that the people of your city dress a certain way, the buildings in your city
have a certain architecture style, you have a language and a whole culture in common.
If you took two steps to the right, you would effectively be in that other city, even
though you would not see it. And that’s the world in which this book is set.
What’s brilliant is it gives you this vocabulary—there’s a couple particular terms,
such as “cross-hatching,” which is the area where the two cities are literally side-by-
side, building by building. And also “breeching,” a criminal offense, is when you step
outside the boundary of your city and you suddenly exist in the other city, which
must be guarded against by all means. As soon as you read this book, in the real world
you suddenly realize when you’ve breeched. You’re walking down a street and look
down an alleyway and see a side of the city that you know you’re not supposed to see,
that exists in a totally different zone of culture and awareness. It’s not how you go
about your day-to-day life, but once you’ve seen it, once you’ve breeched, it’s unsee-
able again.
That is constantly happening, where you live in your reality bubble, or bubble of
metaphors for how you understand the world, and most of the time we’re very good at
unseeing the very things that break those metaphors. But occasionally those things get
through. So one of the things the New Aesthetic may have been doing is provoking that
breech between ideas of the present and the imminent future, between the digital and
physical, and saying these things are not as separate as you might have believed they
were before, that you are capable of transcending that boundary. But it may provoke
very odd reactions within you.
ANP: You’re probably going to hate this next question, but what you’re
talking about—the subtle perception and the overlap—is what a lot of
magic is about.
JB: Yep. With a k.
ANP: With or without, I think it works both ways.
JB: I have a long and abiding fascination with everyone from Crowley to Gurdjieff
to way back before then. It’s one of the main taboos of any discussions about
consciousness is that people tend to ignore the huge amounts of research done under
the name of “magic(k).” It’s just reality manipulation and—well, you’ve read Grant
Morrison, right? We’re talking about The Invisibles and technology as standing in for
what used to be called magic(k), or various other things. It’s all metaphors.
ANP: I figured you had to have some sort of knowledge of these worlds.
Is that something you’re allowed to talk about in the circles you run
around in?
JB: Ha, I’ll talk about anything! Yeah, of course, but you have to be very careful about
talking about these things, or at least you have to be sure that when you start talking
Extract from the Gallery of Default Anonymity: A Work in Progress by Rob Walker. www.murketing.com
RVCA .COM / 91
in a different set of metaphors, that it’s clear to everyone in the conversation where
those metaphors intersect and where they don’t. So I could say the same thing about
conspiracy theories, or about attributing intentionality to non-human actions. At some
level in all of these things you’re talking in very broad metaphors, and sometimes
you’re being deadly serious. Anyone who discusses magic(k) seriously is usually doing
both things at the same time. Which is often quite hard, but in terms of circles, no,
come on down to Treadwell’s bookshop and we’ll talk about the apophatic silence at
the heart of everything, which is produced by magical, noumenal experience.
But equally, you can have the same discussion with a bunch of very serious tech
people about the difference between a blog post and Twitter. These things are
stacks of metaphors.
ANP: Yes, and I’d say the language you’re speaking in is universal Polari.
It’s like sub-code we can all relate to.
JB: Yes, Polari is a code within the language that’s creating a number of other
signifiers for what’s understood. Polari’s a good example in terms of it being useful
on some levels, internally and externally. So the thing about Polari is that it creates
a sense of solidarity amongst its speakers that is visible to those outside even if they
don’t understand it, but it’s also a useful way of communicating to people from inside
a world. That’s true of magical speech as well. When magicians talk about conversing
with higher beings, they don’t necessarily mean, say, Thoth or elder beings. They
might just mean higher consciousness or their own inner state. But you’ve created
a scene around those things that allow you to discuss it on many levels at once. Yes,
that’s what I’m frequently doing. Maybe? Possibly.
ANP: Ha, ha. You’re a magician!
JB: Ah, you know, we’re all magicians. It’s all good.
ANP: We’re over a year later from when you’ve first introduced New
Aesthetic. It was May last year, right?
JB: That’s when it was given that particular name, which was a very throwaway
name at the time, just one of those things that stuck. It was, as I’ve said, very
much connected to much longer discussions about struggling to articulate the new
experiences that we were having but somewhat denying because we didn’t have the
right words to describe them. It seemed like an interesting way of talking about them.
ANP: What’s happened in this last year?
JB: The last year’s been really interesting. I got to spend a year playing with this
idea, and as we discussed, being very careful not to define it. Not to put a direct line
on it. My friend Tom Taylor wrote a wonderful thing about it, where he described it
as akin to a playlist, something you could drop ideas in and out of and slowly shape
a thing. Which is kind of spot-on. My feeling about what I was doing at least on the
Tumblr was to put these things out there and see how they felt. And many of them, in
hindsight, weren’t what I was talking about. But by putting the things out there, you
kind of got to have the conversation about them and shape it further.
One of the joys in the process was this constant process of correction. For me, pretty
much as soon as anyone else said, “Ah! I see what you’re talking about, here, it’s this.”
I go, “That’s brilliant, really interesting, but therefore not that.” Because you’ve been
Various digital glitches in photography and video courtesy of www.glitchnews.tumblr.com

Glitch blanket by Phillip Stearns. “These blankets are layered with irony: a digital photographic image, made with an intentionally broken (rewired) camera, is mechanically woven or knit into a photoblanket, an
object commonly advertised as a kitsch memento. In this project, a keepsake for cherishing one’s memories now becomes a platform for fashioning corrupted memory, the cold logic of digital systems into soft,
warm blankets.”

RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 92

John Rafman, Nacozari De Garcia - Montezuma, Sonora, Mexico (2011) Chromogenic Print. From: 16 Google Street Views. Courtesy of M+B, Los Angeles.
able to put your arms around that particular thing, therefore it is not that. So we’ll veer
off into another direction for a bit, and that happened constantly throughout the year.
What happened back in March and April, when it exploded, was that kind of happened
to almost all of it. Or at least it happened to what was happening on the Tumblr, which
was always one aspect of New Aesthetic. There’s been a huge amount of conversation
and debate around it. But almost all of that is not what I was talking about, even
though it’s been incredibly fascinating to figure out, to see how that happened.
On the most basic level, the most interesting thing that happened was that you got to
see this immense chasm between technology and art. In that the New Aesthetic was
never about art, though artworks were included in it. Rather there’s this huge area of
culture that the art world hasn’t really gotten a handle on, and so largely ignored for
a long time or treated it completely face value without delving into what was behind
it. It suddenly reached a point where a lot of that stuff looks like art to artists, even
if it was never produced within the theoretical sphere of the art world. Suddenly the
art world has taken up the New Aesthetic, which has produced all sorts of fascinating
conversations. But it seems to be a way of saying, “Oh right! It’s that thing there, we’ll
grab that and grasp that,” While still missing the changes that are happening under the
hood to have made that occur.
ANP: You’ve created one specific act of actually creating an amorphous
framework that didn’t kill the thing it might contain. You’ve created
a chase.
JB: Part of me thinks it’s killed a chunk of what I was up to, but that’s OK, that’s just
again another correction, and we’ll figure out where it goes next. Yeah, it clearly hit
a nerve, right? We would not be talking if it didn’t. That was part of it from early on,
to name something that people needed a name for. That’s always very interesting. It
doesn’t advance the thing itself necessarily.
ANP: It also makes me think about how we form new archetypes or
symbols, even. I think about the pixel, or a pixilated edge, becoming a new
alchemical symbol.
JB: Yeah, there’s something really nice in that. I did a bunch of sigils from pixel stuff.
At South by Southwest, I invoked Crowley. But it was me saying, “This is Crowley,
talking about words of power and how you bind archetypes and blah blah blah.” And
to some extent, that’s what New Aesthetic did. And for a long time after it all kicked
off, I was genuinely like, “This is all Crowley’s revenge. I invoked him arrogantly in the
wrong way and he is showing me what words of power actually do.” I still fairly believe
that to some extent. There’s a very—I hesitate to call it deliberate—a fairly accidental
kind of sigil formation that happened there. Without a doubt. And I was also conscious
of that process happening and very, very conscious that every single magician who
does something like that uses it for powerful ends. And that in itself should be what we
try to avoid.
ANP: What should we avoid?
JB: Trying to have any form of power relations over these things, which is really hard. I
get very nervous around manifestos and people claiming to have strong opinions about
RVCA .COM / 93
things, because that essentially is about control. All of this stuff is slowly figuring itself
out. This conversation is as much a part of it as anything.
ANP: What’s next for you?
JB: I’m mainly interested in two things—well, I’m mainly interested in everything—
but still attempting to chase down this idea of how we put ourselves (our memory,
experience, and culture) into the things that we make, which is increasingly mediated
by the network. The network remains something that we haven’t gotten a handle
on. We need to keep endlessly generating new metaphors for it, in order to try to
understand. We never truly understand anything, but it’s worth continuing to poke
it. And the other side of it is a better understanding of what the hell we’re doing with
technology. Like, what we do with it next. So, we’ve built this thing, and we’re still
really using it as an extension of old media or telephones or existing things. It’s got to
be good for something else.
ANP: Are we collaborating with the network or are we becoming more
dependent on it?
JB: Dependency’s difficult, because we’re always dependent on technology. Except
once we’re dumped without them, we seem to mostly do OK. But collaboration is really
interesting, the idea that we are co-producing so much of our world now through
technologies we’ve made but are largely illegible, whether that’s the stock market or
architecture, city planning or the way in which we communicate—those things are
intimately bound to the technologies we’ve built. I used to think everyone should
learn to code, and I’m not so about that now. It’s the difference between literacy
and legibility. I used to think everyone needed to be literate in this stuff; I’m not
sure that’s true. It’d be nice but it’s kind of ridiculous. You should at least be legible;
people should have a greater awareness of how these things shape everything that we
do. I think that’s the only way we’re going to see a larger change in everything, from
consciousness to politics to everyday life.
www.new-aesthetic.tumblr.com
At the center of Micaklene Thomas’s exhibition, Origin of the
Universe, is a cropped nude portrait of a black female torso.
The painting updates L’origine du monde, folding Courbet’s
famously ambiguous gesture back on itself to re-inscribe
it within a narrative of black identity politics and feminist
sexuality. The original ambiguity doesn’t disappear, however—
it proliferates a series of new questions about which universe
is being created and what or whom is doing the creating. The
questions are again re-phrased and compounded on the cover
of the monograph accompanying the show, which instead of the
nude torso displays a photograph of a one of Thomas’s signature
cozy interiors. A brightly patterned couch with a riot of throw-
pillows nestles in the corner of a presumptive living room,
waiting placidly beneath Thomas’s ubiquitous wall-paneling
and a photograph of a naked woman seated in a refracted,
nearly identical environment, her afro the same size as the vinyl
records haloed on the wall behind her.
These two different implicit versions of the Origin mutually
inform each other and map out the valences Thomas’s work
has taken recently—zooming in to deep personal interiors and
telescoping out to collaged landscapes and figureless spaces.
While ‘figureless’ isn’t usually a very descriptive term, in
Thomas’s work it makes sense; the momentum of the body of
work she has produced over the last decade of her meteoric rise
implies a figure even when none is present. She has become
famous for her bold rhinestone-encrusted portraits of black
women seated in plush cacophonous interiors, the women’s
postures at once seductive and challenging, lustrous and
evaluative. This work culminated in Thomas’s gigantic painting
commissioned by MOMA in 2010. Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe:
Les Trois Femmes Noir­—a fractured, explosive kaleidoscope
of texture and pattern presided over by three women who look
back at the viewer as though waiting for answer as to why you
have interrupted their moment (but maybe if you’re cool you
can have some quiche). Now, even when Thomas paints a room
without anyone there, you still feel the presence of her women
boldly gazing out.
Thomas’s landscapes remove further from figured space without
leaving altogether the realm of interior. Strips of camouflage
fight for space with ‘trees’ of wood paneling punctuated with
colored shapes that recall Stuart Davis’s work. But under
Thomas’s hand, even the naked torso of Origin itself becomes
a refracted landscape, viewed and viewing without eyes, a
cipher yet still a real physical presence. Origin of the Universe­­—
Thomas’s recent large-scale solo museum exhibition, at the
Brooklyn Museum of Art, represents a huge transition in
her work both in style and subject matter, while retaining
her signature themes. We spoke about the new show, her
technique and what has lead her to this point in a recent phone
conversation...
by Sean Kennerly / images courtesy the artist

MICKALENE
THOMAS
(previous page)
Portrait of Mnonja with
Flower in Her Hair #2, 2011
Rhinestones, acrylic and
enamel on wood panel,
60x48 in.

(this spread)
Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe les
Trois Femmes Noires, 2010
Rhinestones, acrylic and
enamel on wood panel,
120x288 in.

Baby I am Ready Now, 2007

Rhinestones, acrylic and
enamel on wood panel,
72 x132 in.

RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 96

Sean Kennerly: The first thing that jumped out
at me about your show Origin of the Universe
is the space in the paintings. How did you
approach space differently for this show?
Micaklene Thomas: The space in the work has to do
with how I’m considering a collage space against a
flat space and a perspective space. Flatness versus
perspective. I was considering the edge of things, how
certain elements of an edge can determine what’s
in a foreground or a background. A lot of my earlier
works were very central and very flat, and oriented the
image more graphically. I was really interested in how
flatness could appear flat, but once you deal with the
edge of it, you could create depth-of-field. That came
about through working with my collages—the tactile,
hands-on considering of the materiality of how I could
transform a collage into a painting. I’m not sure if
I’m always successful, but I’m trying to transform the
essence of a collage into a painting.
SK: It seems like you approach your
landscapes more from a collage perspective.
MT: Yeah, I think it’s partly that, but I think the
landscape informs more of the collage element,
because it allows me to work with the image itself and
juxtapose all the contrasting elements I am working
with on a flat plane without a figure. Because in the
beginning, I was thinking those ways, but it would
always become convoluted in my creative mind
because the figure held such importance for me and
was so much more significant in relationship to the
center—there wasn’t enough critical distance where
I could just think about formal aspects of the image,
there was a different connection. So I think working
with the landscape allows me to be more free in how
I approach the process. That transition in how I
approached my studio practice opened up new ways in
how I was working and looking at the images that I’m
interested in.
SK: You have a painting from 2007 called
Baby I’m Ready Now…
MT: Yeah, I did that for a 2007 show at Caren Golden
Gallery. It was a two person I did with Shinique
Smith. The title of the show was Prime Time, and
Baby I’m Ready Now was a title that I took from a
song by Mille Jackson. It’s an image of my friend
Aisha Belle. The painting is a play on the idea of the
availability of this black woman’s sexuality, of the
appropriateness or inappropriateness of a specific
stereotypical idea of black women’s sexuality. I used
that as a way of creating that image. For me, that
was probably one of the first paintings where I really
started thinking about the interior space or core, and
about how the figure, the model sat in that space. It
no longer became centralized graphically, but became
more about how she resided in that space, her body
language, how the control of her environment, her
own situation and her gaze, and how she was situated
in that space. I guess it’s a diptych, but I look at it as
one painting. And it was the first time where one side
of it was without a figure and was mostly abstracted
space­—I think it’s the left side—and that was very
exciting for me, it was like, ‘Ok I’m going to try this, I
don’t know how this is going to work, but…’ I was
very interested in creating a space that has a figure
in it, and how that space relates to or responds to the
figure but in an abstracted way­—just have it be like
a one painting next to a bigger painting and see how
those two things work together. It was the beginning
of me experimenting with allowing my collages and
what’s happening in my collage work translate into
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painting with the tools of painting, if I could. It was
very exciting that in some ways it worked for me. In
the craft of it there were some parts that were flat and
in the foreground and then the space receded and the
way she sat in it you really got a sense of her being in
the environment that I create in my studio where I
photographed her. So for me that painting had great
significance because it was a drastic shift in my work
from 2005 to 2006, and it opened the door for a lot
of works from 2006 that incorporate the way I make
my collages. I really wanted to keep some of those
edges and force that in a way, and play with it in the
sense that, ‘OK, I’m doing this in the collage, why am
I not doing it in the painting?’ I was removing things
and omitting things so much that, once I got to the
painting, I didn’t feel like things were evolving in the
direction that I wanted them to. But I try to have my
studio practice inform the evolution, the process of my
work in the direction that it’s going to go, just to have
it be very organic, it’s very important to me because
of a lot things change from one body of work to the
next, but it’s not some drastic jump or shift, it’s a
slight progression of where the works going and what
I’m thinking about. It all comes from work I do in my
studio and playing with different materials.
SK: When you’re doing a collage, you’re
working in the studio, but you’re envisioning
something outside of it, but your interior work
is always manufactured in the studio.
MT: Yeah, I have an interior up in the studio right
now. I feel like it’s best, it’s my process from start to
finish. I guess for some it could seem quite laborious,
but for me, through every aspect of the work I’m
thinking about constructing the paintings, the
composition of the paintings, the sitter in the painting
(clockwise from top left)
Landscape Majestic, 2011
Woodblock, silkscreen and
digital collage print,
52x68 5/8 in.

Portrait of Madame Mama

Bush 1, 2010
Rhinestones, acrylic and
enamel on wood panel,
84x108 in.

Something You Can Feel, 2008

Rhinestones, acrylic and
enamel on wood panel,
96x120 in.

Three Graces Les Trois

Femmes Noires, 2011
Rhinestones, acrylic and
enamel on wood panel,
108x144 in.

RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 98

RVCA .COM / 99
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 100
Interior: Striped Foyer, 2011
Color photograph and paper
collage, 11x8 1/2 in.
(opposite)
Interior: Two Chairs and a
Fireplace, 2012
Rhinestones, acrylic and
enamel on wood panel,
96x72 in.
- for me, I enjoy the tangible thing, so I really need
to visually construct the space so I can start thinking
about how I want to create the painting. It goes as
far as where I do build up the installation, I throw
wall paneling up, wallpaper, the cots are arranged,
the linoleum, the carpet and all that. It’s creating a
real environment, so when I photograph the models,
it’s exciting and fun, and they’re not just sitting in
front of a fabric that’s on the wall. They really become
part of the space and engage with the space. From
those photographs I then select which ones I want
to print and cut up for my collages. I make a series
of collages. My collage work is more like a way of
drawing, of figuring out what kind of relationships I
want in the painting, as far the flat planes of color, the
wood-paneling what’s the rhythm of the painting. I
then I choose which collage I want to transform into
a painting. Sometimes it works, and then sometimes I
have to reference one of the collages that I didn’t use
because the color’s better and it changes. But it allows
me to work a lot of things out first before I go to the
painting. That’s not to say that once you start painting
that things don’t change – they do. Not everything that
works in a collage works well in the materials that I’m
working with when I’m making a painting.
SK: Your work also seems to have shifted in
its temporal focus­—your new show has fewer
references to ‘70s or ‘60s style.
MT: Well, when I was invited to do this show with
Lisa Melandri, when my gallery Susanne Vielmetter
in Los Angeles spoke with the Santa Monica Museum
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about doing a solo show, initially they wanted to do
all loaned works, borrowed works for the show, I
thought that was exciting, because of course that’s
what museums want to do, they want to see if they
can curate an idea around works that already exist.
I had a conversation with her, and you know I was
playing with a lot of ideas in my studio and I started
changing some of the material I was working with, I
began working in oil paint. I spoke to Lisa and I said,
you know I want to do some new works. I want to
shift my painting in a new direction but still have it
conceptually be interesting to me, to still have it come
from some my ideas from the ‘70s and concepts that I
have, but to bring in new ones. It was an opportunity
for me to try these things and put it out there and play
around. As an artist, I think it’s important to have my
work not be about just one thing. As I develop and my
work changes, my ideas do to. I’m interested in many
things, and I hope to bring some of those experiences
and those ideas into the work, so that those aspects are
prevalent and people can get a piece of where I’m at,
and where I think I want my work to go. The interiors
in the show were inspired by a show that I saw at
MOCA on interiors of the 50s and 60s that I really
enjoyed, as well from a book that I found years ago
called the Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating
and Home Improvement. When I found one of these
volumes, I thought ‘Hmm, I’m creating some of these
in my studio,’ and so I went on Amazon and got the
entire edition. I wanted to figure out how I could
incorporate some of these images into my own works.
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 102

