It’s been called “the best vintage store in the world,” but owner Hitoshi Uchida opened his Tokyo-based shop J’Antiques in 2005 without thinking much about its future. “I happened to find a property for sale in my neighborhood,” he says. “So I started my store without preparing much.” located near the Nakameguro neighborhood, J’Antiques’ shelves and aisles are packed with classic men’s and women’s wear (focusing on authentic American work wear from the 1920s and beyond) as well as bric-a-brac like vintage buttons, antique keys, and WWII-era military gear. His pieces are humble yet beautifully crafted; relics from the days when the U.S. was really celebrated for creating carefully crafted clothing that was built to last.
Becoming a master at sourcing and selling artifacts like these was a natural extension of Uchida’s personal passion for unique style. “I was looking for clothing that was different from other people’s,” he explains, “That’s what first led me to vintage.” Growing up in Gunma, a mountainous area north of Tokyo, Uchida considered becoming an architect. But his love for fashion and its history drew him to career clothing. Once he’d secured the location for his shop, the name for J’Antiques was a natural fit. “It’s a combination of ‘junk’ and ‘antique,’” Uchida explains. “I think somebody’s ‘junk’ can be another’s ‘antique’ and vice versa, depending on people’s choices and taste.” He makes regular buying trips to the U.S. to seek out choice pieces from flee markets and vintage shops across the country — and still gets excited about working with one-of-a-kind garments. “I love that I can be involved with the whole process: getting a vintage item, cleaning it, displaying it at the store, and selling it to a customer, who truly loves it”.
Uchida’s got a particular passion for vintage denim, and still fondly remembers his first pair of Lee 101z’s. “I especially like pieces that look like they were used as work clothes,” he says. He’s not a snob about the historical provenance of every item in the shop, though—J’Antiques offers some new pieces, but only those that have certain timelessness. “I always try to find new items which have a potential to become vintage,” he explains. Still, the pleasure of working with vintage clothing, says Uchida, is the eternal element of surprise. “I get to see something that I have never seen. Each item is unique, even the ones that look similar.”
CURATOR, FATHER, RAPPER, SURFER— “INTERDISCIPLINARY” IS A GOOD WORD TO USE TO DESCRIBE MICHAEL DIAMOND, A.K.A. MIKE D. GROWING UP IN NEW YORK CITY IN THE 1970S AND ’80S THE SON OF RENOWNED ART DEALER/ COLLECTORS HAROLD AND HESTER DIAMOND, MIKE EXPERIENCED THE BUBBLING BOUILLABAISSE OF PUNK ROCK AND HIP-HOP AMIDST A CLUB AND GALLERY SCENE THAT RECOMBINED THESE DISTINCTLY DOWNTOWN FLAVORS. BEASTIE BOYS, THE RAP GROUP HE FOUNDED ALONGSIDE CHILDHOOD FRIEND ADAM YAUCH AND ADAM HOROVITZ, EVOLVED FROM BRATTY BEGINNINGS TO DEFINE MUSICAL DIVERSITY AND CONSCIOUS FUN OVER A MULTIDECADE CAREER.
MARRIED TO THE FILMMAKER TAMRA DAVIS, DIAMOND IS A PROUD PARENT OF TWO BOYS, AND THEIR FAMILY LEADS A BICOASTAL LIFESTYLE THAT ALLOWS FOR DIVERSE INTERESTS AND PROJECTS. IN 2012, MIKE CURATED TRANSMISSION L.A.: AV CLUB, A 17-DAY MULTIMEDIA ART FESTIVAL AT MOCA IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES. IN 2013, FOLLOWING THE DEVASTATION OF HURRICANE SANDY, DIAMOND AND VISIONARY RESTAURATEUR ROBERT MCKINLEY DEVELOPED ROCKAWAY PLATE LUNCH, A HEALTHY-EATING FOOD TRUCK THAT SERVED AN ESTIMATED 20,000 FREE MEALS TO RESIDENTS OF QUEENS AND BROOKLYN WHO WERE LEFT WITHOUT POWER.
HERE, DIAMOND SPEAKS WITH HIS FRIEND, LONG BOARDING SURF GODDESS KASSIA MEADOR, ABOUT WAKING UP, WAVES AND THE BENEFITS OF BEING A DAD.
Everyone has their different times of day that they get inspired. What are your peak hours of creativity?
In different times in my life it’s been different. For so long I was only a night person. I could only create at night and work until 4 in the morning; that was my zone. Then it totally shifted. I cycled around to the opposite, where now I’m so psyched to get up while it’s still dark and take a shower before it’s hot and know that when I come out the sun is going to just be up and I can really focus. I have all this access to my mind and that’s a really cool free moment.
Do you vibe more when it’s rainy or sunny?
Rainy moments are good for me to focus on music because then I’m less distracted. When it’s sunny I always get a little bit jealous when I’m inside in the studio. You tell yourself, aw it’s so nice outside. Life’s better in the sun—what can I say?
That’s why I love California. So, who are your heroes?
Why are heroes such a big thing? There are so many musicians that I look up to that are incredible artists. Artists that I think are incredible. They’re not necessarily heroes. Gandhi is a hero. Gandhi should inspire my daily life, but maybe he might not inspire my daily life as much as a musician might or a book that I’ve read.
What is your all-time favorite book?
I’m not good with all-time favorites, but there’s a book called Ringolevio that I read when I was a kid, and I’ll still go back and read it. It’s kind of like how Basketball Diaries is a coming-of-age type book. I always related to it. I don’t even know if it’s in print. The title Ringolevio comes from the name of a street game in New York City that you played, like stickball.
Like stickball? Cool. I love that!
Emmett Grogan wrote it. He was a New York City street kid who moved to San Francisco and ended up in this whole movement the Diggers, who were like pre-hippie radicals. And the book is about the Diggers too.
What are the movies that always stick with you?
Probably Wes Anderson’s movies, like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. He has this crazy eye for detail that makes his movies real works of art, but then they have this incredible emotional heart to them too.
I just saw his new one, The Grand Budapest Hotel.
I don’t even want to know if you liked the movie, I just want to see it!
My friend Spike’s new movie Her I really loved. That was incredible. It operated in this surreal circumstance but then all of the issues are just relationship issues that we always have. What’s real, what isn’t real, what’s love, what are the boundaries? Can connections last? Are they meant to just come and go?
And even the connection of the emotional and physical, which is so interesting.
I thought it was really cool that he set it in the future but it wasn’t people in silver spacesuits—it actually seemed plausible. That gave it a surreal edge and added another dimension of meaning to these questions.
In that future, people can’t even connect anymore because they’ve been so virtualized.
But we also have that now. You can have that because of technology, but you can also have that without technology being the factor.
All right, what’s your favorite grub spot in New York? Maybe your favorite spots for breakfast, lunch and dinner?
I would work backwards. For dinner there’s this place called Marco’s in Brooklyn that’s not that far from me. It’s traditional Italian. The same people have this other restaurant called Franny’s that’s also really good. I feel like the trend right now in New York is that everyone’s trying to top each other. There are so many talented chefs and such good food, but everybody’s trying to come up with something that somebody else hasn’t done. Simple is good if you can do it. That’s almost harder to pull off because then you have nothing to hide. Marco’s is like that. There’s a restaurant called Charlie Bird in Manhattan that has super good wine and really good food. And they play good hip-hop so I give them props. Then for breakfast or lunch, it’s Mogador in St. Mark’s Place.
You’ve done so much in your life. With your kids, are you concerned that everything you’ve done is going to overshadow them or make them insecure about their own dreams?
That’s a good question. I get so fueled by my friends that I’m lucky enough to work with, so I just keep my kids incorporated into my world, so they’re exposed to all the same people that I’m excited about. I think that’s a positive thing because what’s normal to my kids is that people create stuff. I mean, we’re all freaks, but they don’t think we’re freaks for doing that!
It’s funny the way things can stick with you from when you’re a kid. I remember when Brittany Leonard would surf in Malibu all the time. Joel Tudor said she’d developed something called Point Break Syndrome because all she ever did was surf a right-hand point break. And I was maybe 15 at the time, and I was like dude, Point Break Syndrome? I don’t wanna get that!
Point Break Syndrome—that’s funny. This morning we surfed Drain Pipes. We looked at the cam online and the surf looked super small so we just grabbed long boards, lines, threw them in the car, went down and surfed. It wasn’t that it wound up being even that big, but I would’ve actually been much better off on a smaller board. Instead I had a long board and no leash, which in a way made it so much more fun because it was so much more challenging.
When you play music, then, do you see the things that you’re playing? Do you see the sound that you’re creating?
Sometimes you’ll make music and you’ll imagine a mood, you know? It’ll be more of a visual mood. As a band we were always super stoked and excited to work on visual stuff because it was another part of the challenge. We were always just as excited to figure out what our record cover was going to be or what the music video would look like as we were making the sounds. Those things went together.
