Month: December 2015

SOULS OF MISCHIEF

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

IT’S BEEN OVER 2 DECADES SINCE ’93 AND SOULS OF MISCHIEF IS STILL CHILLIN’.

If you were to step inside a serious hip-hop head’s exclusive record vault, you’d likely find Souls of Mischief’s 93 ’til Infinity on precious wax, possibly framed. The Oakland-based group’s debut studio album was and still is a flawless work of audible art that never ceases to appear on best-of lists, making it an integral part of the groundbreaking genre’s history. And while the pioneering foursome and lifelong friends have heavily influenced both the independent and mainstream hip-hop arenas for more than two decades, they’ve miraculously managed to dodge the manipulation of commercialization, allowing them to live in this infinite sweet spot that merges street accreditation with global appreciation.

Formed in the Bay Area in 1991, Souls of Mischief features four members of the equally influential hip-hop crew, Hieroglyphics: Tajai, A-Plus, Phesto and Opio. Prior to rhyming with their core collective, the killer quartet met when they were just pint-sized talents. East Oakland native Tajai Massey (Tajai) and Colorado expat Adam Carter (A-Plus) were already spitting in grade school at the ripe age of 8. Tajai recruited his best friend Damani Thompson (Phesto) in middle school and A-Plus brought Opio Lindsey (Opio) into the budding act in high school.

Just two years after hitting the scene, SoM scooped up a major label deal with Jive Records and released the aforementioned 93 ’til Infinity in 1993. Equipped with unforgettable tracks like “Never No More,” “That’s When Ya Lost” and the title single, “93 ’til Infinity,” the funk-infused album was an underground success, offering true beat junkies a refreshingly unique sound that was unlike anything being produced by more established hip-hop acts during that time. Rather than take the easy route of excessively gabbing about babes, blunts and bling, SoM’s perspective challenges the listener to think, offering a provocative array of memorable lyrics, both bold (“Puns and phrases I stun in phases”) and brainy (“Shins get split, men get spindled, swiveled, pivoted by my riveting centrifuge”). Their distinctive approach to the genre garnered a myriad of accolades, including a spot on The Source’s 100 Best Rap Albums list.

Twenty-one years after releasing their groundbreaking chart- topper, the life-long friends now have six studio albums under their belt, including No Man’s Land (1995), Focus (1999), Trilogy: Conjlict, Climax, Resolution (2000), Montezuma’s Revenge (2009), and the recently released anniversary joint There Is Only Now (2014). Produced by eclectic hitmaker Adrian Younge (he’s worked with everyone from Ghostface Killah for “Twelve Reasons to Die” to Jay-Z for “Picasso Baby”), the live instrument-heavy production is a clever nod to the group’s ’90s roots, offering nostalgic, storytelling sounds backed by real-life experiences and guest appearances from the likes of Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest, William Hart of The Delfonics and Scarub of Living Legends. There Is Only Now proves that there’s no better time to remind the hip-hop game that Souls of Mischief paved the way.

 

A-PLUS

 

Similar to childhood friend Tajai, Adam Carter (aka A-Plus) was a brainiac in school, dabbling in both computers and comic books while enthusiastically taking on advanced classes and exploring the then-budding world of underground hip-hop. The spawn of a musical family (his 13-year-old son is starting to make beats, too), the Colorado-born, Oakland-raised talent has released three solo records: My Last Good Deed (2007), Pepper Spray (2011) and the just-dropped Molly’s Dirty Water, which A-Plus calls “an EDM- inspired hip-hop album.”

“I’ve been into EDM [electronic dance music] for a long, long time,” A-Plus explains. “I just want to see if I can do a hip-hop hybrid. So I’m just pushing my boundaries. I’m always trying to inspire myself to do different things, push my envelope further. A lot of early ’80s music was completely electronic. I’ve been to a lot of raves, done a lot of psychedelic shit. In the mid-2000s I was dating a chick that was into that stuff a lot, like all the sub-genres of electronic music. I was listening to it more and more, and I guess around 2009-2010 I was really trying to start learning.” Those Souls of Mischief kids, always learning.

On the subject of throwbacks, A-Plus recalls the days when technology and hip-hop were separate entities, allowing the genre to maintain monetary value on an organic level. “At that time, you know, before P2P and file sharing and Napster came into play and all of that, independent hip-hop for us was extremely lucrative because we kind of cut out the middleman and we still

had an audience,” he explains. “So all we had to do was make sure we had a distribution deal, and once we got that we were able to make all the money that the record companies could make off all of our audience. For example, getting a couple hundred thousand on a tour would be considered a complete failure, but selling a couple hundred thousand as an independent—as a group, not on TV and not on the radio—is so fuckin’ money.”

Instead of blowing hard-earned cash on the flash that today’s rappers tirelessly boast about, A-Plus and the rest of the Hieroglyphics made a smart splurge: “Around 2003, we took the money and invested it and bought a big-ass warehouse out in East Oakland to hold our studios,” he notes. In addition to hosting the group’s offices and shirt-printing business, the approximately 8,000-square- foot compound, known as the “Hiero Compound” or “Hiero HQ,” is also where There Is Only Now was recorded. (About the album’s name: “We were in the midst of making the album and we hadn’t come up with a name yet,” A-Plus says. “Then, Tajai said the lyric ‘There is only now’ and everybody was, like, ‘Shit, yeah.’”) While Tajai can take credit for the album’s title, it was A-Plus who made initial contact with producer Adrian Younge: “I emailed him and said, ‘Dude, you want to work with us? We want to work with you!’ And he was like, ‘Hell yeah, let’s make this shit happen.’ After that, we talked about it for, like, five or six hours. I talked to the rest of the crew […] and a couple of weeks after that we were in the studio.”

 

OPIO

 

Two driving forces behind Souls of Mischief’s success are education and friendship. Similar to Tajai and A-Plus, the multi-talented Opio Lindsey thanks his upbringing for instilling his skills. “I think it was our parents, you know?” he adds. (His father was an attorney who represented the likes of Richard Pryor and Ice Cube.) “Education was always the most important thing in my home—and the same in everybody else’s home. It wasn’t, like, a scenario where you can just be lazy and shit. We had a thirst for knowledge that wasn’t just about being in class—it was just kind of this natural connection we had with each other.”

Opio—who has released a handful of solo works, including Triangulation Station (2005), Vulture’s Wisdom, Volume 1 (2008) and Red X Tapes with Equipto (2011), and recently worked with SoCal underground hip-hop producer Free the Robots—explains that the group’s thirst for knowledge is also why they naturally entered the hip-hop game early on. “We are fans, fans that are lucky enough to do music,” he adds. “We have a passion for hiphop music and culture. “I was writing graffiti, breakdancing and DJing; we all tried everything. That passion and love for the music kind of connected us during a time when it wasn’t really cool to be a rapper. You know, people would be like ‘You a rapper?’ and think it’s funny and shit. Nobody was a rapper; in America there were probably 1,000 rappers at the time. So that kind of made us have a strong bond. [People would try to make] hip-hop be this negative force or some shit like that, like it encourages you to do criminal acts and act thug or whatever, but that’s not it.” He also adds that money was never a motivating factor: “It wasn’t something that we put all this focus on. We were friends first and then hip-hop was just part of our lives and what we did, so it felt natural to do it together—we weren’t trying to get rich off of it.”

While money has never been a driving force for Opio and his Souls of Mischief counterparts, maintaining street cred is a constant stimulus. “We just wanted to put out a record to have the respect of all these emcees that we grew up on and loved,” he explains. “That was more of our focus—to get respect from the hip-hop community. For us, we always try to do something that nobody is doing in hip-hop. We don’t say, ‘Oh, what’s popular in rap music right now so let’s make sure we do that. You know what I mean? That’s always been our biggest strive; we love to be creative but we want to separate ourselves from everybody.”

SoM’s interest in innovation dates all the way back to the ’90s, when the group had its first taste of technology. “I mean, we were basically one of the first websites to do any type of commerce,” Opio reveals. “[Fans] would get in touch with us through our website and then place an order, and then we would mail out CDs and T-shirts and whatever. I think it was around ’96 maybe. I mean, there was nobody really selling anything [online during that time]; we had a website before Chrysler!”

