My story on the band It's Casual...out in the LA Weekly soon!

Coming to An Off-Ramp Near You: It’s Casual

Like most Angelenos, Eddie Solis is pissed about the traffic on the 101. Unlike most Angelenos, Eddie Solis writes songs about being pissed about the traffic on the 101.
Solis’ band, an impossibly loud punk/hardcore duo called It’s Casual, addresses transit issues with a bone-crushing urgency hitherto unmatched in the realm of urban planning. Imagine Henry Rollins at a City Council Transportation Committee meeting, all neck veins and municipal outrage, and you begin to get the picture.
On stage, Solis’ eyes bulge amid a shock of curly hair, his throat emitting the collective war cry of a million frustrated commuters.
“Los Angeles! There’s too many people! I want them to go away!”
His isn’t the Los Angeles of Priuses, Pilates and brunch; his is the Los Angeles of undocumented immigrants, hardcore music, and waiting for the bus. Now, after nearly ten years of ceaseless yelling, looks like It’s Casual’s bus has finally arrived.

STORY OUT NOVEMBER 11 IN THE LA WEEKLY!!!

Get to The Choppa! Austrian Death Machine for Hurley.com

As a lifelong Arnie devotee, I was nothing short of orgasmic when I learned there was a death metal band whose entire œuvre is inspired by the cinematic work of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Songs include "I Am A Cybernetic Organism, Living Tissue Over (Metal) Endoskeleton", "Screw You (Benny)" (remember that asshole taxi driver in "Total Recall"?), and of course my personal favorite "Get to Tha Choppa", inspired by a key moment in "Predator".
Austrian Death Machine's stage show is like porn for Arni fans--Tim Lambedis screams his vocals, backed up by a masked Ahhhnold character who brings enough Austrian accent for an entire Okotoberfest.
The bass player looks like a gay T-1000 in cop aviator glasses and blue shorts, and occasionally, an actual Predator might make its way on stage.
I interviewed Lambedis this morning and we spent some time discussing wherether Linda Hamilton was hotter in the first or second Terminator, and why "Pumping Iron", the 1975 documentary featuring a young and very dumb Arnie is a must-see.
I'll post the link to my story on Austrian Death Machine when it runs.

RIP Brendan Mullen...acid house forever

(I wrote this for Urb.com)

LA punk impresario, storyteller and ‘Mad Scot’ Brendan Mullen was one of those guys who had been around forever--so you kinda assumed he would stick around forever, too.
Founder of LA’s first punk rock club The Masque in 1977, Brendan created a perfectly dysfunctional home for LA’s nascent punk rock subculture, grimy headquarters for bands like The Germs, The Weirdos, The Bags, X, and so many others who would come to define the West Coast punk sound.
Amid the chaos, the ODs, and the flashes of genius that made up the scene, there was always Brendan, a free-spirited Scotsman and troublemaker who survived the chaos and, amazingly, managed to remember nearly all of it.
Mullen’s ability to recall in minute detail events that took place decades ago made him LA’s unofficial punk rock historian, and he would go on to author several books about the scene: “ We Got the Neutron Bomb: the Untold Story of L.A. Punk” (with Marc Spitz), “Lexicon Devil: the Life and Times of Darby Crash and the Germs” (with Don Bolles & Adam Parfrey), “Whores: an oral biography of Perry Farrell and Jane's Addiction”, and then “Live at the Masque 77-79. Nightmare in Punk Alley. A Visual Recollection” (with Roger Gastman).
When he died of a massive stroke on October 12, 2009 aged 60, the overwhelming sentiment among LA’s music community was one of shock—Brendan had told many, many stories, but there were still so many more we expected to hear.
We became friends in 2006 when I helped him out with The Masque book. We decided to throw an acid house party at the Hyperion Tavern--his collection of rare 1980's British rave music was unmatched. The event was a success, although no-one but he and I seemed to enjoy the music. He ended up placating the bar owners with some punk vinyl instead. The photo is of he and I on that night.
A couple days before his death he came over to my house for a cup of tea and seemed energetic and enthusiastic as ever, telling stories from obscure MC5 shows and looking forward to his future projects. He had been writing the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ biography, and was working on what he hoped would be the ultimate punk rock thesis, establishing once and for all when the scene was born. And he revealed, with a sigh, that after nearly 40 years in LA, he was planning to relinquish his British passport and become a naturalized American citizen.
In the end, he never got a chance--Brendan Mullen travels to the great punk gig in the sky with his British passport clearly intact and a lot of stories left to tell.
I'm sure he and his old friend Darby Crash have plenty of catching up to do.

GWAR feature for Dazed and Confused magazine

Before Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle, before the twisted Guns ‘n Roses album art of Robert Williams, before HR Giger’s sinewy aliens and before the WWF, there was GWAR—a troupe of crack-addicted, heavy-metal extra-terrestrials, who, beneath their grotesque rubber and latex costumes remain among the most hopelessly underappreciated art school drop-outs of our time.

In a career spanning 25 gory years, GWAR has never had a radio hit, yet their meticulously-wrought horror movie aesthetic, DIY art-punk philosophy and anarchist leanings have inspired and amused countless artists and musicians, paving the way for shock rock acts like Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, White Zombie and Lordi.

Al Jourgensen of Ministry claims GWAR “changed his life”. Legendary “Alien” movie artist HR Giger was so blown away by GWAR he invited the whole band to his house, and goes to see them play each time they visit Switzerland. Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra has repeatedly allowed himself to be “killed” on stage by GWAR, and Debbie Harry once gifted the band an axe, upon which she’d scrawled “keep on hacking”. But despite their devoted hardcore of fans and admirers (2000 or so diehard GWAR fans calling themselves ‘Bohabs’ follow the band to each show), success has always remained tantalizingly out of GWAR’s reach.

The reason? They’re gross.

Read my lengthy analysis of the mighty GWAR in Dazed And Confused magazine, coming out in December.

GWAR is also playing the House of Blues in LA in mid November...see you there.

Meeting with a guru: read my story in the LA Times soon!

I am writing a story for the LA Times about Sadhguru, an Indian mystic who I met a few weeks ago at a very special dinner, at Anjelica Huston's house. That's me with him, at the dinner. I felt honored to be invited, and brought my friend Steffie Nelson. Anjelica brought her friends--Oliver Stone, Jacqueline Bisset, Lauren Hutton...Rosario Dawson, Radha Mitchell and Mark Forster were at our 'young uns' table, and everyone seemed fired up from what the visiting sage had to say.
Sadhguru is a big deal in India--crowds of half a million people are common at his public addresses. That night he reminded us of some basic truths--namely that everything we feel, our entire experience of "life" occurs in our minds. Happiness, sadness, fulfillment, loss--these are emotional responses occurring within our brains, emotional responses that are often entirely at the whim of outside circumstance. Detachment from those things allows ultimate engagement in the joy of being alive. Or something like that. He has a technique called Isha Yoga that I will learn at his three day retreat in a few weeks.
After the dinner, I told him I was writing a story about him for the LA Times. I had some questions. We were both catching planes the following day (he to South East Asia, me to Richmond Virginia to meet GWAR) , so he suggested we meet in the morning and play a few rounds of golf. In the end, I met him by the beach in Santa Monica and we talked for an hour.
"Do you prefer shackles of gold or shackles of steel?" he asked.
Duh, gold.
He shook his head.
"At least with steel shackles, you want to break free sooner. Steel shackles are much easier to escape than gold."
I told him that if I'm gonna be shackled, I better be lookin good, in some diamond and gold shackles. He laughed.
Then I told him I was planning to buy a 1972 Mercedes, and he shook his head. "Oh you're going to spend more time under that than in it."
Guru with sense of humor who knows about cars! I'm sold.
I'll post a link to the Times story when it comes out...

My story about Vogue's first black cover model, in the LA Times

Beverly Johnson recalls her Vogue cover

In August 1974, she became the first black woman to be featured on the front of the magazine.

Beverly Johnson was a 21-year-old ingenue sleeping on a mattress on the floor of her midtown Manhattan apartment when she went into the photo studio with legendary photographer Francesco Scavullo 35 years ago this month.

The atmosphere, she remembers, was "magical." "You could kind of feel it in the air during the shoot," says Johnson. "I knew it was going to be a good picture."

But the rising model was stunned when she learned that an image from the session -- of her in a simple, powder blue sweater and a Mona Lisa smile -- would become the cover of Vogue in August 1974, making her the magazine's first black cover model.

Read the rest here.

My LA Times story about low brow art and Hurley

225 Forest shows Hurley's commitment to lowbrow art

Retail and street art go forward together at 225 Forest, where Hurley and others brands are secondary to the subculture.

By Caroline Ryder
August 2, 2009

Another day, another concept store -- except that 225 Forest, a new Laguna Beach youth lifestyle boutique carrying Hurley, Nike ID and Converse wares, feels more like a street artist's workshop than a retail space.

The muted facade, devoid of any obvious signage, barely hints at what the space might be that houses this collaboration by the three brands. Step inside and, yes, there's merchandise, but it plays second fiddle to art and the making of art. The store's top floor is dominated by sophisticated screen-printing machinery where patrons can decorate their swimwear with motifs by well-known street artists. Walls are covered with wheat-pasted, cartoony icons by Jason Maloney, Hurley's in-house art ambassador. You can design your own Nike ID or Converse shoes at the store. And then there's the immense centerpiece, a 22-foot-high painting by skater/fine artist James Marshall, aka Dalek, a former assistant to Takashi Murakami who has deep roots in the lowbrow art movement. His painting -- a kaleidoscopic abstract comprising meticulously rendered shards of color -- cascades from skylight to floor. It is the largest free-standing piece of Dalek's career and, without doubt, the focal point of 225 Forest -- more so than the actual merchandise, perhaps.

READ THE REST HERE:

http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-ig-hurley2-2009aug02,0,3480497.story

Metal Mania: My Story About The Band 'Holy Grail' for the LA Weekly

Who the Hell Is Holy Grail?

An L.A. metal band with songs about “chicks, Vikings, ex-chicks, being tough, macho/machismo, FEMA, Fabio, Conan, rad dinosaurs, UFOs and Bilderberg Group,” that’s who

By Caroline Ryder

published: June 04, 2009

The aroma of burning goat flesh permeates the night air as five kids clad in denim, leather and studs take to the stage. Their name: Sorcerer. Their mission: the resurrection of metal.

It feels a little like Ozzfest in the Echo Park backyard of Laurel Stearns, a former Capitol Records A&R lady and manager who had happened upon the band with the stereotypically metal name a few weeks prior. She had an A&R moment — that “feeling” — and invited them to play at her Sunday goat roast. This will be their fifth show ever. A gaggle of music-industry types look on, dumbfounded, as the pitch-perfect power-metal screams of lead singer James de la Luna explode the heavens, causing dogs to whimper and startled neighbors to peer over garden walls. Guitarists James J. LaRue and Eli Santana emerge from clouds of dry ice, backlit and majestic, furiously harmonizing like latter-day Eddie Van Halens, high-speed arpeggios shooting from their electric fingers like bolts of proverbial lightning. Their gigantic bass player, Blake “B.A.M.” Mount, grimaces in the background while drummer Tyler Meahl pounds like a meth-addicted monkey. Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

By the time we meet again, the band has signed with Prosthetic Records (Lamb of God, All That Remains), which will be releasing its debut EP this summer. It’ll feature two original songs plus two Judas Priest covers. And, in true metal tradition, the band has already undergone a name change, from Sorcerer to Holy Grail. (Apparently, there were a few too many Sorcerers in the kitchen — a 1970s band and an electronica DJ, both of whom, as one band member put it, were refusing to “pass on the scepter.” Not that Holy Grail is much of an improvement, judging by MySpace.)

Holy Grail’s songs have Dark Agey, testosterone-dipped names like “Fight to Kill,” “Immortal Man” and “Valhalla Calling.” Their thematic oeuvre spans “Chicks, Vikings, Ex-Chicks, Being Tough, Macho/Machismo, FEMA, Fabio, Conan, Rad Dinosaurs, UFOs and Bilderberg Group.” Imagine Wyld Stallions with actual chops. LaRue’s motto is “a thousand scales for a thousand days.”

Blond/brunette creative duo LaRue and Luna (known as “James Squared” to their friends) are the primary songwriters. From an “elite school of San Diego shredders,” LaRue is the romantic, arpeggio-obsessed blond. “Have you heard the steel foundries, have you seen the fucking factories?” he marvels, when I tell them I have been to Birmingham, England, birthplace of heavy metal. “Have you been to the Euphrates? Have you seen the Tigris?” continues LaRue (he rides a bicycle and shares a bedroom with drummer Tyler, and is clearly ready for Holy Grail’s world tour). Luna is the sweet-cheeked Warrior-Next-Door, replete with tousled fashionista mullet and the resonant lungs of a Stradivarius. He hails from Pasadena — birthplace of Van Halen — and he can’t step outside his door these days without someone telling him how they used to hang with the Halen. “Everyone in Pasadena has a Van Halen party story,” he says.

A former choirboy, 26-year-old Luna worships metal screamers like Klaus Meine (Scorpions), Rob Halford (Judas Priest), Ian Gillian (Deep Purple) and Sean Harris (Diamond Head), and his own high-octane performance style is inspired by the stage antics of David Lee Roth and James Brown. What got him into high-pitched vocals was listening to Glenn Hughes (Deep Purple, Trapeze), “one of those underrated hard-rock singers no one ever talks about. He did these power-metal screams live at California Jam in 1974 when he was a bassist and backing vocalist for Deep Purple, and made Coverdale [Deep Purple’s lead vocalist] look like Bret Michaels — it was that gnarly.” Later Luna heard Judas Priest’s Painkiller album, and that “sealed the deal for me.” Now he hones what he terms his “diaphragmatic power” with vocal coaching and warm-up scales — although the real secret to his falsetto is, he says, “in the pants.”

Luna, along with LaRue and Tyler, was in the retro-metal revivalist outfit White Wizzard until a semi-amicable split last year. Burned but not jaded, they segued into Sorcerer with a uniquely alchemical mission: to melt down their favorite metal (Sabbath, Priest, Scorpions) and birth a new metal ore. Whether they’re entirely new-sounding is debatable; it’s their look, their drive and their talent that could propel Holy Grail to realms beyond the existing, tight-knit metal scene.

“We’re like deviled eggs,” suggests guitarist Eli Santana when we meet a few weeks later, at another metal barbecue. Gentle and perpetually smiling, he lives on his friend’s couch in Playa del Rey, and was recently fired from his job at Starbucks for insulting an early-morning customer. (“It’s a shame. I really took pride in my foam,” he sighs.)

So Holy Grail is like deviled eggs?

“Yeah,” he says. “We took the core of what metal was and then we took the egg out and we put all this paprika in and we made it all fucking fancy and guess what? It’s deviled eggs.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. The egg is the metal. And the devil is us — something completely new that the egg didn’t even think it was going to become. We’re the devil within the egg.”

Despite its meticulously wrought Megadeth-meets–Early Man aesthetic, Holy Grail — unlike the farcical Metal Skool or some posturing Brooklyn speed-metalists — is 100 percent nonironic about its shredding. More accessible than modern-day metal purists (like Helvetets Port, Cauldron and White Wizzard, for example), it’s not solely trying to champion the old metal ways; like Bill and Ted, these young sorcerers come “from the past and the future,” says Luna, adding that “heavy metal is shunned by people who don’t listen to metal. People who think heavy metal is dead are dead.” LaRue’s two cents: “As much as the dinosaurs exist today as birds, classical music exists today as metal. It will never die.”

Indeed, if there’s any realistic hope for a mainstream metal revival beyond the enduring success of Metallica and other dinosaurs, perhaps the young warriors of Holy Grail could be it. The evidence is there, from the Paris catwalks through to the success of metal documentary Anvil, the public at large is showing its willingness to re-embrace the metal. And like Black Sabbath, who rose to dark dominion in the direct wake of the flower-power movement, Holy Grail — attractive, talented and tight as the pants they love to wear — could indeed provide a perfectly timed antidote to the indie-folk glut of today. Just look at them — evolved, Obama-friendly metalheads deeply in touch with their feelings. “Have you ever been so overwhelmed with emotion that you wanted to say a million words, but couldn’t?” asks Santana, as the heavy-metal barbecue draws to a close. “To me, that’s the meaning of shred: being able to say every single one of those words, as fast as you can.”

And, believe it or not, there’s a tear in his fucking eye.

My new secret blog...and the first post on it

I wrote something super quickly today, as requested by my friend Charon Nogues who is participating in the Echo Park Tv.com project.
The theme was "moving" and the piece had to be around one minute long.
My piece was totally two minutes long, and about ink blobs.
Read it here, and say hi to my new blog, the creatively-named Caroline's Words, which will feature all the finished (or half-finished) fiction and poetry stuff I'm too shy to post here.
Blobs rule!
http://carolineryderswords.blogspot.com/

My Gael Garcia Bernal cover story for Paper mag is out now!

I was so excited to write a cover story for Paper mag, about none other than the supremely talented actor Gael Garcia Bernal.
Some blog made fun of me for "having a boner" for Gael. Yeah, well, so what if I do? He's rad.

For Paper magazine's Beautiful People issue- Tiffany Campbell

Tiffany Campbell's movie about lady ocean-farers, Dear & Yonder, is about to break -- and it ain't no Blue Crush. "We made this film because women surfers wanted something broader-reaching," says Campbell, who lives in the mountains above Santa Cruz with her husband, surf artist-filmmaker Thomas Campbell. "Women -- we connect with our sport differently," she adds. "And when we watch surf films, we want to get a more in-depth view of who these people really are." Two years in the making, Dear & Yonder traces the history of women's surfing and features pro girls like Coco Ho, Silvana Lima and reigning world champion Stephanie Gilmore -- and follows them as they long board, short board and body surf, both at home (dear) and around the world (yonder).

The film also features lesser-known but nonetheless noteworthy sea creatures such as body-surfer-geophysicist Judith Sheridan from the Bay Area, and "Cap'n" Liz Clark, who is currently sailing the world, pirate-style, chasing breaks. "So many women lose their dream of surfing as they become older and have families," says Campbell. "We're trying to show that you can have everything you want, and still surf." Campbell made the film with her friend, Andria Lessler, through the production company she owns with her twin sister, Nicole Young. The company, Villa Villa Cola, shares the same name of Pippi Longstocking's house (Villa Villekulle), and while Longstocking may not be known for her wave shredding, she's one of Campbell's biggest inspirations: "She's the independent headstrong little girl we always wanted to be." Dear & Yonder comes out on DVD in August.
CAROLINE RYDER

For LA Times Image: Sometimes It's Hard To Be A Fashion Student

Fashion forward

After months of sketching and sewing, students at Otis College take their designs to the runway. The hoped-for outcome? A job.

By Caroline Ryder

April 26, 2009

Davy Yang, 21, peers at the models sashaying down the Otis College runway in his carefully wrought designs -- an arresting yellow swimsuit that swirls on the hipbone with fabric trailing down the back, and a blue jumpsuit with an eye-catching rust-colored scarf -- garments that took two full semesters of sketching, stitching and adjusting to perfect.

Squinting through a crack in the wall backstage, Yang, a junior in the college's grueling fashion design program, critiques his work, aloof as a master couturier. "I was a little disappointed," he says afterward. In fact, he's always a little disappointed -- such is life in fashion, apparently.

"Every fashion designer is on this pursuit of perfection," says the waifish Yang, who describes his designs -- and his own personality -- as "dramatic." "I don't know if it happens in other fields as well, but I think in fashion you never stop. There's never a point when you're done, and it's perfect."

There is a point, though, when the "imperfect" student work honed over many months is paraded down a catwalk and judged in a contest with "jump-start a new career" as its prize. The lead-up to the big event is the show Yang is watching on April 9, a revue of nearly 200 looks that are sized up by industry professionals, many of them Otis alumni, then winnowed to the 175 pieces that will be shown at a scholarship benefit gala Saturday at the Beverly Hilton hotel.

That final show -- the school bills it as "the biggest runway show in Los Angeles" -- is attended by fashionistas, media moguls and Hollywood starlets, and its culmination is the presentation of the Silver Thimble Award, the Otis College of Art and Design's equivalent of an Oscar, to a handful of top students.

The competition is intense, and this year's seniors, weeks away from entering the least favorable job market in decades, are keenly aware that a Silver Thimble -- or even a noteworthy garment in the show -- could vastly improve their chances of scoring that all-important first job. In the last three years, John Varvatos, Nike and Monique Lhuillier have all hired top-ranking students to become assistant designers.

Tough love

If it all sounds a bit like "Project Runway," Otis fashion department chair Rosemary Brantley wouldn't disagree. In fact, in the program, "every day feels like 'Project Runway,' " she says. Rejection, criticism, creative compromise, beleaguered budgets -- woes that all designers must face in the real world -- are part of each student's daily diet. And the ones who make it through the four intense undergrad years (many drop out, overwhelmed by the workload) emerge resilient and primed for an increasingly unforgiving fashion industry.

Like apprentice Navy Seals armed with sewing machines, the survivors seem thicker-skinned than most, and unburdened by glamorous illusions about what life as a fashion designer is really about.

Brantley, Otis' salt-of-the-earth matriarch and resident "Tim Gunn," believes a little tough love goes a long way in preparing her charges for the challenges ahead, making them ready for jobs as assistant designers -- rather than interns -- immediately upon graduation.

Underpinning this "real world" style of education is Otis' mentor program, which has students spending much of their junior and senior years constructing a handful of garments under the guidance of high-profile industry gurus, visiting wizards who have included Isaac Mizrahi, Bob Mackie, Francisco Costa, Varvatos and Isabel Toledo.

This year's mentors are typically stellar -- Lhuillier, Badgley Mischka and Todd Oldham are among them, as are designers from multimillion-dollar brands such as Cosabella, Hurley, Anthropologie and Ed Hardy. Each gives the students an assignment -- broadly, to create looks that fit the mentor's aesthetic -- and the fledgling designers have until showtime to complete it. "The students have a very unnatural relationship with these garments," Brantley says. "They have literally used their rent money to buy their fabric. Often, they've been carrying around these dresses and living with them."

Senior Ila Erickson, 22, was so involved with her garments that the servers at her local bar expressed surprise when she didn't come in holding one of her Monique Lhuillier or Alabama Chanin projects. "It's nonstop," says the flame-haired, soft-spoken Erickson, who grew up on a ranch in Montana and plans to have her own line one day.