I began to scan them in and get photographs printed
of them, and then started collaging them, mixing them
up with other images that I had.
SK: You’re specifically talking about the
interiors in the show, the Striped Foyer
painting and Blue Couch with Green Owl?
MT: Yeah, those come from images from the
encyclopedia and photographs of landscapes that
I’ve taken, from my own photographic resources and
my installations. I wanted to recreate an interior
environment that was removing the figure. Artificial
spaces that appear to be real environments, but
they’re not. None of those spaces exist—they’re all
fabrications of spaces that I would imagine, or spaces
that I would create if I could with the actual materials.
It was easier to do it with the collage and then make
paintings of them. And I wanted to do something
without the figure—it’s as simple as that.
SK: You also went in the other direction,
with close-ups of the figure in your updating
of Courbet’s L’origine du monde. Was that a
counter-balance?
MK: Absolutely. It’s a way to have all these aspects
of my work in the show. It’s also just about having
fun with painting. Sometimes I can get bogged down
with certain things and images, so for me, I just want
to have fun with the painting and creating the image.
I think working abstractly without a figure, it’s just
easier sometimes, you know, figure painting and
portrait painting you get so attached to that person
that it doesn’t allow you to really think about
a painting.
And I started looking at a lot of other bodies of work
that I never really truly considered before—I became
really interested in Stuart Davis and how these flat
planes of color, how he created these flat planes and
geometric shapes of color to create space. I found
those very interesting and wanted to use some of those
elements in my own work. And that’s why every once
in a while you’ll see these big sheets or shapes of flat
color. He creates a different type of collage of shapes
that I find very interesting. There’s a rhythm that I’m
interested in. It reminds me of Jacob Lawrence. So
those are some new things that I’m playing with in my
own work. I’m interested in that way of painting right
now. I think I’m interested in genres and formalities of
painting more than the concept behind it.
SK: In general, your work seems very joyful
and positive.
MT: It does? That’s nice.
SK: I wonder if you really think of it that way,
as opposed to this dark heavy thing where
you’re working out demons…
MT: Yeah, the world’s already full of that. You
know, I’m interested in beautiful images and things
that make people feel good. I actually like that you
think that my images are positive. If was to start
working with dark and heavy ideas or images, I
would probably get depressed. I think some people
can work with those things, but I can’t. It’s not how
I live my life and I think my work has all aspects of
who I am as a person. Artwork and creativity are an
extension of the person. It’s up to us to make works
that make the viewer see the world in our way. That
could be political, or controversial­­—whatever aspects
that person is interested in, it’s up to them to be as
authentic as they can with their creative work.
SK: Courbet’s L’origine has a long history
controversy and censorship—I was reading
the other day about how it is currently banned
on Facebook.
MT: You can’t post mine there either. You can’t even
print them in newspapers or use them for press.
SK: You’ve encountered problems with
that already?
MT: Yeah. It’s really funny. I think when as a society
we allow women to have control over our own
reproductive rights, that’s when we are going to
allow a female nude to exist in the world the way it
should be. We still have a long way to go when we
have our government determining what a woman
can and cannot do to her own body. We still have
problems. The female nude in that sense, it’s like
c’mon now, where are we? Where are we living? It’s
RVCA .COM / 103
Hair Portrait #7, 2012
Rhinestones and acrylic on wood
panel, 48x40 in.
(opposite, clockwise from top left)
Portrait of Marie Sitting in Black
and White, 2012
Photogravure 21x16 3⁄4 in.
From an Edition of 20 and 8 Art-
ist’s Proofs
Put Something Down On It, 2009,
C-­Print, 60x48 in. From an Edition
of 5 and 2 Artist’s Proofs
Hot Wild Unrestricted, 2009
C-­Print, 24x30 in. From an Edition
of 5 and 2 Artist’s Proofs
so much deeper than an edict of female genitalia.
That image will always be very powerful, it will always
be controversial because of the problems we have in
the world. It’s like, there’s other issues that require
our attention much more than a created, secondary
image that’s of an expression in an artistic form that’s
about the illusion and fantasy that’s trapped into the
provocative notions of what we’re dealing with. There
are other ways that we could deal with this issue
than banning certain expressions of creativity. Those
things, these images are harmless. The restrictions
they put on women’s reproductive rights are harmful.
I have problems with them not letting the image up on
Facebook. They think people aren’t able to deal with
certain images. There’s such a waste about female
sexuality. You know, I’m glad to know that my body
has so much power in the world that people cannot
deal with that, with looking of female sexuality.
America—we’re complacent and lazy. It just makes me
really sad somehow that we can’t use certain images
in 2013. That’s why it’s important for artists to keep
making what they’re going to make. Because there
may be some time when we may not be able to. We
may jailed or fined or stoned. So I’ll stick to my pretty
images for a little longer. I’m not ready to have a fight.
That’s why I love Tracy Emin’s work. She did a sort
of Origin of the Universe but with her neon lights. So
colorful, just a line form, saying so much with so little.
But those were banned too.
 PETER SHIRE by Aaron Rose / Portrait by Joshua White, Images Courtesy the Artist
Anyone who is familiar with the East Side of
Los Angeles has undoubtedly spent time in the
neighborhood of Echo Park. It’s now considered
one of the trendiest areas to live in in the city,
chocked full of cafes, natural markets and
clothing boutiques catering to the upwardly
mobile hipster. However, that hasn’t always
been the case. Back in the 1950s the area had
a much different name. They called it the Red
Gulch. The area got this name because at the
time (all through the 1950s and 1960s) it was
the hotbed of American Communist activity
in Los Angeles. If you’re wondering what this
has to do with artist Peter Shire, then you’re
in for a treat. In fact, this is an article that I’ve
been trying to get into this magazine for years.
I first learned about Peter, his history and his
work when I was housesitting for some friends
in Echo Park. These friends were at the time
subletting the Shire family house and it was
through my brief time living there that I learned
his story. Peter was what they used to call a Red
Diaper baby, meaning that his parents were
communists. He grew up in this house and the
place literally reeked of counter-cultural history.
It was a wonder of mid-century design, simple
and perfect in it’s construction. But by the time I
was staying there Peter has basically customized
the whole thing with his unique primary colored
sculptural elements so that it felt something like
a hybrid between a Charles Eames construction
and a the set of a Go-Go’s video. It was wild. I
became incredibly intrigued by the secret slice of
Los Angeles history that Peter had opened up for
me and it drove me to dig deeper. I soon found
out that not only was Peter Shire an artist who
grew up with communist parents, but his entire
family had influenced the cultural landscape of
Los Angeles. His brother, Billy Shire is a popular
gallerist as well as founder of the underground
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY / 104
bookstore/art gallery Wacko in Los Feliz. They
are a true artist family. Peter has considered
himself an artist since the 1960s when he was
a teenager, but it wasn’t until he discovered
ceramics that he really began to blossom.
Through access to pottery, he began to develop a
unique style of post-modernism that permeates
his work even today. Ceramics eventually led
to furniture design and it was while pursuing
furniture that he was introduced to the world-