 

PHESTO

 

“I grew up in a family of musicians, but I got into music because of my dad and my uncles,” reveals Damani Thompson (aka Phesto or Phesto Dee), rounding out the Souls of Mischief quartet. “My dad wasn’t a real musician—he didn’t play any instruments—but he used to collect a lot of music, so he had records. “That’s kind of how hip-hop started as well, by going through our parents’ records. That was my entry into this world of looking at record covers like Parliament and James Brown, all these people that you hear on the radio. You might have heard them on the radio as a hit but you didn’t know they had this extensive catalog of music. When you were young, you would just hear a hit song but you didn’t know people had all this music and that was where I learned that from, from [my family]. There is another spectrum of music out there that doesn’t necessarily get played in a pop format or whatever. This was before I even knew about hip-hop. I mean, hip-hop existed, but I wasn’t really into it until I started messing with other forms of music first and then I got into hip-hop.”

Once Phesto got into the genre, the genius lyricist went at it full force. Solo projects include Granite Pedigree (2011), Background Check (2012) and the recent Infrared Rum (2014). As far as his work with Souls of Mischief and Hieroglyphics, the new dad (he welcomed a son last year) reveals that he entered the crew when it was just about fully formed. “So, I was watching what they were doing, and [asking myself] ‘How could I fit in without going against the grain?’” he explains. “I mean, how I can bring something new to the group without destroying the dynamic and cohesiveness that already exists? I came from a visual artist mentality because of graffiti. When I first came into the group, I was concerned about the visual stuff because I felt that we had the audio stuff covered. We got dope lyrics, we got dope beats, but maybe visually I can bring something to the table. So that’s why I did the Souls of Mischief logo.”

Phesto’s contribution to the group involves much more than SoM’s memorable emblem. “I feel like my best strength right now is my knowledge of music theory, and hip-hop is really about defying all theories,” he adds. “One thing I learned about music is that it’s one thing to break the rules, but another thing to know the rules in order to break them. So I feel that I’m a person who knows the rules, and that’s why it’s a little different when I break them. When we do need a rule or need something radical from a musical standpoint, I can provide that because I’m kind of trained in a traditional way.”

Speaking of strengths, Phesto adds that the group’s staying power can also be attributed to their support of one another. “I think now we are at the point where we know certain people have certain strengths, and if you are just not as strong in that area, you pick up the slack more in your area. We’ve been friends since kindergarten. I mean, you can’t say that about a lot of people— people who are still good friends and business partners. So it’s not that we have our egos in check, it’s like we knew each other before we even had egos.”

 

TAJAI

 

“I went to Stanford for undergrad and got my master’s at Berkeley in architecture,” explains Tajai Massey (known simply as Tajai), one-fourth of Souls of Mischief and one-eighth of Hieroglyphics. Born in Stanford and raised in Oakland, the 39-year-old father of two (“I got a 13-year-old and a 6-year-old”) is the impressive offshoot of a well-educated household (his mom was a professor and dad was “like a sysop or something like that”), setting the tone for SoM’s uniquely intellectual point-of-view.

“I got into computers early on, so I think we were fortunate to have parents that were getting an education, because we were part of the computer and literate community,” he notes. “But it wasn’t like it was an anomaly; you know where we lived.” Indeed, the Bay Area in the ’80s was already a hotbed for tech culture. Because of this, Tajai and fellow group member A-Plus got deep into computer programming at an early age, experimenting with a range of now-classic models, including the Commodore 32, Commodore 64, Apple IIe and Apple IIc. “Tajai was the first person I knew who had the first Mac—the very first Mac!” A-Plus adds.

Just like his advanced computer literacy and burgeoning architecture career (“I just did a cupcake shop for [Hieroglyphics member] Casual’s sister, I did a kitchen for my buddy and I’m working on a container-based mall”), Tajai’s determination to stay ahead of the game is why There Is Only Now is a true envelope-pusher. “We put a lot of effort into this,” he says. “We’re trying to change music a few times, you know what I’m saying?” One of the record’s prime examples of progression is the fact that it’s a time piece set in 1994, right after the release of 93 ’til Infinity. Prepare to be intrigued by the embedded, real-life story of how the guys were attacked after a show that year. “A guy runs up and pulls his ski mask down and was, like, ‘I ain’t playing with you, get on the ground,’” Tajai says. “But while he’s talking about how he’s going to kill us all, he puts the gun up to [Hieroglyphics producer] Domino’s face, and I’m like, ‘oh shit, Domino’s dead.’ Then the guy chases us around the corner and starts shooting at us. It was a terrible experience; we didn’t understand the gravity of that.” Domino’s life was fortunately spared, but the trauma was enough to leave the group permanently shaken.

“Although we made a record that stimulates that era—that feeling— it is still current,” Tajai explains. “So, it’s not like a throwback record. It represents Souls of Mischief in that time period for this record, like a circular rather than linear thing going on at that moment. I think it’s got a throwback feel without being, like, ‘oh, it’s a comeback record’, or we’re trying to recreate that feeling. We’re just trying to recreate the soul.” And while Tajai may appear as the leader of the pack of this retro-soul resurgence, he’s quick to expound the equality of SoM’s operation. “We just recognize and treat our roles in the group like instruments,” he explains. “Like, you know: bass, drums, keys, guitars. It’s like a jazz quartet, or a punk rock band. A guy’s not gonna get up there by himself [and be an] asshole or a bad-ass.”

 

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Every Mother Counts LONDON FILM PREMIERE

Posted on by Jessica Bowler

On Wednesday, April 22nd, a mix of creatives and influencers – everyone from Celine’s Phoebe Philo to British Vogue’s Lucinda Chambers – gathered at London’s Ham Yard Hotel for a special screening hosted by Christy Turlington Burns in partnership with Citizens of Humanity. The film, entitled “Every Mother, Every Mile,” was directed by Christy to raise awareness for her non-profit Every Mother Counts, which aims to make pregnancy and delivery safe for every mother. The short film presents marathon running as a metaphor for birth and highlights how distance creates an obstacle that inhibits many women around the world from having access to maternity care. After the film was shown, model and writer Laura Bailey moderated a Q&A with Christy where she educated and engaged the audience on the issue and how to help. It was a relaxed and fun evening that gave attention to an admirable effort that Citizens of Humanity is thrilled to support.

 

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ROBERT TJIAN

Posted on by Jessica Bowler

Preparing to interview Robert Tjian, professor of biochemistry, biophysics and structural biology at the storied University of California, Berkeley, is a daunting task. After all, the scientist has been working in the field of molecular biochemistry since the 1970s, worked under Watson and Crick (yes, the Watson and Crick), and is now the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the organization that gives away $900 million annually in grants to groundbreaking scientists. So it’s safe to assume that he discovered his love of science as a child and kept his nose to the grindstone in order to achieve his goals, right? But that’s not exactly how it happened. Asked what kind of kid he was, he laughs and answers succinctly: “Bad. My mother was convinced I was going to be a hoodlum. I didn’t pay much attention in school—I was always playing hooky and going to the beach instead. My childhood was a lot of fun for me, and a total pain for my mother.”

Tjian had a peripatetic childhood: Born the youngest of nine children in Hong Kong, he and his family moved to Argentina shortly thereafter. When he was 5, the family headed to Brazil; he finally moved to the U.S. in high school. Tjian didn’t realize he might be destined for a career in science until middle school, when he had to make up a biology course over the summer. “They just gave me a book and said, ‘Go read this, and then we’re going to give you a bunch of exams.’ And I read the book, and understood everything. I didn’t necessarily think I was going to become a scientist, but it did strike me as funny that I could read a book with no help from teachers and completely get it. So that was my first indication. But then I went off and screwed around some more.”

He arrived at U.C. Berkeley as an undergrad in 1971, convinced that math was his future. “I immediately realized that I might’ve been brilliant as a math student in high school,” he says, “but I was nowhere compared to the geniuses that were here. And so then I thought, ‘Oh man, I better find something I’m reasonably good at.’ I changed my major about three times—I went from math, to chemistry, and finally to biology.” While at Berkeley working under Watson and Crick (who, of course, discovered the double-helix structure of DNA), he “made some discoveries of a whole world—I would say almost a universe—of a special kind of molecule that can basically read DNA and decode the genetic information.” Having decided on his field of study, he got his Ph.D. at Harvard, and eventually returned to Berkeley in 1979, where he’s taught ever since. He and his team now study molecules in order to assist in the creation of new drugs that’ll change the way we treat diseases. It sounds like a nearly overwhelming task, but it’s one that suits Tjian fine. “Watson’s advice to me was, ‘Pick a problem that’s so big that you’ve gotta work your entire life to figure it out.’”