Her Monique Lhuillier garment, a complex 1940s-inspired gown made of thin, hand-sewn strips, individually draped, drew nods of approval from the audience at the April 9 show. "Doing the show put us all under lots of pressure, but it's great motivation to do the work and meet the deadlines," she says. And working on one or two big garments as opposed to several smaller projects was beneficial, she adds. "You really learn," she says. "You become completely immersed in the process, and are forced to learn every step in how something comes together."

John Cherpas, vice president of design at Hurley, the surf-skate line, believes the focus on creating pieces in time for the end-of-year show helps students get a sense of the deadlines involved in being a fashion designer. "In the initial stages, being youthful and artistic tends to make you not want to follow a calendar," says Cherpas, a mentor who watched the preliminary show with other Hurley executives. "But being creative isn't always enough -- you have to be creative under the gun."

Well-rounded designer

Patricia Marquis of Cosabella, who mentored a junior class this year, agrees. "In these times, it's not just enough to be a designer. They have to be more rounded and understand who they are designing for -- and that's not always just themselves."

Nicole Guice, 22, a willowy, impossibly pretty senior who models part time to make ends meet, created looks for Otis mentors Morgane Le Fay and Badgley Mischka. Her Badgley Mischka dress, a glamorous "slinky siren" 1930s-inspired gown, underwent some last-minute alterations, but she was happy with the results. "I had some major changes after the show, but they were for the best," she says. "It's exactly what I had envisioned the direction to be."

Guice, who grew up in Highland Park and now lives in Altadena with her family, says she never could have afforded school were it not for her extracurricular modeling. "I was so fortunate to have that. My cards played out for me."

Shortly after the juried show, she learned that one of her dresses -- not the Badgley Mischka dress that had proven such a challenge, but an ethereal Morgane Le Fay number -- would be among the 25 looks this year that wouldn't be making it to the Beverly Hilton.

Difficult as the rejection may be, Brantley says, it's all part of the process. "Sometimes, people forget that fashion design is really hard," she says. Shows like "Project Runway" sometimes leave people starry-eyed about the fashion industry, and the multitudes of Christian Siriano wannabes should be aware of what they're getting themselves into before picking up needle and thread, she says. But she adds that with enough hard work, "there's always a chance. And that's why we're here -- to work them so hard they find out if they've really got what it takes."

Jorge Munoz, whose dramatic black leather and organza Monique Lhuillier gown was one of the most striking senior looks, said he was just grateful to have made it into the big show. "A couple of people I know have been eliminated, and I tell them at the end of the day it's the same for all fashion designers, big or small -- one season they get really good reviews and then the next, nobody likes their stuff. It's part of the business."

Munoz, who looks as though he could've stepped out of a Dior Homme ad campaign, was one of the few students who modeled during the jury show as well as designed clothes for it. His turn on the catwalk was extremely successful -- not only did he draw loud cheers from the audience, but the ensemble he modeled also went on to score highest in its category. He's been invited back to model in the gala show and is more than happy to explore his newfound talent. "Maybe I should model my own clothes," he mused.

Munoz, like all his classmates, was on tenterhooks Friday, when Brantley gathered together all the fashion design students and revealed which ones would be collecting Silver Thimbles. (The thimbles are awarded based on the votes of the mentors, each of whom received a DVD of the show.) Only four were selected -- among them Erickson, who, along with her design partner Margaux Solano, won for the strappy Monique Lhuillier dress she had been dragging around. ("Monique [Lhuillier] absolutely loved it," said a rep for the school). And Yang, the perfectionist who is constantly "disappointed" with his work -- he'll be taking home a thimble too. His mentor, Rod Beattie, of swimwear company La Blanca, advises Yang to give himself a break. "He's very young and he doesn't have confidence yet," Beattie says. "But honestly, he's one of the most talented young students I have ever worked with."

Beattie has told Yang that as soon as he graduates next year, he should hop a plane to Paris and try his luck among the big guns -- despite that tendency toward self-criticism. "Anybody who is talented and creative is constantly questioning what they do," Beattie says. "I constantly question what I do -- maybe not quite as openly as Davy -- but at the end of the day, self-doubt is just part of the process."

And for one sweet moment, so is winning.

HarperCollins book deal!

HarperCollins' youth/street culture imprint It Books is publishing the book I'm writing about teen motocross star Ashley Fiolek! The book will come out in summer 2010!
I first came in to contact with Ashley about a year and a half ago, when I interviewed her for Paper magazine (big love to Paper managing ed Rebecca Carroll for setting that up!). Her story blew my mind and I knew I wanted to get much deeper in to it. Early this year, I connected with an agent at Endeavor and when I told him about Ashley, he thought it would make a great book too.
I worked like crazy to get a proposal together with the help of Ashley and her superhuman mom, Roni. Two weeks after we sent the proposal to New York, the book sold!
Ashley's story is really special and we're all super excited to be sharing it with the rest of the world. Thanks to a few people who helped make this happen: Kirby Kim, Sarah Tomlinson, Kate Hamill, Rebecca Carroll, and Debbie Adler for letting me crash on her couch in New York.
Click here to read the New York Times article about Ashley--it'll help you understand why she's such an extraordinary person. Now I guess I better get to work...
PS: I met my editor at HarperC in New York last week and she told me our book will come out alongside Spinal Tap's long awaited memoir. Sweeeeet!

On the cover of LA Times IMAGE: My story about Hannah Montana and tween fashion

Clean-cut, wholesome and decidedly demure. Look at the ultra-Disneyfied costumes in this month's "Hannah Montana" movie and you'll see the latest reflection of the accelerating shift toward more parent-friendly tween fashions.

Forget Britney-era bling 'n' bras or clingy American Apparel spandex -- 16-year-old "Hannah Montana" star Miley Cyrus wasn't even allowed to wear leggings while the cameras were rolling. Spaghetti straps were verboten, as were bare bellies, micro minis, one-shouldered tanks and anything resembling a camisole.

In part the decision was a pragmatic one aimed at keeping Cyrus connected with "Hannah Montana's" 6- to 14-year-old tween demographic, even as the actress herself moves beyond it. "We wanted her to look as natural, normal and neutral as possible in most of the film -- hair and makeup of course, but especially costumes," says director Peter Chelsom.

Veering away from "Hannah Montana's" garish TV get-ups, as well as Cyrus' increasingly grown-up off-camera style (remember her glittering, somewhat stately, scalloped Zuhair Murad couture gown for this year's Oscars red carpet? Not your average 16-year-old's party dress), he and the film's costume designer, Christopher Lawrence, dialed down their young star's look.

The goal was to clearly differentiate between Miley Stewart, the carefree girl in the "Hannah Montana" franchise (and alter ego of its flashy fictional pop star), and Miley Cyrus, the real-life star whose brand is valued around $1 billion. And they were mindful of the impact of "Hannah's" style, which plays out in a vast array of branded apparel, not to mention body shimmer, guitar picks and even a "Hannah Montana" ceiling fan ($99.95 from Disney's shopping site). "Miley Cyrus is a role model for young girls," Lawrence says. "And that's something we took very seriously."

Movies set in the present day tend to feature store-bought looks, but Lawrence knew that the clean-cut, Hayley Mills-inspired image he wanted for his star would be a tough find in Abercrombie & Fitch, Limited Too or American Eagle Outfitters, stores that are popular among tween and teen shoppers.

"When you go out shopping for young girls, colors are acidy and fabrics are clingy," he says. "You see lots of spandex cotton, tank tops and spaghetti straps, really short skirts and tight jeans. Some of this stuff is way inappropriate." With that in mind, he made nearly all the costumes himself. (Original costumes were also necessary for licensing reasons, as several are being re-created in miniature for new "Hannah Montana" dolls.)

Lawrence brainstormed with fashion designer Nony Tochterman, founder of the House of Petro Zillia label and boutique on 3rd Street, known for its uber-feminine, whimsical designs. Then he went away and created a series of guilt-free, girly looks -- coquettish Carrie Bradshaw-esque outfits for the glamorous Hannah Montana character, and rustic "Little House on the Prairie" get-ups for girl-beneath-the-star Miley Stewart. "Feminine, pretty clothes -- but the kind a girl can still climb a tree in," Lawrence explains.

Like a ruffled powder-pink dress with a bow and ruffled skirt, for instance, paired with a Chanel-inspired mini jacket for Hannah Montana's Rodeo Drive shopping moment. The most memorable of the film's looks -- a demure-yet-punky white cocktail dress that channels Audrey Hepburn in "Sabrina" -- was worn with a mini cardigan to cover the actress' pale shoulders.

When the Hannah Montana character quits L.A. for Nashville, reverting to her Miley Stewart persona, we see her in an array of country girl looks -- and not the haughty Ralph Lauren equestrian kind. Think down-home plaid shirts, sweet '70s-style prairie skirts worn with Frye boots, and denim tight enough to be trendy, but that always flares to a practical boot cut.

The most risqué get-up in the entire movie is a slinky sheath dress covered in multicolored paillettes, conjuring images of the Studio 54 dance floor -- but even that sexy little number had its siren potential dimmed thanks to "nice broad shoulder straps" as designed by Lawrence, who was always careful to leave plenty to the imagination.

The movie's tendency toward the tame is very much in line with what's happening in tween fashion, says Gloria Baume, fashion director of Teen Vogue.

"There's a general shift away from 'Britney style,' " she says, referring to the kid-ult, exploitative fashions that started appearing in stores around the turn of the millennium: Padded bras and high heels for 8-year-olds. Tube tops for babies. Thongs for 6-year-olds. The kind of kids' styles that ventured far beyond Renaissance-era conventions of dressing kids like adults, entering into distinctly Humbert Humbert territory.

The backlash against such suggestive styles has occurred in part, she says, because magazines like hers have promoted more tasteful dressing for youngsters. Teen Vogue, for instance, garbs its young models in clothes by Tory Burch, Rebecca Taylor, Alexander Wang and 3.1 Phillip Lim, ostensibly adult designers whose chic-but-insouciant wares (ballet flats, mini-dresses, shorts, oversized tees) easily cross over to much younger consumers and the stars they love (Sophia Bush, Hilary Duff, Mandy Moore and others).

The new modesty could also be linked "to what we're going through economically," Baume says, citing the old hemline index that had skirt lengths falling in concert with the stock market. "Either way, girls are embracing more classic looks, and they're putting them together in a more wholesome way." Think tailored blazers, nautical prints, white cotton tees, practical plaid and even the once-again ubiquitous Ray-Ban Wayfarers, the classic sunglasses frame that Gen Next has so thoroughly reclaimed as its own.

That's evidenced by girls like 9-year-old Phoebe Nance from Mount Washington, from whose fashion-fluent lips fall advanced sartorial terms such as "form-fitting." An extra on the "Hannah Montana" movie, she favors a simpler, more Miley Stewart aesthetic -- jeans, simple dresses and layered tees -- for her personal wardrobe. But finding her favorite looks isn't always easy.

"There are some stores that are supposed to be for kids, but the skirts are like really, really short," says Nance, whose favorite store is Forever 21. "And they sell shirts that show your belly. I don't think it looks good." Her own daily uniform comprises long, tight T-shirts that are "sort of halfway between a dress and a shirt" worn over skinny jeans (preferably brightly colored ones) with Converse Hi-Tops.

Actress Vanessa Williams, who plays a rapacious publicist in the "Hannah Montana" movie, feels Nance's pain. A mother of four (including one 8-year-old girl and a boy of 15), she is all too familiar with the challenges of tween shopping.

"The bottom line is that they are much more self-conscious about their bodies than we are," she says. "I have had issues with my girls feeling too exposed -- there is a lot of stuff out there that is very clingy, and when you have a little belly or baby breasts it makes the girls feel insecure."

What about Miley Cyrus? The furor surrounding her recent Annie Leibovitz photo shoot for Vanity Fair, for which she was draped in a sheet with her back and shoulder on display, only served to underscore the push-pull between innocence and experience that comes into play as tweens become teens.

But even for a young star who seems to be growing more glam by the minute, admitting to a penchant for Prada and Louis Vuitton purses, there seemed to be a certain comfort in the movie's more restrained looks.

"I believe there's a way to be cute and sexy and also not give everything away," says Cyrus, who also says she "can't believe" the over-the-top sexy looks she sometimes sees high schoolers wearing. "And honestly -- who on Earth has the body to fit into the shorts at Abercrombie?"

The clothes she was happiest wearing on the "Hannah" set, she says, were the comfy Miley Stewart pieces.

And tellingly, she singles out the one that made her feel "most confident."

It was a simple, rose-colored tee.

John Sinclair--MC5 manager, poet, and legendary counter culture dude. I wrote this for BPM mag a whiles back.

"When I realized there wasn't going to be a revolution I said to myself 'nice try', and went back to being a poet."

John Sinclair

Every revolutionary needs a bible - Marxists had The Communist Manifesto, feminists had The Second Sex, and in the 1960's, hippies had Guitar Army, a collection of incendiary writings by poet and counterculture father figure John Sinclair. In Guitar Army, Sinclair famously urged young people to launch a 'total assault on the culture' using three essential tools: 'rock n roll, dope and fucking in the streets'. Rock, he wrote, was "the great liberating force of our time and place here in the West." On dope: "Don't let old people fool you, there's nothing wrong with feeling good." And on fucking in the streets: "Everything else is about fucking; fucking is fucking."

No-one had ever heard anything quite like it.

Sinclair, an intellectual who spearheaded the White Panther Party and managed legendary proto-punk outfit The MC-5, wrote parts of Guitar Army from jail. He had been sentenced to 10 years for giving a cop two joints. It was a clear attempt by the government to subdue a man whose ideology threatened theirs, and it backfired - John Sinclair became a cause celebre, one of the best-known political prisoners of the era. He was released after serving 18 months, just days after John Lennon, Allen Ginsberg and Stevie Wonder headlined the "Free John Now Rally" in front of 20,000 people in ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Fast-forward 35 years and I'm sitting with Sinclair in a coffee shop in LA. Scruffy and twinkly-eyed, he's twiddling his snow-white beard and holding a copy of Guitar Army as he recalls his time in jail. "My crime was possessing two marijuana cigarettes. I didn't think that would make me too much of a danger to society. I mean, I was trying to change the law - but I didn't intend to go to prison." He remembers the day he was told about the Lennon concert - "I was exhilarated because I knew it would lead to my release. It turned the key."

That was a joyous day for hippies, Yippies, freaks and beatniks, a day that further stoked the fires of their youthful revolution. But within a few years, the dream had died. Music, the lifeblood of alternative culture, had been commodified, as musicians were turned into pop stars who could in turn be manipulated by the industry. Meanwhile, the hippies were strung out on drugs and homeless in doorways. The comedown was rougher than anyone could have imagined. Today, says Sinclair "I ain't got no messages for anyone. I used to think I could save the world - but now I keep my opinions to myself."

He says this with a smile, but clearly, he's a little sad – and who can blame him? This is the man who articulated a complete vision for global change, through love, LSD and music. Today, in an era of global warming and homeland security, it's hard to imagine young people possessing that kind of optimism. Part of the problem, Sinclair says, is that kids are inundated with pop culture, "and it is draining them. Look at 50 Cent with his $150million. It's bullshit! Kids should try turning off their television sets. You want something to happen - turn off your TV!"

Or, you could try reading Guitar Army, which was re-released May 1, having been out of print for decades. It still contains Sinclair's original writings from Jackson Prison, and essays he wrote for the underground press during the sixties, plus two dozen previously unpublished photographs . The language, and even some of the anger may seem dated. Sex, drugs and rock n roll are no longer things we need to fight for (Motley Crue took care of that), but freedom is, and Sinclair's words still carry a potency and clarity that resonates, even in these jaded times. Since starting the American book tour, he's received many emails from supporters - young people whom, it seems, are still enthusiastic about what he represents. Just don't ask him to start another youth uprising – he's really not in the mood. "Do I still think in terms of revolution? Frankly, no," he says. "I can't even see people opposing the war (in Iraq) in a meaningful way."

Sinclair may have shaken off the mantle of revolutionary leader, but otherwise not much has changed. He is still a prolific writer and poet (he's working on writing one poem for each of Thelonius Monks' compositions), and a broadcaster (Radio Free Amsterdam). And, of course, he still smokes pot. Lots of it. He even sells pot behind the counter at the 420 Coffee Shop in Amsterdam, the city he made his home in 2004. "I'm a fiend," he says. "I like being lifted up from the reality of life on the street level. That's why I smoke." What about acid, the catalyst for his revolution? "Acid? Now you're talking," he says. "If there was a new wave of acid today, then things would get more interesting!"

These days, he mainly listens to "black music, mostly from the past". He likes Iggy Pop and Sonic Youth, or "the Sonic Youths" as he likes to call them (Thurston Moore is a friend and admirer of Sinclair's). Everything else pretty much sucks, in his opinion. Punk rock? Didn't like it. ("They have that selfish attitude.") Techno is just as bad. "It doesn't have a human heart. It's about deadening people so they don't feel anything." What does he think of Bono, modern-day rabble rouser? "I heard a song by U2 for the first time the other day and I hate that shit. Doesn't have any feeling." Same goes for Sting. "I didn't even like The Police. I mean come on - someone like me is never gonna like a band called The Police." In fact, he doesn't like bands, period. "Bands are for cowards. The idea of a band and a record company and a 'career' is bullshit. In New Orleans (where he lived for several years), people just play music because they want to."

Then he tells me his baby granddaughter has just been named Beyonce, and I think he might cry.

Mention The MC-5 though, the band he managed in Detroit in the 1960's, and his eyes light up again. If music was the key ingredient in Sinclair's revolution, then The MC5, a group of working-class bad-asses who joined the hippie movement, provided it. Led by Wayne Kramer, whose on-stage battle cry 'kick out the jams, motherfucker!' became synonymous with the counterculture, the MC-5 staged a series of politically-charged concerts that provided Sinclair with the proof he'd been looking for –rock n roll really does have the power to unite, and ignite, young people. And maybe it still does, some place far far away from the Billboard Music Charts (at the time of writing, Maroon 5 was at #1, closely followed by Avril Lavigne and Fergie). "Who knows if it could happen again," says Sinclair. "At the end of the day - we were a bunch of hippies who really cared. That's all. It was good."

The Style of Mickey Rourke, for Variety

Mickey Rourke is, was, and shall forever be the absolute opposite of wallflower—and the same goes for his dress sense. Since the release of his much-hyped comeback vehicle “The Wrestler”, we’ve seen Rourke work the red carpet with renewed panache, sporting an array of eye-popping designer looks wild enough to K.O. even his flamboyant wrestler alter ego, Randy “the Ram” Robinson.

“He’s never been one for a classic black tuxedo,” says his stylist, Michael Fisher, hired by Fox Searchlight to style Rourke for the “Wrestler” press tour. Fisher, a former assistant to photographer Annie Leibovitz, earned his stripes working with uber-stylists Rachel Zoe and Lori Goldstein, and was set up with Rourke four months ago. Unlike so many male stars, Rourke “likes to take chances on the red carpet” says Fisher. “He has a look that’s all his own. Very masculine, put together, and decadent. ” (Picture Robert Evans, Hugh Hefner and Frank Sinatra on a yacht in Monte Carlo—with lots of hair product.)

Rourke, in line for the Best Actor Oscar, had never worked with a personal stylist prior to Fisher. Once he realized Fisher didn’t have a stylist’s “agenda”, and was willing to help him express his own style, things went swimmingly. Rourke already had pre-existing relationships with certain labels, like Billionaire Couture (owned by Formula One mogul Flavio Briatore), and was keen to continue working with the company. Ralph Lauren and Dolce&Gabbana were also favored. “Mickey likes wearing a three-piece suit with a tank top, to bring in his boxing aesthetic,” says Fisher.

For the SAG Awards, Rourke wore a sharkskin Dolce&Gabbana suit paired with a long sequined Maison Martin Margiela scarf. Never frightened to wear sunglasses at night, he sported a pair by Loree Rodkin that evening, and is often seen wearing Sama’s “Press” sunglasses, as well as classic RayBan Wayfarers. “He likes his accessories, and that’s a rare trait to find in men,” says Fisher.

For the Golden Globes, Rourke chose a midnight blue velvet dinner jacket by Billionaire Club, worn with a long Stephen Webster pocket chain and an Etro pocket square. His burgundy velvet slippers, worn sans socks, were by shoe designer Jean-Michel Cazabat, with whom Rourke has a longstanding relationship. He is also a fan of Roberto Cavalli and Dolce shoes. “He loves his Italian designers,” says Fisher.

For the L.A. Premiere of “The Wrestler” Rourke channeled King Midas, with a look by Billionaire Couture, comprising a gold jacket, amber waistcoat, and shirt the color of lemon pie. He was more muted for the BAFTAS in London (where he won the leading actor award) in a charcoal Dolce and Gabbana dinner jacket with cream piping and black silk shirt, livened up by a white belt and that swinging key chain.

And what about the all-important Oscars rug? Fisher is keeping the sartorial details under wraps, but confirms Rourke is working with an avant garde designer to create a look that’s sure to stand out. “For the Oscars, Mickey is definitely going to be Mickey,” he assures us.

Production Designers story for Variety. Feb 09.