We’d go on tour and talk about what projections we’d use as the backdrop. When I got the opportunity to curate the MOCA show, even though it was completely crazy for me to do it, I was able to because I had had that experience combining visual elements and music. It gave me the tools, I guess.
That was such a great show. It was like you could really feel all these passions together inside the space.
Yeah. I think with the heaviest pieces—and this might be corny to say—but it can be a photograph or a painting, or even when you walk into a building, it’s almost like it will create this frequency. It’s a frequency you’ll feel.
Totally, I feel that. It’s like that low hum.
That’s it. And I think what we all chase is that moment when you just connect with something and it really moves you. You can have that in visual art, photography and painting and you can have that in music or while you’re watching a film, where you’re completely inside an experience. And that’s why those things intersect with surfing, and skateboarding too. You’re just completely sucked into that experience.
Growing up, you were definitely in the hype scene in New York in the ’80s when New York was really blowing up. Talk about that and how all the art and the rest of the city influenced you.
Growing up in New York City, I was always around visual art and totally stimulated by it. Art and music always seemed the same to me. Music grabbed me and I went like into it 180 million percent, but visual art was always around me, you know? And it was always super important. I feel grateful to have grown up in New York at that time. First of all, I was a kid running around clubs and doing crazy shit. At that time people moved to New York because they were a writer or a photographer or a musician or maybe they didn’t even know yet. Somehow New York was affordable enough. Now you couldn’t do it because it’s prohibitive. But then, you really could. You had music from all different takes all happening in New York. And now you can get that on your laptop or phone. But back then the only way you could get it is if you were there. I mean, if I were 13 years old now, I would still have that same process of discovery, right? But I could be anywhere. Still, it’s not the same as actual physical proximity to something. I think New York is the same in that it’s still a place where there’s all kinds of rad creative stuff happening, but it’s kind of shifted in that you can’t just move to New York and survive. One of the things that keeps me in New York is that almost every day I’ll see somebody who’s like a walking freak show, and I mean that in a good way! I mean, why do you live in Venice? Because there’s stuff happening that you feed off of probably, right?
Absolutely. And in places it’s quiet as a bell, and you only have yourself to inspire you. Finally, what balances you?
Friends, surfing, breathing. [Laughs.] And more than any of it, my kids, definitely. Because you can be completely frazzled and caught up in your mind, but you have to be present with your kids. It’s great to have people that you just have to be present with, and let all your stuff go.
MAKING BOLD STATEMENTS REQUIRES BOLD FILMMAKING AND AN OPTIMISTIC VISION.
Citizens of Humanity nurtures documentary short filmmakers to inspire global awareness and influence a course of action. Christy Turlington Burns and Roger Ross Williams both share this passion and bring the human experience closer to all of us in their new documentary shorts, no matter how much distance lies between. Model and advocate Turlington Burns has gone behind the camera to shed light on maternal health issues in the developing world as well in the United States. Her organization, Every Mother Counts, ran a 200-mile relay race to create awareness for mothers’ preventive health and wellness. Her short film, Every Mile, Every Mother, documents the experience and parallels the endurance of the runners to the women who have limited access to health care resources in rural areas of the world. Ross Williams is a seasoned documentary filmmaker whose experiences shooting heartfelt stories in Africa about the human experience have led him to create Tutu: The Essence of Being Human, a short film that examines the strength the Tutu family shares in its mission to fight racism and advocate peace through humanity.
These two talented storytellers sat down together and discussed the challenges and blessings they encountered to bring light to stories set far from America that affect us all.
Christy Turlington Burns: I was curious when you said you almost chose [Malawi’s] President Banda for your film, how did you ultimately make the decision to go with Desmond Tutu?
Roger Ross Williams: Jared Freedman [of Citizens of Humanity] had already been talking to Tutu. They came to me with the project. But I had in my last film, God Loves Uganda, focused on faith leader Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, so there was that connection to the idea. When Jared saw that part of the film, he was like, “I really want that, what you captured from Bishop Senyonjo, to translate that to Tutu.” Tutu is very different, though, because he is such a public figure and press surrounds him all the time. He can’t walk out of the store without paparazzi around him. So it was very different, where as Bishop Christopher, he’s a private citizen. It was interesting with the Tutu media frenzy around him, which was a challenge in the film.
C: How big of a crew did you have?
R: I just had a South African production company. I had a South African producer, sort of a production coordinator, my DP from New York, and local sound. Just a small documentary crew. How about you? How did you decide to do yours?
C: Well, I have only made one other film. I made a documentary called No Woman, No Cry a couple years ago. It came out in 2010. . . . We filmed in Tanzania, Guatemala, Bangladesh and here in the U.S. looking at maternal health, the challenges and also the solutions in those countries. It’s funny, because I’ve wanted to make a documentary film for a long time, but it was only when I had a complication with my own delivery of my first child, I was like, this is the subject that I want to explore and I want to understand more what’s happening globally. Which women have access, which women don’t. It kind of grabbed me as a subject matter and then got me to take the risk to go into unfamiliar territory and take that journey.
R: I think documentaries have to be personal. You have to be passionate about it. It’s such a commitment; it’s such a long-term commitment too. That’s really what sparked me and sparked a lot of people when they make theirs, especially their first film.
C: Yeah, my husband is a filmmaker and he’s made probably four movies since I made my one documentary, so I got the sense of like, oh my god. It’s really like a child in the sense that it took me this long to be like, OK, I think I can actually start to make something else again.
R: Tell me about the film. Let’s talk about Every Mother Counts. How did you start that organization?
C: It started with the experience. I had this complication with my first child, who’s 10 now. I started to hemorrhage after I delivered her. I was in a birthing center here in New York City. I had a midwife, I had a doula, I was in the right place at the right time and they knew what was happening and they managed it the best they could. But in the weeks afterward, when I was trying to understand, how did that happen out of nowhere—like, why? Why me?—was when I came across the global figures of maternal mortality. I learned that my complication is often a cause of death for girls and women in a number of countries. Ninety-nine percent of them are in developing countries, but they happen here in the U.S. too. We have two deaths per day, and half of those are preventable as well. Once I learned the information, I had to know more about why. This isn’t one of those issues where we don’t know how to save the lives of women. It’s a matter of whose life has equal value or doesn’t. That part of it got me to want to do more. My mom’s from El Salvador and I’ve traveled a lot besides that, but I grew up going to her country, which also has a lot of issues around maternal health.
R: I’ve spent a lot of time in El Salvador.
C: I grew up going there quite a lot, but I went after I had my first child. I went back with CARE, one of the humanitarian organizations, while pregnant, with my mom, to El Salvador. That’s where I had the experience of traveling to a remote village and thinking if I’d had that complication here I probably wouldn’t have made it. Then going back and having my son and no complications and then really deciding then that this was an issue that, first of all, nobody knew it was an issue. I mean literally, I was shocked to find out women were dying. But I started to educate myself. I started traveling a bit with CARE and then also with ONE, just looking at maternal health in a number of countries. I then applied to Columbia University to get my master’s in public health.
The film actually just became a way that I thought. I was writing a column when I first started traveling with CARE for Marie Claire magazine, and I thought it was great to bring some of these stories of women that I’m meeting to life and closer to other women who otherwise wouldn’t get to travel. Then I thought those are great and useful, but film is such an incredible medium to really transport people and to really get someone to put their feet in the shoes of another human being.
The film became very clear. I just saw it. In Peru, I was coming back from a really remote area and thinking, this is my documentary film. I’m going to get out there, I’m going to look at this and examine this as an issue and hope that people want to see this. We were able to get a lot of people to learn about the issue from the film. It really has turned into an organization once I finished the movie. The film feels really good, and I think it’s going to make an impact. But then what? What are you telling the audience to do when people feel, like, how can I help?
R: Exactly. So that’s how you developed the organization? Because that’s really the big thing right now in documentary film is outreach and engagement around the film. Now it’s a whole industry. So now your budget for the film, actually your outreach and engagement budget, equals the budget of the film almost. And we develop pretty extensive campaigns. Now you have your film producer and we have our outreach and engagement producer.
C: Yes. Initially, we thought of it as a campaign, and I had it very much tied to the Millennium Development Goals. It came out in 2010 and I thought, OK, for the next five years I’ll use the film and my platform as best I can to get this to be a mainstream issue. But of course, after about a year or so, I thought, OK, that’s helpful, but a lot of organizations asked, “Can I screen your film? Can I raise money off of your film?” I thought, OK, yeah, that’s sort of satisfying, but not really that meaningful in the end. Not for me and also not for the audience that I’m touching. I think the audience was sort of like individuals like me who, whether they had a complication or not, they’d come through the experience. And just simply having come through the experience they felt connected and wanted to have that tangible connection with another woman and another mother. We really wanted everyone to come be that.