renowned designer, Ettore Sottsass who was at
the time developing a whole new school of design
he was calling Memphis. The Memphis Group
was an Italian design and architecture group
that started around 1981. They drew inspiration
from such movements as Art Deco and Pop Art
including styles such as the 1950s Kitsch and
futuristic themes. Their designs included Post-
Modern furniture, fabrics, ceramics, glass and
metal objects. The group’s colorful, ironic pieces
were hailed as some of the most iconic examples
of Post Modernism in design and the arts. Peter
Shire was soon to become their only American
member. Now, with some serious credibility
under his belt, Peter began to really expand his
range. Back in Los Angeles, he embarked on
numerous large-scale sculptural and architectural
projects alongside continuing innovations in
ceramics, metal and furniture. He started Echo
Park Pottery in a disused industrial space,
just blocks where he grew up and continues to
maintain that studio to this day. If you happen
to find yourself in the neighborhood, please stop
by his studio. There are some wonderful things
to see, feel, taste and buy there. Unique stories in
Southern California are a dime a dozen, but very
few are as loaded with innovation, politics and
artistic diversity as the creative life of Peter Shire.
He is a true one of a kind and we could not be
more excited about this interview.
 Aaron Rose: I’m really interested in your childhood and growing up in
Echo Park, living with parents who built this amazing house and were
members of the communist party. Also how that environment informs
your work as an artist.
Peter Shire: It informs it all the way! I’ve actually been trying to come to grips with
that more and more. But it’s not like the old saying about you how become your
parents. It’s the part where I realize that everybody comes from somewhere. In
my case it’s a very intense and overloaded somewhere. The humanistic, idealistic
political system stuff because my parents were American communists. You know,
if you were living in the late 1960s and had a beard you were an immediate target.
Now it’s ok. That rebellious imagery has been co-opted by the working class. The
computer has also changed everything. Political manipulation can be done much
differently than the 1950s and 1960s and they don’t need the target of the red scare.
“They” of course, meaning presumably the oligarchy or whatever. The upshot of all
this is that political action has taken on such a radically different aspect because the
political system and political idealism has changed so much since then. You know
what we were called as kids...the kids of parents who were communists? Red Diaper
Babies! There was also this predominant idea that you could be born a Catholic, but
you could not be born a communist.
AR: How aware of the Red Scare were you as a kid growing up?
PS: We were very aware of it! They called Echo Park the Red Gulch. Some people
also called it Red Hill, but I’ve always known it as Red Gulch. I asked one of my
Dad’s friends who lived in the area with us about this and he said, “Sometimes when
we were kidding we called it Red Gulch, but really we all called it Happy Valley!”
AR: Do you know why so many politically minded people gravitated to
the area around Echo Park during that time?
PS: First of all there were political people all over Los Angeles. Why this particular
area got the emblematic locus I don’t really know. My dad came from New York
and when he moved to Los Angeles he first lived in Chavez Ravine, which is a few
valleys over from Echo Park. The thing is that like in any era, the high-end people,
the people who have really got it...whether it’s in design or art or politics, become the
signifier. It’s like art deco. Go out and try to find some art deco. There’s not much if
you really think about it. I remember the first time I went to the Milan furniture fair
and I was expecting to be inundated by good design and it was just acres and acres of
the worst crap. Things like brass beds and stuff. Most of the really great companies
weren’t even there! So when you talk about how many communists there were in Los
Angeles it’s the same. This was the bizarre part for me growing up. They all came to
my parents’ house. They were my parents’ friends. It was a community. But maybe
in my age group it was like only four or five families. It’s conceivable that there were
twenty families total across Los Angeles.
AR: How old were you during the height of the Red Scare?
PS: Well it’s been with me for my whole life! There was always an awareness in my
family that we didn’t talk about it to other people. My parents used to call it “The
Club”. My dad was in the carpenter’s club and my mom was in the neighborhood
club. They would have a meeting once a week where everyone was assigned topics.
Basically they reviewed the news of the world. Part of the Marxist jargon had
to do with having a “world view.” It was the idea that one didn’t see oneself as a
microcosm, but in relation to the world. They would all read and discuss articles
from the newspaper. But guys in suits did come to our door and that whole business.
They were nuts. It was so stupid. What’s funny is that the FBI guys who were
functionary in it didn’t even have any idea who they were working for! It’s just like
now. Why would anybody vote for a republican? I mean, what part of this are you
not getting bud? You know what I mean? You know it’s funny, speaking of that, there
was all this media attention at the time about the Hollywood Ten, but my dad used
to always say, “Well what about the other 10,000?” What about everyone else who
has had their lives taken apart?
AR: Were your parents artists?
PS: My dad was trained as an artist. He graduated for graphic design and
illustration in 1932. I remember as a kid watching the hearings on Un-American
Activities on TV and the whole time he was drawing portraits of all those guys. I also
remember going to rallies in these big auditoriums when I was a kid. My mom also
had an extreme interest in the arts. My dad did hundreds of paintings and cartoons
and brochures, but there became a time for him when that wasn’t backed up by an
income. I remember one year he turned our whole living room into a studio and
did these 20-foot murals. But he eventually became a carpenter when he had a
family. It’s funny because as artists we really do work for the wealthy. I do for sure.
My grandfather was a political exile from Russia. He fled and ended up working
as a cabinet-maker for the rest of his life. My dad ended up becoming a contractor
and working for very wealthy people. There’s that thing about us all becoming
our parents. I’ve noticed that my way of negotiating and dealing with people is
essentially the same as his. So being a commie when I was a kid, all those things still
come through in my life today.
AR: I’m sure you’ve seen the neighborhood change so much...
PS: Well sure I’ve seen it change! There’s this great cartoon by Sir David Lowe
in one of my dad’s old books. He’s got this one where it’s the Japanese as the
(above) war tiger eating a Chinese peasant, and the peasant is saying, “Ok, but only up
Cabbibi-Erke, 1984, Mixed media. to here” meaning to his chest. Well that’s the same with Echo Park. “Only up to
Installed in Elysian Park, Los Angeles.
here.” People always come into the neighborhood for a certain reason, but then
Photograph by Gerry Lapple for Arts & Architecture magazine
they completely pave it over. It will always maintain some semblance of being this
(clockwise, from opposite top left) bypass community, you know funky houses and lots of trees, but if you look at the
The Shire family, 1951 community organizations that exist here in Echo Park today, they’re all real estate-
Photograph by Doyd Olmsted oriented, not socially-oriented.
Interiors of the Mid-Century home in Echo Park built by Peter’s
AR: One last thing about your childhood. I’d like to talk for a second
father, Hank Shire. about the house you grew up in. Your father built it right?
PS: Yes. My father built it. The house was designed by an architect, Joseph Van Der
Peter Shire with Bone Aire chair, Seattle, 1983 Carr. He was also communist. That’s why my parents used him. He wasn’t really a
Photograph by Kevin Latona
political guy, but he did have to testify to the Un-American Activities Committee but