Whether they're conceptualizing five-star Persian Gulf Xanadus in between film jobs, or designing immersive retail landscapes on the side, film designers have proved themselves to be adept moonlighters. Some of them take sabbaticals from moviemaking to envision the entertainment environments of the future.
It started in the 1950s when Walt Disney handpicked his favorite staff artists to work on his theme parks. Film folks like John DeCuir, Henry Bumstead and Randall Duell became pioneers of themed attractions. Today, the two major theme-park design companies -- Walt Disney Imagineering and Universal Creative -- continue to cherry-pick from Hollywood for their billion-dollar pleasure-domes.
Designer Adrian Gorton ("Changeling," "The Last Samurai") has gone back and forth between movies and themed-entertainment design for 30 years. "If there's a story you want to tell through design, a place-making, transporting kind of experience you want to create -- that's where people like us can help," he says.
Gorton's nonfilm resume is formidable. He was lead designer on Malaysia's Sama World theme park, was one of six art directors who worked on Universal's Islands of Adventure theme park in Orlando and is supervising art director for entertainment-venue development firm Thinkwell Group, which is working on a major studio-backed theme park in Abu Dhabi.
Burgeoning development in the Middle East has kept Gorton and his peers very busy. NBC Universal, Paramount and DreamWorks have all announced licensing deals for new theme-park ventures in Dubai. While the recent economic downturn has slowed progress (Universal Studios Dubailand's opening has been delayed from 2010 until the first quarter of 2012), the Persian Gulf remains a lucrative hub for Hollywood's design A-list.
Thinkwell hires film designers to help create large-scale developments for its clients -- including Ski Dubai, the Middle East's famous indoor ski resort. Production designers are suited to such projects "because they know how a space can communicate a specific message" says Thinkwell creative veep Randy Ewing.
Veteran film designer Norm Newberry ("Beowulf," "War of the Worlds") is a member of that community of film designers, most of whom have some affiliation with Disney Imagineering and/or Universal Creative, who are regularly lured off-set to work on billion-dollar commercial projects. In 1987, Newberry replaced Bumstead as head of Universal Creative's art department, overseeing projects like the "Jaws" special effects rides at Universal Studios in Orlando and Osaka, Japan; the "Back to the Future: The Ride" in Japan; and the 12-minute "T2 3-D" theatrical attraction in Japan, Orlando and Los Angeles -- said to be the most expensive venture in movie history on a per-minute basis.
Lately Newberry has shifted his focus back to film. "Most designers always want to get back to film, eventually," he says, "although the really nice thing about theme parks is that at the end of it, there's something permanent there that you can be proud of. On film, your work's on celluloid."
Another prolific moonlighter, Jack Taylor ("Million Dollar Baby," "Mystic River") was one of Bumstead's favorite art directors. Taylor is redesigning the 3.3-acre Universal Studios backlot that was extensively damaged by fire last May. "In this industry, the only security you have is your insecurity," Taylor says. "You work for six weeks or six months, and then you could be off for a couple of months. So I always like to keep something on the back burner." For Taylor, this can mean small interior design projects, too -- he converted Robert Duvall's cow barn in Virginia, updated Barbra Streisand's home in Malibu and created interiors for Clint Eastwood's private golf club near Monterey.
It goes both ways. Celebrity designer David Rockwell, for example, primarily known for his commercial work (the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles, Gordon Ramsay's Maze restaurant in London), is also a successful theater and film designer ("Hairspray," "Legally Blonde").
Increasingly, film designers are conceptualizing commercial projects that take leisure time to a new level -- like resorts where guests can assume a character and play a role, similar to a videogame adventure -- except it's real.
Hettema Group has created designs for these kinds of immersive concepts. Topper Phil Hettema, a former senior veep at Universal Studios Theme Parks, predicts interactivity, rather than the typical pre-programmed theme park experience, is where the future of themed entertainment lies.
"It used to be that the best way to experience cool new technology was to pay $50 to go to a theme park -- now you can find that technology on your iPhone," he says.

Shepard Fairey/Obama "Hope" poster story for Antenna magazine

Right now, graffiti is totally verboten in the White House—but Shepard Fairey’s working on it. By wheat pasting his now-iconic Obama “Hope” posters all over the streets of America, Fairey has bridged the unbridgeable, aligning the worlds of Graffiti Art and Presidential Politics, uniting law-breakers with law-makers, and gifting the Democrats one helluva campaign contribution—street cred.

Now synonymous with the Democratic Nomination Race of ’08, the posters are classic Fairey: burnished, muted colors, and simple, populist motifs that nod to the work of Communist-era linocut artists like Dmitry Moor and Vladimir Kozlinsky. Yes, it’s ironic that Soviet Red Army propaganda stylings could turn so damn Blue—but the Cold War is long over, and there’s something almost generically American about Fairey’s posters.

Bearing the word “Hope” in a simple, sans serif Gotham font (the kind of lettering seen on liquor-store signs, old-school office buildings and car parks across the nation), the posters present us with a vision of one possible future - Barack Obama in red, white and blue, his expression calm, determined—and totally pirated. “Um, we did use an unlicensed image,” admits Fairey, speaking from Studio Number One, his graphic design studio in Echo Park, Los Angeles. (He has since been supplied with an approved head shot from the Obama camp.)

The limited edition screen-prints were available on Fairey’s Obey Giant website for about a millisecond before selling out. In fact, judging by web traffic, the Obama posters have been the most popular prints of Fairey’s career. “When the second run of posters came out there were 800,000 people on the site at one time, trying to buy 750 posters,” recalls Fairey. “It was intense.”

It started almost as an afterthought. Two weeks before Super Tuesday, Shepard thought he should put out a poster. He had seen Obama speak at the Democratic Convention in 2004 and liked what he had heard. “I thought ‘maybe in ten years, he’ll run’,” says Fairey. “I doubted he had enough insider clout to run before that, because everything in politics is about relationships and Hillary, I thought, had it sewn up.” Then when Obama won Iowa and New Hampshire, Fairey re-evaluated. “I thought wow…this is exciting.”

He talked to Yosi Sergant, a young Obama campaigner and publicist, and Sergant took the poster idea to Obama’s camp. “I wanted to make sure I wasn’t seen as an unwelcome endorsement,” says Fairey. “Lets face it, I am a street artist who has been arrested a bunch of times.” Word came back that while no official endorsement was possible, it was OK to go ahead.

Fairey made 700 posters—350 on thin paper to wheat-paste up in L.A., and the rest to sell on his site. When those sold out, he used the money to make 10,000 more, and had them shipped to states where Democratic caucuses and primaries were yet to be held.

Early posters bore either the word “Progress” or “Hope” until Obama’s campaign got in touch, saying they preferred “Hope”. “So I stuck with Hope,” says Fairey, no stranger to the realm of politically-charged, mass distributed poster art (he created several anti-Bush posters in 2000 and 2003). He’s not the first pop artist to vent his political angst – in 1968 Ben Shahn created a hope-based image for Eugene McCarthy. And Andy Warhol’s “Vote McGovern.” poster, produced in 1972, was memorably ironic, bearing a sinister image of McGovern’s opponent Richard Nixon. (Bearing in mind his influence over that elusive youth demographic, does Fairey himself have any political aspirations? No, is the resolute answer. “I speak my mind, which doesn’t go over that well in politics,” he says. “If I had to go into politics, I would be a benevolent dictator.”)

When Fairey posted the image on his website, it went viral. People posted it on their MySpace and Facebook pages, and soon the all corners of the media, from the Huffington Post to New York magazine to Gawker, was discussing the “Hope” poster. The Obama campaign got in touch again, this time about the legality of the image. They asked Fairey to create an illustration from a photo of Obama they had rights to use – and that’s when the third “Change” poster was born. (It is now featured Barack Obama.com, where it helped raise $350,000 for the campaign, before selling out). To date, he’s produced 80,000 posters and stickers, the vast majority of which have been glued up around the country. “I had no idea the image was going to resonate the way it did,” says Fairey.

Since then, dozens of artists have followed suit, creating responses to the poster (Michael Ian Weinfeld’s “Pope” parody, for instance), or pro-Obama images of their own (Ron English’s “Abraham Obama” poster). In Houston, local street art collective Aerosol Warfare painted a giant replica of the “Hope” poster on the side of Obama’s headquarters there. Also in Texas, art collective Upper Playground commissioned Coachella Valley-based fine art duo The Date Farmers to create an Obama “Change” poster in the spirit of Shepard’s work. “Shepard was really the touch stone,” says Sergant, who facilitated the original poster campaign. “He was the first person to jump in the pool.”

And in jumping right in, gave Barack Obama a more powerful youth endorsement than anything millions of dollars in advertising could have bought.

Senator McCain should take note.

My story about female voice over artists for Variety, December 2008

Movie trailers lack female narrators

Void left by 'Voice of God' could open field to women

By CAROLINE RYDER

(Photo of of voice over artist Melissa Disney)

Don LaFontaine, the so-called "Voice of God" who held a virtual monopoly over the narration of bigtime movie trailers until his death Sept. 1, had a clear idea of who his successor should be -- God's voice, he said, should belong to a woman.

"I think women are vastly underrepresented in this area," LaFontaine told me in 2006. "You'd think that for films directly aimed at women, chick flicks, the logical choice would be for a woman to narrate the trailer. But studios hold focus groups and the people in them, women included, seem to prefer the male voice."

Two years later, little has changed. Movie trailers remain largely unaffected by feminism's march, with growly baritones like those of Andy Geller and Ashton Smith seeming the likely replacements for LaFontaine's wizened authority. Women, who make up a small fraction of the trailer voice talent pool (William Morris reps three female trailer voices compared with 33 males, according to its website), remain almost exclusively confined to TV, radio and DVD trailer spots. The reason isn't so much gender equality, apparently, as it is resistance to change among the moviegoing public -- male and female.

"Audiences, including females, are so used to hearing a male voice that when they hear a female voice they think something is wrong," says Mike Southerly, senior VP creative advertising at 20th Century Fox. He, like many interviewed for this article, is in favor of hearing more female voices in movie theaters. But he says it's "always a fight" trying to get a female voice approved for a trailer, even for more female-friendly TV spots.

"The public is finicky, and it takes them a while to trust voices they aren't used to hearing," says Southerly. "And the voice they were used to for many years was Don's."

On the rare occasion that trailer houses suggest using a female voice, studios often nix the idea. "A female voice might take away from the content of the trailer," says producer Christine Peters ("How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"). "If the industry does transition to more frequently using female voiceovers, I imagine it will take the audience awhile to get used to it."

A notable exception to the rule was the trailer for Jerry Bruckheimer's high-octane "Gone in Sixty Seconds" (2000). Voiced by the sultry-toned Melissa Disney (widely regarded as the most successful female voice artist working today), the trailer is cited as the one example of where a feminine intonation actually worked.

"The few movies that women have worked on tend to be the high-testosterone movies," notes Jason Marks of Jason Marks Talent Management, who specializes in representing trailer and promo voiceover artists. Marks thinks action movies, not chick flicks or romantic comedies, present more fertile ground for his female talent.

Even though the odds seem against them, voice actresses are optimistically chipping away at the glass ceiling. Debi Mae West, whose voice has been heard on NBC, Starz and AMC, recalls that after Disney's "Sixty Seconds" work, she found herself being invited to "scratch" more trailers. Scratching is industry lingo for when trailer houses invite voiceover artists to voice a spec trailer, which is then submitted to the studio. The winning submission is then "finished" by the trailer house.

The competitive nature of pitching means trailer houses are often pressured to present safe, salable options, which means female voices are risky. "There might be three other trailer houses trying to get the same job, so often it's a matter of staying within the comfort zone," says West. "But people are starting to realize that women can really sell the sexiness of a film. Women are a lot softer and less showy, and trailers seem to be moving in that more conversational, less in-your-face read anyway."

And even if women still aren't actually getting the bigtime jobs (LaFontaine was said to earn $10 million per year), "scratching, at the very least, means you're on the radar," says voice actress Sylvia Villagran, whose voice is regularly heard on MTV, NBC and Mundos. "Of course, the ideal would be to go from scratching to finishing -- but I guess it's one step at a time."

Slash interview for Swindle magazine

SLASH

By Caroline Ryder
Photos By Jeremy and Claire Weiss

Maybe it’s his top hat. Maybe it’s his ‘fro. maybe it’s the near-death drug experiences. Or maybe it’s his guitar, played cacophonous and dirty, his solos providing a mighty riposte to the howls of Guns N’ Roses mate Axl Rose on Appetite for Destruction, the band’s debut album and the masterpiece of 1980s Sunset Strip rock. Who knows what it is? Somehow, Slash, with his iconic look and blues-infused rawk, has imprinted his name on the air-guitar-playin’ soul of a generation

I visited Slash’s house in the San Fernando Valley not so long ago, and shared red wine and French smokes with the man himself. He’s 40 now, but doesn’t look it. “A lot of people say I look young,” he remarks. “They say I should look a lot more addled.” Is that because of his former decadence, when he walked, talked, shot, and snorted the rock ‘n’ roll dream, back when even Steven Tyler was impressed at how hardcore GN’R was? “Yeah, probably,” he says, in his mellow-yellow mumble. “Aerosmith used to trip out on the fact that we were so fucked up. Maybe we reminded them of themselves.”

Slash was born Saul Hudson on July 23, 1965, in London, England, to Anthony and Ola Hudson, a white Englishman and an African American. His father was an artist, an album cover designer for Geffen Records, and his mother was a fashion designer who once dated David Bowie and created some of his costumes. The family moved to Stokeon- Trent (birthplace of Lemmy Kilmister and Robbie Williams), where Anthony’s father lived, but they left the country before Saul hit his teens. Saul moved to L.A. With his mother when he was 11, and grew up in an affluent, bohemian household where members of the rock gliteratti, including David Geffen, Iggy Pop, and Ronnie Wood, were regular houseguests.

Outside the home, Saul was a loner who didn’t fit in at school. He hung around with street kids, riding his brakeless BMX bike in empty pools in Hollywood. At 14, he met future GN’R drummer Steven Adler after Adler fell off his skateboard in a half-pipe and Saul went over to see if he was okay.

When Saul was 15, his maternal grandmother gave him a Spanish guitar with just one string on it that she had in her basement. He started practicing, sometimes up to 12 hours a day. “When I started playing,” he recalls, “this explosive and progressive part of my personality, which I didn’t even know existed, came out.” He had just discovered Aerosmith’s Rocks. “I grew up on the [Rolling] Stones, Bob Dylan, The Kinks, and Zeppelin, but when I discovered this one Aerosmith record I related to it on a different level. The decadence, the sloppy guitars, the huge drums, the screaming Ð the whole of it. It did something to me.”

Soon after that, Saul became Slash, not just in spirit but in name, given to him by character actor Seymour Cassel. “I was friends with his kids, and he used to call me Slash because I was an aspiring guitar player, always hustling, never stopping to hang out. I was always in a hurry. So he started calling me that, and it stuck.”

Obsessed with guitar and guitar only, he dropped out of school in the 11th grade and formed a band called Road Crew with Adler. In the spring of 1985, Slash and Adler were invited by Axl Rose to play with his newly-created band, Guns N’ Roses, after his drummer and lead guitarist failed to show up for rehearsals. Slash bought himself a top hat from a store on Melrose Avenue in preparation for his first gig with GN’R, June 6, 1985, at the Troubadour, billed as “a rock ‘n’ roll bash where everyone’s smashed.”

“We started out on the lowest rung of the ladder, as far as club bands are concerned,” says Slash, recalling the early days of GN’R. “When we got signed [to Geffen] we were totally fucked up. We got $7,500 bucks apiece and spent it all on drugs. We had nowhere to live. We were staying in cheap motels. We couldn’t find anyone that wanted to produce us and manage us. Then we went on tour opening up for Aerosmith, and everything just sort of worked its way up.”

Some of the most memorable hard-rock guitar riffs of the pre-grunge era emanated from Slash’s Gibson Les Paul, including those on “Paradise City” and “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” He claims the “Sweet Child O’ Mine” guitar melody came about from “just fucking around. I didn’t even like that song or the guitar part. I thought it was stupid. But Axl really liked it.” Despite their growing success, the band members were too dysfunctional to really take stock of what was happening. Even after Appetite for Destruction went Platinum, Slash never felt like a rock star off-stage. “We’d be on the road and we’d hear we sold a certain number of records. Then we went back to Hollywood and it’s the same shit: living in a cheap apartment and doing drugs all the time, except this time I didn’t want to go out because people would recognize me.”

After their sold-out Use Your Illusion tour ended in 1995, Axl went on hiatus and Slash worked on his side projects, Slash’s Snakepit and Slash’s Blues Ball, and recorded with artists like Iggy Pop, Lenny Kravitz, and Michael Jackson. In October 1996, Slash resigned from GN’R and gave the rights to the band name to Axl, mainly because Axl wanted to take the band in an industrial-techno direction while Slash wanted to remain true to their bluesrock roots.

It was around the time of the band breakup that he ran into his second and current wife Perla Ferrar, whom he married on October 15, 2001. He had been introduced to her by porn star Ron Jeremy in Las Vegas several years prior, at the height of GN’R’s fame. “I was just in the process of quitting Guns N’ Roses, and I was losing my first wife. I was sitting at the bar and Perla came in with her crazy girlfriends, and we just started dating.” Their first son, London, was born in 2002, and second, Cash (producer Robert Evans came up with the name), was born two years later. Becoming a father meant Slash had to give away his collection of reptiles and wild animals, including a mountain lion that once slept in his bed with him.

In the meantime, Slash was rounding up former band mates Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum (who replaced Adler in 1990 after Adler was kicked out for his drug abuse), along with Scott Weiland from Stone Temple Pilots and Dave Kushner from Wasted Youth, to form his current project, Velvet RevolverÑthe plan being, no doubt, to continue creating rock music of the highest magnitude. “The best piece of advice my father ever gave me was ‘Don’t go down with the ship.’ That’s what he said when the band was breaking up and I was losing my mind. What I’ve learned is that there’s always another ship.”

My stunt story for Variety, Jan 2009

SAG honors stunt ensembles

Award showcases the art of physical acting

By CAROLINE RYDER

For stunt professionals, diving off skyscrapers and KO'ing baddies is one thing -- but can they do it with emotion?

"Truth is, when you're performing in a scene, if you're not emotionalizing what you're doing, you're just doing moves," says Paul Jennings, stunt coordinator on "The Dark Knight."

Jennings, along with nine others, has been nominated in SAG's newest award category, which recognizes stunt ensembles in motion pictures and primetime television.

The very existence of the award, now in its second year, raises the question: To be a true stunt superstar, should one know one's Stanislavski as well as kung fu? Or should "emotional recall" be the last thing on a stunt actor's mind as he or she tumbles out of a helicopter?

Jennings believes the best stunt people possess, at the very least, a gift for physical acting.

"An angry man will fight very differently than a sly man, for example, and you have to be able to convey that," he says. "If you're doubling a character, you have to get to a point where you understand their emotions so your physical actions can reflect what they feel. It's not always just about jumping out of cars."

Jennings, who is British, started out as an acrobat -- he had a juggling and fire-eating stage act from the age of 13, and performed at medieval-themed banquets and jousting tournaments in the U.K. He became accepted in the Equity Stunt Register in 1989 after completing his training and has since stunt-coordinated a number of pictures including "The Golden Compass," "Blood Diamond" and "Munich."

For "The Dark Knight," director Christopher Nolan avoided CGI wherever possible, preferring stunts and staged combat to be carried out in the flesh.

"Chris feels CGI takes away from the story because the audience can sense that it's not for real," Jennings says. "He pushed us really hard to do things for real." Like flipping a 16-wheeler truck, for instance? "Yes -- even if there existed an easier option -- he just feels there's a lot of weight and energy behind what's real."

In contrast, Timur Bekmambetov's high-octane action adventure "Wanted" stands out for its use of cutting-edge CGI and visual effects technology. For instance, lead actors were scanned and 3-D molds of their bodies were generated, creating the basis for digital stunt doubles. But according to the film's stunt coordinator and SAG award nominee Nick Gillard, tech wizardry will never preclude the need for expert mimicry. "You have to hang out with the actors as much as possible," says Gillard ("Star Wars" Episodes 1, 2 and 3 and "Sleepy Hollow"). "You have to know how they are going to react when they are in dangerous situations. You watch them and see how they walk and how they run. You mimic their posture. It's all in the details."

For "Wanted," Gillard developed a common fighting style for the actors, in concert with the notion that the film's band of assassins had been in existence for many hundreds of years. "All the characters fight a little differently, but we made sure there was a common thread -- like the way they punch."

When it comes to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences not recognizing stunt performers, Gillard is pragmatic, if not self-effacing. "If there were Oscars, suddenly you'd have all these famous stunt coordinators running around when really it shouldn't be about us -- it should be about the actor. I wouldn't want to belittle the actor."

While actors sometimes request guidance on how to stay in character while performing more grueling stunts, "Wanted" star Angelina Jolie needed no instruction on how to stay "sexy" during her myriad hair-raising turns. "You don't need to show Angelina how to be sexy -- she's the grand master," Gillard says.

TV football drama "Friday Night Lights," also nominated for a stunt SAG Award, is at the opposite end of the action spectrum. Because the series is shot in a semi-improvised, pseudo-documentary style, emotional authenticity in stunts is key, precisely because "it's not your traditional action show with explosions and people jumping out of cars," stunt coordinator Justin Riemer says. "We actually try to dumb down the action a little bit so it feels more real. It's never just about the stunt person stepping in and being the big guy."

Off the football field, the actors generally carry out all their own stunts. On the football field, each character has his own football double, and the actors study the nuances of their doubles' movements as much as the doubles study the actors'. "It's a two-way creative exchange -- you'd be surprised how much the actors will take from the doubles," Riemer says.

"Friday Night Lights" is taped at breakneck speed (one hourlong episode per six days of shooting) with little or no rehearsal. There are no set camera positions (camera operators follow the actors around) and no marks for actors. Long stretches of dialogue will develop into action scenes with no cuts in between, none of which makes life especially easy for Riemer.

"Making sure everyone is in a safe place and able to perform the emotional as well as the physical without cutting is sometimes a very hard job," he admits. "But the key for us is knowing how much is too much, and how much is not enough. When all's said and done, I think we've struck a good balance."

My story about Ilene Chaiken and the end of "The L Word" for The Advocate.com, January 2009

Ilene Chaiken Has No Regrets -- Except Killing Dana
By Caroline Ryder

Before January 18, 2004 -- when the first episode of The L Word aired -- Ilene Chaiken was a resolutely below-the-line, behind-the-scenes kind of lesbian. Today, thanks to show’s success, she needs little introduction -- and not just among the LGBT audience. Chaiken is an integral component of The L Word’s global brand, a mainstream entertainment commodity that has been sold in dozens of countries around the world, from Uruguay to Lithuania to Iceland. Being thrust into the role of lesbian storyteller in chief has occasionally proved jarring for the cerebral, reserved writer-director.

“I was a blithering mess in the beginning,” says Chaiken, smiling. “It’s terrifying when you’re someone who is not groomed to be in front of an audience, and you don’t really feel well-suited for it.”

For the first year after the show launched, she took beta blockers. “Then I didn’t need to worry anymore. These days, I don’t shake nearly as much when I’m making speeches.”

The sixth and final season of the show is set to begin on Showtime January 18, exactly five years after the series launched. While it’s a bittersweet goodbye for Chaiken, one gets the sense she’s a little relieved.