R: How did you decide to use the race as sort of the structure of this film that you did?
C: A couple years ago in New York City, we were invited to join the New York City Marathon as an organization. There was a dad in my kids’ school, “Oh you have a nonprofit? Would you like 10 spots for the marathon?” And I think he thought we might turn around and sell them or give them away in some kind of contest or something and I thought I know at least a handful of runners who would run this. And I kind of always had in the back of my mind maybe one day I’d run a marathon. So we responded and said, “Yeah we’ll take the 10 and we’re going to run it.” We were only three people at that time as a staff. So the three of us are definitely in, and then our next level of friends in our circle who are runners and could handle it, no problem. We started training and as soon as I started training—I wasn’t really a runner but had run up to four or five miles before, running and trying to increase my mileage a little bit. And I thought as all that time was going by, like, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” But it also to me became really clear that one of the biggest barriers for women to access care is distance. I thought a lot of people raise money and awareness in marathon running. But for us specifically in our issue and how many women live in rural areas and can’t get to health care when they need it, especially in emergency situations, like that will be the way we communicate around this. Five kilometers being the minimum distance women have to walk to seek care; 35 kilometers is nothing, but it’s average probably for emergency transport. Just to get people again to put themselves in the seat of another human being.
So we ran it the first time. We ended up making it a team of 50 the next year because it was resonating with people, the idea that distance is a barrier. “Oh, wow, I can make that connection— women should have a ride or be able to have access.” So we got this opportunity to then run this 200-mile relay race. As soon as I learned about it, I thought what a cool idea. But it also takes that running metaphor that much further, because 200 miles is a very long way. Running as a team and thinking about how you really have to share this experience when one person is sort of losing energy, losing steam, you can switch them up and give us the support that we need to keep going. . . . I wanted to make a film of it but I wouldn’t have necessarily thought of making a film like this or finishing it this quickly. I would’ve thought, maybe we’ll shoot it and we’ll see what will happen down the line, but I didn’t have any real reason for it. When we started talking to Jared at COH, I said, “Well, we have this thing coming up that I want to film anyways.” He was like, “That sounds great, and that sounds interesting. Let’s do it.”
R: It’s great because you have a structure. You have a beginning and you have an end.
C: Exactly. And we want to inspire people to get involved. I hope that is ultimately what it does.
R: Yes, it’s very inspiring.
C: Had you done a short before?
R: I did a 30-minute short, called Music By Prudence, which won the Oscar in 2010. But I started it actually making a feature. I shot a feature and then I took it to HBO and I showed it to Sheila Nevins of HBO Documentary. Ten minutes and she’s like, “This is an Oscar short. It’s going to win the Academy Award.” She’s like, “Cut your feature and then you’ll see that I’m right.” They let me just spend six months cutting my feature, and I sat and watched my film and I was like, she’s right. I could do so much more. We could possibly win an Oscar, and then we did, which does so much unbelievably for the issue, which was about disability in Africa.
C: That’s incredible. The moral of the story—you finished it full length and then you reapproached it? That must be so hard.
R: It was painful because you’re just cutting out this and that, and you’re so married to this material. It’s like cutting your heart out.
C: Do you always work with the same editor?
R: No. Actually the last film, God Loves Uganda, is a different editor, an amazing editor, actually—one of the best in the business, Richard Hankin. I work with the same DP. Editors I sort of tailor it to the project. Some editors have strengths in one area and not in another. But God Loves Uganda is my first feature. This Tutu short my partner edited. . . . The great thing about making films is you get to meet people like Tutu, who is a hero of mine and a hero to many. Being around him was extraordinary. He’s such a down-to-earth guy considering everything he’s gone through and the history and the amount of people around him. He’s very moved when he talked about his life; it’s just amazing.
C: Yes, I loved that. There’s that old expression of behind every great man, behind every human, there is another who is making it possible for them to do great things. They, too, have made such a commitment to the world and there are a lot of sacrifices that they have to make. To see the impact not only on the world but also on his family—he has a very big family and a close family, but that’s just such an incredible thing to be able to get insight on.
R: He’s out being a person of the world and his wife is actually there in South Africa fighting that battle. What’s amazing about her is that she’s sort of different because it was his 80th birthday last year and he had his big party in the cathedral with Bono and Clinton and everyone, all his friends, and Richard Branson. She is a person who likes to be in the township with the people. She wanted to have her 80th birthday in this one-room church. All of the dignitaries have to come and cram into this one-room church because this is where she wanted to be. On the day of her birthday, she built a playground for the kids in this township who didn’t have a playground and she wanted to dedicate the playground and be with the kids on that day. She doesn’t want media attention; she doesn’t like the cameras. She’s just amazing—he actually teared up talking about her because she’s his rock. She’s the rock for all his family. He has three daughters and all of them do the work, they all do the work of Tutu, they all work in women’s rights and they’re all ministers and they all are inspired when they talk about their mother. Their mother was the real rock and, as he said, she is much more radical than he is.
C: I think it’s more common than has been told or shared over history. I think about Bob Marley’s wife, and one of his daughters wrote a song for our city and she also tells that story . . . he was off doing what he had to do, but she was really the rock and she was the one who’s still there, keeping the name alive.
R: Motherhood. There’s a theme. Strong, the woman behind the man, and it’s really behind motherhood for her. She raised pretty extraordinary daughters. Without Tutu—he wasn’t there much. I look at even Winnie and Nelson Mandela. She became very radical because she was in the streets fighting and he was away in prison. The women are the real sort of backbone of the clan and probably the world. Definitely in Africa.
Francesco Clemente is stark and intimidating, not unlike his artwork. He speaks carefully and briefly, without a sign of chattiness or informality. Clemente’s wide-ranging works of the 1980s, often centering on stark, confrontational representations of the human body, defied much of the abstraction in favor for the previous decade. His painted imagery could simultaneously evoke sexuality and religious allegory, with portrait subjects staring the viewer squarely in the face. Born in Naples in 1952, Clemente moved to Rome in 1970 to study architecture at the University of Rome. He soon began to work as a visual artist, and at age 24, he met his future wife, Alba Primiceri. The couple soon had the first of their four children and moved to India. By the beginning of the 1980s, the couple and their children were in New York City, but Clemente returned frequently to India, completing his 24-work 1981 series “Francesco Clemente Pinxit” in collaboration with Indian artists trained in miniature painting.
In New York he became an art star, collaborating with the young Jean-Michel Basquiat and the older Andy Warhol. Clemente also created works in collaboration with or to accompany the works of poets Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley. Along with Alba, who was a frequent muse to and portrait subject of many of their renowned artist friends from Basquiat to Alex Katz, he would spend evenings at the great New York nightclubs of the 1980s: Danceteria, the Palladium and the Paradise Garage. Clemente never ceased traveling, however. He maintained homes and studios not only in New York but also in Rome; Taos, New Mexico; and Chennai, India. Today he and Alba live in a Greenwich Village home that belonged to Bob Dylan in the 1970s, and he maintains studios in Manhattan and Brooklyn. It is India, though, that has perhaps been the center of his creative energy for the longest. Having long collaborated with Indian craftspeople in connection with his art, Clemente continues to work alongside them in his most recent series of tents, which are sized to hold dozens of people standing within them and are densely painted and printed both inside and out. Evoking nomadic cultures around the world, the tents are made in India, each taking a year for Clemente and a team of Rajasthani woodblock-printing artists to create. They’re a spot-on metaphor for Clemente himself, the nomadic artist, ever wary of easy categorization, to set up an identity he can take down and take away anytime he chooses.
New York City’s Rubin Museum will present a show of 20 of Clemente’s India-inspired works in September of this year, and Mary Boone Gallery will present two new tents in November.
What was your childhood like in Italy?
I grew up in Naples, a city somehow broken but full of wit and cultural arrogance. My parents had modest means but managed every summer to travel by car to a different European country. By the time I was 12 they had taken me to see every monument or museum in Europe they could think of.
You briefly studied architecture in 1970. How did you end up becoming a painter?
The faculty of architecture in Rome was then the hotbed of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist activism in Italy. There was much violence and turmoil and, to my eyes, opportunism. In an early catalog of my work I remember writing: “I am looking for a territory without enemies.”
What compelled you to want to share your thoughts and ideas through art?
I had an exaggerated awareness, from an early age, of the dynamics of power. All knowledge appeared to me a tool for domination and exploitation and hence a lie. I didn’t want to be part of the lie. To become an artist was the way out.
How did you come to collaborate with Basquiat and Warhol?
Bruno Bischofberger, who at the time was one of the few who had respect for both Warhol and Basquiat, suggested we make some works together. This was easily done. Our studios were close to each other. We were close, too. Warhol’s Interview magazine had covered my work only a month after my arrival to New York. Basquiat and I had common literary likes, particularly the Beat poets.