RVCA .COM / 107

he refused to tell anything. When my folks died we inherited the
house and it now belongs to my brother and I. I’m actually living
in it now. It’s a straight on modernist home. It is literally a mid-
century modern home, redwood post and beam. It was finished
in 1950.
AR: I really like the way that, since you’ve taken it
over, you’ve added newer elements. Things such as
postmodern artworks and sculptures that really don’t
fit with the original architects design.
PS: Some of the changes are as you say “add-ons” so yes, we’ve
pounded it with a bit of a postmodern take back. This is a big
deal. It brings up some interesting philosophical questions
about our moment. We’re a society that wants to be entertained
and that for the most part has been removed a step from basic
survival. So I’m very interested in how this informs our lives and
how does political idealism meet a cultural one. The works I’ve
installed in the house are informed by that. The complicated
thing is that Joe Van der Karr probably only designed eight or
ten houses and I don’t think he cared about the career part. He
was a very modest guy, which was an anomaly for an architect.
He would only design for people who were of an idealistic
political bent.
AR: When did you first realize that you had some sort
of artistic talent?
PS: Well, I guess I had some sort of idea of it from the time I
was about five! But then everybody is an artist when they’re five.
This is something that I’ve thought about before, because as you
get older you review things. There comes a time in elementary
school when kids kind of divide up into categories. Some kids
are math kids and one kid is a dinosaur kid and then there were
a half a dozen of us that were art guys. So this went on and
eventually we were all sent to Chouinard (an important West
Coast art school that operated from 1921 to 1972. It eventually
became Cal Arts-ed). I would go on Saturdays both in junior
high and in high school. I was good in all of those art things, but
not in the other academic subjects. I had become very interested
in ceramics. There was a moment where I really started to take
it very seriously. At that point I knew I had to be something. I
had to make a move. I knew it wasn’t going to be in math and
I knew it was not going to be in English. Also, being an artist
seemed like the most interesting and the most romantic and
the most fantastic career I could choose. There’s a great notion
of the diagonal capability of art and artists. I pursued it but my
teacher and my mom decided that I should go to City College
first for academics. They didn’t think I was ready for a full on
art school. It was probably a good thing for me. It taught me
discipline. What’s funny is that at City College I got kicked out of
all of my art classes.
AR: Really? Why was that?
PS: Well, I can only surmise that the woman that taught me art
there was a piece of work. She was a mess in the way that only
women can be a mess when they’re really a mess. She probably
had some kind of inkling that I was good and she was reacting
to that. When I asked her why I was failing she wouldn’t tell me.
I was in tears. I got kicked out, so I ended up applying to go to
Choinard full time in 1968. That was really formative because
it really set my cadence so I could survive. When I was taking
about being an artist and becoming an artist, it was something
I dared not articulate or even make plans for. I just had to go
right for it.
AR: When you left school were you looking to be a
commercial artist or to show in galleries? How did
your career manifest?
PS: That’s always the thing isn’t it? It was like that then and it’s
the same now. I was out of school for maybe a couple of months
and I got a call from a friend to share a studio. At the same time
my parents and my brother and I had just started The Soap
Plant. The original space was on Sunset Junction. My brother
eventually bought it from my parents and took it over and
moved to Melrose.
AR: What year was that?
PS: Oh, that was in 1971. The Soap Plant actually just had their
40-year anniversary. So we were merchandising the store.
There were all these family connections. My grandfather was a
cabinetmaker and my father was a carpenter and I do custom
furniture too so things just stacked up. Also around that time
I got a job at Franciscan Pottery. Franciscan was a pottery
manufacturing company in Los Feliz. They were a very large
ceramics company. It made sense for me, it being ceramic
related and my goal was to work there for a year and then to
get my own studio. Working there did a very operative thing
for me. After that I decided that I would never go work for
anyone again.
AR: Which is really what you have to do with own your
craft. You have to find that focus.
PS: Well for my first year in the studio I really didn’t know what
to do. Within the ceramic milieu there was a different approach
Selected Ceramic Works, 1978-1986
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than in the art world. There weren’t galleries that would come
and look at your things. I did all the juried shows with a bunch
of guys that I’d always see. But that got old. It became upsetting
when I noticed that if I tried to second guess the public I did
well but when I did what I liked I didn’t. There was a guy named
Bernard Zimmerman and he sent me to see this woman who
had a gallery. She loved my work and then I did my first show.
That was 1975.
AR: How were you first introduced to the
Memphis group?
PS: I read about them in a magazine! There was a little piece in
something on a couple of Memphis teapots. Ettore Sottsass was
very in tune. He had actually done a little magazine when he was
at Stanford that I saw. His wife was a translator there and she
had translated all the beat poets. Eventually they found about
what I was doing and came looking for me. When I looked at
those guys the first time I was like, “Those are the shoes that I’m
always looking for!”
AR: So you were already doing work that was fitting
into a Memphis aesthetic?
PS: It was all there. At least to me, I always incorporate all the
things I love! I love merchandise and I love merchandising and
I love craft. I don’t mean the craft aesthetic. I mean the craft
action. I love sculpture and I love drawing and so forth...and, of
course, I really love design! The way I define design is that it’s
the act of being a maker in the abstract. So somehow I can do
that. Of course when I got to Italy and met the entire Memphis
crowd there I was in Sottsass’ office. He had this storage closet
that was behind these accordion doors and I’d go in there and
see all this stuff. I’d say to myself, “I remember that!!” It was
like as if this guy imagined me. I had been looking at his stuff in
magazines for years. It was the stuff that inspired me.
AR: Were you living in Italy at the time?
PS: No, I was just going there a lot. My wife always teases me
because every time we would dream up a project to do over
there they would never let us live there. But I did travel to Italy
quite a bit. Who knows maybe it’s better that I never lived there.
AR: I find it very interesting that you were able to take
the Memphis aesthetic, which really is a European
invention, yet put a very unique Southern California
spin on it.
PS: Yes. Of course! Basically my deal is that I’m incorrigible.
That’s my deal. That’s what its all about. I always want to be a
little bit bad. Let’s go steal something you know? The design
guys before the Memphis crowd were all kind of like Chinese
tea. They’ve must be steeped, and warmed and always in good
taste and sepias and olive greens and siennas and then here
comes us Memphis guys! We were all talking to each other. As
creative people, we don’t do things all alone. We look for our
people. You know we have to talk to each other right? We were
a bunch of talented headstrong guys so you’ll find that a lot of it
was non-verbal. We were just watching each other. There was
also a lot of that protracted Italian communist pseudo-Bauhaus
dialogue about how we were doing it for the people. I’d always
be like, “Come on Man! We’re making custom furniture!” They
thought they were all political acts. You know for me, storming
the barricades is an example of a political act. Really putting
your ass on the line. How do you explain making design as a
political act? It’s sort of silly. But I suppose there is a political
aspect to everything. My parents believed that design could help
improve people’s lives and that’s why they built that house 50 or
60 years ago.
AR: That’s very true.
PS: Do you know the story about the mandate of heaven? Well
it says that no matter what happens or what people believe,
society will continue to move on in their own directions. The
idea of design, architectural control, etc. moved over a little bit
with Memphis into the human arena and said, “Yes these things
can be organized but they’re not going to stay that way.” Things
aren’t organized in that way by nature. They’re organized, but
not in that way.
AR: Would you consider that an overriding philosophy
behind Memphis? This breaking apart of prescribed
aesthetic structure?
PS: That’s a question that I haven’t really thought about. I
mean Memphis was definitely out of control...or in control
depending on how you’re looking at it. It’s out of bounds
for sure. There was a break in aesthetic at that point and for
that reason alone it became very important in the latter half
of 20th Century design. My standard take was that we were
examining computer technology before computers really took
hold. We were interested in the computer’s ability to really
dummy everything up all at once. That’s where we came in as
Californians. That how we solve things out here. One thing they
used to say about T.S. Elliot and James Joyce was that they
weren’t concerned with doing something completely different.
They were concerned with doing something completely of
their time. I suppose our concerns were similar. We
were moving outside of the production model. Our
world was moving from being a making society to an
information society. We were moving from being a
manufacturing society to becoming a manipulating
and managing society. You could even say that we’ve
become a bit parasitic as a society.
AR: When you are creating your work,
would you say that it is still in reaction to
something?
PS: Always! I would say especially in reaction
to things that offend me. That was a big part of
Memphis. It was created with all these offensive
materials. You know Formica and strange patterns.
During that period we were all living with an
exhilaration of absurdity. We just loved that off-
balancedness. That’s still a question for me now. Is
that what I still ascribe to? I mean, I come from the
Bauhaus school. It was very Germanic. Those guys
were hardcore. Everything had to be functional. I
look at Bauhaus architecture sometimes and think,
“This thing is amazing but where are the family
photos?” Where is the life in this? Julius Schulmann’s
photos are so perfect. You know the guy is changing
the record and the girl is in a taffeta dress. he’s not
even close to bedding her! He’s not even allowed to
touch her. Where is the life in that?
AR: I think about that myself. This picture
perfect world that ‘50s mid-century
modernism promised, but the reality was
that everyone was really damaged behind
those pristine exteriors. You know, where’s
the mess? Where is the laundry on the floor?
Where’s the shot of mom passed out drunk on
the couch. That same tradition still holds in
architectural photography today...
PS: Could that look good? I’m not sure. Here’s the
deal. Schulman did two things. He was consciously
apolitical and he hurt for it. He was embarrassed by
it. He would never admit it though because he had a
huge ego, but the thing that he came back with was
that he put people in his shots. Nobody had done
that before.
AR: Where did the idea of making teapots
come from?
PS: Well, that all comes from my roots in ceramics.
The teapot is the standard in ceramics. It’s the one. It
is by far the most complicated thing to get right in all
respects. Balance, functionality, and the look of the
whole piece. The tea cups too. Looking at it over the
years I’ve discovered that the teapot is also the social
moderator in a situation. It’s the center of the party.
Everybody pours from the teapot. The cup is the
individual. It’s the introspective side or the ego. I’ve
made arguably about 40,000 teacups at least. So the
upshot of it is that my cups were pretty well taken.
The teacups were kind of a darling for me.
AR: Lets talk about your sculptural work. Can
you describe your process a bit? How does it
start? What is the process for creating one of
your sculptures?
PS: Everything is always coming out of philosophy.
Sometimes it might be a straight up visual thought,
but all vision is informed by philosophy anyway.
(clockwise from top)
Bel Air Chair, 1982, Wood and upholstery
Hollywood Table, 1983, Wood, enamel and laminate
Brazil Table (for Memphis), 1981, Wood and enamel
Big Sur Couch (for Memphis), 1985, Wood, enamel and
wool panta
(opposite, clockwise from top)
Bette Blanc & Bette Noir, 2007, Steel, enamel and wood
Nuovo Belle Aire Chair, 2007, Steel, aluminum,
polychrome
March of Time (4 Chairs), 1991, Steel, enamel, screws
Pizz-O-Lover, 2007, Steel, enamel, and wood
Oh My Cats, 2007, Steel and enamel
Right Weld #1, 2007, Steel, enamel, rope, mixed media.
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(clockwise from top left): Cherry Tea, 1992, Enamel, wood and steel. Sumimasen, 1992, Stainless steel, bamboo and hinoki. Subarashi, 1992, Enamel and steel. Ohayo Gozaimasu,
1992, Stainless steel, bamboo and hinoki. (opposite) Encino Public Library, Encino, California, 2004.