Tjian’s work obviously isn’t just high-level nerdery—there are major human-health implications for his research. “We all hear about these diseases, whether it’s cancer, or diabetes, or Alzheimer’s, or autism, and we’re all trying to figure out: How can we make our lives better? It’s not just living longer, it’s living better. But how do we get there?” he says. “All this esoteric stuff we do—like trying to understand how to read DNA, and how the DNA information then informs how a living person operates—is at the root of understanding disease. So everything we do, ultimately, helps the people who are interested in developing therapeutics for whatever disease. That’s what we’re all motivated to do.

Tjian’s personality bucks most of the stereotypes about scientists; on the phone, he’s funny, relaxed, and totally patient with even the most remedial science questions. But his laid-back demeanor belies his fierce work ethic, and an unwillingness to tolerate slackers in his laboratory or classroom. “I have a reputation for being demanding, because I feel that doing science and being paid for it is an incredible privilege,” he explains. “So my feeling is, if people are paying you a huge amount of money to be a scientist, you better not screw around. I do expect my students and people in the lab to work, well, constantly, basically. There are no ‘weekends’ or anything. We work all the time.” That said, while he’s a rigorous leader, at least he’s a friendly one. “I’m very upbeat. So my students can come in and have their experiments be a complete disaster, and I don’t get upset. I try to buck them up, because I know they just spent two weeks doing some experiment, and then it just blows up. Even though I’m a taskmaster, I also have to be the cheerleader.”

It’s easy to imagine, given the pressing environmental issues the human race is facing, that Tjian would occasionally be pessimistic about the future of our planet. But he says that couldn’t be further from the truth. “I’m just the eternal optimist. The more I learn about both the beauty and the complexity of life, the more optimistic I am. I was born in 1949, and my father died of type 2 diabetes when he was relatively young. He basically had no treatment, because of how little we knew about type 2 diabetes back then. But now we’re attacking things like Alzheimer’s. How can you not be optimistic, now that these really complicated, tough, chronic diseases are being dealt with, and the speed with which we’ve dealt with them? People are all freaked out about Ebola right now, but hey, they already have a drug out there that seems to be working. So I’m not pessimistic.”

Though most of us will never study microscopy, or decode human DNA, Tjian says even non-geniuses would understand the basic concepts that his work is founded upon. “Here’s one of the problems with scientists: We use a lot of jargon and it makes us sound smart. It takes a certain amount of education to understand the basis of what we do, but the stuff we do is not that complicated, really. We’re trying to understand how a living cell works, and we understand more and more every day,” he explains. “The most important thing to realize about us scientists is that we don’t have the answers to everything. In fact, we have very few answers. And if we would just admit that, we’d probably be better off.”
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BENJI LYSAGHT

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

If you’re looking for a live-wire frontman, or a musician who’ll do Townsend windmills while waggling his tongue at the audience, Benji Lysaght is not your guy. In fact, the Los Angeles-based guitarist—who’s made a name for himself as a gun-for-hire session and touring musician—eschews the spotlight pretty strenuously. “I have a lot of ambivalence and anxiety when it comes to performance,” he says, “I love rock and roll, and those extroverted musicians with the bravado and the swagger, they’re so inspiring. But that’s never been a part of my personality, or my emotional constitution. I’ve always gravitated towards performers with a very quiet, understated stage presence, even when there was a great intensity about what they were doing.”

Luckily, bravado’s not a requirement for success, and the 33 year-old’s tremendous musical talent has kept him very busy over the past decade and a half. Lysaght demurs when asked about his career history (“Prepare to be totally bored,” he laughs), then proceeds to list his credits, a process that takes quite a while. Straight out of college, in the early 2000s, he toured with beloved indie-pop group Ambulance Ltd., and after leaving the band, started work as a session player and occasional touring guitarist. Lysaght has since lent his skills to both the first and second solo records from the Killers’ Brandon Flowers, backed Beck at the Hollywood Bowl for a tribute to Serge Gainsbourg, toured with Father John Misty (and played on tracks for his upcoming album), did a stint backing Lauryn Hill in the mid-2000s, recently taped a VH1 performance with pop goddess Sia, worked on tracks for Crystal Skulls’ upcoming album, and played with British songwriter Michael Kiwanuka. And the list goes on. But the self-effacing Lysaght is quick to note that some of these gigs were brief, a matter of one or two days in the studio. “I’m just so self-conscious about seeming like a braggy schmuck,” he says.

Lysaght was born and raised in L.A., the son of a death penalty appellate lawyer and a civil litigator. He started taking guitar lessons at age 10, though certainly not at his parents’ behest. “I think my parents were a little, not quite apprehensive, but neither of them are musicians. They were incredibly encouraging, though.” Lysaght worked for a summer at a local guitar shop, and by 15, he was hooked on the instrument. “I’m trying to edit myself so I don’t say these things that sound like absolute platitudes, like, ‘I fell in love with it,’ but…” he laughs. He played jazz guitar in high school and moved to New York to study jazz performance at the Manhattan School of Music before transferring to Columbia. There, he focused on music and art history. But moving from jazz into the rock genre wasn’t a natural fit for him. “A guy who I knew from playing jazz gigs said, ‘Hey, I’m in this rock band Ambulance Ltd.—would you be interested in playing?’ It was a whole musical style that I was pretty unfamiliar with, because I’d done nothing but essentially listen to jazz records for the previous six or seven years.” While his ensuing musical education was a pleasure, he soon realized that life as a permanent member of a touring band wasn’t his destiny. “Those sort of interpersonal dynamics [within bands] are so difficult to negotiate,” he says, “especially for someone like myself who tends to be pretty socially awkward. I really prefer the independence of being a hired gun.”

Asked about his the artists he’d love to collaborate with, living or dead, Lysaght responds excitedly like the music geek he is. “I would’ve loved to have played with Lou Reed. Tom Waits is one of the dream gigs. Then you go to canonical figures like Miles Davis or Johnny Cash. I’d have to throw in Captain Beefheart, and Thelonius Monk would’ve been otherworldly.” He interrupts himself to add, “Oh! Ornette Coleman. And Kurt Vile. I’m gonna reread The Secret and then go put these people on my dream board,” he jokes. It’s a list as eclectic as Lysaght’s own niche, which he describes as “rock and roll, soul, country, folk, some R&B, and pop as well.” But becoming a musical chameleon can have its downsides. “I guess the pitfall is losing a sense of self and identity,” he says, “because you sort of assimilate to the aesthetic ideology of whatever music you’re playing at the time. It’s a thing that I struggle with, just keeping a sense of identity and self. I’m still working on that.” It’s clear he’ll have plenty of time to figure it out.

 

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ED RUSCHA

Posted on by Taylor Norman

Traveling through Tennessee recently, I could still see the impression legend Clark Byers’ hand-painted SEE ROCK CITY signs have left behind. Some are vinyl knockoffs, but some of the original boards remain, acknowledging the lost Americana art that has suffered against modern printing technology and the bombardment of digital advertising. Artist ED RUSCHA has fond memories of these signs, just as America does for the many similar ones that adorned big businesses and small communities around the country for generations. Ruscha was inspired, and there’s no doubt his body of word paintings are a close relative to the hand-painted sign—his necessity being to communicate an idea rather than something for sale. Of course, art is for sale, so there are comparisons on many conceptual levels. The message is in the hand-painted letters nonetheless. In the 1980s the advent of precise die-cut vinyl lettering and ink-jet printers made the art of necessity cheaper and quicker, but the beauty of the hand-painted symbol has survived. The magic of a hand-painted sign isn’t just in the eye of the beholder; it really lies in the hand of the painter. The perfect brush to pull a line, the optical illusion of letter size, the planned spacing for the optimum read—all these techniques are unique and can’t be replicated by any machine. The human craft of creating one-of-a-kind signage is historic, and though the experienced sign-painter journeyman may be fewer and farther between, the art is alive and well thanks to a resurgence recently in art galleries, books and even as the subject of documentary film. Sign painting is not a science; it’s simply an amazing way to use color and paint to build up letters and words on metal or wood, and it speaks directly to you. Ed Ruscha, like many artists, recognizes this beauty. I was fortunate to have a conversation with him about the art of the hand-painted sign.