What was it about their work that you made a connection to?
I relate more easily to “big” art. By big I mean art that crosses its cultural context and aspires to express a worldview. Both Warhol and Basquiat, in different ways, shared this aspiration.
You have also worked with many poets. How has that medium inspired yours?
Yes, to use the words of John Wieners, I pray every morning, saying: “Poetry visit this house often.” Ginsberg, Creeley, Wieners continue to inspire me, not just with their words but also with their character.
When did you first travel to India and what sparked that desire?
The same motive forced me to become an artist and to travel to India. I was discontent with the boundaries of Western culture, the culture of want, of “I” and “mine,” a culture that claims to have defeated poverty, whereas it has made poor even the rich.
How did Indian culture begin to influence your work from that point on?
In India I learned my favorite prayer. It goes like this: Oh Lord protect this body, protect this mind, protect this intellect, protect this ego [three times]. I am not this body, I am not this mind, I am not this intellect, I am not this ego [three times].
How does your work relate to the artistic practices and traditions of various regions in India?
I am attracted to cultural contamination, to inclusive views, to rituals, to handmade things, to anonymity, to anything that looks worn by time, to anything that has a feel of poverty and nobility at the same time. I encounter many of these qualities as I roam across India.
In contrast to the conceptual art practices of the 1970s, why did you choose instead to include representation, narrative and the figure in your work?
I did not choose. I made room for a work to happen. The work manifested itself this way. Sociological concerns just don’t seem so important if you begin to listen to the troubling noises of mind and body. “Ready-made,” “appropriation” are excellent tools if you want to show what art is. I am more interested to show why art is; hence I paint and draw.
You have explored a variety of more traditional, artisanal materials and modes of working. Can you please share how that evolved for you and what those processes and materials are in your artwork?
The work mimics the fragmented state of the world. It mimics a world in flux, where the only constant is “the continuity of discontinuity.” Not only do my mediums change all the time but also the supporting surfaces of my paintings are never the same for long. By doing this I chase the ever-changing nature of our perception and aim at stripping it naked of conventional truths.
In 2013, you had an exhibition of tents, something different from your usual exhibitions of paintings. How did this come about?
I had spent time in China, and from China the world appears bigger than ever. I felt challenged to make larger, more public paintings, but I didn’t want to lose softness, vulnerability and sensuality of touch. These are the tents—they are enormous paintings you can touch, smell, sleep in.
The tents are all hand-painted, inside and out. How does that influence the experience the viewer has, even though they are inside a gallery setting?
The beautiful thing about handmade things is that they always make room for something unexpected to happen. In this case I had not anticipated that the painted walls of the tents were going to be viewed in a dim light, the same light of ancient churches or primordial caves.
How do you unite your Western aesthetics with your interests in Eastern mysticism and spiritualism?
All these divisions, East and West, North and South, are an invention of imperialist and consumerist politics. If you want to invade a place with your armies or with your products you have to make everyone believe that the place is different than your own and that it is an empty place. To the eye of the poets and the artists I admire there is no East or West, there is only a suffering mind or an awakened mind.
How do you use symbolism in your work? Why is it part of your artistic language to use symbols?
The loss of the sense of the sacred and the loss of a symbolic language is at the root of the ecological catastrophe we witness today. Rational thinking is not enough to defend the mind from itself. War, genocide and the destruction of the earth are conceived of “rationally.” They are the sum of “rational” decisions.
Courtney Love has a reputation that often precedes her. However, through her private and public ups and downs she has proven herself to be not only an honest talent but a truly committed artist. As she put it in conversation with friend Jemima Kirke, “I have a lot of regrets, of course I do…but I did it my way.”
JEMIMA KIRKE: Hi Courtney!
COURTNEY LOVE: Hi Jemima, how are you doing?
JK: I don’t know—I’ve just been yelling at contractors for a little bit. I’m trying to destress right now by talking to you.
CL: Are you doing your apartment?
JK: I’m doing the bottom floor of the house and turning it into a playroom. But anyway, you know how contractors are—so full of shit. Anyhow, where are you?
CL: I’m in Los Angeles.
JK: Do you like it there? How long have you been there? Seems you’ve been in L.A. for so long now.
CL: Like a year and a half almost. It’s ironic: I don’t love it at all. I lived here for 20something years of my life, in New York for about eight and then in London for maybe four. Then Oregon, Portland and Seattle for maybe three or five years. But L.A., I used to love it, and then I just don’t like it anymore. After living in New York for so long, I don’t like it, but I’m getting a lot of acting jobs here. So by being here I’m getting jobs. I just got this film, so I’ll be fine.
JK: What’s the film?
CL: They are doing the offer today. It’s called The Long Home, with James Franco, and I’m sure there’s not going to be any problems with the offer or anything. It’s like a Southern Gothic, moonshiney film. I’m his wife. It’s a good role. I’m happy about it.
JK: Is it sexy? Do you make out with him?
CL: No, not in this draft. The original draft, William Gay wrote when he was alive. There’s going to be some revisions, but I’m basically a hooker who is his wife. He’s a moonshiner and I run, like, his brothel, so the first time you see me, I’m doing something sexual with a sailor. It’s pretty dark—William Gay was like O’Connor or Faulkner or something like that, like he was in that group of Southern Gothic writers.
JK: Do you find that acting with someone like James Franco who is super talented makes a difference?
CL: Absolutely. I’m really emphatic and unfortunately reactive, so I can’t really hold my own. If somebody sucks, I’ll probably suck, and if somebody’s really good, then I’ll come up to their level.
JK: I saw you in Empire. Courtney, you were so fucking good! I was blown away!
CL: Oh, thank you!
JK: It’s just your singing—you singing was my favorite part. It was your voice, it was your style, it was the way you sang painfully, you know, so that was awesome. When you got sent that role, did you immediately want to do that?
CL: Yeah! I didn’t get sent that role, though.
JK: Did you pursue them?
CL: I didn’t pursue—more like stalk. I wrote Lee Daniels and said: “Hi, I’m a big fan. Love, Courtney Love,” and like two minutes later my phone rings and it was Lee Daniels and he said: “I’m doing this little show; no one knows if it’s going to be a hit or not, but will you take a part on it?” and I said: “Absolutely, what’s the part?” and it was supposed to be R&B, and I can’t sing R&B. It’s kind of a really funny story: Initially, he wanted me to sing this Patti LaBelle song that not even Patti LaBelle can sing anymore, with such crazy high Mariah notes, right, and there were like four or five Fox executives on the phone and I sang it to Lee and Lee said, “That’s great,” but I sang it to these Fox executives. It’s called “Messing with My Mind.” It’s not a hit, it’s like a deep cut, and they were cringing, like, “Oh my god, you can’t sing that.” I was so bad at it. So then they sent me down to Timbaland to Hit Factory and we came to the compromise that I would sing “Take Me to the River.” So I came down to Hit Factory in Miami and the first night Timbaland was all, “What is the deal with this girl who can’t hit notes?” and he’s very musically intelligent, but I was like, well, “You know, think Patti Smith, think Bob Dylan,” and he said, “OK, I get it, I get it,” but it was really funny for the first two hours. He was like, “Well, can you hit this note?” and I’m like, “No, I’ve never hit that note.”
JK: But I think it’s great that you took it on knowing you probably couldn’t deliver on it and you made it you. I think a good actor is not somebody who can do anything they’re asked to do, but someone who can take it and make it doable for them.
CL: Yeah, it did definitely change the character to a rock singer more like Joplin or Stevie Nicks more than a Mariah singer.
JK: But you killed it. The episode wouldn’t have been as good or you wouldn’t have been able to do it as well. When I see a scene that has crying, or if a scene opens with crying, I’m like, “I don’t know how to cry on command. I need some dialogue—can we put some dialogue in here to help me get there?”
CL: I hate doing it. Look, in my whole career I’ve only pulled off crying on cue one time, and that was in Man on the Moon with Jim Carrey. And he has cancer in the movie. All day long I was walking around with all these triggers, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, and then it’s time to cue the scene and I’m all worked up! In the scene in Empire where I’m crying because she’s taking my drugs from me, I had to mist my eyes, but then I did start to really cry. I’m taking acting classes and that’s where the stamina is, and my acting coach is excellent and I go to class a lot and the more I get on stage and do deeper stuff, the more I really want to do a play. I just read for this play; it takes months and months to set these things up. I don’t want to say what it is, but it’s a good one. It’s a play about what happens to rockers—this role is about me. It’s a play of what happens to rockers who don’t make it, so what happens to say, someone in Helium 10 years from now, you know? Helium was an indie band that I took on tour back when you were a fetus. Like what happens to those bands, or Super Furry Animals or whatever, that didn’t make it. So it’s meta, in the sense that there’s lines like: “I don’t get nervous, I’ve opened for Thurston Moore,” you know? She gets a Matador deal and betrays her son over it. It’s a meta play. It’s not me, but it’s in my wheelhouse, so it’s really, really interesting and I really want to do it.