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(clockwise from top left)
Goodrock’en Angel with Cubi Tiki Head, 2010, Enamel and steel,
West Hollywood, CA
Time to Shop/Sky Hook, 1985, mixed media, Santa Ana, California
Untitled, 1980, Steel, aluminum, pearlescent paint.
Collection of Lodz Museum, Poland
(opposite)
Studio Parking Lot, Photograph by Joshua White
That’s the thing, and it relates straight back to my education. Drawing is the center.
Everything always starts there. There are so many stories. We are Western people and
drawing is at the center of all Western art. As I understand it, Islamic and Middle Eastern art
have calligraphy at their center. So for me, everything bounces against the work on paper.
You know money, quest, desire, the ability to imagine...
AR: Is there a lot of trial and error involved for you?
PS: Well, most of the trial and error happens on the page. That’s one of the advantages.
You’re working though stuff on paper all the time and it goes all these funny ways. It’s like
dreams. You know how you have a dream and you wake up and it makes perfect sense and
you go to yourself, “How could that make perfect sense?” Then you can start to solve that
problem on the page. You know you see something in your head that is connecting, but on
paper it doesn’t even end up there. That’s an ability to visualize which luckily I seem to have.
It works out really oddly at times. I did this big piece in Japan, and they weren’t worried
about liability issues the way we are in the United States. So I proposed that we cut this big
kettle, which had been part of a large beer vat so the escalator passengers in this structure
could pass through a notch in it. I kept saying, “It’s gonna fit there!” The engineers were like,
“No it won’t!” I kept saying it would! One of the engineers spent hours trying to make it work.
Then, when they installed it, of course it worked. That’s the deal. Luckily I can do that a lot
of the time. I can draw things and they end up being pretty much that way. It’s funny though
because all of these things are stuff that all those other guys that I went to school with were
really good at but I was terrible at, yet I’m the only one who is still doing it.
AR: Oh, but that’s so classic...
PS: Like with drafting. These guys in school would draft these amazing cars. I was always
like, “I wanna draw a car!” But mine were always smudged and terrible. But now I can do
it. Still though, I do run into problems where things work in the sketch, but not in physical
space. There’s always some rod that I have to get over to a corner that doesn’t quite fit. So
it really does go both ways. I’m usually refining things on site. The tricky thing is that after
I’ve made all these changes on site, how do I get the original feeling of it to remain? One of
the great things about having my shop here is that I can play with things in real space. Of
course, the interesting thing to me is that people always want my finished objects above the
drawings. I think the drawings are just as interesting. People want the discipline and the
sweat that goes into the object itself, and I suppose there is something to that, but to me most
of that is pretty boring. It’s fun, it’s nice, it takes your time up, but the process is just doing it.
It’s just a process. Completing is important, and it’s also a big deal but it’s just a function. It’s
not a flight moment.
AR: If there was an over-arching emotional response that you would hope
people get from your work what would it be?
PS: Let’s love him!! Let’s go rub him.
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BACK MATTER
CONTRIBUTOR BIOS
Francesca Gavin is a writer, editor and curator based in London. She is the Visual Arts Editor of Dazed & Confused, the art editor of Twin and
a Contributing Editor at AnOther and Sleek Magazine. Her books ‘100 New Artists’, ‘Creative Space’, ‘Hell Bound: New Gothic Art’ and ‘Street
Renegades’ are all published by Laurence King. She has written for publications including Vogue, Wallpaper*, It’s Nice That, Nylon, Bon, icon,
Oyster, Blueprint, Art Review and Sunday Times Style and is the curator of the Soho House group. www.roughversion.blogspot.com