What are your earliest memories of seeing hand-painted signs?

I watched a heavyset man squat before a sheet of metal and hand-letter the complete menu for a drive-in hamburger stand in Oklahoma City. He was quick, facile and had everything preplanned. Another time I watched a man do gold-leaf lettering on the translucent glass of my dad’s office door à la Sam Spade. It was for the Hartford Insurance Company.

What attracted you to their craftsmanship?

It was all showmanship, and neither man was distracted by observers. One used matchsticks and toothpicks to correct over painting, while the other used a comb run through his hair for static electricity. These guys were artists!

You had an early interest in typeface in your fine arts career. How did that originate and how did it develop into a fascination with language?

Walking past a bakery always gets the good sniff responses, but in my case it was the aroma of printers’ ink. Especially freshly printed material. It was only a matter of time before I noticed the difference between typefaces.

Do you consider yourself to be a typographer (or a sign painter) since so many of your pieces contain words as the primary subject?

Anyone who makes pictures of words is doing so as though they are carving that word in marble, to make that word solid and last forever. It’s like making a word final and official.

 

 

 

Los Angeles didn’t really have a sign-painting movement like San Francisco or NYC. It really developed here later. We had more neon, oil-based and plastic signs. Do you think there is a connection between sign painting and pinstriping and that could’ve influenced the movement in Los Angeles?

The custom-car culture of Southern California used paintbrush features associated with sign painting, such as pinstriping and embellishments. This set L.A. apart from other sophisticated centers like New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

What is it about the casual look of hand-painted letters that is more appealing than corporate logos?

Handmade letters are more compelling because they are just that: handmade. They call back to the individual rather than a refinement of an industrial idea.

How is the art of optical illusion used in sign painting and why is it important?

Many tricks and devices are used, and in sign painting, these novelties are necessary and, as most sign guys say, “to catch the eye.”

How and why did you adapt that technique in your own artwork?

It’s only coincidental that I lay paint on a surface with a brush like a sign painter. Sign painters might be more “correct” than me since my stuff might be more cerebral.

How does sign painting use color as a necessity?

Again, it’s like that “to catch the eye” concept.

How do you implement your choice of what graphics (ground) vs. graphics (typographic) you use in your word paintings? Do you think that decision is inspired from a sign-painting perspective?

All of us use the ground/subject format. I think about these oldtimers using one-stroke show-card lettering. They get results I envy for.

Is graffiti related to sign painting? How so?

For urgency if not for commerce. These two things might be blood brothers.

How is the psychology of sign painting (in terms of having a very specific purpose) related to the concepts in your word paintings? Is there a connection?

My painting may not sell hamburgers, but I’m aiming for the same high ideals.

Do you have a favorite memory of a hand-painted sign that you really appreciate?

Yes, there was one on the back of a truck in Chickasha, Oklahoma, that said “MELNS 25 CENTS” sitting against a bed full of freshly picked Jubilee melons.

What do you think you would you have done if you weren’t Ed Ruscha the artist?

I would have been Ed Ruscha the meteorologist.

 

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ISMAEL OLIVERA

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

If you’re a denim devotee, there’s a good chance that, at one point in time, Ismael Olivera had his hands on your favorite jeans before you. That’s because Olivera, who now works as one of the head sewers at Citizens of Humanity headquarters, cut his teeth working for every major denim label that has manufactured in Los Angeles in the last two decades.

But the roots of his stitching wizardry can be traced back to Pueblo, Mexico, where Olivera was born. The son of a tailor and a farm owner, Olivera was one of seven brothers and five sisters. “The only thing I remember was that we were really happy,” says Olivera, reflecting on his impoverished childhood. “We were poor, but we didn’t know any better.”

At age ten, alongside his two older brothers, Olivera picked up a needle and thread with his father, and began to learn the family trade. Known far and wide for making long-lasting garments, especially trousers, his father’s storefront was frequented by customers of all backgrounds, from truck drivers to prominent business owners. The secret to the shop’s signature pants? Each backrise, inseam and side-seam was reinforced with a special elastic thread.

At age 15, Olivera’s father migrated to the United States to make more money to educate his younger daughters, leaving Olivera and his brothers in charge of the shop. It was an important time for learning, he says, recalling the customers who would come to the family shop and dish out advice as they waited for their garments to be finished. “Work hard and take care of your money,” they told Olivera—lessons which continue to resonate with him today.

Fresh out of high school, Olivera followed his father to Los Angeles, where he quickly found work making Guess jeans for a Mexican contractor in downtown. Quickly, he set his sights on the most coveted job in the factory: working on the caballo machine, making backrises. The position required experience and skills—both which Olivera lacked—and also paid more than double what he was making at the time. On lunch breaks, Olivera would study his friends’ techniques, and, when the manager was out, would try his hand at the machine.

His proficiency was put to the test when he landed a job at another factory working the backrise machine, and was fired within a week. Olivera continued to hone his skills working for a handful of other brands, including Bongo, before landing at the Pepe Jeans in 1994, before going back to Guess for two years, followed by stints at Cherokee and Calvin Klein. Here, Olivera flourished, and when the factory was moved to Mexico, Olivera was asked to come. Instead, the tailor opted to stay, and was promptly recommended for a position working thecaballo at the newly launched AG Jeans.

In 2003, the denim world was abuzz with the debut of Citizens of Humanity, so at the urging of friends in the industry, Olivera left AG Jeans to work there. “I came from a big company to a small company, and took the risk,” he says, admitting he was quickly won over by the value the brand placed on all of it’s team members. “I never thought it was going to be this big.”

No day is alike for Olivera, who, eleven years later, is one of the company’s head sewers. From crafting samples to pressing jeans for fittings, Olivera and his team leave their mark on every piece of denim that passes through the brand’s facility outside downtown Los Angeles. “I think denim will stay for ever, but people get tired of the same thing, so it has to change all the time,” he muses.

And Olivera’s proudest moment? Keeping his word to his now-departed father, and paying for his sibling’s educations with his talent and hard work. “If you put a machine in front of me, I can do so many things,” he says. “Wherever I go, nobody can take this skill away from me.”

 

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DEREK RIDGERS

Posted on by Taylor Norman

Though he’s captured frames of some of the most iconic performers, artists, politicians and even gangsters, it was snapping through rolls of film in London’s club scene in the ’70s and ’80s that established Derek Ridgers as a talented photographer. Ridgers was already in his late 20s when he trekked out to Skin Two, The Blitz and other London venues where British youth were rebelling and reacting to the right-wing agenda ushered in by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, with brash fashion steeped in fetish and the extremes of underground culture.

The youth Ridgers caught on film were stretching the boundaries of convention, sporting tattoos on their faces, necks and hands—something that wasn’t only taboo but often dangerous to have etched on your skin in public. Skinheads, new romantics, punks, goths and every other subsect of youth culture were commingling, with a total disregard for societal boundaries. It was ripe for documentation, and that decade has now been illustrated in a rich monograph titled 78-87 London Youth, in which Ridgers’ images and John Maybury’s text tell the story of the evolution, punch and panache of the disenfranchised and the historic scenes they inhabited. 

 

Derek Ridgers SI #1

 

How did you first get interested in photographing club kids, and were you met with any resistance initially?

Back in the 1970s, I was an advertising agency art director with easy access to a camera. By night I was a keen music fan and I started taking a camera to gigs, forcing my way to the front, pretending to be a photographer and shooting photos of some of the bands I liked.

In the beginning, it was simply an excuse to get a bit closer to the musicians themselves. But eventually I started to quite enjoy looking at the results as well.

Then in 1976, punk happened.

One really would’ve had to have been blind not to see how photogenic the punks were. So I turned the attention of my camera around and began to photograph the audience at the punk shows as well as the bands.

I really never had much resistance from any of the kids I was photographing. Maybe because I was keen on portraiture rather than reportage, I usually used to ask people first and if they declined, I’d just move on.

The only exception to that was in the early fetish club Skin Two. Most of the punkers didn’t want me there because they wanted to keep their fetishism private and they didn’t think outsiders should be around, let alone outsiders with a camera. Which is fair enough. I had a few of them offer me physical violence a few times—I remember one guy grabbed me by the throat. But my charm eventually won through. Plus, I’m quite a big bloke to be grabbing by the throat.