JK: It’s that angle that they always keep chasing it, chasing the dream, or maybe just chasing and trying to keep making music.
CL: That’s exactly what this is, and it’s a really good play. I hope it gets done. It’s by a writer named Sam Marks.
JK: Do you like doing plays more or making music?
CL: I haven’t done plays in New York proper, ever, so I don’t know. I did this musical and that required some acting as well. I have fidgeting issues, I have hand issues, I have issues with my physicality, like keeping a posture straight and all this stuff that I have to think about when I’m on film or TV.
JK: It’s strange because you’ve been on stage in your life more than you’ve been in front of a camera. I know it’s different because that’s singing, but it’s still performing.
CL: It is, it’s performance, but being a different person and having a fourth wall and not being able to hand out flowers to people in the front row or hold their hands or break the fourth wall, that’s a skill in itself.
JK: When you say being a different person, do you mean being a different person from who you are?
CL: Yeah, to be this character is really challenging and something I really want to do. I mean, I’ve done enough films to know how to save up my energy for the take and then give it on the take and do that, but I was never trained before in the ’90s when I was doing films, and so now I’ve decided to really go for being trained, you know, take on Shakespeare, take on things that are really difficult and challenging for me.
JK: Do you find that now that you’re being trained you’re learning so much more than you wish you knew?
CL: Oh god, yeah, from posture to breathing to fidgeting. I saw a play called Marjorie Prime at the Taper and they’re robots basically, and it stars Lois Smith, who’s a stage actress who’s been around forever, and she stops still—everyone in that play stops still. And it was really an epiphany, because, you know, there is no onstage fidgeting. You know, with Kansas City Choir Boy I also had to learn how to interpret someone else’s music and interpret someone else’s direction onstage in a live and intimate space. In rock ’n’ roll it’s really about being as vulnerable as possible and giving them what they want. But onstage it’s about pausing, about internal life, it’s about internal triggers—that’s one of the reasons I’m really challenged to do a play. I’m super excited to be doing a movie; I just got offered another indie movie too and I’m really, really excited to be doing these films. And I think I’m coming back to Empire. I think so. So that would be really amazing, especially now that it’s a hit. The wardrobe department will be really on fire. I can’t wait for that. They spent a fortune on everything and the wardrobe department kind of suffered, so it was every man for himself, because no one knew it was a hit yet. When Naomi Campbell came on she hired a stylist. I called Marchesa and got a gown; they were really kind about it, but people didn’t want to take a chance on an unknown show yet, and then it blew up.
JK: That’s always fun! I love going to fittings before we shoot. It’s one of my favorite things.
CL: Do you find that what you wear for your character on Girls is inspired a lot from what you’re wearing personally? Because I certainly do. What I’m wearing really informs, you know what I’m talking about?
JK: Absolutely. A good stylist knows that and is not going to push you to wear something that you’re not comfortable with. Period pieces are a whole other thing. But yes, it’s collaboration. I’ve learned so much from the stylists; it’s truly not about just dressing in what looks good or fits right or is cute or whatever. It’s how does this outfit that she’s wearing today show where she is right now in her life? Subtle things, like putting matching
colors with some of the characters just to show and bring the connection, and like replacing something that one character used to wear and now I’m wearing it, it’s really cool. And how about the other one you did, the motorcycle one, what’s it called? The Hells Angels one, but it’s not Hells Angels?
CL: Oh, Sons of Anarchy.
JK: I didn’t get to watch that.
CL: It wasn’t a lot. It was my start into this chapter of my life. Again, I got in touch with the producer, Kurt Sutter, and I was like, “Can I be on your show?” He gave me the part of a kindergarten teacher and it was really like dowdy dresses and espadrilles. It was really great. I wasn’t like chomping on the scenery—it wasn’t like with Empire, where I got some big stuff. I was there as a supporting costar and that’s what I did. But I was still crazy nervous about it because it’s been 10 years; I hadn’t acted professionally in 10 years at that point, and Kurt really did me a solid by letting me have that part because, you know, it sort of showed the community and I am proving it slowly that I show up, that I show up early, that I’m on time, that they can dress me in anything. I don’t really care, I’m not picky—if it’s right for the character, it’s fine, you know? And I really want the community to know that.
JK: What community?
CL: What?
JK:The audience? When you say “the community”?
CL: The film community—like the Screen Actors Guild and the Producers Guild and the Directors Guild.
JK: Yeah, OK.
CL: So that’s why I live in L.A., because most of the community is here. A lot of the theater community is in New York. There are some serious great actresses, like Julianne Moore, who live in New York as well. Hopefully I can get to the level where I can move back.
JK: I understand why you live in L.A. I think it’s quite humbling; I think it shows you really want this. Sometimes you need to move for a while and someone like Julianne Moore doesn’t need to move to L.A. and I think that’s cool that you’re starting at the place where you feel you should be.
CL: Also, I’m really near my daughter, a few blocks down. Not that I see her every day, but we do spend the night like once a week or something.
JK: Do you feel like people have a preconceived notion of you that affects how they are seeing you or whether they hire you?
CL: Not really right now. It’s coming undone—it’s definitely going away.
JK: I think it’s your own doing, by the way.
CL: No, it’s Lee Daniels’ and Kurt Sutter’s doing, by giving me these roles. It’s showing the community that I can.
JK: But you were professional. If you weren’t professional on set or if you didn’t do your job right, then people wouldn’t hire you. They gave you these jobs to give you the opportunity, but you stepped up.
CL: I’m not hearing any blowback at all. I mean, even when I stepped out from doing films and had a dark period, I never did anything dark on a set, so I never made enemies on a set. I never was a bad girl on a set; I always considered films a really sacred space, so when I had my problems, I had them very much away from the film community. Look, there’s so many people in the program, in recovery. I’ve talked to Kurt Sutter and Lee Daniels and they know where I’m at. My agents are really nurturing and great. I didn’t have an agent for 10 years, so I’m devoted to my agents and I’m devoted to my publicist. They’re fantastic. I have a really good team around me.
JK: On a side note, are you really 50?
CL: Yes, I’m 50. I turned 50 in July. But I’m not going out and getting a facelift.
JK: How do you feel about it? I’ve heard from a few actresses that it’s hard to get good roles as you get older.
CL: Well, you can get a little disillusioned.
JK: Do you ever regret not taking advantage of things more when you were younger?
CL: Regrets, I have a few, but in the end, as Frank Sinatra sings, “I did it my way.”
JK: You know those people who say they don’t have any regrets? I hate that so much.
CL: I have a few regrets, for sure.
JK: It’s so inhuman and so immoral to say, “I have no regrets.”
CL: Je ne regrette rien. I have a lot of regrets, of course I do. I should have taken that part; I should have maybe married that one, I don’t know, but I didn’t. So I am what I am and I’m pretty condent that I can break in. I think what I have to offer on film and on television is honest and I’m more disciplined than I was ever before.
JK: I 100 percent agree, and I think that your discipline is going to take you far, because there’s a lot of people who can be emotional and vulnerable.
CL: You know, part of me wants to do what Lena [Dunham] did in the sense of coming up with my own idea and my own show. I’m not as prolific a writer as her; I need a cowriter, because I can’t just do it myself. I just can’t.
JK: Everyone needs a cowriter.
CL: Yeah, so I found this girl Kit and this girl Dierdre. And basically started. I don’t have the pitch done yet, but these girls understand it.
JK: Lena targeted a niche, a very specific niche that if you tried to say what it was before she wrote it not a lot of people could relate. It’s a very specific type of person, type of crowd. Everyone’s on the feminist train right now, which I’m thrilled about, but right now it needs to be about older women.
CL: It’s about what happens after 40 with men, with money and with life and real estate.
JK: My mother is the perfect character study for this right now. I mean really—her life has completely changed. Bigger changes happened now than in her 20s.
CL: Definitely.
JK: She’s having more fun right now than I am. I can’t imagine what she’s learning about herself.
CL: I’m sure she’s having a blast. Your mom is a big influence on me, aesthetically and all sorts of ways. I love your mom. I got fascinated with all these characters around her, from the psychic to your sisters to your neighbors.
JK: It’s very hard to describe to people sometimes the way I grew up, because it wasn’t like my parents were irresponsible. They weren’t necessarily reckless, but they were bringing all types of energy into the house, all kinds of people. There were never doctors or lawyers but there were all kinds of others. I feel like the criteria for who she would let in the house was always just like, “Do they have kids? Can they play with my kids? Are they interesting to me?” She loved bringing people in the house from all walks of life. Interesting, that’s for sure. So you’re doing a tour with Lana Del Rey, right?