“I feel that it is exactly the right time to be moving on,” she says slowly and purposefully, grating lemon zest for a mousse dessert as she talks to Advocate.com in her kitchen. “I’ll miss the community of The L Word, but I was personally ready for it to end. Jennifer Beals did joke that someday Bette and Tina would have grandchildren -- but I think all of us agreed that it was best to go while we were still relatively young and sexy.”

We spoke a few days before Christmas -- she’d recently returned to Los Angeles from Vancouver, where she had wrapped the 20-minute pilot of her new, as yet unsold L Word spin-off starring Leisha Hailey. It's rumored to be a prison drama, but Chaiken declined to go in to any detail about it. Even so, one would be safe in assuming that Chaiken has plenty more lesbian-themed entertainment up her sleeve, right?

“Yes, but remember, I never saw The L Word as purely lesbian-themed,” she points out. “I saw it as a show about lesbians for everyone. Personally, I’m interested in telling stories. Telling lesbian-themed stories, yes, but not exclusively. I’m interested in making mainstream entertainment.”

Her determination to appeal to a mass audience has occasionally put Chaiken at odds with women who felt unrepresented among the show’s glamorous cast of characters. But Chaiken makes no bones about her position -- she’s making TV for America, and America likes lipstick.

“I never had any qualms about the way we were representing the culture,” she says.

When The L Word ends in March, there may be no TV show on U.S. mainstream cable or terrestrial television featuring predominantly gay or lesbian characters to replace it. It’s a problem, says Chaiken. Niche cable channels that focus on gay content, like Logo, are “great for what they are,” she says, “but they don’t preclude the need to represent us and our lives and our stories in mainstream entertainment.”

And despite its massive global reach, The L Word has received little formal acknowledgment from Hollywood -- just one prime-time Emmy nomination in six years. “It’s pathetic,” says Chaiken. “We really were ignored by the Emmys.” (The late actor Ossie Davis, who played the father of Jennifer Beals’s Bette Porter and Pam Grier’s Kit Porter, received a posthumous nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series in 2004.)

There’s always the possibility season 6 will receive more recognition. With Jenny Schecter (played by Mia Kirshner) revealed to be dead in the opening moments of the first episode, you can be sure that the final season of The L Word will continue take the term lesbian drama to new levels. All in just eight episodes.

”Having eight episodes was a business decision by Showtime,” says Chaiken. “We agreed it was actually kind of a great thing for a final season, because we could make it more contained. So we came up with a concept for wrapping it all round one story idea.”

And once The L Word’s final chapter closes, then what?

The Farm, Chaiken’s Leisha Hailey–L Word spin-off, has been taking up much of her time.

“It’s a very different show to The L Word,” says Chaiken. Actresses Famke Janssen, Melissa Leo (who played Winnie Mann on The L Word), and Laurie Metcalfe (Roseanne) are also rumored to be on board.

And what about an L Word movie?

“I would love to do an L Word movie,” she says. “My cast would love to do an L Word movie. We have no formal plans, but when I have a moment to take a breather, I certainly will think about what the climate is for actually doing one.”

Chaiken is also working on “a couple” separate film projects as a writer and director, and she has plans for a new Internet venture. Ourchart.com, the social network for lesbians that she cofounded, is on ice -- editorially speaking, at least. (Users can still network through the site, but there haven’t been any blog posts on the home page since November). Chaiken’s new venture “may or may not be separate to Ourchart.com,” she says. Whatever the future of OurChart, she promises to find a place online for the OurChart users who were L Word fans -- no doubt music to the ears of those wondering where they’ll be able to pontificate on Tibette (Tina and Bette) and express their continuing fury over Dana’s death.

“If I could do it all again, that’s the one and only thing I’d do differently,” says Chaiken of killing off the L Word’s Dana character, a move that resulted in a minor revolt among the show’s fans. “I think if maybe I had known how people would react to that and how long the anger and despair would last, I might have reconsidered it ... ”

Frontiers cover story on Daniela Sea from a while back

Story by CAROLINE RYDER
"All my life I’ve used clothes to express myself,” says The L Word’s chisel-cheeked resident
genderqueer, Daniela Sea. The impossibly handsome 29-year-old, dubbed “the female River
Phoenix” by L Word creator Ilene Chaiken, made history last year playing the role of Moira, a
Midwestern stone butch who morphs into Max, television’s first recurring female-to-male transgender character. Playing a transman wasn’t much of a stretch for Sea, who was already toying with her gender presentation when she was just 10, dressing like a mini 1950s greaser or fopping it up like a preteen Chaucerian gentleman.
A former punk guitarist, fire juggler, goat herder, and citizen of the world (she lived as a man in India for eight months), Sea has run the queer style gamut, ricocheting between medieval rebel boi and green-haired punk princess. “Right now, I think I’d describe my style as princely,” says Sea, who lives in Brooklyn with her girlfriend of five years, queer performer Capital b (formerly Bitch from folk duo Bitch and Animal).
Sea was working at a restaurant in New York City when the makers of The L Word flew her to L.A. to read for the part of Moira (her friend was a writer on the show and had given the producers Sea’s reel). They hired her almost immediately—great news for Sea, bad news for the show’s costume designer Cynthia Summers, who had just five days to come up with an entire wardrobe for Moira/Max.
Summers and Sea worked together to develop Moira’s androgynous rebel look, inspired by the cult teen movie The Outsiders. Later on, Max—complete with facial hair and biceps—would start wearing more conservative office shirts and slacks as he attempted to assimilate into mainstream life as a straight man.
Playing TV’s first regular FTM character was a “huge honor,” says Sea, who had only appeared in one film prior to The L Word (a small role in John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus). But her relative newness to acting was counterbalanced by her ultra-bohemian life experience, which equipped her better than most to play the role.
Sea was born in Malibu, the daughter of artist/surfer intellectuals who met on a sustainable farming community. Her father came out as gay when she was 3. “My mother didn’t see it as a betrayal,” says Sea. “They were really in love so she said, ‘OK, let’s see what this is all about,’ and they went to a gay bar in Hollywood. They tried to go through it together.” The couple eventually parted ways when Daniela was 5. “I don’t think it was a simple decision for my father, but I’m glad he did what he did,” says Sea. “It taught me about the importance of being true to yourself, at any cost.”
When she was 16, Sea left L.A. and moved to San Francisco to join the Gilman Street Project, a punkartist feminist collective. She came out as a lesbian shortly after, and all her “significant relationships”since then have been with women. She played guitar as “Dan-yella Dyslexia” in queercore bands Gr’ups and Cypher in the Snow, touring with big-name hardcore acts like Fugazi and Rancid. “I had a green mohawk, and sometimes I’d wear this crazy ripped-up prom dress with wings on stage,” recalls Sea. “It’s funny, looking back.” She then traveled through Europe, working as a circus performer and hitchhiking her way around while learning to play
the accordion and penny whistle.
“Music is very important to me,” she says. “When I met my girlfriend, one of the first things we did was play music together.” Sea and Capital b have a music project called the Exciting Conclusion, an edgy, political freak-folk combo scheduled to perform at Club Skirts’ Dinah Shore weekend in Palm Springs in April. The biggest annual gathering of lesbians in the world, “the Dinah” has developed a close and natural affiliation with The L Word, with cast members known to attend and mingle poolside with the ladies.
"[My father’s coming out] taught me about the importance of being true to yourself, at any cost.”
This year Sea is also starring in Itty Bitty Titty Committee, a coming-of-age tale by lesbian director Jamie Babbitt (But I’m a Cheerleader) which takes a wry look at the lives of a young group of womyn activists calling themselves “Clits in Action” (aka C.i.A.). “The film looks at the good and bad sides of being in a group of people trying to change the world,” says Sea, who stars alongside Guinevere Turner, Jenny Shimizu, Melanie Mayron, and Melonie Diaz. “And we get a chance to laugh at ourselves, which is great; people always think of feminism as being so serious.”
And Sea is, of course, looking forward to playing Max in another season of The L Word—although
sometimes she secretly wishes he would ditch the suits and ties for some funkier threads. “Fashionwise, I’m not a big fan of what I would call his boring office clothes,” she admits. “But it’s been a trip feeling him become more and more comfortable in his skin. Playing Max is an adventure, every day.”

Duchess Georgiana, for Variety, Jan 09.

The Duchess

Be faithful to an 18th-century fashion icon

By CAROLINE RYDER

Challenge: Be faithful to an 18th-century fashion icon in the absence of sartorial records

Regency aristocrat Georgiana Cavendish, subject of Saul Dibb's period drama "The Duchess," is widely recognized as one of the first true influencers of fashion, her giant plumed wigs and sprayed-on gowns sparking copycat trends across 18th-century Britain. And yet very little archival evidence of what she actually wore exists.

"If we had been doing a film on Queen Victoria or Queen Mary, it would have been different," says costume designer Michael O'Connor ("Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day"). "But with Georgiana, there's hardly anything. Even the portraits generally show her in biblical, classical-type robes -- not what she actually wore."

In all, O'Connor created 27 costumes for the duchess, dressing actress Keira Knightley in the most progressive, flamboyant styles of the era, styles Georgiana is known to have had a hand in creating. Dresses were often stitched onto the actresses, re-creating the "desperately tight, maximum bosom" looks that were popular then.

The gender-bending military uniform worn during a political rally is one look the duchess is known to have actually worn. Though Georgiana was known to have originally designed the outfit in red, O'Connor re-created it in blue, the color of the British Whig party. "That costume perfectly illustrated how the duchess always refused to blend in," he says.

Paper magazine: Troy Garity interview (excerpted)

I meet the actor Troy Garity at one of his hangouts, a rustic family-run café at the foot of the Hollywood Hills -- the kind with floral pink wallpaper, wood beams and ancient men sitting alone at the counter. Thanks to Garity, the café has just stopped using Styrofoam cups. "I persuaded them to use paper cups instead," he says proudly, with the manager piping in: "He's greening the neighborhood!"

Garity may be a film actor, but his instinct for serving the greater good is unusually strong. Perhaps that's because activism is in his genes: His father is Tom Hayden (peace activist and social justice figurehead) and his mother is Jane Fonda, the quintessential Hollywood activista.

Just the other morning, Garity's alarm radio woke him up with news that his mom was in trouble, again. This time, for dropping the "C" bomb on national TV. Fonda and Vagina Monologues creator Eve Ensler were being interviewed about turning the New Orleans Superdome into a giant vulva. Upon hearing the news, Garity was, naturally, very proud. "My mom has given some great TV quotes," he says. "My favorite was, 'If the penis could do what the vagina does, they would stick it on a postage stamp.' Brilliant."

Garity is intense-looking, with a gaze that could crack cement. He's also a little shy and speaks in ponderous slow motion with pauses so heavy I'm scared I'll run out of tape. Maybe growing up so conscious, so socially-aware, forces you to think about every single word that comes out of your mouth? He tells me he's reading a book about how to re-program your neural pathways. "I'm re-wiring myself," he says. "I'm trying to develop an optimistic reflex to things."

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Jeremy Scott story for Oyster magazine

Beam me up Scotty

Good art, or bad taste? More than most, white-trash fashion innovator Jeremy Scott treads the line, Caroline Ryder writes.

Who else would send models down the catwalk wearing conch-shell inspired swimsuits with three-foot high collars, dresses that look like jukeboxes and army helmets with Mickey Mouse ears? Was the helmet an anti-war statement, I wonder? “Let’s just say our president is no different to Mickey Mouse,” he says, perched cross-legged in the living room of his Hollywood Hills house.

I had expected Jeremy Scott’s home to look like his fashion, some kind of ironic homage to bad taste with neon walls, chandeliers made from dangling Big Macs, and portraits of Alexis Colby. The reality, to my surprise, is much tamer — black floors, white walls, and zebra print furnishings. And then I spot a bust of Beethoven wearing a pair of Wayfarers — Scott, it seems, likes to keep his sense of humor close at hand. “Humor is a clear method of communication,” he says. “It helps everyone understand what you’re trying to say.” It must take supreme confidence to be able to be humorous with your art? “Yes,” he nods, “or supreme stupidity.”

Along with Terry Richardson, Corinne Day and Harmony Korine, Jeremy Scott represents the 1990’s generation of fashion anti-heroes. With the support of magazines like i-D and The Face, they spearheaded a new era of artistic irreverence, one which visited the margins of pop culture and transformed them into high art. Some people weren’t into the whole lowbrow = high art thing, but that’s OK as far as Jeremy Scott’s concerned. “To me, making fashion is about creating and enlarging my vision, not about selling blah number of units. It’s not healthy to even think in terms of sales.”

For Scott, the obsession with bad taste and Americana was no artsy bourgeois amusement—it reflected the world he came from. Growing in rural Missouri, America’s heartland, it was impossible for Scott not to absorb the Big Mac/trailer park/Rikki Lake culture of his surroundings. He has worn his hair in a mullet, the classic trailer park style, since he was 18. It’s the only look that really suits him, he says. “Even Vidal Sassoon told me never to change my hair,” says Scott.

And yet he was always different. He wore his mullet bright orange, for starters, to match his idol Cyndi Lauper. He was vegetarian (“I have never eaten a piece of chicken in my entire life,” he says) and has never smoked a cigarette in his life. Aged 18, He applied to New York’s prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), and was heartbroken when they turned him down. They said his work lacked “originality, creativity and artistic ability.” He flew to New York City to appeal the decision, and found that his unconventionality was embraced by professors at the Pratt Institute. “They didn’t care that I wasn’t interested in designing khaki pants,” he says. His graduation show was typically outrageous, inspired by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Months after graduating, Scott moved to Paris, he dreamed of an internship with Jean Paul Gaultier. “I would have picked pins up off the floor,” he says, but try as he might, he couldn’t find a way in. Scott did, however, find himself drawn into the heart of the Paris club scene, and became a friend, muse and rumoured lover of Karl Lagerfeld, creative genius behind the House of Chanel. He art-directed photo shoots for Lagerfeld and in return, Lagerfeld gained access to Scott’s youthful, avant garde world. When asked what he thinks of Parisian street fashion, he suggest it’s not as avant as the rest of the world might want to believe. “Yes, there is a cool kid look, but at its heart Paris is about sophistication, and you can only have that with age, familiarity and security. If you’re talking about street style, London and Tokyo are where the envelope is really being pushed.”

In 2002 he left Paris and moved to Los Angeles where, tucked away in a mid-century modern home overlooking Hollywood, he enjoys a quieter, more anonymous existence. “My life here is about working on my ideas, and cocooning,” he says. Los Angeles, which is still struggling to find its place in the fashion world, was for many a surprising choice of location for Scott, who has only shown in his adopted hometown once. He showed in New York for five years, before returning to Paris. It was like a homecoming, Scott says. A recent runway show, called Happy Daze, had British model Agyness Deyn marching down the runway in a dress that looked like a pink Cadillac, complete with spare tire on her ass. For many, that show was the highlight of Paris fashion week. At the end he emerged triumphant onto the runway, wearing a smiley-face sweater. Naturally, the smiley-face had a bullet in the head.

British style bible i-D recently ran a 10-year retrospective of Scott’s work, calling him “bad taste personified…an i-Con for a generation...spreading bucket-loads of silliness in his wake”. Scott was featured side-by-side with model Devon Aoki, his number one muse. Scott first laid eyes on Aoki eight years ago in a Nick Knight magazine spread. She was 13, and Scott was smitten by her heart-shaped face and cushion-like lips. “My best friend when I was growing up was half Japanese,” he says. “Maybe that’s why her beauty resonated so much with me.” He had a friend of his call Storm, her agency in London, three times a day until she agreed to take part in his groundbreaking “Rich White Women” Paris show in October 1997. “I will never forget her walking in the room with her mom,” says Scott. “She has the best lips. I’m into the rarest, most unique, most precious things - and that’s her.”

There’s friends, and then there’s business. And in L.A., the only real business is show business. I ask him about his celebrity clientele, and it reads like a tabloid magazine’s wet dream. “Britney, Paris, Lindsey, Mary Kate, Ashley, Kristin, Mischa, Nicole…” he lists. “I dress rap people, I dress pop stars, I dress Kanye, Madonna and Fergie. I like to mix it up. They come to me because they know I have such diverse inspiration. I’m an anomaly.”

His greatest collaborative relationship, however, is with Bjork. She’s the one who ‘gets’ him the most, he says. “Maybe it’s because I’ve had such a long friendship with her,” he says. “She is such a pure, genius artist, with such respect for other artists.” A year ago she sent him a copy of the then-unfinished album Volta and he designed a tribal skeleton bone corset and rainbow-colored hairy skirt for her, while playing it. She wore it on stage this Spring, at the Coachella music festival in the California desert. “I am able to translate her music into clothes,” he says. “That to me is one of the most amazing things.”

Brian Lichtenberg story for Oyster magazine

The Obsessions of Brian Lichtenberg

by Caroline Ryder

Auburn-headed fashion designer Brian Lichtenberg rocks the fragile indie-junkie look so masterfully, it’s hard to believe that beneath the torn sweater and drainpipe jeans lies a clean-living rap and R&B fanatic, who thinks Ludacris is the shiz. Known for his futuristic sportswear and holographic leggings (as beloved by M.I.A.), Lichtenberg loves to shop, but eschews the trendy boutiques of Los
Angeles for the thrift stores of South Central, where security guards carry real guns and hookers flash their asses to passers by. Another anomaly - he doesn’t own a car. Raised in Los Angeles, the city of freeways and low-lying smog, he has no idea how to drive. Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of Brian Lichtenberg. Caroline Ryder writes.

Obsession # 1: M.I.A.
Lichtenberg and Sri Lankan/British rapper M.I.A. have been having a fashion love affair since the summer. She was in LA on tour for her new album Kala when a friend of his who works for her management company passed some of his hologram leggings to her…and the rest is history. M.I.A. owns more than a dozen pairs of his leggings now, and some body suits, and has worn them throughout her tour. This love affair was meant to be - two years ago, before they started their collaboration and became friends, Lichtenberg appeared as an extra in M.I.A.’s Bucky Done Gun video. “I was walking down the street with my friends and someone came up and asked us if we want to be in the video. I freaked out when I realized who it was for.” Lichtenberg and seven of his best friends were driven out to the Salton Sea, an eerie saline lake in the desert just east of Los Angeles, where the video was shot. “It was like a fun field trip,” says Lichtenberg. “And we got paid for it too.”

Obsession # 2: Thrift-shopping in South Central
When Lichtenberg was growing up, he, his mom and his brother loved to wake up early on the weekend and go to yard sales. Now he heads down to South Central, to neighbourhoods like Compton and Long Beach. It’s his little secret. “I’ve gotten all these vintage jersey tank tops and fur coats and sequined dresses there,” he says. “I have scored Christian Dior boys’ blazers, Chanel belts, all this amazing stuff.” Last time he was there, he recalls being mooned by one of the prostitutes that hang out outside cheap motels in the area. But that’s about as gnarly as it’s ever gotten, for him at least. “I have never been fucked with at all,” he says. “People have that stereotype about going to the ghetto, like something is going to happen to you. But I realized that I have never been messed with, probably because I look like a junkie.”

Obsession # 3: Ludacris and UK two-step
Lichtenberg’s look may be all stripy Kurt Cobain, when it comes to music, he veers heavily towards the urban. “I love hip hop and R&B, and any black-influenced music,” he says. He has a crush on Ludacris, whom he thinks is genius. “At the end of the day, the songs are still about money and booty and alcohol and drugs. But they are lyrically clever and funny and the beats are more progressive than in any other music that’s out there." He’s also into Ciara, Dizzee Rascal, and UK Two-Step. He says one day, he too would like to make music, probably R&B. “I would love to make music and collaborate,” says Lichtenberg. “My grandma always says I have such a nice voice.”

Obsession # 4: Going to Japan a lot
Lichtenberg hasn’t traveled much outside the US, except to Tokyo - four times. He even speaks a little Japanese, having studied it at high school (which, incidentally, was where Beverly Hills 90210 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series were shot.) “Growing up I had friends from all ethnic backgrounds,” says Lichtenberg. “Now when I have shows, I always want to include someone of every ethnicity. My friends call it the United Colors of Brianton.” He was raised in the L.A. suburb of Torrance, which has one of the largest Japanese ex pat communities in America. “That’s where my interest in Japanese pop culture was born,” he says. He loves to go to Little Tokyo and immerse himself in the magazine racks. “The magazines in Japan are so visually stimulating, and they showcase such amazing young talent and street style,” he says. “So much amazing shit.”

Obsession # 5:Taking the bus in LA
“I don’t drive,” says Lichtenberg. This, in LA, city of freeways, is a revolutionary statement. “I have driven, like, three times in my life. I wasn’t really into it.” These days, his assistant drives him around. But before he had that luxury, he took the bus. He would make sketches taking the bus from Torrance to the boutiques of Melrose Avenue and Vermont Avenue, where he would shop at XGirl, the store where Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon once sold her line. Sometimes Lichtenberg would get inspired by the people he saw on the bus. And sometimes they would scare the hell out of him. “One time this guy pulled a knife,” he remembers. “He was older and there were these young gangbanger kids. He said ‘Oh, you guys think you’re tough?’ and got out this knife. It was scary. Another time this dude had a heart attack.”

LA Times story - The Bride Wore Black

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK

By Caroline Ryder
October 28, 2007 in print edition P-6

A pink-haired drag queen scattered rose petals before the bride as she glided toward the altar, looking every inch the goth princess – vampy eyes, raven bouffant, black veil and noir Dutch rose nosegay. She swooshed with funereal drama past her guests – burlesque diva Dita Von Teese, pop surrealist Mark Ryden and Bauhaus drummer Kevin Haskins among them. Waiting at the altar was her dapper, inky-haired groom. The DJ, lowbrow artist Tim Biskup, faded out the music – a dirge by Sigur Ros – and the wedding officiant cleared his throat. He was wearing, naturally, a giant Easter Bunny head.

“Ladies, gentlemen, friends and fellow bunny lovers,” he intoned. “Welcome to the wedding of Jessicka Fodera and Christian Hejnal.”

When goth rockers Fodera and Hejnal decided to get married on Valentine’s Day 2006, the usual white satin thing was definitely not happening. Fodera, known professionally as simply Jessicka, once sang with Marilyn Manson, and went on to form a noise-pop outfit called Scarling with Hejnal, a guitarist and visual effects producer at Sony. At the heart of Hollywood’s goth rock scene, they were introduced seven years ago by their mutual friend, best man Lisa Leveridge, who thought they would make a good couple because they were both “small musicians with black hair.”