I used to get left waiting on the pavement for a long time by [Visage frontman] Steve Strange at The Blitz Club too. Steve Strange was already a legend in his own mind, even before anyone had heard of him, but having people wait out in the cold was all part of his shtick. But I’ve found you get nowhere in life if you take “no” for an answer. I simply wore Steve down with my persistence.

Can you explain the shock value of seeing kids with face, neck and hand tattoos back then?

I think that back then kids that chose very visible, very antisocial tattoos felt themselves to be ostracized by society and they were expressing themselves in one of the only ways they had. By getting themselves tattooed in that way they were saying, “I know I’m never going to be a conventional member of the society like you, and I don’t want to be.”

There was another, darker side to it as well. Most of the facial tattoos were done by unlicensed backstreet “scratchers,” and the majority of them in London were done by one man who, for a few cans of lager, would tattoo pretty much anything on anyone—provided you were young and male. Happily, I never met this guy, but I reckon an element of coercion could have been involved. Recently a guy that was subject to just such a facial tattoo from a scratcher—not sure if it was that particular guy—described the experience as being like a 30-year sentence.

He’s now hoping to get it removed.

At that time, the only people to have very visible, antisocial tattoos were people at the margins of social acceptability. Bikers, skinheads, teddy boys, prostitutes, rent boys, etc. I photographed all of them and never found approaching any of them difficult, but one does have to pick the right time, be polite and avoid being patronizing. If you have a big macho guy who’s in a bike gang, for instance, they are used to people looking away when crossing the street. They expect to be able to intimidate people. They don’t expect to be approached with an open mind and a friendly manner. Then my camera and its proximity often intimidates them and you get to see the real character. Often there is a real vulnerability in faces like that. They might take on a dozen men in a bar fight but they don’t always feel so comfortable with the close scrutiny of a camera.

 

Derek Ridgers SI #2

 

What do you think was happening in England that spawned so many flamboyant and over-the-top looks then?

It wasn’t really what was happening culturally but politically. The key event of this time period was the election of the Thatcher government in 1979 and the circumstances that allowed such a cynical, right-wing government to take power. Margaret Thatcher had a very anti-trade-union, anti-working-class agenda, and a lot of the teenagers from that time didn’t think they would ever get a decent job and so they had very little to look forward to. I think their fairly understandable response to having, quote, “no future,” was that they may as well try to have fun whilst they were still young.

There was a tremendous flowering of young creativity under Thatcher which I don’t think we’ve ever quite seen since. Though unfortunately the country is still suffering from a lot of the rightwing policies she started—like the selling off of Council housing and the selling off of publicly owned assets. I was not a fan of Margaret Thatcher. Not by a long chalk.

What were you mainly shooting with for the photographs in the book and what were the challenges shooting in club settings?

Throughout the period I was taking the photos in the book I used a small SLR Nikon. First, a secondhand Nikkormat and eventually a Nikon FM. I used either a 50 mm or 24 mm lens, and I used a small and very underpowered flashgun, which I had mounted on a contraption I had made from a bent coat hanger. The purpose of the unconventional flash bracket was to get the source of light as close to the lens as possible and therefore reduce the effect of shadows.

Around 1984, I fell asleep on the train one night, on my way home from a club, and had the first camera and very unconventional bracket stolen. I simply reproduced it a second time, but the second version was never quite as good as the first. I used this wacky bracket that was covered in Sellotape right up until I started using digital cameras in 2004. I never once saw anyone else use that idea. I’m not sure if that means it was a bad idea? The big challenge to shooting in clubs is that it can often be very noisy, very dark and it can be very, very crowded. This aspect isn’t always obvious from my photos. This is why an awful lot of my photos are taken in corridors and stairwells. That was the only place I could see, make myself heard and stand far enough back from my subject to get them all in frame.

There’s a sharp contrast between punk now and even what Malcolm McLaren was selling as punk in the ’70s and what the average kids are seen looking like in your book. Can you explain the difference?

With the exception of the Malcolm McLaren/Vivienne Westwood stuff and a few items from BOY, the original punks only really had clothes they had made or adapted themselves. I shot extensively in the original London punk club—The Roxy—and there was a lot of augmented school uniforms, painted leather, stencil work and bin-bag clothing. The mass-market punk clothing from places like Miss Selfridge didn’t come until later. But not much later.

A lot of the multinational brands had wholeheartedly jumped on the punk bandwagon by the end of ’77. Which for the original punks, spoilt things somewhat. That was why a lot of them then rejected the punk look and went for what was, in many respects its antithesis. The new romantics and their high fashion and overdressed approach, which started the following year, was initiated almost completely by ex-punks.

Back then I don’t think the various youth cults you mention were seen as being a part of the overall fashion scene. That they were almost all quickly subsumed by the requirements of big fashion chains, that have to have something brand-new to sell each season, was not a surprise. But I was surprised by the speed that it happened. In ’77-’78 I worked close to Oxford Street and I saw the punk styles appear very quickly in Miss Selfridge. Even before punk had rolled out to some of the less hip provinces.

Nowadays the fact that so many aspects and styles of the past have become present-day fashion memes is to do with commercialism and nostalgia. And I suppose partly that some of those things, like the leather jackets of the bikers and rockers or the Dr. Marten boots of the skinheads or the parkas of the mods, always were destined to become design classics. A lot of the brands that were associated with the various youth styles are always going to endure because their qualities were intrinsic.

Who were you photographing back then that eventually became famous and did you see that “star power” in them?

The most famous of them all was Boy George, who for a while in the mid-’80s must have been as famous as anyone anywhere ever. I certainly did not think he had any star power before he was famous and he just struck me as quite a friendly bloke with a lot to say for himself. Everyone thought of themselves as being at the bottom of a certain trajectory and only a few of them were correct in that assumption. Quite a few of my photographic subjects went on to become pop stars for a while [Siobhan from Bananarama is also in the book], and in every case, you could have knocked me down with a feather if you’d told me they would achieve fame.

I was at art school with Freddy Mercury [then Bulsara], and we were friendly. It was the same with him. A guy less likely to achieve worldwide fame I couldn’t have imagined. Maybe I’m just no good at picking them?

I’d rather not pick a favorite, but what I would say is that there were some exceptional women around then. Myra Falconer, who is in the book twice, had a very unconventional beauty but I’d rather shoot her any day than a conventional beauty. And that’s not supposed to be a backhanded insult either—she always looked sensational.

What one image captures the title 78-87 London Youth to you and why?

Well I didn’t make the choice of what photographs were used in the book and I also didn’t make the choice for the cover photograph. Never in a million years would I have chosen that image to go on the cover of my book. But in retrospect I think it was a very good choice, and this factor shows why I am not a book designer. Kudos there to the books designer Rupert Smyth. So for one image that captures the title London Youth it would have to be that one.

But if you asked me to say which is my favorite image, it would definitely be the last one inside the book—the skinhead girl Babs, shot close to Carnaby Street in 1987. She was such a beautiful young woman with such sad, expressive eyes. And with the back-to-front tattoo on her cheek, I guess she was very mixed up and probably a rather troubled soul. I’m fairly sure she was a troubled soul because I have other photos of her taken in ’84 and she had her whole life roughly sketched out in an amateurish way on her arms.

I haven’t seen her since the day I took the photograph and I sincerely hope she’s had a happy and productive life. The look in her eyes is one that can bring me to tears. That’s why it’s my favorite.

 

Derek Ridgers SI #3

 

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IMAN

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

CHRISTY TURLINGTON BURNS: You’ve probably thought about it more than a lot of people because you’re asked about it constantly, but how has your notion of beauty changed over the years, if at all?

IMAN: It keeps on changing. I came to the United States when I was around 18 years old in 1975. I was a student. I was more concentrated on becoming a political science student; I had never worn makeup in my life, never saw fashion magazines, and it was the last thing on my mind. Then all of a sudden I became a model—which was a complete surprise to me, because nobody had even ever said I was beautiful before. So I took it in stride, I took it as a business, because we were refugees. We left our country [Somalia]; we were living both in Tanzania and then Kenya and had to fend for ourselves. So this was an opportunity—modeling was an opportunity for me to take care of my family and my brothers and sisters, let them finish their schooling.

CTB: How long did it take you to start to see, even in the photographs of yourself, what other people were seeing?