CL: I’m doing a tour with Lana Del Rey. She’s young enough to be my daughter—it’s kind of weird.
JK: Did you choose that? Did you choose Lana Del Rey?
CL: It just happened, Jemima. I was like, “Lana, come to London to the British Fashion Awards with me,” and she was like, “OK. If I do that, then you have to do a little bit of my tour,” and I was like, “OK, I’ll do a little bit of your tour,” and that led to me writing two songs and I’m dropping a single. One’s called “Died Blonde” and the other one’s called “Miss Narcissist,” and “Miss Narcissist” is like the catchiest song of my career so far.
JK: Really?
CL: Yeah, it’s super good. I heard it yesterday. It’s not mastered yet, but I’ve heard it mixed and it’s really good and modern sounding but still grungy and rock. I don’t think it’s going to end up on Billboard or on radio, but there’s enough outlets for alternative radio that it will end up there. By the way, if you’re in L.A. and you listen to KROQ, they don’t play a lot of chicks. They play me a little, they play Paramore a little, they play No Doubt a little, and that’s sort of it. I’m the last chick on alternative radio that they’ll play, and it’s really kind of stupid. It’s so hard for rock ’n’ roll right now—it’s so hard. I have someone really close to me who is in a rock band and they’re excellent, they’re the best rock band I’ve heard in years, and they signed an old school deal with Interscope but it’s really a struggle and it’s a struggle just to be middle class. I’m not talking big houses and art collections. I’m talking about just getting by.
JK: I mean I don’t know anything about the struggles in the music industry, but I can only imagine that you have to do a fuckload of touring.
CL: That’s what you gotta do, go on tour. So this is a little bit of touring, but I want to go back to acting immediately after it. In fact, I have to weave the touring days in and out of my Franco movie.
JK: Did I read something about you and Miley Cyrus? What are you doing with Miley Cyrus?
CL: Yeah, Twitter is an amazing thing, because people follow each other and they can make friends, and so Miley Cyrus asked me to like come and have a drink with her at the Chateau, so I went and had coffee with her. I ended up taking her over to Brett Ratner’s, who’s basically my best friend in town.
JK: But why did you bring Miley Cyrus to him?
CL: Actually, Miley, when she had Hannah Montana, had already done a video with Brett, and Brett’s house is like the equivalent of your mom’s in a way in L.A. It’s like a salon—you go over to Brett’s house, you never know who you’re going to meet. Michel Gondry could be there or like porn stars from the Valley. It’s really fun. You never know who’s going to be at Brett’s house—it’s awesome.
JK: Are you doing any music with Miley Cyrus?
CL: No, I have not made any music with Miley Cyrus. I don’t know that that would be a good match, but she’s really put together and smart. I liked her a lot.
JK: I want to ask you, this is something that I think we can relate on, you on a much stronger level, by the way, but do you find it frustrating that you have to so strongly prove yourself when you want to be called an actor?
CL: Absolutely.
JK: My nightmare is to be “that girl from Girls.” I always feel like if you make a lot of money doing something or if you’re doing something for a long time, then that’s what you are to people.
CL: Yeah, like a rock star, like a provocative rock star that sings about gnarly stuff. Which, by the way, these songs don’t do anything to dispel that; they’re both really kind of filthy. But that’s kind of what I do—I do sort of work in torture, filth, angst and torment. I don’t do straight love songs. I can’t. It’s not in me. So when it comes to music, it is what it is. I remember seeing a Marianne Faithfull quote about why she didn’t do anything like
Broken English after Broken English back in 1978, and she said: “I didn’t want to be the rage girl,” but it’s still what she’s known for, that comeback and that rage.
JK: We have to be so calculated with our moves, you know, and that really stops what you actually want to do. I hate this expression, but at the end of the day, if you take yourself seriously at whatever you’re doing, then people will take you seriously.
CL: It’s what you said earlier—it’s about discipline. Discipline is going to see me through, so I think as long as I show up and I’m disciplined, but I still have to prove myself … I got asked to speak at TED—they want me to speak on “reputation.”
JK: Oh, you should do it!
CL: I’m thinking, rather than speak on it, why don’t I just prove it? You know what I mean? Rather than discuss it out loud in front of the world, why don’t I just prove it and then maybe speak on it after I’ve proven it? Take a bad reputation and turn it into a good one, take all those things that were hideous and turn poison into medicine. So that’s my answer to that, my love.
JK: I have a million more questions, but we can save that for some other time.
CL: All right, darling. I can’t wait to see you.
JK: Me too. Thanks, Courtney.
Coat – Vintage | Necklace – Pamela Love | Shirt – Dries Van Noten | Bra – La Perla | Tights – Capezio | Shoes – Christian Louboutin
It’s been 10 years since Saglio landed a plum internship at Vogue Paris and worked her way up the editorial ladder to the distinguished rank of the title’s fashion editor, where she remains today, curating a vision of style under the industry’s watchful eye.
Despite her sixth sense for fashion (she’s regularly snapped by street-style bloggers for her cool Parisian-girl vibe), Saglio didn’t always envision herself immersed in a world of runway shows and photo shoots. “I first started studying economics,” explains the native Parisian—who continues to live today in the same arrondissement in which she grew up. But Saglio quickly got bored and within two years made the leap to fashion school, enrolling in ESMOD, alma mater to the likes of designers Thierry Mugler and Olivier Rousteing and Marie Claire creative director Nina Garcia. “It was interesting because they offered many internships in the industry, and it allowed me to have various short experiences in press departments, commercial departments and marketing,” notes Saglio, whose final internship was a six month stint at Vogue Paris. “I loved everything there,” she says. And the rest is magazine history.
Like most budding fashion editors, Saglio paid her dues performing tasks such as clothing returns, eventually earning herself a coveted spot as the second assistant to then editor-in-chief Carine Roitfeld (who departed for new editorial pastures in 2011). But a chance to help on a photo shoot in Los Angeles afforded Saglio the opportunity to work for 10 days with then fashion director (and current editor-in-chief) Emmanuelle Alt. From then on, Saglio cut her teeth as Alt’s main assistant, working for five years before earning her stripes and current title of fashion editor. And lest anyone think a fashion assistant’s job doesn’t have some humorous moments, think again: “I had just started working as Emmanuelle’s assistant; I barely knew her and we were not yet on familiar terms,” explains Saglio. “We were shooting in the Seychelles and the first night, while I was fast asleep, she came knocking on my door at 3 a.m. I mean, she was my boss, not my friend, but she asked to sleep with me because there was this terrifying insect in her room!”
It’s no surprise that this editor, whose expertly trained eye is responsible for landing of-the-moment designers on the pages of one of the world’s most respected fashion magazines, has her own, seemingly effortless style down pat. Saglio likes to rock a self described “classic, masculine” style and identifies an old Isabel Marant sweatshirt, a vintage Saint Laurent smocking and a pair of black jeans as favorite pieces in her own well-edited closet. “I have always been obsessed with Saint Laurent and his smocking,” says Saglio, who counts Jane Birkin and Betty Catroux among her personal style icons and currently has her eye on designers Anthony Vaccarello, Fausto Puglisi and Christophe Lemaire.
So next time you’re lusting over looks in Vogue Paris, you know who to thank.
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In a theoretical economy with two goods and a fixed productivity, when you increase the production of guns you must simultaneously lower the production of butter, or vice versa. “Guns and Butter,” the saying goes. You can only get more of something by giving up something else, but you always need both.
It’s an esoteric economics reference, but it became the go-to expression for Craig Lieckfelt and his friends, thanks to an eccentric high school science teacher who used it gratuitously. Before Lieckfelt put his knife set in the back of a car and drove from his NYC apartment to Detroit in May 2012 to launch his pop-up restaurant, he called a childhood friend looking to affirm his name choice.
“He suggested that maybe it wasn’t smart to open a restaurant in Detroit with the word ‘guns’ in it. At least not if I wanted people to come,” Lieckfelt says. “I immediately thanked him for the affirmation, and it’s been Guns + Butter ever since.”
You don’t need to spend much time with Lieckfelt to realize he’s completely unimpeded.
Guns + Butter started with an eight-course, $65 dinner that Lieckfelt cooked in the kitchen of a breakfast joint in Corktown, a neighborhood considered by some to be the cradle of Detroit’s burgeoning DIY artist scene. The three-night dinner series sold out, which set the precedent for the whirlwind that has followed SoHo, Brooklyn, Tribeca and the East Village in New York City. India, Singapore and London. A Dubai series in partnership with Rolling Stone magazine. The Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles (where Lieckfelt illegally served smuggled foie gras). A dinner on Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain. Intermittent returns to Detroit, where he recently received 1,000 reservation requests in less than 24 hours for 60 available seats.