Lisa Rovner is a French American filmmaker, writer and artist whose interest in cultural studies has led her to experience media as an art ma-
terial, and mass media as a curatorial space. The medium is her medium. Through her expansive work in film, photography, performance and
the written word, Rovner engages with historical precedents and predecessors all the while confronting History with her story. Her company,
Message is the Medium, specializes in creative consulting and branded films. www.messageisthemedium.com

Kate Williams writes about art, music, fashion and pop culture for magazines and websites. She grew up in Kansas, not far from the Garden
of Eden, but she is pretty sure that her own personal utopia lies someplace not far from the beach. Or maybe the desert...but there are definitely
cacti. More of her work can be found at www.lightasafeatherstiffasaboard.co.

King Tuff is a musician and visual artist from Brattleboro, Vermont, now living in Los Angeles. He grew up reading dirty comic books and
playing baseball, spent the middle part of his life writing rock & roll songs, partying and texting, and eventually settled down as an old man,
oil painting in his cabin in the woods, bald with long hair on the sides, wearing glasses, drinking wine, watering his plants, stacking his books,
dancing by himself, and looking out of his many windows.

Chris Lux is artist, a painter, and a sculptor who lives and works in Los Angeles. He is represented by Jancar Jones Gallery and has recently
published a book 12 Saints through Peradam Press in New York City. He interviewed Clare Rojas for this issue.

Alexis Georgopoulos is a composer and artist based in New York City. As ARP, he makes liminal, minimal music, often with analog synthe-
sizers and, increasingly, with classical stringed instruments. His album The Soft Wave (Smalltown Supersound) was named a New York Times
Notable Album of 2010. He is currently at work on two albums of new material which be released by Smalltown Supersound and RVNG INTL,
respectively, in 2013. 

Liz Armstrong’s primary quest is perfecting the art of writing motivational notes of self-fulfilling prophecy, though she also devotes much
of her time to exploring subtle methods of perception and communication. She finds living in Los Angeles a huge enabler of fascination with
all things glittery and fantastic. A professional writer, she covers topics of invented immersive reality—currently for this publication, Vice, The
Fader, and Rookie. When not jacked up on magical, heady concepts in front of a computer screen, she’s playing saxophone, DJing at KCHUNG,
encouraging friends to just fucking go for it already, or is off on some adventure generally involving mountains, partial nudity, ridiculous mis-
hap, and spreading love.

Pat Graham has been photographing artists, designers and musicians for over a decade. His photographs have been featured in artwork for
iconic record covers such as Bikini Kill’s eponymous first LP, Modest Mouse’s Lonesome Crowded West, and many more. He has been included
in numerous books and articles and has exhibited widely across the world. He is a partner in 96 Gillespie, a non-profit art gallery in London. His
photographs have been featured in Rolling Stone, Spin, Artforum, Dazed & Confused, Village Voice, the Guardian and many others. His first
book of photographs, Silent Pictures, was published by Chronicle Books in 2011. He shot our cover boy James Bridle for this issue.

Sean Kennerly is a writer/muscian who lives in Brooklyn, where he fronts the inscrutable Ice Balloons in a fly mask. His articles have ap-
peared in the SF Bay Guardian, Juxtapose and Rolling Stone. His mother once told him that 90% of pain is self-pity, but she was there for him
when he broke his arm. He is currently working on a novel about hyenas.

Cali Thornhill-DeWitt co-wrote our article on LA Punk Gangs and runs the record label, Teenage Teardrops, releasing all manner of books,
prints, vinyl records by emerging artists who are true to the spirit and philosophy of underground culture. He is also a talented photographer,
writer, DJ, and partner in the multi-media publishing company, Witchhat. He lives in Los Angeles with his bride Jenna, and their rescued
poodle, Caramel Bobby.

ANPQuarterly Contributing Photographers

Volume 2/Number 7 Pat Graham, Zen Sekizawa, Joshua White, Damon Way, Ronna Pearl, Jennifer Finch, Fabiola Alondra,
Cali Thornhill-Dewitt, Melodie McDaniel, Ruth Swanson, Laura Flippen, Angela Boatright, Deanna
Publisher Templeton, Cheryl Dunn
PM Tenore
Special thank you to:
Editor-in-Chief John Albert, Tony Decou, Elisabeth Gaffaney, Molly Small, Tim Plumley, Lucy Rose, Molly Toberer,
Aaron Rose Bryan Ray Turcotte, Shaun McCracken, Vera Hild, Shannon Richardson, Alexandra Wetzel, Prism
Gallery, Rose Gallery, Gallery Paule Anglim and Maureen Paley Gallery, London
Art Director
Casey Holland ANPQuarterly is published four times a year by RVCA Corp © 2013 RVCA (All rights reserved). Printed
February, 2013, on Crumple Street in Gardena, California. Reproduction in whole or in part is strictly
Contributing Writers prohibited by law. Opinions expressed in articles are those of the authors. All rights reserved on entire
Liz Armstrong contents unless otherwise noted. Artists, photographers and writers retain copyright to their work.
Kate Williams Every effort has been made to reach copyright holders or their representatives. We will be pleased to
Chris Lux correct any mistakes or omissions in our next issue.
Kyle Thomas
Francesca Gavin ANPQuarterly™ is a Registered Trademark
Clark Rayburn
Sean Kennerly 960 W. 16th Street
Lisa Rovner Costa Mesa, CA 92627
Nora Atapol
PH: (949)548-6223
Alexis Georgopolis
info@rvca.com
Cali Thornhill-Dewitt
Brian Roettinger

This issue is dedicated to Ed Templeton & Brendan Fowler. (front cover)

James Bridle, 2012
Photograph by Pat Graham

(back cover)
Clare Rojas, Untitled, 2012
Oil on linen, 60x48 in, image courtesy
Prism Gallery, Los Angeles
doverstreetmarket.com
london tokyo beijing
artist oscar murillo