IMAN: It took me a while. It took me really a long time, but then I found my sense of appreciation about myself. When I came here as a young girl, I was not sure about myself. My self-esteem was low.

CTB: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?

IMAN: Absolutely, and let that beholder be you. The beholder has to be you, you know …

CTB: I agree.

IMAN: But it is in the eye of the beholder how they see you and how you see yourself; I always say, as I get older, the beholder becomes me.

CTB: How does that change the way you feel, when people are always saying “great shot” or telling you that you are “beautiful” all the time? Doesn’t it change the way you take that word in?

IMAN: Sometimes it’s over the top, so you don’t believe it. But then it makes the real people in your life—people you trust, you know. I tell my daughter, “You have to find people you can trust.” Because she says to me, when I say to her, “You’re beautiful,” she says, “You say that to me because you’re my mother.” But it’s very important for them to believe in themselves, because she always thinks I’ll say that because I’m Mom.

CTB: It’s funny—I call both of my children, boy and girl, “Beauty,” “Hey, Beauty” or “Good morning, Beauty” for both of them. I just thought about that now, actually, as we’re talking, it’s not in an objective way. “You’re pretty” or “Oh, you look beautiful,” but it’s just the idea that you are beauty. It’s this holistic, bigger thing: You’re kind, you’re smart, you’re all of these things.

IMAN: Absolutely, absolutely. She would say to me, “What’s so beautiful?” I’m like, it’s never about something specific. It’s not about your lips, nose, eyes. It’s not that.

CTB: It must be a really interesting experience to go through that with a teenager.

IMAN: And I have an older daughter, too.

CTB: So, how has it been?

IMAN: Different.

CTB: Yeah, tell me.

IMAN: The first time—

CTB: You were in the middle of your career, too.

IMAN: Yeah, but the times change. Nowadays, before they go to school, you try to really make some part of a human being that will know their worth, but their peers are more important to them when they become teenagers. And nowadays they’re bombarded—they’re in social media, they’re bombarded with different kinds of images. And I’m so surprised. I mean, I find the hardest job nowadays is to raise a girl, because the society is so confusing—not only about what beauty is, what body image is, and how we are celebrating women. Nowadays, nobody is ashamed of doing anything bad; they’re celebrated for it. So how do you tell somebody “That’s not right,” when the person has become a star?

CTB: Right.

IMAN: How do you? It’s so difficult. “Just look at what has happened to that person when they did that.” You can’t even say that.

CTB: I know. It’s always as if the next celebrity scandal is just a moment away. Have you had to deal with selfies with your daughter?

IMAN: Yes, I warned her about it. I said, “First of all, you know, you can’t put yourself out there, because what you will get back is not always nice.”

CTB: No, you can’t.

IMAN: I print her selfies for her.

CTB: Wow.

IMAN: I’m trying to convince her, “Now that’s a selfie!”

CTB: My niece is a senior at the same school as your daughter and my kids; there are a lot of photographers amongst her friends, and there’s a lot of nudity as well. But some incredibly artistic shots, and it’s been interesting because they’re all going to go to art college. They say, “Well, you were photographed nude.”

IMAN: You did it?

CTB: Yeah, and I regret it, honestly. Even the ones that are more artistic, I still regret.

IMAN: When my parents come, I hide them under the bed.

CTB: I have photos of people I don’t know that are nudes, beautiful nudes by Larry Clark and Irving Penn, but there’s something about… when you’re a known person or when you can recognize the person—it’s hard to be objective about it, but I told these girls, I feel terrible about it only because … I feel like I was trying to be strong in the moment, like, “Oh, I’m so free with my body,” but really, I’m not that free, you know what I mean? I wasn’t ever that comfortable.

IMAN: I did a topless shot, I think, 15 years ago, for Vanity Fair. There was a story on me and it was on the cover, so they wanted to do it again when I was 60. They asked me, “Can we do it nude?” and I said, “Absolutely not.” And it’s not because I’m older. It’s because knowing what I know now, you know what I mean?

CTB: So of all the photographers you’ve worked with, who do you think has captured you best? What’s your favorite photograph?

IMAN: I think Bruce Weber. Because Bruce captures moments. You rarely are posing for Bruce, and I have an Arthur Elgort picture that is black-and-white; you would never think it is an Arthur Elgort.

CTB: Not all smiling and jumping.

IMAN: It’s the most amazing picture—shadows in the background and the noise, the dress flying and the curls of the hair with some kind of an architectural thing. It’s one of my favorite photographs.

CTB: It’s interesting, because I feel like when there is such a body of work, there is just so much crap that we’ve done, and all those fashion shows too. When you go to Milan—well, maybe it’s different now; I haven’t even been there in 20 years.

IMAN: I haven’t done a fashion show since ’89.

CTB: I can’t go to watch them either. I have over the years every now and again, but it’s so stressful to be there when you don’t have a reason to be there. It’s just not fun and you feel like you’re in a fishbowl.

IMAN: Exactly. “What is she doing? She must be looking for a job.”

CTB: When you made that decision, how much time went into thinking about when, or did you just know one morning and say, “I’m done”?

IMAN: I woke up one morning, and I have to tell you, the Naomis and the Lindas and everything was happening at that time, so that was it for me.

CTB: But there was overlap.

IMAN: Yeah, but it was like a perfect time to exit. I literally woke up and called my agent and said, “That’s it,” and they said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, let me call you next week, for my book.” And I said, “No, I’m done.” And I was done and I never went back.

CTB: Yeah, I had a similar thing. I thought about it for a long time, and I guess I really haven’t fully given modeling up, but in my mind I did, because I went back to school and moved on in my life. And when I went back to school, same thing. I remember somebody telling me that they were in a location van and they saw me walk by with my backpack, and they were like, “Oh, poor thing.” And I’m thinking – “Poor thing? I’m getting my education, you fools.” But I remember thinking about it. I think I had finally quit smoking and had gained some weight, and I was in Paris for the couture shows and I remember that moment when I thought, “You know what, I’m doing something healthy for myself, and they’re judging me and I don’t want to subject myself to it anymore.” And it’s such an empowering feeling when you can make that choice.

So what’s the question about beauty you hate the most? Is it, like, the aging ones?

IMAN: The aging ones. I’ve also always been … instead of trying to fight it, go with it in all the stages of your life.

CTB: Journalists are always asking the same old age questions …

IMAN: Sit.

CTB: Yeah, it’s like “Whoa.” And I just even hate the way beauty products and campaigns are selling “anti-aging.” It’s going to happen, it is happening, there is nothing we can do about it, so why are we trying to deny it? And people are surprised when you actually do embrace where you are in life, as opposed to saying “Ahh!”

IMAN: Exactly. You celebrate it. You don’t say, “Ahh, it’s freaking me out.” It doesn’t freak me out.

 

 

CTB: I was having lunch with Dayle Haddon last year …

IMAN: Oh my God, I haven’t seen her for a while.

CTB: She’s amazing. She said to me, “Oh, I feel so great in my 60s.” She said, “In my 20s, I’m trying to figure it out; my 30s, I’m starting to feel like I got it; then my 40s, I’m so busy and so tired all of the time. And then my 50s …” Is there a word that could describe who you were in each decade?

IMAN: Yes, well, I don’t know about a word.

CTB: Or a feeling.

IMAN: I would say, my 20s, even though I was in the height of my career, not as sure, self-confidence low, self-esteem low. 30s felt like … I’m aging, right? 40s, I started to own it. Funny enough, late 30s is when I met David [Bowie]. At 45, I had my daughter. Which was a miracle of delivery—no, it was a miracle conception. 40s were liberating, that I could get pregnant, that I found somebody in my life. 50 was a celebration of a half a century for me. I became very close to my older daughter. I became kinder, gentler, even to myself. I completely stopped picking on myself.

CTB: Self-acceptance.

IMAN: Yes, self-acceptance and self-celebration.

CTB: That’s amazing. We’re all just human, and sometimes we just don’t know. It’s our first time going through this, but there’s gotta be laughter and some silliness, and I think that’s what keeps us healthy and that’s what keeps us sane.

IMAN: Yeah, I know, the first time that my daughter saw me crying … she was shocked.

CTB: Like, you have feelings too?