Goth culture has thrived for more than 20 years, but nowhere more than in Los Angeles, where America’s first goth club, the Fetish Club, opened in the 1980s. Now there are more than 20 goth and death rock club nights a month, a goth-industrial roller skating event called Wumpskate and goth days at Disneyland. There are a slew of goth bands in Southern California, and goth clothing boutiques such as Necromance, Shrine and Panpipes selling the dramatic velvet and leather looks to devotees. Some of L.A.’s most relevant fashion designers have a goth bent, Rick Owens and L’wren Scott among them.

So a goth wedding was pretty much inevitable.

Fodera and Hejnal booked the deco-decadent Oviatt penthouse in downtown L.A. for Oct. 13, and artist friends began pouring their talents into the details – the invitations, the creepy bunny centerpieces and the goth-rock playlist.

Jessicka’s dress was a blend of influences – “Addams Family” and turn-of-the-century vintage. Costumers Adele Mildred and M’Lynn designed a silhouette that was slimmer on top and flared at the knees with a small train, made of champagne silk overlaid with black French Chantilly lace. Mildred had also made the dainty veiled doll hat worn by guest Liz McGrath, the diminutive downtown sculptor known by friends as “Bloodbath McGrath.” McGrath had, in turn, designed the dozen or so creepy little rabbit centerpieces, each ghoulish bunny elaborately attired in top hat, polka dots and pink lace collar.

Ryden’s wedding gift was a miniature portrait of the couple – a faithful adaptation of Jan Van Eyck’s “The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini” that was reproduced on the invitations. Gifts to the couple included a cuckoo clock, a mannequin head and an anatomically correct model of the human heart. Iconic horror comic book artist Roman Dirge gave them a framed sketch of a woman with vampire teeth and a fur-lined jacket.

It was Jessicka’s idea to have a rabbit, a symbol of fertility since pre-Christian times, officiate over the ceremony, and in his sermon, the bunny described how the star-crossed lovers first met seven years ago, on Friday the 13th. Then came the vows. Jessicka promised she would comfort Christian “in times of sorrow and insanity,” while Christian swore never to try to “restrain” his wife in any way, causing chuckles among many guests. As they slipped simple white gold wedding bands onto each other’s fingers, the couple vowed to “embrace each other – but not to the point of smothering” and to “say I love you a lot, and let go of the stupid little things.”

The mother of the bride sniffled through the ceremony. Then the bunny declared them husband and wife – and high-fived the groom.

The party was on.

The guests were fabulously attired, largely in 1940s siren style and, of course, black. There may have never been a wedding with so many black fishnet stockings, Vivienne Westwood heels and black crucifixes, unless it was in a Billy Idol video. Naturally, there was an abundance of body art, and complexions were fashionably milky.

Von Teese, who met the bride through her former husband, Manson, was a vintage vision in a 1940s clingy cap-sleeved black knit dress with tiny turquoise beads on the shoulders, Weiss costume clip earrings and a striking miniature aqua felt hat, adorned with a single saddle brown ostrich feather. In choosing her outfit, Von Teese was inspired by the 1944 classic “Cover Girl,” starring Rita Hayworth.

“I don’t often get to wear top-to-toe vintage,” she said, showing off even her nylon stockings, as Biskup DJ’d on his Mac laptop.

There was a pause in the action for speeches from the best man, maid of honor and author Clint Catalyst, who waxed lyrical. (“Jessicka and Christian’s union is an integral part of an ancient umbilical cord, connecting multi-talented musicians to visual artists to writers to performers to designers, in a symbiotic relationship that academics of future days will pigeonhole as a ‘movement… .’ ”

Then Jessicka took the mic and commanded guests to “go forth and drink.” Most were happy to follow her orders.

–

Meet the Addamses

Jessicka and Christian had decided that once married, they would both lose their family names and start afresh. After considering Bubblestorm, Awesome, Applebottom and Deathblow, they settled on Addams, an homage to the macabre TV family. “It was time for a new bloodline,” Jessicka said with a shrug. “Plus, the name Addams just fits well, like an old goth T-shirt.”

No, their actual families weren’t horrified. Nancy Gissing, the mother of the bride, could barely contain her emotion throughout the ceremony, which she said fitted Jessicka’s personality exactly. “I would have been shocked if she’d done this any other way,” she said.

Samantha Maloney, bridesmaid and drummer for Peaches (and formerly Motley Crue and Hole), graciously assumed the role of tour guide, showing guests around the space. Surrounded by twinkling views of the L.A. cityscape, the penthouse was built by haberdasher James Oviatt in 1927, whose high-end shop once occupied the ground floor. The place oozes decadence. Oviatt and his wife, Mary, were known for their lavish soirees, and signed photographs of their friends – John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, Howard Hughes – still line the walls.

Downtown continues to be a destination for hedonists. As the Addamses and their goth royalty entourage celebrated at the Oviatt, around the corner indie folk hero Devendra Banhart was onstage at the Orpheum theater, while members of the Strokes and Mexican heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal looked on.

At the former St. Vibiana’s cathedral, fashionistas had gathered for EcoNouveau, a green-themed runway show. And a stone’s throw away, on Santa Fe and Fourth, trance freaks dressed in garish neons and Mylar danced off the last of the playa dust at the Burning Man Decompression party. Back at the Oviatt, the music segued from Sisters of Mercy to Christian Death to Kajagoogoo. Even at this iconoclastic affair, one wedding tradition refused to die – crazy dancing. And the prize for best moves went, unsurprisingly, to the Easter Bunny, who by this point had revealed himself to be screenwriter Jeff Buhler.

“When Jessicka asked me to officiate the wedding as a rabbit, I thought it was a great idea,” he said. “It exactly sums up our group of friends, you see.”

Later he made a brave attempt at the splits.

LA Times: My story about The Source fashion

BACK TO THE SOURCE

By Caroline Ryder
November 25, 2007 in print edition P-12

Incense lingered heavily in the air as cult members wearing silk headbands, caftans and long, long hair swayed to the sounds of YaHoWa 13, a three-man jam band rocking out with guitars and a large gong. The crowd talked about mind expansion and a new era of consciousness, while swirly visuals and flashing lights shone above them. At the end of the night, Sky Saxon, the singer for a psychedelic garage band called the Seeds, took the stage and sang “Give Peace a Chance.”

Sound like Woodstock, circa 1969? Try the Echoplex, last week.

It was the first time the Source Family, arguably the most stylish “cult” of our time, had reunited in 30 years. With about 140 members, the Source was a fixture of 1970s Los Angeles. Now, a new book by former family member Isis Aquarian has brought the group back into the creative ether, inspiring some of L.A.’s hottest fashion designers and musicians.

The group was led by a man named Father Yod (pronounced “yode”), a Kundalini master and erstwhile student of Yogi Bhajan. He taught meditation, yoga and esoteric occult wisdom to his “family.” He also had 14 “spiritual wives,” drove a Rolls-Royce and owned the Source restaurant on Sunset and Sweetzer, where dishes such as Aware Salad, Aladdin’s Lamps and Magic Mushroom were served to a showbiz clientele – John Lennon, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Smokey Robinson, Frank Zappa, Cicely Tyson and Bud Cort (who briefly joined the family in the early years).

Members’ names were predictably ethereal – Mercury, Lotus, Venus, Pan and Infinity. Paris Match called the Source Family “Les Millionaire Hippies de Los Angeles,” marveling at its home, the Chandler mansion in Los Feliz, which boasted an Olympic swimming pool. The family later moved to a chic residence in Nichols Canyon overlooking Sunset Boulevard, originally built by Catherine Deneuve. (Let’s forget that there were so many of them, they had to cram into tiny pod-like sleeping areas, a precursor to Tokyo’s capsule hotels perhaps?)

The women of the Source, who included Lovely Previn (daughter of musician Andre Previn, who played violin at the Echoplex event) and the niece of Chief Justice Earl Warren, represented the stylish side of the au naturel spiritual subculture. As Jodi Wille of Process Books (which published “The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod”) put it, these women were “incredibly sexy, cosmic rock groupies.”

Picture them in thigh-high moccasin boots, Victorian nightgowns with lace necklines and fluttery sleeves, figure-hugging panne velvet goddess gowns, off-the-shoulder robes and sheer caftans that they made themselves. The look has become so analogous to Los Angeles, you can see it on Sunset Boulevard now, any day of the week.

“They had this very earthy, caftany vibe, but still they drove a Rolls-Royce, lived in a mansion and were very sophisticated about the way they lived their lives. It’s the blending of two sensibilities,” says Paula Thomas, designer of the label Thomas Wylde, who supplied caftans to Source groupies from Flaunt magazine at the Echoplex event in Echo Park. “And they had their genres, just like a seasonal fashion house.”

Even the Source children (51 in total, all born through natural childbirth) looked Renaissance Faire haute, decked out in satins and velvets. And don’t forget the slender, impossibly handsome men, who were wont to wander around with bows and arrows, looking like hippie variations on Legolas Greenleaf from “The Lord of the Rings.”

An Angeleno through and through, Father Yod often said, “Any man who does not take the time to look good is no real man,” and the male Source members duly took note, donning velvet-trimmed ponchos with custom-made “Tahuti belts.” The large round silver buckles bore Mercury/Wisdom symbols mounted on lead with solid gold centers. (Many of the Source Family’s jeweled and metal accessories were crafted by family member Sunflower.)

Fashion designer Corinne Grassini, of the offbeat Society for Rational Dress label, has picked up on some of the Source’s style cues, too. Caftans and tunics are a mainstay of her collections, as are leather belts and straps. “Actually having a connection to the physical materials and trims and leather is really important in my work,” she says. “When I was introduced to the Source Family and found out that they made all their clothes and belts by hand, I was very inspired, and felt like I was close to home.”

Influenced by esoteric traditions, Source Family members would often adopt the style of the ancients they happened to be studying at the time. Early on, it was an all-white, Essene-inspired look, which included white Mexican cotton pants, shirts and headdresses. This evolved into more colorful Greco-Roman, Atlantean and Knights Templar looks, with some Victorian lace thrown in for good measure (it was the ’70s, after all).

Sometimes when Father Yod was venturing into the outside world, or Maya, as he referred to it, he would swap his terry velour robes for a three-piece white suit, fedora and cane, looking about as superfly as a yogi could.

The book, which features 200 photos of the Source Family in their fantastical regalia, has sparked somewhat unexpected interest in the mystical group. Musician Devendra Banhart, filmmaker Wyatt Troll and music producer Rick Rubin are all, reputedly, hooked.

But not everyone at the Echoplex reunion was as taken with it all. “It feels like Halloween,” remarked one attendee. Another felt uncomfortable with Father Yod’s multiple wives, some of whom were underage. Yod was, according to some sages, very much “stuck in his sex chakra.”

Mostly, though, the response among the 600 revelers was enthusiastic – something that came as a shock to most Source Family members, including Galaxy Aquarian, the family’s unofficial fashion designer.

Galaxy, who now goes by Dawn Hurwitz, created many of the looks worn by the family. All the members were uncommonly attractive, something Hurwitz ascribes to their raw food diet (“We wouldn’t even eat the food that was served in the Source restaurant – it wasn’t pure enough for us”), meditation and simple beauty regime. They wore no makeup, did not shave their bodies, partook of regular salt scrubs by the pool, used Dr. Bronner’s organic soap (“for everything”) and treated their hair with Nature’s Gate Herbal Hair Conditioner. “For long hair it is the best, and it smells really great,” says Hurwitz. “I still use it.”

Homespun, a company based in Culver City at the time, was the favorite fabric house of the Source Family. “They made this heavy cloth from thick fiber and natural, unbleached cotton, and we liked that,” said Hurwitz. “It was heavy, so it worked well for robes.”

One day, after years of dressing almost entirely in white, Father Yod decided the family should inject some color into their lives. “It was like Dorothy opening the door from black and white into Technicolor,” Hurwitz recalls. “I sat in the room with YaHoWha (the moniker later taken by Father Yod), and he wanted me to go to International Silks & Woolens and buy velvets in the colors he saw us wearing. He chose gold for me.”

By this point, Hurwitz was making clothes for the outside world. She was commissioned to make a pair of opulent blue flared pants with rhinestones for Elliot Mintz, radio host, friend to Lennon and Yoko Ono, and current publicist for Paris Hilton.

Hurwitz also made the garnet velvet robe and black sleeveless over-robe Father Yod was wearing when he plummeted to his death on Aug. 25, 1975, after attempting to hang-glide from a sheer cliff in Hawaii. While he was in mid-air, the wind simply stopped.

Without their father, the family lost direction and, eventually, their trademark look. In late 1975, after the restaurant was sold, Hurwitz and other family members launched the Crabtree Fashions clothing line, but it never got off the ground. The Source dispersed in 1979, and Hurwitz returned to her native Chicago, where she opened a boutique. She also made costumes for rock bands such as the Ministry, dressing front man Al Jourgensen during his more romantic sartorial moment.

She moved to Hawaii in 1989, opening a metaphysical bookstore and cafe before starting her current business, selling and servicing Mac computers. She says she would love to design clothes again. But these days, Hurwitz doesn’t wear caftans. She prefers a more fitted look.

LA Weekly archives: Granny Chic

The Maude Squad

Our tribute to Harold’s gal, the ultimate granny-chic icon

Caroline Ryder

Published on March 30, 2006

I met my granny for the first time in October 2004. She lives in São Paulo, Brazil, in a bullet-riddled cement block in a neighborhood called Wobbly Frog. And like all Brazilian women, she looked hot.

She’s nearly 90 — yet there was something daring about her knee-length stripy wool socks. An elegance to the way she tucked her silver hair inside a brightly patterned knotted head scarf. Nothing she wore matched, yet she was far from dowdy. Her mix of garish greens and mustard yellows, her wools and her nylons — those things to me spelled insouciance, quirkiness, an innocent joie de vivre. That moment marked the beginning of my appreciation for “granny chic,” the frumpy-is-fabulous style that makes it cool for youngsters to rock visors, gloves, brooches, netted hats, string pearls, alligator handbags and face-eating glasses. And don’t forget the Kleenex. Never forget the Kleenex. Because the key to granny chic, the thing that separates it from plain vintage, is practicality. Grannies wear their knickers big and their shoes orthopedic — and they don’t give a damn.

The phenomenon was spawned, some say, when Prada found its new muse — old Italian peasant ladies — and fashion entered what Vogue would dub its “senior moment.” Skirts skimmed the knees, and youthful celebrities sported fashions that wouldn’t have looked out of place in their nanny’s closet. The Olsen Twins wouldn’t leave the house without their long string pearls or oversize beads. And remember Christina Aguilera’s Norma Desmond–esque head wrap? In 2004 Katie Grand, the British über-stylist working with Prada and Miu Miu in New York, announced the new crop of style icons: Margaret Thatcher, the Queen of England and TV detective Miss Marple. (And if you’re a guy, it’s Sherlock Holmes — time to dig out Grandpa’s houndstooth and pipe.)

Some say that granny chic is a backlash against the hoochie-mama-show-me-more-skin/Paris Hilton celebutante phenomenon. They call it a return to modesty. Maybe it’s no coincidence that in a time obsessed with aging, dressing like seniors has become de rigueur among the youth. Either way, now it appears we are entering the second wave of granny chic, as announced by Vogue last month. “The new granny chic is all about appliqué and eyelet. Spring’s catwalks have been flowing with clothes apparently made from tablecloths.” Marc Jacobs, Chloe and Dolce & Gabbana sent their models mincing down the catwalk in pristine eyelet lace — “broderie anglaise” — and linens.

The new senior styles are, according to Vogue, more elegant than before. Looking like a curtain may be their fresh and dainty new take on granny garmentry, but frankly I’m a purist, a fan of the old-skool granny who, like Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude (the ultimate hot granny), looks sexier than hell in her musty faux furs, sagging stockings and clashing nylons. Echo Park stylist Charon Nogues, who rocks the AARP chic better than anyone I know, agrees, and came up with the following recommendations on junior-senior fashions for 2006:

If you’re going granny, your trouser should always be high-waisted and wide-legged. “Grannies don’t like things clinging to their pendulous bodies,” says Nogues. “And the high waist makes your legs appear longer and your ass smaller. Think sailor pants.” As for materials, it’s rayon, rayon, rayon all the way. Buy a cloche — a small 1920s felt hat that clings to the head, kind of like a skullcap. “Mark my words, that’s gonna be a hot item,” says Nogues. Basically, any hat with a feather or a veil says elegant granny. Don’t forget wide-brimmed gardening hats for the summer. The 1920s, 1940s and 1970s are key decades when you are putting together your granny-chic look. “Those eras celebrated bold patterns and simple construction. And the best part is, you can mix and match the decades to come up with a totally original granny ensemble.” Good pairings are ’20s with ’70s styles, or ’40s with ’70s. 2006 granny-chic hair is all about the finger wave — the Marcel. Think Charlize Theron at the Oscars, or Christina Aguilera of late and Maggie Gyllenhaal all the time. “The Marcel is a classic hairstyle that lends itself to granny chic if you wear it with a cloche, a big sweater and some clumpy shoes,” says Nogues. If you are going for the Palm Springs granny look, then a visor is essential (Prada put their models in visors and saggy gray stockings for a recent ad campaign). The truly committed should buy BluBlockers, preferably purchased from QVC. As for colors, always go bold and primary. Red-orange is hot right now, and green is a granny perennial. It doesn’t have to be putrid algae green — think crocodile green, avocado green . . . But the key to making granny chic sexy is to always wear garters. And here’s Nogues’ insider secret — buy designer tights and cut them off at the top. “The better made they are the less likely they are to run,” says Nogues. At night, you could try a little silk chemise worn beneath a kimono, à la Maude. And keep a boy toy in your bed at all times. Lastly, remember granny chic is not just fashion — it’s a way of life. While we’re not suggesting anyone wear Depends or carry mothballs, you should at the very least brush up on your granny lingo (it’s not a dress, darling, it’s a frock), watch British soap opera Coronation Street (character Hilda Ogden, who was always in a pinny, curlers and head scarf, is a granny-chic icon across the pond), and whatever you do, don’t forget the Kleenex . . .

LA Weekly archives...my Cory Kennedy story

Cory's World

Caroline Ryder

Published on August 03, 2006

Cory Kennedy, ubiquitous club urchin and object of desire for fashion-mag hags everywhere, is hanging with her buddies after The Like show at MoCA. One of them is designer Jeremy Scott. “Cory’s the It Girl!” he announces. Then, pointing to her boyfriend, nightlife photographer Mark “The Cobrasnake” Hunter, he adds, “She’s always being hounded by the paparazzi!” Giggles all ’round.

A blonde girl is hanging out with them, and I ask how she knows Cory. “I just met her tonight,” she drawls. “We’re really close now.” She turns to Cory and asks how it feels to be a celebrity. Cory brushes a tendril of matted brown hair from her eyes and pauses. “I don’t really think about it.”

Away from the group, we sit facing each other, cross-legged on the edge of the MoCA fountain. The New York Times interviewed Cory the other week. It must have been kinda surreal, I suggest, especially because she’s only 16.

“I can’t even grasp it yet,” she says, all big eyes and spindly legs, like a foal. She tells me they asked her about her childhood, her fashion sense and the controversial nature of being her.

Controversial?

“I think that’s why I’ve gotten so much attention, because I’m so controversial,” she explains. “People either love me, or they hate me, hate me, hate me.”

She twiddles a ’90s-rapper-style gold chain, which she wears over a Marc Jacobs T-shirt dress, worn backward. A metallic American Apparel boob tube glimmers beneath the giant armholes. A Marc Jacobs scarf is tied around her right bicep and her flat gladiator sandals — Salvation Army, $4.50 — are falling apart. One is held together by a hair band.

Why does she think people hate her?

“Maybe it’s ’cause most celebrities are, like, perfect,” she ventures. “They have their hair brushed and their makeup done and no bruises on their legs . . . and I’m like BLEURRRRGH!”

Then there are those who hate on her for being, as Gawker.com put it, “a malnourished teenager who dresses like she raided her retarded grandma’s basement and does nothing with her wasted life but pose for pictures on a Web site and hang out and live off her parents while waiting to get famous for some as-yet-unrevealed talent.” Ouch.

Either way, Cory’s life has changed dramatically ever since The Cobrasnake made her his intern and splashed photos of her all over his Web site. A latter-day Bianca Jagger in ballet flats, she’s the one with the messy long brown hair, the crooked smile and the glass of white wine perpetually in hand. Now she gets MySpace messages from admirers all over the world, and fashion bloggers in Europe, Australia and South America have been asking “Who is Cory Kennedy?”

Apparently, the worldwide Cory craze started in the Netherlands.

“They were the first international place that started giving me attention,” Cory says. “Then it went to Spain, and then London, and blah blah blah . . . and Australia kinda came last, and Canada’s chillin’.?”

People usually ask her about her age, and her clothes. She says her biggest fashion inspirations are Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle, the 1920s through the ’40s, Twiggy, Edie Sedgwick and Kurt Cobain. She loves to mix vintage with designer, and lists her favorites: Chanel, Oscar de la Renta, Marni, Jeremy Scott, Isabel Marant, André Courrèges, Obesity & Speed, Pierre Cardin, Tsumori Chisato and Mary Ping.

She tells me she’s especially excited to be working with Jeremy Scott on his next collection. “I bring him stuff and say, ‘Look at this!’?”

I wonder where Cory gets the money to buy designer clothes. “My parents are good to me,” she says, adding, “But I’m good to them.”

She lives in Santa Monica and has a twin sister (not identical) who doesn’t go out clubbing like she does. She also has two younger sisters, ages 14 and 13. Her folks run education programs for adults who did not complete high school. They don’t want Cory to end up one of their pupils.

She agrees, and plans on getting her high school diploma before pursuing her career, probably in fashion. Her parents are vaguely aware that she has a following, but “they don’t really understand. It’s kind of weird because I say, ‘Yeah, I kinda have some fan sites and stuff,’ and they’re like, ‘That’s cool.’?”

Cory’s starting to get fidgety. We wander back into the courtyard, while she tells me about some haters who have been posting mean things about her on livejournal.com. Then she spots Mark and yells his name with extraordinary force for one so petite. He comes over. There’s a party downtown, he says. There’s a possibility it may be lame, and they carefully weigh their options. It’s a tough call — after all, Cory isn’t even supposed to be out. Turns out she’s grounded.

Yuri manga story for The Advocate

Lost in Translation

What’s not gay about girl-on-girl comic book love? In Japan, everything. Caroline Ryder explores the elusive world of lesbian manga.