It’s not overly generous to say that the Guns + Butter pop-up experience has put the former Jean Georges sous chef on the world’s culinary map. This 18-month sprint started with little more than Lieckfelt’s incessant drive and culminated with Bourdain’s televised pronouncement that this guy could be running a 300-seat restaurant in Las Vegas.
Lieckfelt is not opening a 300-seat restaurant in Las Vegas. Instead, he’s realizing his lifelong dream by opening the brick-and-mortar Guns + Butter restaurant in a city whose residents didn’t have access to a national grocery chain until this past year: Detroit. Lieckfelt’s moving cherry-bomb radishes across a mandolin slicer, veins flexing through the ink of a faded Old English “D” tattooed on his forearm. The radishes fall onto the cutting board in crisp shavings, sliced so thinly they are little more than transparent circles with a fine red border. With tweezers in hand he meticulously layers them atop a piece of skinned walleye, caught from a Michigan lake by the father of his sous chef and lightly seasoned with salt and chili powder. The detailed scales of a fish emerge, and it’s clear that Lieckfelt is creating something he’s envisioned for months. Every movement is scientific in its precision yet simultaneously appears almost completely involuntary. He throws a dash of chili pepper across the layered scales and adds six miniscule green Thai chilies to the surface with painstaking accuracy. He starts indecisively rearranging the green chilies.
“Every bite should have a chili; you have to imagine the cuts.”
It’s a constant and delicate balancing of sight and taste. While hoping to maximize both, Lieckfelt will never sacrifice the latter.
He moves the single piece of walleye to the top level of a multitiered bamboo steamer. While it cooks he quickly whips together a dill and olive oil puree in his blender and lightly wilts fresh garbanzo shoot and radishes with a radish juice. He prepares an immaculately white plate with the puree and the garbanzo shoot and radishes, which are now heated and smell like summer. There is an art to plating, and Lieckfelt will do it over and over and over again until he finds the right collage of taste, color and texture. It’s a race against lowering temperatures as he lifts the top of the steamer and moves the pristine piece of walleye from stove to plate, where it’s slowly and carefully set in place. Lieckfelt has cooked for presidents, he’s eaten at the most distinguished restaurants in the world, and he’s relentlessly critical of his own work, but after plating the fish he looks up at me with a giant, childish grin on his face.
“That’s some sexy-ass shit.”
You can only be so refined in Detroit.
Two nights prior to this cooking session I’m sitting on a halfassembled sectional in Lieckfelt’s sparsely furnished loft while he tries to explain an incoherent sketch in his oversized notepad. It’s another bitter-cold February night in Detroit, and I’m staring at an outline for the walleye dish that he had been developing since the previous June. For every two explanatory sentences out of his mouth, there’s at least one tangential sentence about some Jay-Z song playing in the background, or a piece of art, or a childhood anecdote from the city that lies beyond his windows. It feels like some sort of unproductive, two-steps-forward, onestep-back routine, until I realize that Lieckfelt finds and constructs meaning by piecing together these seemingly disparate parts. Jay-Z. Graffiti. Detroit. In some sense, he thinks like he cooks.
He points to the postcard taped beside the chicken-scratch handwriting in his notepad. It’s one half of a flier for a 2012 exhibition at Detroit’s Library Street Collective gallery. In June, Lieckfelt’s business partner had sent him a text message with the image on that postcard. It’s a painting by REVOK, the renowned L.A.-based graffiti artist who has spent a lot of time in Detroit in recent years, inspired by the city’s overwhelming sense of possibility and enabled by the unencumbered freedom you find here as an artist. REVOK’s first foray from the streets to the gallery world was a collection of 3-D collages he made by assembling various pieces of reclaimed wood he found throughout Detroit’s storied cityscape, a third of which is abandoned. When REVOK attended a Guns + Butter pop-up last May, Lieckfelt respected his presence by serving the dinner’s Baby Greek salad course on a plank of reclaimed wood. This subtle gesture, along with REVOK’s attendance, is reflective of the general support network that exists between Detroiters who are pursuing tenacious dreams in this city of harsh realities.
It was two months after that dinner with REVOK that Lieckfelt received the text message with a picture of REVOK’s painting. The vivid, brightly colored circles layered like the scales of a fish immediately moved him. They conjured images of overflowing stands of vegetables, fruits and flowers in Eastern Market. The evening sun sinking lazily into the Detroit River. Fishing up north. Summertime in Michigan. For Lieckfelt, memory of taste and memory of place are one and the same; he accesses one through the other. He realized that a particular technique he’s used to prepare potatoes would effectively mimic the scaled texture of REVOK’s painting, but that realization was met with a poignant discord.
“Potatoes are not a purely summer ingredient. I’m not going to cook a summer dish with ingredients that aren’t summer specific. He adds, “That’s not some marketing ploy; that’s being a chef.”
Lieckfelt immediately began experimenting with other preparation techniques and summer-specific ingredients. When summer ended before he had actually created the dish he was envisioning, he was forced to move the creative process from his kitchen to his sketchbook.
It’s February before he’s figured out the right ingredients, aesthetic and approach, and apparently they’re outlined in the incoherent notes he’s trying to walk me through. As his words trip over cigarettes and Jay-Z references, we decide it’s best that he finally just cooks his REVOK-inspired creation, which is what he does two days later. The dish, like REVOK’s work with reclaimed materials, is more than homage to the past or Lieckfelt’s memory of it; it’s his attempt to make those memories both present and transforming.
For Lieckfelt, cooking itself is an act of remembrance. It’s the process by which he connects his past to his present and explores the possibilities of his future—a process that is deeply tied to a sense of place, and that place is Detroit. Guns + Butter is more than his tribute to the diversity of fauna and flora that exists within Michigan. It’s more than his attempt to bring the taste of Detroit to the world, which he will undoubtedly do. Guns + Butter is Jay-Z CDs played over the speakers of his high school Chevy. It’s sweat on inner-city basketball courts and undermined racial tensions. It’s hunting trips up north. An egg fried with a pound of butter in his gramma’s kitchen. The smell of spices and raw meat in Eastern Market. It’s the city’s salt mines. Summers on Belle Isle. Bitter-cold February nights. It’s sacrifice and respect and family and hard work. It’s a constant return to these things.
It’s a return home.
When Lieckfelt finally opens the doors to Guns + Butter’s permanent location in downtown Detroit this July, that return will be very real.
Imagine having the potential to be the best in the world at what you do, yet also knowing there’s a pretty good chance many people will never believe you got there honestly, no matter what proof you provide. And then just saying, “Who gives a shit. I’m doing it anyway.” That kind of mindset requires a very rare combination of qualities, including (but not exclusively): world-class talent, bulletproof confidence and balls of steel.
Welcome to the world of Tejay van Garderen, a man competing in cycling, a tarnished sport that is still on its path to resurrection following a catastrophic doping scandal that spanned and discredited the results of 20 years of accomplishments, and the best and brightest hope for America since Lance Armstrong, perhaps the most reviled athlete in the history of popular culture. If this were 2000, van Garderen, a handsome, supremely talented 26-year-old who has done everything the right way, who finished fifth in the Tour de France last year and who is now poised to take home the title this summer as the unquestioned leader of the BMC Racing Team, would be a media darling. But as it stands now, van Garderen is flying well below the radar of the zeitgeist, and that is probably a good thing. Too much scrutiny at this point would only invite cynicism by the public at large, thanks to Armstrong’s sociopathic behavior during his now discredited seven Tour wins and the revelations that every other top rider during his era was doping as well. It will all shake out this summer. No pressure.
Van Garderen was born in Tacoma, Washington, but spent his formative years in Bozeman, Montana, a picturesque Western city with ravishing mountain vistas and a noted hub for outdoor sports junkies. It was there that his stepfather, a Dutchman named Marcel van Garderen (Tejay took his last name after being legally adopted), turned the 9-year-old on to cycling. The kid was a natural, especially when it came to climbing, the sport’s most grueling, oxygen-depleting, lactic-acid-inducing, soul-crushing subdiscipline, and by the time he was 18 he had already won 10 junior national titles. He turned pro that same year, then began his ascent to potential greatness.
Regardless of his future accomplishments, it is a near certainty van Garderen will be judged within the Armstrong prism, an unwarranted fate by any standard. A much more apt—and fair—comparison would be Greg LeMond, the last clean American cycling superstar and unquestioned winner of the Tour three times (1986, 1989, 1990). Like LeMond, van Garderen married very young (van Garderen got hitched to his longtime girlfriend, Jessica, at 23; LeMond was 20 when he tied the knot), moved to Europe because it was the only way to perfect his craft, did so without the requisite linguistic or cultural skills, began his career as a domestique (a supporting player, in cycling lingo) and then emerged from the peloton with a giant target on his back thanks to his nationality. But LeMond didn’t do it in the shadow of Lance. And van Garderen is, for now, just a prospect, not a winner. Not yet.