IMAN: No, because she thinks of me as so strong. She said to me one day, “I’ll never be like you and Dad,” and I said, “It’s not about being famous.” I said, “It’s about qualities that you admire, because my mom was not famous. My mom was a nurse and became a doctor, and I always thought, ‘Oh my God, Mom. I’ll never be like her,’ ” you know? I said to her it’s not about fame, it’s qualities we like about people, and I said, “That’s what you should always surround yourself with, people you want to emulate. There is nothing better than somebody that you really admire that you want to emulate, you know. What are they doing that I like that I want to be a part of?”

CTB: That’s really what a role model is.

IMAN: But she said, “Oh, that’s like a copy.” I said, “No. Because nobody’s invented anything, it’s all passed around; we take bits and make it our own.”

CTB: I don’t remember feeling those classic adolescent feelings, maybe because I was working at such a young age. And then you kind of get thrown out of adolescence, and then you’re in our business—you’re celebrated for things that would maybe be awkward in school. It’s funny to say, but the industry got me out of feeling overly self-conscious or self-loathing. It was like, “Oh, somebody else thinks I’m good, so I’ll go with it.”

I get the best quality time with my daughter when I drive her out to Long Island to ride or go to a gymnastics meet. In the car she is more open, less distracted.

IMAN: It’s true, starting a conversation is tough, besides the “Did you do your homework?” So I said recently, “Oh, Rihanna might be going out with Leonardo DiCaprio,” so that’s how I started. She started to talk. She said, “Really? I don’t see them. Isn’t he too old for her?”

CTB: You obviously have an incredible work ethic and you’re doing so many things. How do you manage that, to be able to have the time to be there for your daughter, be a partner with your husband, you know, be all of those things that I think so many women struggle with?

IMAN: I close shop at 3:30. Done. I look at the emails after she finishes dinner and she’s doing homework. After that, every- thing is shut off.

CTB: Is it hard to do or is it easy to do for you?

IMAN: For me, it’s easy. It’s actually harder for her; she was doing fine, and then I found out she was up till 12 a.m. So now 9 p.m., everything comes out of the room.

CTB: Wow. That’s smart.

IMAN: I usually cook at home, you know, watch a movie with David after she goes to bed, so yeah. But you have to. It’s so important. You want a career? Do that first. You don’t want to have kids? Then don’t. You don’t want to get married? Then don’t. But once you do something, you got to know that there is compromise.

CTB: Yeah, someone once told me sequencing was the way to do it. You can have it all, but not at the same time.

IMAN: If you want a career, do the career first. You get married, then you have to sacrifice, and then children are coming, and then you have to sacrifice more, you know. But then I tell them, it shouldn’t shame you. If you want to have a career and you don’t want to get married, don’t, but don’t think that you can have all at the same time.

CTB: What about barriers you have overcome? What about race and religion in the industry—have you seen a noted difference in terms of representation?

IMAN: I don’t watch fashion shows, so I was not aware of it, but Bethann Hardison, one of my closest friends—she’s an activist. So one day, I get an email from her, and she says, “Do you know that they are not using any working black models in the runways anymore?” Prada hasn’t used them for six, seven years. And when the New York Times wrote about Calvin Klein, they called him the blonde leading the blonde. So all of a sudden we started to highlight this conversation; I see a lot, the politics of beauty, the politics of race. There is politics behind it. And designers were like, in the beginning, “Oh, we’re not going to be pushed around and be forced to use a black model.” Nobody’s saying this, but they say we’re not seeing black models this season, but they don’t know the harm you’re doing to the self-esteem of a young girl who is trying to get a job. So we talked about it on television and interviews on CNN, and there has been a cohesive effort by all designers.

CTB: It’s good just to have it in their consciousness, right?

IMAN: And it was very good to see that. It was so visible that the public realized, you know, and that’s very good. When it comes to me, religion, I’m Muslim, so what I’m doing is against what my religion is.

CTB: Everything about you.

IMAN: But I’m Somali; Somali is how we were raised. We never wore burkas because Somalis had our own cultures. We adopted Islam, but the world has changed. I’m always criticized by other Somalis and Muslims for what I’m doing as a model and married to a white man and all that. They all say, “You’re going to hell,” and I’m like, “Well, don’t worry about it, that will be me, why do you worry? You shouldn’t lose sleep over me. Really, please don’t worry. That will be between me and God, don’t worry about me.”

CTB: Well, once again, it’s a confidence. You know what your faith is—it’s a private thing, it’s a personal thing.

IMAN: The only opinion that I really care about is my parents’ and as I said, I have these beautiful [Irving] Penn photographs of me nude, and they go under the bed when they come.

CTB: Are you raising your daughter Muslim?

IMAN: No, she is an atheist; she doesn’t really believe in anything. So if she’s going to be, she’ll choose. She should know about everything.

CTB: Eddie [Burns] and I were both raised Catholic, but I studied comparative religion in college. I like looking at what we have in common and what’s good about all of these religions rather than what sets us apart or at odds. You want your children to be exposed to all of it and come up with it themselves, but to have something as a starting point, to question. I think atheists are really the most religious of all, because they’re questioning all the time and if you’re questioning you’re thinking about it, which makes you a much more spiritually conscious person.

IMAN: People will say all the time Islam doesn’t allow that, but that’s just not true. Extremism doesn’t allow that. There is a big difference. You have to question. Make your choice!

CTB: Well, I think we’re good, unless there’s anything that you want to say that I didn’t ask.

IMAN: No, you did very well.

 

 

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CHRISTIAN HOSOI

Posted on by Taylor Norman

Skateboarding in the 1980s needed a new radical. It was suffering a dip in popularity following the burnout of the Z-Boys, the gnarly Southern California team who a decade earlier were the first to liberate the sport from the confines of gravity, launching theirboards and themselves into the air.

Enter Christian Hosoi. The Cali youngster with a Hawaiian attitude spent his early adolescence at the Marina Del Rey Skatepark, where his artist father Ivan Hosoi worked as the manager so he wouldn’t have to pay for every visit, since they were there all the time anyway. At the skatepark the younger Hosoi could go for hours watching original Z-Boys like Jay Adams and Shogo Kubo, who in turn would soon see Christian Hosoi’s potential and start treating him like a younger brother. They taught him tricks and grew his confidence, their techniques and outlook rubbing off on him.

Hosoi began amazing other skaters and growing crowds with his ability to fly higher than anyone else on the scene. The mid- ’80s soon became a new boom time for skateboarding, both commercially and creatively. “Tricks were being invented on a daily basis in the ’80s,” say Hosoi now. “It was so spontaneous and radical and fun.”

Hosoi’s most notable contribution to skateboarders’ arsenal was the Christ Air, a move where he took flight and stretched both arms out to the side, the board held in his hand, separated from his feet. Though there were definitely other skaters Hosoi looked up to as he rose up through the ranks, he always drew from other childhood idols as well. “I wanted to be like Bruce Lee. I wanted to be a martial artist. I was going to be the best in the world,” Hosoi says. “But I got introduced to skateboarding, and I was like, oh wow, this is something no one has done. I can actually be the Bruce Lee of this sport. I wanted to be the dominator. I wanted to smash people like Bruce Lee did. I wanted to be the best, and that was my goal at 10 years old.”

Christian Hosoi and Tony Hawk became the biggest stars of the era. While Hawk was renowned for his technical ability and dedication to perfecting tricks, Hosoi was famous for his outrageous sense of style. That style was not only reflected in how he skated but how he dressed while he skated, the boards he skated on, the print ads for those boards and the lifestyle he led away from the skate ramps. He grew out his mane of hair (sometimes supplementing it with extensions). He wore leather pants, multiple Swatch watches on his arm and the clothes his apparel sponsor had designed for women. He became a hard-partying fixture in the Los Angeles nightlife world. “What I grew up around—the art world, the Hollywood scene, the club scene—got me to want to look a certain way,” he says. “That’s where all the style comes in. That’s how you create your own image and be yourself.”

 

Hosoi SI #1

 

Hosoi was always consciously looking for ways to differentiate himself. “I definitely didn’t follow the trend,” he says. “I wore spandex and said, ‘No one is going to wear this, that’s why I’m wearing this.’ I didn’t think, ‘I can’t wait until everybody starts wearing this.’” Still, there were plenty of skaters and fans who coopted his looks, though few, if any, could pull them off like he did.