By Caroline Ryder

America’s appetite for all things Japanese is voracious -- sushi, karaoke, Hello Kitty. In the past seven years our Nipponese fixation has turned toward manga, comic books that have a distinctive Asian aesthetic and are published in innumerable genres, including romance, action-adventure, horror -- even sexuality.

In 2007 manga sales represented 56% of the revenue of all graphic novels sold in the United States. And things have been particularly good for manga in film lately: Warner Bros. put out Speed Racer earlier this year, and 20th Century Fox is adapting Dragon Ball for a 2009 release. U.S. publishing houses HarperCollins and Random House have teamed up with manga publishers.

Manga is so vast that there is an entire subgenre portraying love between girls. Yuri -- which literally translates as “lily” -- can revolve around anything from hard-core sex between impossibly pneumatic girl characters to sweet tales of schoolgirl crushes, where hand-holding is as racy as things get. And while you’d be forgiven for thinking yuri is a gay story written for a gay audience, the Japanese would likely disagree. In a country where homosexuality is still very much taboo, even the most conservative of Japanese parents are OK with their daughters reading yuri manga because the comics aren’t viewed as “gay.” (For the record, there are also boy-boy manga love stories, called yaoi. Raw in their depiction of romantic and sexual relationships between males, they’re primarily read by straight women in Japan.)

This cultural coyness may be attributed to the concept of tatemono honmono, a term for the space between what things appear to be and what they really are, says Erica Friedman, founder of ALC Publishing, the world’s only all-yuri publisher. “In Japan there’s intense societal pressure to live life as a straight person, more than any Westerner could conceive,” says Friedman, who is also president of Yuricon, a convention that celebrates yuri in anime and manga. “Yuri is accepted—so long as it’s perceived as being this fantasy world.”

To the contemporary Western mind, this nuance can be perplexing. In his book Japanamerica, Roland Kelts explains that “the strict codes of etiquette that govern daily life in Japan also allow for an extraordinary degree of creative and social permissiveness: the freedom to explore other identities.” So while a married woman may be able to explore her sexuality freely and without reproach by reading yuri on the subway, that freedom ends as soon as she turns the last page.

Take First Love Sisters, a classically sweet and innocent manga that, like so many yuri stories, is set in a school. The story revolves around Kizaki Haruna, a mysterious brunet teenager, and Chika Matsuzato, a younger student who develops an intense, somewhat obsessive, crush on her. “The instant I met Haruna-san,” Matsuzato gushes, “it seemed somehow warm, as though the very atmosphere had changed.” It’s romantic stuff, culminating in Kizaki licking ice cream from Chika’s face. But that doesn’t mean it’s a lesbian story, says illustrator Mizuo Shinonome. “Womanhood…is delicate, and changes so much with things like marriage and giving birth,” she writes at the end of First Love Sisters. “Love between two women might be seen as ephemeral, shining and gentle.” Shining and gentle it may be, but ephemeral? The assumption that lesbian relationships are the stuff of schoolgirls, merely fleeting fancies, is clear.

First Love Sisters is published in the United States by Seven Seas Entertainment, one of a handful of mainstream manga publishing houses translating yuri Japanese titles for the American market. The steady growth in demand for yuri reflects the larger manga boom in the States. While there are no statistics specifically for yuri titles, total U.S. manga sales in 2007 amounted to more than $220 million, according to Publishers Weekly. Cultural theorists like Roland Kelts say interest in manga was fostered after 9/11, when American readers were able to relate to the postapocalyptic narratives the comics often contain. Whatever the impetus, the fascination is likely to continue, particularly as Hollywood studios, insatiably hungry for a new supply of action heroes, turn to Japan for inspiration.

“I’d love to see more yuri content out there,” says Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, a senior editor at Tokyopop, the second largest publisher of translated manga in the United States. Tokyopop published 12 Days, a dark, deeply emotional graphic novel by South Korean expat artist June Kim about a woman who mourns the death of her female lover by consuming her ashes in the form of smoothies for 12 days. Boy-boy yaoi has established a stronger readership in the States, Diaz says, possibly due to larger demand for male-related themes but also because of continuing misunderstanding of what yuri actually means. “Some people think it’s lesbian porn geared toward men -- and that kind of manga does exist -- but there’s much more to it,” she says.

Riyoko Ikeda, who is largely regarded as a yuri godmother in manga circles, in 1972 created The Rose of Versailles, one of the first manga comics to contain girl-girl themes and the first translated manga to be available commercially in North America. It tells the story of Oscar, a handsome girl who dresses as a boy and serves the leader of Marie Antoinette’s palace guards. Most of the female courtiers have a crush on the dashing Oscar and become jealous whenever she’s seen with female escorts. The Rose of Versailles was adapted for the stage by the Takarazuka Revue, a regional Japanese theater where women play both male and female characters. Takarazuka fans are known for fawning over the actresses, and as with yuri, parents see it as a safe fantasy, having nothing to do with actually being gay.

Fast-forward to late 2006, when Ebine Yamaji’s manga Love My Life became a popular feature film starring one of Japan’s hottest model-actresses, Asami Imajuku. Now available in the U.S. from Wolfe Video, the film provides a positive portrayal of lesbian life in Japan and has an ultraprogressive L Word feel to it. The plot focuses on Ichiko, an out lesbian college student who p finds out that her father is gay and her mom is a lesbian; Ichiko herself spends plenty of time rolling around in bed with her beautiful female lover, Eri.

Yet in a July 2007 interview with Tokyo Wrestling (a Japanese website promoting lesbian and queer culture), Yamaji denied having had any gay friends or acquaintances when she was writing Love My Life. She claims she had never met an out lesbian until after she made the film. And when asked what she thought about lesbian life in Japan she replied, “I really don’t know enough about anything to give my opinion.” Whether tatemono honmono was at work or Yamaji is a straight woman with an astoundingly deep understanding of lesbian culture is debatable. But her statement makes clear that lesbianism isn’t something discussed in polite conversation in Japan.

Mari Morimoto, a professional manga translator and self-identified queer woman living in New York City, says that because of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” nature of lesbian culture in Japan, it’s almost impossible to make generalizations about the relationships readers have with yuri. “Remember -- yuri is very specific, and yet it is very vague,” Morimoto says.

But in America, teens have the freedom to view manga as more than receptacles of repressed sexual feelings. Morimoto says manga and anime conventions in the United States like Otakon and AnimeNext can turn into places where young gay and trans people use the manga fantasy as a stepping stone toward coming out. In that way manga actually helps prepare them for gay life in the real world.

“At these conventions the environment is always very accepting and open,” she says. “You can cross-dress as an alien character and no one will bat an eyelid. As you can imagine, it’s a totally freeing experience.”

Swindle mag: Don La Fontaine (RIP)

Don LaFontaine

By Caroline Ryder
Photo By Aaron Farley

You may not know his name, and you probably don’t recognize his face, but you’ve undoubtedly heard the voice of Don LaFontaine. His is the deep, ominous baritone behind countless movie trailer clichés, from “in a world beyond time” to “nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.” Somehow, these clichés take on a new poignancy when whispered by LaFontaine in the darkness of a movie theater. “My philosophy is that you have to really believe what you’re reading, even if you think the film’s a piece of junk,” says LaFontaine. “Even the worst picture is someone’s favorite film, and that someone is the fan I am always talking to.”

Nicknamed “Thunder Throat” and “The Voice of God,” Don LaFontaine sounds like a nine-foot-tall, cigar-smoking commando. In real life, the man behind The Voice is a very human 5’8”, blessed with Sean Connery eyebrows and a perfectly bald head. His regular speaking voice is clear and steady, with a strong dash of Olivier—but when he turns on The Voice, it’s as though Jehovah himself is commanding you from the clouds. “I think there’s a part of my voice that lives in its own frequency range,” says LaFontaine. “I can be whispering, and my voice will still cut through the sound of a car explosion. There’s only a few of us who can do that.”

And that’s why LaFontaine is the highest paid trailer narrator in Hollywood, and, until recently, has held a virtual monopoly on his niche for nearly four decades. Some of his classic trailers include Fatal Attraction (“A look that led to an evening, a mistake he’d regret all his life”), 2001: A Space Odyssey (“A shrieking monolith deliberately buried by an alien intelligence”), The Terminator (“In the 21st century, a weapon would be invented like no other”), and Rambo (“They knew he was innocent, and they didn’t give a damn”), as well as The Godfather, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Doctor Zhivago, M.A.S.H., The Untouchables, Ghostbusters, Batman, and many, many more, totaling around 3,500. It’s easy to understand why they call him the “busiest actor in Hollywood.” Until 20 years ago, LaFontaine also often wrote the trailers he narrated, studying movie rushes and distilling the plotline into a two-minute narrative.

LaFontaine started his showbiz career as a recording engineer. He became a trailer narrator when, in 1964, he filled in for a voice actor who was unavailable to finish the trailer for a Western called Gunfighters of Casa Grande. The filmmakers loved his melodramatic approach, and by 1970 LaFontaine was the most imitated trailer narrator in Hollywood.

LaFontaine sees himself as a storyteller, and possesses a genuine reverence for the power of words. It stems back to the first time he read Cyrano de Bergerac as a young man. “Since then, I have been enchanted by words,” he says. “But we don’t have great orators anymore, people who can stand up and inspire.” He takes issue with fellow storytellers, most notably those in the rap world. “What’s wrong with that Ludacris fellow?” he asks. “I think some rap music is very poignant, but I also see it contributing to the complete breakdown of communication. Words are mispronounced, beaten up, and misspelled just for the sake of misspelling them. Rap is reducing thoughts to the simplest Neanderthal grunts.”

LaFontaine predicts that trailer narrating will evolve toward a soothing, more everyman style in the future. One of the biggest thrills, he says, would be for the next big trailer narrator to be a woman. “I think women are vastly under-represented in this area,” he asserts. “You’d think that for films directly aimed at women, chick flicks, the logical choice would be for a woman to narrate the trailer. But the studios hold focus groups and the people in them—women included—seem to prefer the male voice.” LaFontaine was recording up to 10 trailers a day during his busiest period, being ferried around the studios in his own chauffeurdriven limo. These days, he takes things a little easier, working from home at about “two-thirds the speed” he worked at 10 years ago. There are also more narrators on the scene, people like Ashton Smith and George Del Hoyo, but there’s no denying that LaFontaine forged the path being trodden by the new generation. “I don’t think that there will ever be another career quite like mine,” he says. “It can’t be duplicated. I came into the field of movie promos just as it was being born. I had the opportunity to work in virtually every narrative style, mostly reading copy that I had written or co-written. Many of the younger narrators of today grew up hearing me. And right or wrong, it became sort of a template for how trailers should be read.”

Swindle mag: Black Panther Bobby Seale

Bobby Seale

By Caroline Ryder
Photo By Adam Wallacavage

Of all the revolutionary groups to emerge from the 1960s’ counterculture, one of the most compelling—and certainly the most badass—was the Black Panthers. With their shotguns, berets, raised fists, and angry anti-police rhetoric, this group of armed African Americans captured the imagination of both black and white disaffected youth, sparking a new racial consciousness and riling the FBI like never before. Two men started it all: former Air Force mechanic Bobby Seale and charismatic lawyer Huey P. Newton. Together, they created the largest Black Power organization America has ever seen.

Born Robert George Seale in 1936 in Dallas, Texas, Bobby Seale was raised by his carpenter father and devout Christian mother. Seven years later, the family moved to Oakland, California. Bobby failed to graduate from high school, and instead enlisted in the Air Force. He was eventually discharged for refusing to accept military discipline. On returning to Oakland, he enrolled in Merritt Junior College, where he met Newton. The civil rights movement was starting to explode, and in 1966, inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, Newton and Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.

Angry at police brutality against Blacks in Oakland, Seale and Newton decided it was time to raise arms. They penned a manifesto, the Ten-Point Program. The seventh point demanded “an end to police brutality and murder of Black people.” Armed with guns (back then, it was legal for citizens to carry weapons for self-defense), law books, and tape recorders, they began patrolling the streets of Oakland, their sole purpose being to observe and document police interactions with Black people. It was the first time the community had stood up against institutionalized racism in this way. “If you read our Ten-Point Platform, you’ll see we weren’t that different from other civil rights organizations,” says Seale. “Except we had guns.”

The Panthers became icons among the many leftist, militant groups at the time due in part to their trademark uniform, born when Seale saw Newton wearing a black leather sport jacket, black slacks, a starched blue shirt, shined shoes and “pimp socks” – sheer black socks. “I said ‘Huey, that’s it, that’s it, man! That’s our uniform! Our people are black and blue after being oppressed and bullied. So our colors will be black and blue.’” They added berets, inspired by old movies Seale had watched about the black-capped members of the French underground resistance during World War II.

“We needed a uniform,” says Seale. “As I told Huey, the low-income African-American community will not accept hippies as the leaders of their community. We have to be neat and respectable and organized.”

The Panthers achieved national notoriety in 1967 after storming the California State Capitol in Sacramento with their shotguns while Governor Ronald Reagan was talking to children outside. The Panthers were protesting a bill that would ban people from carrying loaded guns in public places. They had planned on marching into the spectator section, but ended up taking a wrong turn—onto the floor of the California State Assembly. “Suddenly we look around and all these legislators are ducking under their seats,” says Seale. “I was raised to be polite, so I said, ‘Oh sir, I am sorry. We are in the wrong goddamn place!’” Seale was charged with disturbing the peace, and jailed for six months.

That October, Newton was involved in a shoot-out with police and charged with killing an officer. During the three years Newton was behind bars, Seale oversaw the expansion of the party from 400 to 5,000 members nationwide, with a surge following the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968.

As the Panthers expanded, the government became increasingly nervous, and instructed the FBI to “neutralize” the Panthers and other Black Power groups as part of the COINTELPRO program. More than 2,000 people were arrested in FBI raids on Panther offices. In one, New York Panther leader Fred Hampton was drugged, shot, and killed in a joint police operation with the FBI while other party members were dragged into the street, beaten, and then charged with assault. The FBI tried to destroy the party from within, breaking up relationships and planting agents provocateurs within the Panthers’ midst. “They used to come inside our organization and do dumb shit that had nothing to do with the policies of the Black Panthers,” says Seale. He believes one member, Bill Brent, who held up a gas station and drove away in a truck with the words “Black Panthers” on the side, was almost certainly a plant. “The letters spelling ‘Black Panthers’ were a foot and a half high on the truck. It sure was funny.”

Seale was himself jailed in the aftermath of violent anti-war protests at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He was one of the Chicago Eight, charged with conspiracy and incitement to riot. During the trial, Seale was bound and gagged after calling Judge Julius Hoffman a “fascist dog” and a “pig.” He was sentenced to four years in prison for contempt of court.

Meanwhile, cracks were starting to appear within the Panthers’ ranks. Where Newton and Seale preached power to all oppressed peoples, not just Blacks, some factions were clearly leaning towards extreme Black Nationalism. Information Minister Eldridge Cleaver, for instance, had gone so far as to condone the rape of white women, calling it “an insurrectionary act.” The ideological split, combined with continuing pressure from the authorities, led to the demise of the Black Panther Party in the early ‘70s. In the Panthers’ lifetime, 34 members were killed and 69 wounded, and 15 police officers were allegedly killed by Panthers. Nine Black Panthers remain in jail today, and Seale is the only surviving founding member.

After the Panthers disbanded, Seale continued to work as an activist and public lecturer. He has written three books: Seize the Time and A Lonely Rage, both memoirs of his life as a Black Panther, and Barbeque’N With Bobby, a collection of traditional Southern and Western barbeque recipes, with proceeds going toward education and employment programs for Black youth.

Today, Seale lives in Philadelphia, where he devotes much of his time to lecturing and R.E.A.C.H., an organization he founded to teach young people how to organize. He still receives hate mail from people saying the Black Panther Party was nothing more than “the Black man’s Ku Klux Klan.” This couldn’t be further from the truth, says Seale. “From day one, the establishment media called us a paramilitary organization that hated all white folks. But we didn’t. We had working coalitions with leftist white organizations. The media simply liked to project us as a menacing threat because we had guns, and because violence sells.”

Seale worries about the resurgence of extreme Black Nationalist groups in America, two of which use “Black Panthers” in their name. “It makes me mad,” he says. “They have hijacked an organization that I founded and created.” As far as he’s concerned, the Panthers were less about skin color and more about human liberation as a whole. “Remember: the Black Panthers stood for all power, to all the people.”

In Variety, Project Runway's LA Talent

'Runway' shines light on L.A. designers

Reality show features rising West Coast couturiers

By CAROLINE RYDER

It may be shot in Manhattan, but "Project Runway" -- Bravo's competitive reality show that pits 15 aspiring fashion designers against one another -- is giving America a healthy dose of L.A. style. How so? Through its characters.

Remember Jeffrey Sebelia, the tattooed teetotaler who won season three? Santino Rice, the all-singing, all-dancing eccentric? What about Nick Verreos, the bolero-jacket loving dandy; Rami Kashou, the suave red carpet whiz (and season four runner-up); and Kit Pistol, the Silver Lake indie goddess? And let's not forget Sweet P, Kara Saun, Raymundo Baltazar, Andrae Gonzalo and the rest. All hail from L.A.

With season five to air in July, nearly a quarter of "Project Runway" alums to date are Angelenos, outnumbering contingencies from anywhere else in the country.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise; in a city that values showmanship over talent, "Project Runway" represents a smart career move for entertainers with sound sewing skills. When "Project Runway" moves from Bravo to Lifetime for its sixth season this fall, expect even more Tinsel Town -- Lifetime plans on shooting part of the show in Los Angeles.

"I'll admit, before 'Project Runway' I didn't know much about L.A. as a fashion center," says Tim Gunn, the show's resident onscreen Yoda. "Other than the leading costume designers like Adrian, and Edith Head, nothing about L.A. was in my vocabulary. But now I feel that you can't responsibly talk about American fashion without thinking about L.A."

A former chair of fashion design at Parsons and current CCO at Liz Claiborne, Gunn attends all the "Project Runway" open calls in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Miami. "There's a slickness in many ways to the Los Angeles crowd, and a sense of savvy about the entertainment industry," he says. "In New York there's a little more naivety about what being on the show is about."

"Project Runway" casting judge Jen Egen, who is national VP of arts organization GenArt, believes the show reflects L.A.'s fashion eclecticism. "If you look at Nick's line and Santino's line and Rami's and Jeffrey's lines -- they are all very different. I mean, Jeffrey works in leather and boning, and Nick will do bolero jackets and gold lame."

Both Jeffrey Sebelia and Rami Kashou have found that publicity generated from the show has propelled their businesses to new heights. Others, like Nick Verreos, are carving second careers as media fashion commentators. After being ejected from the show, Santino Rice gained representation and became a spokesperson for Saturn cars, and has performed his now-infamous Tim Gunn impersonations on college campuses around the country. Other "PR" graduates are carrying on from where they left off. And all have stayed in L.A.

Sebelia was a Hollywood production designer and art director before venturing into fashion. Filming in New York City was what put him off ever living there, even though Seventh Avenue is widely known as the fashion epicenter of America. "Ever tried lowering a couch down 44 floors in the snow?" he asks. "Why would I spend my life battling that?"

Even before "Project Runway," he had a successful fashion line -- thanks in part to the contacts he'd made in the film biz. "I knew a lot of fashion stylists from working in film," he says. "So when I started designing clothes, I called them up and they helped get my clothes into the right hands."

Sebelia says he enjoys "a lot more latitude" with his Cosa Nostra fashion line since winning "Project Runway." "When I started five years ago, I was doing handmade pieces and selling them individually to stores and celebrities," he says. (Dave Navarro, Gwen Stefani and Billy Bob Thornton were fans.) "But my label had become pigeon-holed as inaccessibly priced. The show has allowed me to develop a broader range, for a wider audience." As well as Cosa Nostra, Sebelia is now working on a new (and as-yet-unnamed) higher-end line, comprising custom evening gowns and dresses. "Just don't call it 'couture,' though, OK?" he says. "That is the most misused word in the world."

Likewise, Kashou already had generated a following before appearing on "Runway" -- he had shown collections at L.A. Fashion Week, and his designs were being worn by the likes of Dita Von Teese and Jessica Alba. "I knew I didn't need to move to New York to widen my reach -- I just needed extra exposure," he says. Enter "Project Runway." Since appearing on the show, demand for his draped, custom-made evening and wedding gowns has exploded, and Kashou has added to his list of celebrity clientele -- even "Project Runway" host Heidi Klum has ordered four dresses from Kashou.

He was invited to create a dress for HSN (the 350 pieces sold out in four minutes), and gowns he created for the "Project Runway" finale will be featured in the third annual "Outstanding Art of Television Costume Design" exhibit, being held in downtown L.A. this summer. (He had to purchase his own dresses back from the Weinstein Co. -- which owns the "Project Runway" franchise -- as the designers do not own the garments they make on the show.) Nonetheless, "If I had not had that exposure, I might not have gotten these kinds of opportunities," Kashou says.

Verreos, a season two alum and founder of the fashion line Nikolaki, agrees. "My whole life and business have changed," he says. "Things are now very different in terms of calling stores or making appointments with publicists and stylists. Five years ago it would be 'Nick who?' Now they're calling me."

Since appearing on the show, Verreos, who also teaches fashion design at Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, has signed a deal with MSN.com to be a fashion commentator on its "Style Studio" site. And this year, Marlee Matlin wore one of his gowns to the Oscars, something of which Verreos is justly proud. It's known that while actresses may let L.A.-based designers dress them for smaller events, they still turn to the European couture houses when it comes to the most important red carpet of all -- the one outside the Kodak Theater.

Variety: The Many Hairstyles of Holly Hunter

Hunter's hair softens, adds depth

Different 'dos enable eclectic characters

By CAROLINE RYDER

Long, tousled and Rapunzelesque, Holly Hunter's formidably feminine locks deserve mention as supporting actors in their own right, as they regularly serve to soften and add depth to her typically feisty characters.

But examine her repertoire and you'll discover there's much more to the 5-foot-nothing Hunter than long hair and cojones. Masterfully malleable, Hunter is the ideal blank canvas, slipping easily from a period bonnet, fingerless gloves and looped braids (in "The Piano") to talonlike nails and a suburban perm (in "The Firm") and a fetishy square bob and pantyhose (in David Cronenberg's "Crash"). Quirky, intense and physical, Hunter is a covert chameleon whose myriad physical guises are as eclectic as the roles she plays.