If van Garderen does in fact bring it home on the Champs-Élysées in July, wearing the yellow jersey with the customary glass of champagne in his hand as he crosses the finish line, he insists he’s prepared for the inevitable scrutiny that will come with a Tour win, especially one from an American. “I’m proud to tell people I’m a cyclist, regardless of whatever they think, or whatever insinuations come along with that,” says van Garderen. “Cycling obviously has an unfortunate history, but there’s been a lot to clean things up, and hopefully the public starts to trust that, trust the testing and trust the athletes. It’s a clean sport now, so I can’t really speak to the past. I wasn’t there. I came in after all of that stuff.”
Tucked back on an old road in the Pacific Palisades, fashion designer, husband and father John Ward lives amongst the eucalyptus trees and brush of the Southern California canyon. The success of his first line, Three Dots, a quality T-shirt company that offered a variety of men’s sizes when everything was only one size fits all, launched his career. His learning curve widened, though, with his next brand, Maggie Ward, an ambitious project that eventually put him out of business due to the new challenges of creating a whole line and the backlash of the recession. But with any experience comes gems of wisdom. “One element of that line,” Ward recalls, “that always met with a lot of success is these leggings that I did with really beautiful Italian Ponte. It always sold well in the stores. Year after year, people would ask me for those leggings. So I talked to somebody who was interested in partnering up and starting a new line based on the leggings. That fell through. Gary Freedman, my lawyer for a long time, drew up some plans for me. When I told him it fell through, he said, ‘Well, it’s a good concept—why don’t you talk to Citizens about it?’ I threw together some sweatshirts to go with the leggings, made out of this artisanal Japanese fleece. It’s really very simple shapes, but beautiful fabrics. I showed it to everybody at Citizens and they loved it.”
Born from this huge setback in his life, Ward launched the new line, Getting Back to Square One, in 2013 with Citizens of Humanity, and the response was encouraging. They sold to approximately 60 stores and received several reorders. Ward’s penchant for details and quality fabric are key to the brand. The factories he works with in Italy use innovative treatments to create amazing Ponte, essentially a type of double-knit fabric. Ward explains: “The quality of the Pontes are incredible. People get them and wear them and just are amazed how much they hold up. They don’t stretch out. They’re indestructible. It’s almost like an investment that’s going to last, which is, in today’s world, almost a novel idea, that you’re going to buy a piece of clothing that’s going to hold up.”
Though leggings make sense in climates other than Los Angeles, they are practical and there’s been quite a revolution of how women dress on a daily basis. It’s common to see women wearing yoga pants to run errands, so leggings are a smart bet for the market. “It’s practical to get in and out of the cab with leggings. It’s a practical thing to throw a sweater over. It’s practical indoors and out. It’s great to travel with. It’s easy to just throw in a suitcase without worrying about getting wrinkled. It’s an easy, versatile piece of clothing. It’s something, if you put the right things together, you look put together, rather than sloppy. Especially when you want to do something quickly … I think women are feeling more secure about wearing tight things on the bottom, period. It’s sort of an easy jump for this. Also, I think there are a lot of cheap leggings out there on the market. People don’t want to look trashy, so the idea of a premium legging is appealing. It doesn’t have to be so fashion-based. It’s a fundamental part of what you need from day to day,” Ward shares.
Not one to underestimate chance, the opportunity to create a line with Citizens has helped relaunch Ward with a line that can’t be taken for granted. Ultimately, the idea of his product is embracing a real great quality of fabric, something he has always championed.
In his words, “Getting back to square one simply means getting back to something that you really know how to do well and taking that approach.”
When Albert Watson shot that iconic photograph of Steve Jobs, the one that appeared on the cover of the maverick innovator’s biography and stayed on his company’s website for a month after his 2011 death, he needed a strategy. He couldn’t ask a personality like that, notoriously headstrong and skeptical, to just stand there.
As the session began, Jobs commented, with some annoyance, on the photographer’s archaic use of film. Why not use digital?
“I don’t feel digital’s quite there yet,” Watson replied.
“’We’ll get there,’” he remembers Jobs saying, a promise that proved true. Already the two men were butting heads over their areas of expertise, and what Watson said next played right into this dynamic.
“You have something in mind but everyone in the room is against you,” Watson said, asking Jobs to imagine himself into that situation and adopt the appropriate pose. Jobs stared intently forward and put his knuckles to his chin, a more aggressive, confident spin on the familiar “I’m thinking” gesture. Watson shot a test Polaroid and then the photograph that has circulated so widely since. Jobs asked to keep the Polaroid. “He said it was the best photo ever taken of him,” Watson recalls.
Fans of the photo, like photographer Levi Sim, who made a series of images inspired by it, have pointed out that the subject’s face and features compel you so completely that you don’t think about who the photographer is, what kind of lights he used or what kind of camera.
This has been among Watson’s strengths almost since the beginning: being stylistically distinct without taking attention away from his subjects.
Born and raised near in Southern Scotland, Watson studied graphic design for three years in Dundee before going to film school in London, even he decided in his teens that, at least in some capacity, he wanted to take pictures for the rest of his life. In 1970, he moved to Los Angeles with his wife, Elizabeth, who found a teaching job that could help keep them afloat for a while, and began looking for photography work. He received his first serious assignment in 1973, when Harper’s Bazaar called, looking for someone to photograph Alfred Hitchcock for their Christmas issue. Understandably nervous, Watson devoured Hitchcock’s films in preparation.
The director had shared some goose cooking tips with the magazine, and the editors imagined an image of him standing in an apron with a platter in one hand. This struck the young photographer as needlessly tame. What if this director known for psychological thrillers held the skinned goose by the neck? Wouldn’t that be truer to the Hitchcock ethos?
“Well, you’re sort of strangling it,” Watson told Hitchcock once their session had begun, “and you’re feeling a little bit guilty that you killed this goose, but [y]ou killed it, so what are you going to do?” The goose has a bow around its neck in the finished photo, and Hitchcock’s expression is perfect — slightly regretful but not quite apologetic.
By 1974, Watson had opened one studio in Los Angeles and smaller one in New York. By 1976, he was living fulltime in New York, where ad and fashion work was more plentiful — he had started taking Vogue assignments — and where the industrious, fast-paced feeling better suited his sensibility (“You have to be careful in L.A.,” he says. “It can feel like you’re living in a retirement community.”). Certainly, the success of the Hitchcock photograph and his subsequent work for Harper’s Bazaar helped, but he is not quite sure why his career took off with the speed that it did. “It could be that I was just passionate,” he offers.
In the 1980s, he photographed Any Warhol wearing binoculars and Grace Jones looking indomitable. In the 1990s, he compiled a book of images of Morocco, photographed Uma Thurman in all yellow for the Kill Billposters and shot his portrait of nude Kate Moss squatting under sunlight. In 2003, he published a book on Las Vegas, a project that had taken root two years earlier, not long after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He had been in Vegas at 6’clock one evening, and saw a backlit billboard against the sunset. All it said was “GOD” with the red and white stripes of the American flag undulating behind that capitalized block letters. The sky behind it was orange-red and deep blue, seemingly as patriotic as the billboard. Watson always has his camera, and so photographed the scene. “It annoys me if you’re a photographer and you only do fashion or portraits,” he says. “I’m a photographer.” This is true in any situation.
Last winter, he returned to his native Scotland, to do a series of landscape photographs on the Isle of Skye that he plans to exhibit at Milan’s Museum of Modern Art in 2015. BBC filmmakers visited him there, shadowing him and his assistants as they worked. At one point, Watson explained to the camera that he wanted to bring his own style to this exquisite landscape, but it can be difficult to pinpoint what exactly his style is at first.
“Sometimes, photographers are recognized by what they photograph,” he says. Given his range of subjects, this wouldn’t work with him. “But there’s a very easy way to look at all of my work.” He cites the years he spent as a graphic design student before going to film school. “My work is graphics or film-atic or a combination of the two. When you look at everything you can almost drop them into these categories.” The Isle of Skye photographs are cinematic, with their majestically rolling hills and romantically cloudy skies.
His early photograph of Hitchcock had been graphic, a bold figure posed against a clear background. He remembers that, forty years ago, after he finished photographing the director, a secretary brought in two cups of tea on beautiful China. The men talked shop. “’Storyboards are where it’s at,’” Hitchcock told Watson. “’When I’ve done a storyboard, the movie’s finished. All I have to deal with is something spontaneous that might happen. When I have a plan, I follow the plan.’” The then young photographer remembered the advice, but had already begun following it, creating his own storyline for Hitchcock and the goose just like he would years later for Steve Jobs or for the pale skinned models he photographed nude in a pool in 2011, using film over digital to achieve the eerie translucency he wanted. “Now, being a photographer for so long, you tend to do these things naturally,” he says. There’s no need to overthink when he knows what he’s doing.