But even as he took his look to the outer reaches, there was a functional aspect to many of Hosoi’s choices. Shogo Kubo, one of the predecessor skaters Hosoi identified with, used to cut up his T-shirts. Hosoi went extreme, shredding the sides, getting rid of the sleeves and necks, using those sleeves for headbands and armbands, then stuffing more T-shirts in his back pocket so they trailed him like a tail. He deemed it “the love shirt,” but it served a purpose. “We were all about looking cool and feeling cool, because we’re sweating, we’re up there working hard,” he says. The T-shirt tail accentuated the moves he was doing for everyone who was watching.

When he debuted the Hammerhead board 30 years ago for his company Hosoi Skateboards, its fish shape looked drastically different from the egg-shaped boards all the other riders were using. When they treated him like he was crazy for it, he explained that it was a high-performance skateboard that he had custom designed to serve his needs: The cut-out sides lightened it up, the swallow tail allowed him to pull off tricks usually prevented by the plastic coping used on ramps during competitions, and the notched-out flat nose made it easier for moves where he’d hold the front of the board. The Hammerhead not only became a classic but caused others skaters and brands to start rolling out their own experimental board designs, for better or worse.

 

 

 

In the early 1990s, skateboarding went through another recession. While Christian Hosoi embraced the sport’s transition into street skating and continued to innovate there, he also further descended into drug addiction. This prevented him from capitalizing on the huge skating boom that the X-Games helped facilitate just a few years later. In 2000 he was sent to prison for drug trafficking. Today Hosoi has been out of prison for 10 years and is 14 years sober. He’s a married father who has become a pastor at the Sanctuary Church in Westminster, California. His story has been chronicled in the documentary Rising Son and his own autobiography, Hosoi: My Life as a Skateboarder Junkie Inmate Pastor.

In late March, Vans opened a three-years-in-the making 43,000- foot skatepark in Huntington Beach, the Orange County town where Christian Hosoi has lived for almost 20 years. Along with skaters Ed Templeton and Tosh Townend, he was one the inaugural members of the park’s Sole of Fame, dedicated to local skate legends. Just now he’s coming off a toe injury that sidelined him for six months, but Hosoi is still competing, prepping himself for a Red Bull–sponsored event in Brazil. As he says, “It’s time to start skating every day.”

 

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LEE CLOW

Posted on by Taylor Norman

Lee Clow is responsible for some legendary advertising campaigns—not just effective and popular ones, but ones that penetrated popular culture and changed the game: the Taco Bell Chihuahua, the Energizer Bunny and, along with Steve Hayden, the 1984 Apple commercial that launched the Macintosh computer and the hugely successful “Think Different” slogan. From his lifelong home of Los Angeles, the chairman and global director of media arts at TBWA shared his insights on the ad world then and now.

How did you get into advertising?

I grew up surfing and paying not too much attention in school, but I was always drawing in my notebooks and doodling and taking art classes. I figured that I better make this art thing into a career because I’m not interested in much else. I grew up in California, admired Walt Disney—I’m old, so I was here when Disneyland was built. He was my first kind of artist hero because he was an animator; he did this artful thing, and at the same time made it into a business, and with his passion and his focus, wanted to do great things. So I didn’t know if I wanted to be an animator—did I want to be an illustrator? Did I want to be a fine artist?

The thing that seemed missing in graphic design or just becoming an illustrator was the totality of having ideas and storytelling. As I studied in school it was right at the middle ’60s, when advertising was taking on a whole new status or stature. The intelligent advertising that was being done in New York by [Doyle Dane Bernbach]. The Volkswagen campaign—taking the ugly little car designed by Adolf Hitler and making it interesting, famous and popular. Somehow that really appealed to me. The idea of putting something out into the culture that the public responded to.

What was the first campaign you worked on?

I got my biggest and most important opportunity when I got hired at Chiat\Day, a young creative agency. The first really important assignment brand I worked on was Honda. The account got in trouble after we had it a couple years; they were growing and getting bigger and they kind of challenged the agency to add people and treat them with a little more respect. And we were kind of a cocky, arrogant group and maybe didn’t appreciate the potential and opportunity we had, and now all of a sudden they say, “We’re going to talk to another agency.” Unfortunately we lost the account. So it was kind of frustrating, but that was the big opportunity I had with a big brand, and I also learned some lessons about managing and dealing with the client and understanding the reality of being an applied artist.

Has your approach toward the client changed over the years?

Having an idea is one thing. Showing it is probably just as important, and so I think I always had the passion and the artistic design skills. The storytelling sense came along, and I don’t think that’s changed a lot at all, because I just got more and more passionate and intense—almost in a perfectionist zone. I try to make my work smart, special and relevant.

But learning how to convince clients, convince people on how good and how special an idea is and guarding it is kind of what your life is in terms of all of the pitfalls, all of the ways an idea can be lost. I think being an advocate for my work is the reason why I’m still around when there are a lot of young, talented people I came up with that are long since out of the business. I’m still there because I can nurture young people to develop great ideas and I can help them sell them. I can help them see the light of day, even though it’s getting harder and harder in this kind of new media world we live in with all the constituents you need to deal with.

Traditionally, it seemed like advertising was always about a specific product, but you kind of shifted it to make it about the brand. How did that idea come to you?

The advertising I like to do is to find the brand story and figure out how to tell [it]. You go back to Volkswagen: Here’s a car designed by Adolf Hitler in World War II, and the challenge was to sell it in a country where we were buying cars 30 feet long with giant fins on them and there’s this dopey little car. That was exciting to see that potential, not just to do the individual ads for a brand like Volkswagen but to give it a story that became infectious—that driving a VW became almost a status symbol of a kind of young, free-thinking, spirited people.

Finding a voice as a tone for a brand is the art of what I do. I want to consider myself now as a media artist, not an advertising person, because advertising is kind of defined these days and has a negative stigma attached to it. But to be a media artist is to take a brand and find its voice and tell its story and make it interesting and likeable. I think brands are very much like a person. If you can create a personality for a brand that deals with it like a person and not just a one-dimensional entity—sometimes you’re funny, sometimes you’re smart, sometimes you’re thoughtful. Selling who they are and not just what they make is the exciting dimension of doing what I do, I think.

How was the 1984 Apple campaign created?

Well, of course the most important, being-in-the-right-time aspect of my career was meeting Steve Jobs when he was 25 years old and decides that he’s going to change the world with this thing called a personal computer, which nobody knew what it was, why they needed one, how it fits into their life.

So Macintosh, although we were working on Apple products for a while, was trying to come up with a voice for technology nobody knew they needed or knew why. Steve had this computer that was going to change everything, and he wanted advertising that was as big and important and smart as his product was.

Lee Clow SI #1

 

The headline [of a newspaper ad] was “Why 1984 won’t be like 1984,” and it was offering the generic [thought] that says someday everybody is going to have technology—it’s just not going to be for the big companies having this giant computer in their basement. “Someday everyone is going to have a computer” was the spirit of that ad, but it never ran as a newspaper ad.

I was sitting with an art director and another director-turned-writer and we remembered that headline and that just started images in our head—the Orwell of 1984, the Big Brother that kind of controlled everyone’s lives versus the liberator Apple who’s going to take on Big Brother and democratize this thing called technology and give it to everyone. So it just painted this story in our minds, started small and it got bigger and bigger, and we found Ridley Scott, who had done Blade Runner, to give it a stature and style that was not typical of advertising at that moment. And we built it and grew it and it got bigger. [This all] with the promise that Apple was going to change the way the world works, and we called it the democratization of technology. So we have this amazing commercial and were going to run it on the Super Bowl and the board of directors of Apple got cold feet and almost didn’t run it all.

Why did they get cold feet?

Oh, because they were scared of it—it didn’t show the product, it didn’t demonstrate how it worked, although there was a whole ad campaign that went with this commercial, and IBM was coming into the business and threatening them. But luckily we had Steve Jobs, who was one of the bravest businesspeople I’ve ever known, who basically finally drew the lines: “We’re going today.” And it ran and it became pretty famous, and it did put the stake in the ground.

Where do you go for inspiration?

I built a house right on the ocean 20 some years ago here in Palos Verdes, so when you get up in the morning with a cup of coffee and nobody is up yet and you watch the sunrise and look over the ocean—it’s a pretty good place to have a clear head and kind of focus back in on the problem you are trying to solve, what idea you’re searching for. A lot of creative people in particular want to work at night. I’m actually the reverse.

 

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