"When Billie Beat Bobby" (2001)
Foot-Forward Feminist Mullet
Holly Hunter is virtually unrecognizable in this 2001 TV biopic about the 1973 tennis match between court star Billie Jean King and middle-aged champ Bobby Riggs. To authentically portray BJK, the actress ditched her regular mane in favor of a mullet wig and Palm Springs-style visor teamed with pastel tennis tunics, enormous vintage glasses and lapels. Her naturally toned and wiry frame added to the believability of this period look, an authentic slice of 1970s feminist history.

"Crash" (1996)
Square-Cut Subversion
Was it the conservative business suit teamed with black-leather driving gloves? Or maybe the way she caressed her sheer black pantyhose or clutched Rosanna Arquette's prosthetic leg in the back seat of a convertible? In David Cronenberg's "Crash," Holly Hunter's uneasy blend of propriety and deviance revealed another facet to her sex appeal, one in which a dowdy helmet bob (reminiscent of Vogue editor Anna Wintour's iconic 'do) masks her self-destructive urges.

"Saving Grace" (2007)
Blond Flower-Child Braids
For her TV role as Grace, a tough-as-nails Oklahoma City police detective subject to the occasional angelic visitation, Hunter uses her flowing locks to full effect, contrasting her character's forceful demeanor with blond flower-child braids that hint at vulnerability and softness within. Hunter has said she specifically requested the braided style because of its association with tradition and classic femininity.

More than one option

• (Film) Saving Grace
  1986 - Tom Conti, Robert M Young
• (Film) Saving Grace
  1998 - Kirsty Hamilton, Costa Botes
• (Tv) One Woman's Courage
• (Tv) Saving Grace

"O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000)
Sunday-Best Southern Matriarch
Here Hunter plays Penny, a pursed-lipped, Depression-era mother of seven who sports sensible calf-length frocks and tucks her tresses beneath a series of rather prim straw cloche hats. Her mouselike appearance serves to contast the obvious truth -- that she's the one wearing the pants in the relationship with her caddish hubby.

"A Life Less Ordinary" (1997)
Locked-and-Loaded Bounty Hunter
In Danny Boyle's gonzo romance, Hunter plays a glamorous angel-slash-bounty hunter in danger of being banished to Earth unless she can bring together the most hapless couple imaginable. Her comically clipped, deadpan delivery is accentuated by high-fashion-meets-Wall-Street costumes -- pointed shoulder pads and power suits accented with an enormous beret perched atop her flowing hair -- all of which add extra stiffness to a character who clearly has no inkling of what love is.

"The Incredibles" (2004)
Soccer Mom Bob
Pixar's "The Incredibles" was animated, but one could easily have imagined Hunter, who voiced Elastigirl, playing the role onscreen. A superhero turned average American, Elastigirl's purposely "normal" soccer mom bob is so suburban, so cliched, it of course hints at the frustration and chaos that seethe within -- themes Hunter relishes.

My Pam Grier interview for Swindle magazine, Winter 08

Pam Grier

By Caroline Ryder

A Colorado beauty queen of eclectic African-American, First-Nation, Philippine and European heritage, Pam Grier has more than 100 screen credits to her name—yet when she moved to Los Angeles in 1972, she was reluctant to become an actress. Her real dream was to be behind the camera, and she was working several jobs so she could save up money to go to UCLA’s film school. Then legendary movie man Roger Corman thrust a copy of Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares in her hand. “That book taught me everything about being an actress,” says Grier, 59. Under Corman’s mentorship, she landed her first movie role—a bit part in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls—and went on to become the reigning queen of 1970s blaxploitation film.

As feminism’s bras burned bright, Grier’s helming of Coffy (1973) marked the first time a woman had played the lead in a blaxploitation flick. In Coffy, as well as the subsequent Foxy Brown (1974) and Sheba, Baby (1975), Grier presented America with a revolutionary new female archetype: the badass. “My mom was Coffy, literally,” says Grier. “And my aunt—she was Foxy Brown. She rode a Harley, she bought her own Thunderbird convertible, she had children by different men, she loved her lover, she was wild and prolific and honest. I had all these strong women around me. This is how I was brought up.”

Grier’s first major foray beyond blaxploitation was in Paul Newman’s Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), for which she visited the grungy shooting galleries of New York’s Meatpacking District in order to research her part as a heroin-addicted prostitute. Some observers wondered if Grier’s career had gone off the boil after Fort Apache, but all the while she was active in theater, touring in Sam Shepard’s “Fool For Love” and then “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” “People say, ‘You went away and you didn’t work any more,’ but I did work—I did theater,” says Grier. “Don’t negate my career just because I’m not doing movies!”

Despite her many lucky breaks and supreme physical blessings, life was never smooth sailing for Grier. In 1981, a racist cop tried to arrest her outside her home in West L.A., not believing she actually lived there, prompting Grier to move back to Colorado, where she still lives today. Grier had already lost her best friend, soul singer Minnie Riperton, to breast cancer when, in 1988, she found herself battling cancer as well. She was given 18 months to live, but pulled through. All the while Grier continued to act, but was primarily cast in bit parts and cameo appearences for the better part of the next deccade.

Her major big-screen comeback was the lead in Quentin Tarantino’s much-lauded Jackie Brown (1997), an adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch. Her performance as the title character, a sultry flight attendant, earned her Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild best actress nominations and an NAACP Image award. It also introduced Grier to a whole new generation of moviegoers.

Grier talked to SWINDLE for two hours over the phone from her hotel room in Vancouver, where she was shooting the sixth season of the groundbreaking lesbian TV drama The L Word.

On her childhood:
Life was exciting and exotic in the early days. My father worked on military bases, strategic air command bases that were sometimes secret. We couldn’t always live with him, and he couldn’t always talk about his work. So, being a military brat, I grew up in many different countries and cultures. We lived in Swindon, England, for two years, and the people there loved us. As black Americans, we were second-class citizens at home—but we felt equal in England, and highly regarded. They loved our music and our recipes, and we felt so great to be valued for our pride. Then we came back to America and hit the wall of segregation. Buses wouldn’t stop for me and my mom when we were walking home with groceries. I remember one day, a bus driver was at the end of his route and took a great chance in stopping for us. As a child I was taught who to talk to and not talk to, and what bathroom you can and can’t go in to.

On her heroes:
I always admired many of the figures from the black West. Like Mary Fields, the first black stagecoach driver and a woman. And my great grandmother—she owned a three-story boarding house for African Americans, Asians and First Nation people in Colorado. Back then they couldn’t stay in the white hotels. Also, I was inspired by Rosa Parks, and by entertainers like Lena Horne, Josephine Baker, Bessie Smith and Leontyne Price, who were well respected but who had to drive from show to show because, as blacks, they weren’t allowed to take trains or planes.

On the Watts Riots:
Back in Denver I joined a gospel group called Echoes of Youth. Some of the founding members of that group ended up in Earth, Wind and Fire. With all the money we raised from touring Colorado, we bought a vintage Greyhound bus and drove down to California. We were singing at the Reverend James Cleveland’s church in Watts, and the third day we were there, the Watts Riots broke out. The city was burning, bullets were flying and we were stranded. One church member took us into his apartment, so there were literally 30 kids and six adults in a one-bedroom apartment. After three days we got out, because we were running out of money and food. After that, the tour was over. It was scary, seeing a black community in absolute war. I was 12 or 13 at the time, and that was the beginning of reality for me. I realized America was at war.

On moving to L.A.:
I was working as a receptionist in Colorado when I entered the Miss Colorado Universe pageant to try and win money for college. That’s when I realized the effect of b eauty. It’s an aphrodisiac. How a man has power and a woman has beauty. A talent agent noticed me and suggested I move to Hollywood. The black film movement was happening, and they needed more actors. But it was a year and a half before I became an actor.

On being a session singer:
The first week I got to L.A. I got a job singing for Bobby Womack. He said he had a friend named Sylvester Stewart who needed a singer too. So I got to CBS studios and I see these three sisters, and they are Wonderlove, Stevie Wonder’s backup singers. I check in with the coordinator and I go over and meet Sylvester and I stop cold in my tracks—it’s Sly and the Family Stone! I remember he had a bass and a rhythm guitar and these teeth, this smile, and Buddy Miles was playing drums, and I was like, “Oh my god, I am numb!” They said, “Pam, maybe you could go on tour with Stevie Wonder?” and I said, “No, I have to go to school.” So we’re sitting there and it’s late and they are jamming, and then the elevator opens. I see these jeans and this silver belt and a black shirt and a vest and black hair and was like, “Holy moly, it’s Jimi Hendrix!” He went in and picked up an instrument and they started jamming, and we were all in heaven.

On music:
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, music was really bringing cultures and races and religions together. It was so ripe and sweet and had all these flavors—incense and patchouli oil and sitar, Ravi Shankar and Buddhism and chanting and Tolstoy and Keats and Homer, R&B and Fillmore East and West, and so much stuff happening. I wish we’d had a time machine to take all of the young ones—Snoop Dogg and Alicia Keys and Smash Mouth and Nirvana and the White Stripes—take them back to that time of revolution and music. I can’t even come close to describing it. In 1975, I went home to Colorado, and I was skiing in Aspen with Jack Nicholson and Hunter S. Thompson and Ed Bradley, the late CBS correspondent who went up there and bought a home. At that time we were listening to “Hotel California,” Funkadelic, Philly soul and Motown. It was still acid and coke and weed and music and just a wonderful communion. And then the ‘80s came, with the business and the stock market, and that’s when it all changed.

On her audition for Paul Newman’s Fort Apache, The Bronx:
Before my audition I worked on the dialogue for three days. I cleared my room at the Wyndham of all furniture, and all I ate was two cherry pies, so the sugar would give me dark circles under my eyes. I started walking around in these serious fuck-me pumps, and I had to ask the desk clerk at the hotel, “Please don’t have me arrested. It’s for a part.” Carol Burnett was living there, and one time I stepped into the elevator looking like this blonde hooker junkie, and there she was. I said, “Please don’t be scared. I am going to an audition!” So I went to the audition at the Minskoff Theater and there I am, looking like a serious junkie hooker, with a note in my pocket from the production office saying I am an actress. I started walking down the Avenue of the Americas and people were hooting and howling and women were rolling their eyes at me and calling me a ho, and I said, “Thank you! I look like a ho!” Soon enough, the police pull up beside me and try to pick me up. I said, “I’m going to an audition!” and they said, “I bet you are.” I walked into the building and the receptionist looked at me and said, “You’re not Pam Grier,” and I just headed up to the door. They wanted to chat and I said, “No chattin’ muthafucker, let’s just do this damn muthafuckin’ job.” I didn’t want to break the level of focus I had been building for the last three days. We start the audition, and the guy who was reading dropped his line because I reached over and grabbed his crotch. That’s what Stanislavski told me to do. I was shooting up and passing out and sliding onto the floor and they were applauding and Paul Newman was so thrilled. They said, “Pam, you got the job.”

On relationships:
At an early age I was a self-proclaimed feminist, although I didn’t realize how to fully enjoy my femininity. If I enjoy my femininity, I can give it. With any relationship you learn how to be the best woman you can be for your man. Sometimes my boyfriend thinks I want too much sex, and I go, “OK… that’s my own naturalness.” I like everything about being a woman, and I like making men comfortable with being with a woman who is powerful. My boyfriend was having a really, really dark time in the corporate world. He was really feeling like he was losing his inner power and trying to hold on to his manhood. In order to give to him, I had to receive. So I asked him to read me poetry.

On cancer:
I was 36, I was running seven miles a day, I was 117 pounds and very energetic. No symptoms. My first operation, they thought they were getting something superficial. Then the pathologist calls and says ,“You need to talk to your doctor. You have a high stage 5 cancer,” and I was like, “Excuse me? Do you have the right file?” I went to the cancer center in Cedars Sinai and they said I may have 18 months to live. At the time I was living with a New York architect, and when I told him, he just broke down. He was supposed to come to the hospital. He never showed up. My doctor sat on the bed and said, “Pam, you have to think about living today. You cannot think about him.” Damn. You think you know your lover until there’s a crisis. I did the radiation and a lot of surgery. And I didn’t speak to the architect for five years until I went to do a movie for Spike Lee in New York. I walked out of my hotel and turned the corner, and there he was. He walked up to me and I said, “You better walk away because I think I am going to throw up on your shoes.” He said, “I guess I owe you an explanation.” In his hand was a manila envelope, and I said, “That looks like a ring box inside.” He said he had just picked it up for his fiancé. I said, “Well, I hope she doesn’t get sick,” and wished him good will.

On meeting Quentin Tarantino:
I was driving down the street with my lover at the time. We were in Hollywood, on Highland Avenue, and there is this young white man with long hair in a T-shirt and shorts, barefoot, leaning over talking to someone in a car. It was Quentin Tarantino. He had mentioned my name in Reservoir Dogs. Then he saw me and stood in front of my car and stopped us. I was driving and he said, “I am writing a movie for you!” And I said, “I don’t believe it.” And he says, “I’ll keep in touch. I’ll find you.” And I am going, “Oh my god.” So like maybe a year later, I get a call saying Quentin wants to send me something. I am in New York and we get a notice from the post office saying there’s a parcel waiting, and there’s 43 cents due. It’s the script from Tarantino—he had sent it regular mail and it had been sitting at the post office for two weeks. I called Quentin and said, “It’s really wonderful. So which role is mine?” He said, “I wrote it for you. You’re Jackie Brown.” And time stopped. The world stopped moving. What an honor that was to have someone write a movie for me. I thought, I can soar now.

Swindle mag: Seymour Stein of Sire Records

Seymour Stein

By Caroline Ryder
Photo By Alain Levitt

You can be wrong most of the time in the music business and still be successful,” says Sire Records founder Seymour Stein, one of the few in the industry who seems to consistently get it right. Madonna, Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, the Pretenders, and The Smiths are just a few of his legendary signings, his first being the Ramones.

It was 1975, and the punk rock scene in downtown New York was about to explode. “The first time I was supposed to see the Ramones live I was so sick with the flu that I couldn’t go,” remembers Stein. He sent his wife (now his ex) to CBGB to see them, and she came back raving. The next day, bundled up in scarves and sneezing, Stein rented a rehearsal room and invited the “brothers” to come down and play. “I got the space for an hour. Really, we only needed 15 minutes. They did about 18 songs and accepted my offer of a deal on the spot. They went in the studio 10 days later. If only everybody was that easy to deal with.” Subsequent Stein signings, including Talking Heads, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, and the Dead Boys to name a few, came to epitomize the downtown punk/new wave scene.

A few years later, Stein was sick again, in the hospital being treated for an infection relating to a heart condition, when another artist came his way—someone named Madonna. Stein had hired Mark Kamins to find some acts for him, and after hearing a recording of the young Madonna Ciccone, he asked Kamins to bring her to the hospital to meet him. “I hadn’t shaved or showered, and I was wearing those hospital pajamas with a slit up the back,” he remembers. “I had my barber come to the hospital and give me a hair cut.” It was 3 pm when he made the call, and by 8 pm Madonna was at his bedside. He was as impressed by the woman as he was with her music. “The determination, the drive, the zeal, the ruthlessness . . . I remember saying to myself when she left, ‘Boy, if the shortest way home is through the cemetery at midnight, she’s taking it. This girl’s really in a rush.’” Stein, now 63, maintains a close relationship with Madonna to this day, and even helped her found her record label, Maverick, but he’s reluctant to take any credit for her stardom. “Let’s be honest: she’s just fucking great,” he says. “I didn’t create her, Madonna created her. I just happened to see her first.”

He was still close to Joey, Dee Dee, and Johnny Ramone up to their recent deaths. He spent a lot of time with Johnny during the lowest points of his battle with prostate cancer. “I never really believed Johnny was going to die. We were all afraid of him, he was so tough.” Joey was the most fragile of the Ramones, “always sick,” but “a great guy, and so helpful to other people.” Less than a month before his death from lymphoma, Joey was still sending Stein music – demos by young bands he wanted to support. For Stein, the deaths of the three Ramones marked one of the saddest periods in an industry career that started half a century ago.

Stein’s obsession with music started when he first heard his older sister’s records as a child, as she blasted Les Paul, Mary Ford, and Guy Mitchell throughout their small apartment in Brooklyn. Then he discovered country music (Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, and Carl Smith), doo-wop, and R&B (Chuck Berry, Fats Domino). Unfortunately there wasn’t much doo-wop to be found in his predominantly Italian and Jewish neighborhood, so he would take the train up to Harlem, get off at 125th Street, and hang out at the record stores until they kicked him out. “Whatever money I had went on buying singles,” he says. “My allowance, any money I could make or steal. I was a real music junkie.”

In 1956, at age 13, Stein visited the Billboard magazine headquarters and begged them to let him help out. Tom Noonan, Billboard’s chart editor, took a shine to him, and together they developed the original Billboard Hot 100 Chart. While Stein was working part-time for Billboard during high school, Paul Ackerman, the publication’s legendary music editor, befriended the student and sent him out to review several early rock ‘n’ roll gigs. “It felt fucking great,” says Stein. “Getting paid to do what I love. When I got my first check from Billboard I came home and said, ‘Can you believe they are paying me to do this? I would have paid them!’ If I had any money, that is.” While still at Billboard, Stein also met his second and most influential mentor, Syd Nathan, founder of King Records, home to R&B stars like James Brown. Over two summers at the company’s Cincinnati headquarters, Nathan taught Stein everything about the music business, allowing him to work in every department.

In 1966, Stein teamed up with producer and songwriter Richard Gottehrer to form Sire Records. The label’s big break came in 1975, when Stein signed the Ramones, followed by Talking Heads in 1976. A year later, Sire signed a distribution deal with Warner Brothers and went on to sign some of the most successful acts of our time.

Being chairman of Sire (then later president of Elektra and now Sire again, reviving the label for the last three years with partner Michael Goldstein) has allowed Stein to travel the world in pursuit of groundbreaking music. He remembers visiting the tiny British seaside resort of Cleethorpes to see the Sex Pistols and The Clash play during the notorious Anarchy tour in 1976. “I had seen the Pistols quite a few times before that,” Stein recalls, “but I thought The Clash were one of the best bands I had ever seen. I felt it then, and I think it now.”

Today, Seymour Stein and Sire’s model remains the blueprint for American indie labels. Scottish band Belle and Sebastian penned a song, “Seymour Stein,” in his honor after Stein visited them in Scotland. “We had a great lunch at an Indian restaurant, and afterward we went to the lead singer’s apartment,” says Stein, who was president of Elektra at the time. “That place was like a shrine to Morrissey. I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, I am going to have to sign this band.’” (He left Elektra shortly after his return to New York, so the deal never happened). He’s currently working with bands like Finland’s HIM, The Veronicas, Evermore, and The Subways.

After 50 years, there’s only one thing he wishes he could change about the music business. “I wish there were less damn genres,” he states. “When I was a kid, there were three categories: pop, country, and R&B. Now it’s just ridiculous. Because, at the end of the day, there are only really two types of music: good and bad. And that’s all you need to know.”

Singular magazine: my story about parrots and love

The Biology of Love (Singular City, Nov 2008)
by Caroline Ryder

Birds of a feather may weave a cozy nest, but who says they need to tie the knot?

Psychologist Lorin Lindner peers inside a dark cage and looks around for Pilot, a mature gentleman cockatoo in his mid-70s. There he is, up high on his perch, warming his delicate salmon feathers under a heat lamp.

Outside, the eucalyptus leaves rustle gently in the night breeze. Pilot, half-asleep and elderly even by human standards, looks perfectly docile. So it is a surprise to learn that not so long ago, he pecked his own mate to death.

“It can happen when mismatched pairs are forced together in captivity,” says Lindner.

We’re in Serenity Park, the parrot sanctuary she founded at the Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles a year ago. Set in a 20-acre rose and herb garden, it is a place where war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder can help care for the rescued birds, which are often badly traumatized themselves. Highly intelligent parrots, just like humans, have unique sexual and social needs, something many owners neither know nor care about.

“People are still getting parrots simply because they match their living room furniture,” says Lindner.

After feeding her 30 or so feathered friends their dinner, we retreat into Lindner’s small on-site office/hut. The decor is basic, aside from the myriad parrot posters on the wall. Stickers on the fridge say things like “Condors, not Condos,” and pinned to the wall is a reminder to say “good morning” and “good-bye” to the birds.

Aside from the odd squawk outside, the atmosphere is peaceful. You’d never guess one of L.A.’s busiest freeways was less than a half mile away.

Lindner herself is slender, with wavy brown hair and an au naturel style. Her wide hazel eyes glow, especially when she talks about animals, and chocolate. Lindner pulls out a bag of chocolate treats from the freezer and retells a joke about marriage made by former KISS frontman Gene Simmons. “He said something like ‘if marriage is an institution you are committed to, then that’s not something I want to be part of.’” She giggles, adding, “I don’t often quote Gene Simmons.”

Lindner, 50, is one of three children. Her mother, a homemaker, died when Lorin was a teenager, and her father ran several successful sporting goods stores. By the time he passed away, he had two grandchildren and five great grandchildren. He would have liked for Lindner to have added to the brood — but knew and accepted that was not his daughter’s chosen life path.

“I knew from a very young age that I did not want children,” says Lindner. “From there, I started questioning the other norms in our society, marriage being one of them.”

As a psychologist, she listened to many tales of infidelity, and saw 20-year marriages collapse over one indiscretion.

“Since I saw so much dishonesty in traditional relationships, I wondered why I should participate in that kind of facade,” she says. Concepts of marriage and uninterrupted, lifelong monogamy, in her opinion, ignore our natural biological programming.

“The societal pressure to marry and have babies is still so strong, even though there is little established social and scientific evidence suggesting it is the best choice for humans today,” she says. Even parrots, which usually mate for life, are not always as faithful as you’d think. “Females may have a partner who has built her nest and will raise her chicks with her, but DNA testing has found that the father is not always her mate.”

Even if Lindner did ever decide to marry, one wonders how she’d ever find time. On top of running the sanctuary and working with homeless veterans, she has a small private psychology practice, teaches psychology classes at Santa Monica College, and sits on the board of four nonprofits.

By focusing so much of her energy on human rights, animal rights and environmental causes, does she even have time for romantic relationships?

Of course, she says. “But some people keep themselves busy like a whirling dervish in order to avoid intimacy. If I were to psychoanalyze myself, I think that may have been the case with me in the past.”

Lindner asserts that just because she identifies herself as single, that does not mean she is unable to engage in complex, intimate connections with people.

“I’m in the most intense and deeply connected relationship I’ve ever had right now,” she tells us. “But does that mean I have to get married? No.”

Lindner is part of a growing network of adults choosing not to procreate, partially because of concerns about overpopulation. She has been involved with groups like Zero Population Growth and VHEMT (the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement), which grants certificates to members who undergo vasectomies.

Sound a little extreme? “Not really,” she laughs. “All you have to do is choose not to breed. Even if you’ve already had children, you can still join, so long as you choose not to have any more. The human race is displacing other species by the thousands. Why should we think of ourselves as the most important species on the planet?”

Lindner would like for women to be relieved of the invisible, ubiquitous pressure to marry. She says that even in a post-feminist age, it seems many women are still silently ostracized if they dare to remain single.

“I’m so sick of being asked if I am going to be next,” sighs Lindner. It’s undeniable that unlike the word “bachelor,” “spinster” still carries those negative, Eleanor Rigby connotations. Why is that? Lindner says it’s because females who are independent or self-sufficient present a threat to mainstream society.

“Think about it,” she says. “Men work hard to get the money, to get the car, to get the woman. They are contributing to the economic machinery of this world, in order to have sex. Women feel pressure to secure the relationship through marriage, and men go along with it. And the cycle continues.”

It is a cycle that exists in the animal kingdom as much as it does in human society. Female birds, for example, will often only mate with a male once he has built her a spectacular nest of twigs and twine, and devoted all his energies toward her during mating season.

That’s what happened with Sherman and Corky, a handsome parrot pair that have been together for several years. They screech wildly and in unison as Lindner approaches, seeming very much in love. “See, they have a lasting relationship, and they didn’t need a wedding ring,” says Lindner. “So why should we?”

And with that, she bids them good night.

Larry Flynt interview for Swindle mag

Larry Flynt

By Caroline Ryder
Photo By Jeremy and Claire Weiss

Larry Flynt has seen so many cunts, he can tell what one will look like just by examining the area above a girl’s mouth. In fact, Flynt, founder of Hustler magazine and America’s most infamous smut peddler, believes the vagina to be the most beautiful part of any woman – “more beautiful than her face,” he says in his Brando-esque mumble.

The Kentucky-born Flynt published the first issue of Hustler in July 1974 at the age of 31. He started out soft-core, but after four months decided to turn up the heat a notch, making his the first American publication to “show pink” (i.e. spread the lips). He later brought us close-ups of dicks in vaginas. Shaved pussies. Cum shots. Shemales. Hermaphrodites. And the infamous cartoons, featuring gang rape, incest (“Chester the Molester”) and Santa Claus talking to Mrs. Claus with a huge hard-on. It was unadulterated filth—and the readers loved it. Hustler, with its trashy, bad-taste erotica, made Playboy and other competing porn rags appear prissy in comparison. “The pages of Hustler were pretty tame—and circulation pretty flat—until I stopped listening to the people who were saying, ‘Larry, you can’t do that,’” Flynt wrote in the pages of his magazine. “Once I began following my own instincts, sales took off and I became a millionaire. And that, I think, is a key secret to every person’s success, be they male or female, banker or pornographer: Trust in your gut.”

Now in his mid 60s, Flynt presides over his publishing, video, sex shop, nightclub, and casino empire from the LFP (Larry Flynt Publications) headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. The offices are decadent, with antiques, classical paintings, Tiffany lamps, and fake flowers in abundance. Flynt is escorted into his office (the size of a small museum) by black-clad security guards who push his gold-plated wheelchair. He has been confined to it since being shot outside a Georgia courthouse in 1978 by white supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin, who objected to images of interracial sex published in Hustler. Flynt lost motor ability but not sensation as a result of his paralysis, and subsequently had a penile implant fitted so he could maintain an erection.

In the boardroom hangs a massive portrait of Flynt’s fourth wife, Althea Leasure (rhymes with “pleasure”), famously portrayed by Courtney Love in The People vs. Larry Flynt. In the film, we learned how Flynt (played by Woody Harrelson) met a 17-year-old Althea in 1971 when she got a job as a stripper in his club, Hillbilly Haven, in Dayton, Ohio. Five years later she became his wife, and as a wedding gift Flynt treated the bisexual Althea to a woman at a New York brothel. We learned how Althea took over the reins at Hustler after Ruth Carter Stapleton (Jimmy Carter’s sister) temporarily persuaded Flynt to become a born-again Christian, and how she became addicted to the morphine-based painkillers prescribed to Larry after he was shot. She was diagnosed with AIDS in 1983, and eventually drowned in the bathtub of their Bel Air mansion in 1987 weighing just 80 pounds.

There’s no doubt many men, like Flynt, are obsessed with women as objects of sexual desire. But not all of them are as leftist, politicized, or obnoxiously fearless as Flynt, who once told the U.S. Supreme Court that they were “nothing but eight assholes and a token cunt.” He once appeared at a Supreme Court hearing wearing the American flag as a diaper, and threw fruit at the justices. He refused to stop talking when asked, and was gagged by bailiffs. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital for six months, and jailed for 15 months. But throughout, he always stuck to his argument: how can something that is carried out by millions of people around the world every day be obscene? Why is it immoral to publish and distribute images of those acts, albeit in their fullest and most explicit glory?

In 1983, Flynt was famously sued by fundamentalist Baptist minister Jerry Falwell for $45 million after Hustler ran a fake advertisement in which Falwell was “interviewed” about his “first time,” using uncharacteristically foul language to describe fucking his own mother in an outhouse. Five years later, Flynt won a landmark Supreme Court decision in the case. The decision was unanimous, with Chief Justice Rehnquist opining that it was patently obvious that the “interview” was meant as satire, and that the creators of parodies such as Hustler’s were protected against litigation by the First Amendment.

Not surprisingly, Flynt has had an ongoing beef with militant feminists, who he calls “anti-sex, anti-porn, and anti-male.” “I’ve always felt that feminism was just an excuse for ugly women to march,” he once said. He’s also ardently opposed to the Bush regime and has made Hustler one of the few porn rags with a strong political bias, with the right to free speech at the core of its ideology. Hustler contributors have included award-winning BBC reporter Greg Palast, activist Jesse Jackson, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Helen Caldicott. “Here at Hustler, we maintain the same philosophy we had back then,” he wrote in his magazine. “At its core, it’s a philosophy that demands we defend the truth, whether it be by displaying a woman’s body as it was created or by calling an asshole an asshole, even if he is the President of the United States.”

A hero to some and a miscreant to others, Flynt is a man who has changed our times—and our laws. And, as the tagline to The People vs. Larry Flynt points out, “You may not like what he does, but are you prepared to give up his right to do it?”

RIP Isaac Hayes, for Variety.com

Our favorite Isaac Hayes looks

Fans of early 1970's pimp style lost its most flamboyant icon on Sunday, with the possibly treadmill-related passing of Isaac Hayes.
Hayes, a father of 12 (!), was found collapsed near a treadmill at his home in Memphis, and was pronounced dead an hour later. The cause of death was not known. He was 65.
With a wardrobe comprising gold chain vests worn over a bare chest, tight spandex pants and his gleaming shades, Hayes was one of the most glamorous of the Stax male artists, a style pioneer in a class all his own. Eschewing the classic Blaxploitation afro in favor of a smooth bald pate, Hayes foreshadowed the bling era, accessorizing his looks with some of the biggest gold chains ever seen. His style would later influence artists from Snoop Dogg to Biggie Smalls.
As well as writing the Academy Award-winning “Shaft” theme, and numbers like “Soul Man” and Hold On, I’m Comin’, Hayes voiced the libidinous Chef character on “South Park” until he got fed up of all the Scientology jokes (Hayes was a fully paid up member of the Church).
Hayes stars in the upcoming "Soul Men" alongside Bernie Mac (who died just hours before he did) and Samuel L. Jackson, who we hope is taking his vitamins and staying well away from treadmills.

Emmy Red Carpet, Variety.com, September 2008

Emmys 2008: Red Rug Redux

Wall Street collapse, a security alert, and possibly the lowest ratings in Emmy history—such things were of minor import on the Nokia Theatre's red carpet Sunday, where the sartorial mood was decidedly bright and cheery.
That's not to say that there weren't any depressing hues at the 60th Annual Primetime Emmys—there were plenty (Glenn Close, Debra Messing, Nicolette Sheridan, Hayden Panettiere, America Ferrera and Kate Walsh all opted for drab-fab noir)—but the Black Widows lost out to the Ladies in Red, Emerald, Amethyst, Marigold and Plum, whose Technicolor gowns dazzled and shimmered in the afternoon sun.
(Click here and here to see Variety's photo coverage of the Emmys.)

The Stylephile's Emmy 2008 Style Awards:

Best Green Goddess: Christina Hendricks

"Mad Men's" Joan Holloway, aka 30-year-old actress Christina Hendricks, looked like the Wizard of Oz's concubine queen in this emerald Tadashi Shoji goddess gown, which the designer had created in green, just for her. "It's my perfect dream dress," gushed Hendricks, whose Rubenesque figure and heaving porcelain bosom pick up exactly where Ava Gardners' left off.






Best Princess Bride: Olivia Wilde

"House" star Olivia Wilde, 24, looks like a fairy tale princess bride in her pearly Reem Acra satin and chiffon cap-sleeve gown and Jimmy Choo heels—although she's more alterna than her sparkly red carpet attire would suggest. Wilde is married to boho L.A. filmmaker Tao Ruspoli, who is a member of LAFCO, a film and art collective that travels the country in a converted school bus. On the red carpet, Wilde was more interested in talking about her admiration for Hugh Laurie than her hubby's beatnik lifestyle. Working with Laurie "is a dream come true," she said. Winning the coveted Stylephile Princess Bride Award, Wilde beat off stiff competition from fellow fairy princesses Sandra Oh (named "most improved" by carpet commentator Lisa Rinna, thanks to her ruffled Oscar de la Renta gown), and Marcia Cross (in nude Elie Saab Haute Couture gown, Rene Caovilla heels and Hearts on Fire diamonds).

Best Red Carpet Clash: Brooke Shields

Brooke Shields' fuchsia organza dress by Badgley Mischka was a showstopper when she was on stage presenting, but the dress' impact was muted on the carpet, where the red competed with Shields' pink. Shields, 43, who stars in "Lipstick Jungle" with Mary Tyler Moore playing her mom, said it was the first time she had been to the Emmys.







Best Yellow Fever: Teri Hatcher

Teri Hatcher, 43, and Mariska Hargitay, 44, both went for in-yer-face marigold yellow, a shade which is bound to catch the eye of the paparazzi, but is too loud to be truly stylish. Hatcher's dress was by Monique Lhullier, whom the actress described as "the nicest person, so sweet."








Best in Black: Kate Walsh

"Private Practice" actress Kate Walsh, 40, was East Coast sassy in black Zuhair Murad. "Dont mess with the Zuhair," deadpanned Walsh, who was bedecked with Neil Lane diamond-and platinum jewelry worth $1million. "Private Practice" premieres October 1.









Best Flowerchild-Meets-Xena-in-a-Texan-Whorehouse: Phoebe Price

Professional nobody Phoebe Price, age unclear, understands the value of worst-dressed lists—they're better than no list at all. With that in mind, Price went totally bananas in a lacy red see-through gown (designer unknown—and it's probably better that way), red floral headband and red panties, creating a look better suited to the AVN Porn Awards than the Emmys rug. With this colossal mistake of an ensemble, Pee-Pee—described as a "trainwreck-famewhore" by TMZ—is headed straight for the 2008 Fug pile.

Diane von Furstenburg Spring/Summer 09

Floral print maxi dresses. Flowery head dresses. Mismatched flower print chiffon. What is this, the granola aisle at Topanga Canyon Whole Foods?
I'm all for Laurel Canyon hippie style in general, but Diane von Furstenberg's SS '09 collection, named "Rock Goddess", was disappointingly unoriginal in its celebration of all things Joni Mitchell. Where was the war cry, the passion, the sensuality and the decadence? These clichéd yet strangely tame interpretations seem lifted direct from a Woodstock-era Sear's catalog, with no modern value added. And those costumey faux flower head dresses and denim flares—why not just have them wearing giant peace signs and smoking reefer on the ruway and be done with it?
This collection, which we're sure was beautifully stitched and is prohibitively expensive, is primed for massive Forever 21 rip-off status, thanks to the nasty prints and shapeless silhouettes.
Flower children, run for the hills!

Narciso Rodriguez, Spring/Summer 09

Pure, clean silhouettes are what Narciso Rodriguez excels at, and his latest collection—an exercise in glamorous symmetry—stayed true to form. Dresses hovered coyly above the knee, with vavavoom smuggled in via tight bandaging and discreet panels of exposed flesh. Black or white bandages were placed with almost clinical precision upon a procession of dresses that quietly oozed sex, looking like they had been applied by a doctor who is also an expert at Japanese rope bondage. Models looked happy to be strapped in to their frocks, while the occasional round-shouldered, bubble-skirted bodices nodded, intentionally or otherwise, to Balenciaga.
This was a wonderfully versatile collection—this season, Narciso Rodriguez' ladies can be as demure or as provocative as they choose to be.

Eurotrash invades LA

Growing up in London, I learned all my values from a TV show called Eurotrash.
Hosted by Jean Paul Gaultier and the deadpan Antoine de Caunes, it dragged its viewers through the silliest, most bizarro European subcultures imagineable—against a high fashion backdrop, bien sur.
The first season, which aired in 1993, featured appearances by fashion industry icons Ellen Von Unwerth, Helena Christensen, Pierre et Gilles, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Giorgio Armani, punctuated by segments about pubic hairdressing, Alpine Hells Angels, S&M restaurants and nude golf.
I ran into Eurotrash's host, Antoine de Caunes (pictured), last week at a party at the Houdini Mansion in L.A., where around 200 guests were celebrating the birthday of flame-haired L.A. scenester and professional fag hag Lenora Claire. (pictured)
De Caunes was being followed around by a production crew from French network Canal Plus, which is filming a five-part series about American contemporary culture, scheduled to air around election time. The bodacious Lenora Claire and her friends were deemed just the right kind of sexy for the French, and she was selected to be L.A.'s representative for the night. The suited De Caunes was completely re-styled for the camera by Lenora's friend, fashionista and writer Clint Catalyst, so he could fit in with the exotic birds around him. De Caunes ended up looking like a cross between Boy George and a Thomspon Twin, with an assymetrical curly wig, airbrushed makeup and embroidered Jared Gold suit jacket.
"I miss Lolo," lamented de Caunes, when I ran in to him in the bathroom, getting his lipgloss touched up. He was referring to the late French porn star Lolo Ferrari, who had the largest breasts in the world (71 inches), and was a Eurotrash regular. "She was very, very sweet."
Also hanging around were James St. James (former Michael "Party Monster" Alig co-hort), Heatherette designer Richie Rich and impresario Kim Fowley (pictured, in yellow, who formed The Runaways with Joan Jett and Sandy West). Fowley, who looked like a cross between John Waters and Frankenstein's monster, wasted no time in getting to know me—upon being introduced to me, his first question was "tell me about the inside of your c**t. Do you f*** girls or boys? Are you a top or a bottom?" Goodness!
I told him all he neded to know, naturally...

The death of World Beat

A photographer who shall remain nameless, told me she was perplexed about her new beau's sense of style. "He's cute," she said, "but his whole World Beat thing is freaking me out."
These days, clearly, the term "World Beat" comes with some serious baggage.
World Beat, if you remember, means Western music that incorporates non-Western folk elements. (Think Paul Simon in South Africa, Damon Albarn in The Gambia etc.)
Often, it also means things like blond dreads. Unkempt facial hair. Drum circles on the beach at sunset. Hydroponics. Bong hits, GreenPeace, and B.O.
Being in college in the 90s, basically.
Back then it was sexy, a public statement of personal freedom, a flag of probable marijuana/shroom possession, a sign of fun times ahead. Yet, unlike so many things from the 90s that went on to earn vintage status—Marc Jacobs' Grunge collection for Perry Ellis, neon raver clothes, New Kids On The Block—World Beat didn't age very well. Today, in fact, the World Beat look remains virtually untouchable, the final frontier of fashion irony—a frontier no-one outside of Burning Man seems brave enough to cross.
Case in point: a stylist friend sent out a mass email, encouraging her friends to attend today's Los Angeles Social Forum event in Downtown L.A. She received virtually no response, and didn't understand why. Eventually, someone on the email list wrote back. "Sorry," it read, "but you lost me at 'drum circle'."
And then there's the issue of those pesky World Beat dreads—last night, a friend who once had long dreads and a set of bongos back when they were fashionable, described her horror upon finally getting her hair cut. "There were things in them, creatures," she whispered. "Never again."
"Hold on," the defenders of World Beat may exclaim. "Isn't this summer's style supposed to be all global and stuff?" They're right. Flip through the pages of Vogue and Harper's and whatever, and you'll read all about the "ethnic print explosion", or more accurately, the "heathen print explosion” (the dictionary definition of "ethnic" is: 'relating to a people not Christian or Jewish; heathen'. Charming.).
Dries Van Noten's Spring/Summer 08 show (pictured), Oscar de la Renta's mudcloth print dresses, YSL's safari chic—all showed sub-Saharan tendencies. June's Vogue reported how Liya Kebede, a Tuareg pop festival in Timbuktu, was having a fashion moment. Add to that Ryan Gosling contributing to a book about the Darfur crisis, baby Shiloh, and Madonna's adoptee, and it's clear that Africa, whose music inspired the World Beat movement, is absolutely the most fashionable place on the planet in 2008, although you won't be seeing Madonna, Ryan Gosling or baby Shiloh chewing twigs at a World Beat drum circle any time soon.
Why?
Because pretending to be from Africa isn't sexy any more. Africa, is.
(Disclaimer: The views contained in this article are not menat to target anyone living in the Venice Beach or Santa Cruz areas, both of which hold World Beat National Park status and whose dreadlocked residents, being historical artifacts, remain exempt from criticism.)

The Great Los Angeles Brainwash

There was a rumor going around the Mr Brainwash private preview in Hollywood last night that the whole thing was, in fact, a hoax.
"Someone told me this is all a big joke," said my informant in hushed tones. "We're all being filmed, and then in a week they'll reveal that Mr Brainwash isn't who he says he is, and everyone will know just how stupid L.A. is for falling for it."
This was whispered to me as I hovered around a graffiti'd urinal, à la Duchamp, just one of many jarringly literal interpretations on display in the former CBS studio on Sunset Blvd.
Whatever the truth, Mr Brainwash is definitely real, at least: he's Thierry Guetta, a French filmmaker who became so obsessed with the street artists he was filming, he decided to become one himself, wheat-pasting stretches of L.A.'s La Brea corridor with black and white Banksy-style stencils.
And if Guetta is indeed out to insult test L.A.'s intelligence, then he's doing an audacious job of it—in this super-sized solo show, his first ever, Mr Brainwash manages to rip off pretty much every important artist of the last 500 years. The DuChamp urinal, the Van Gogh self portrait and a whole series of Warhol Marilyns, all tweaked, ad-busted and given the Brainwash treatment. (The only thing he hasn't re-worked, as far as I could tell, was the Mona Lisa.)
But that's not to say there weren't any original ideas inside this cavern of re-purposed greatness.
His larger installations were, for example, very striking--former editing bays filled with books and taped off, graffiti'd with the words "not finish"; a dog sculpture made from old telephones; a 15 feet high take-out bag, complete with receipt taped to the side; and a 30 foot high robot built entirely from (working) vintage TVs. "Look, that's totally L.A.," said a friend, pointing to a cage filled with film reels and car tires. She was right.
I asked Roger Gastman, publisher of street art magazine "Swindle", whether he thought the Mr Brainwash thing was an elaborate J.T. Leroy-esque hoax. "Um, no, I don't think so," he shrugged. "I mean, he exists. He's outside right now, riding a tricycle with a cast on his leg."
The next morning I asked Shepard Fairey, arguably the best-known graffiti artist in America, his thoughts on the conspiracy theory. "He's not a hoaxer," said Fairey. "He is, however, crazy."
Go see for yourselves.
Mr Brainwash, "Life Is Beautiful", opens today, June 18th at 7pm at 6121 W Sunset Blvd @ El Centro, Hollywood, CA, 90028.

Ashley Fiolek, 17: Totally deaf, totally badass - story coming out in Paper magazine soon!

Caroline on El Pais.com, talking

Here.

Me, the Irish Times

I was interviewed by the very lovely Kate Butler of the Irish Times for a story about LA Fashion Week.

This is how it goes:

According to Caroline Ryder, a fashion journalist with LA Weekly and an English-Irish ex-pat, LA creativity has been brewing for the past few years and is only now getting the recognition it deserves. "LA is a tale of two cities," she says. "The first city is one of Hollywood Blvd, Venice Beach, Beverly Hills - the west side is very established and dead, creatively. But that's not the LA that most of the artists, designers and musicians exist in. There's a big Eastside scene. It's still relatively unknown and that's why its' cheap to live in and so many artists are moving here.
"Jeremy Scott lives in the Hollywood Hills and he tells me that in terms of street style, LA kids lead the pack, and he hangs out with them. There's this kid called Cory Kennedy, she's about 17 and she is a celebrity, just by dressing the way she dresses, going out and being a hipster. Just in the same way that Karl Lagerfeld did with Jeremy Scott when he was a club kid in Paris and had that youthful vibrance that Karl wanted to tap in to - now he's a grown man and he's doing the same thing. He feels that energy in the youth culture here."

Dig it!

Although I sound a little obnoxious, right? Also I don't talk to Jeremy Scott on a regular basis...everything I said is based on my conversations with him when I interviewed him for the cover of BPM magazine, way back. Never got paid for that story, come to think of it. Sigh.

Swindle mag, the joys of historical re-enactment

Step Back in Time

By Caroline Ryder
Photos By Dan Monick
Illustration By ThingMaking

There are some things adults never outgrow – dressing up, for example. Whether you’re a Halloween party goer in a mask or a closeted transvestite “borrowing” your wife’s panties, costumes provide a safe (and hallucinogen-free) way to explore different realities. This manner of escapism exists in its fullest glory in the realm of historical reenactment. Populated by Vikings, Roman centurions, pirates, and civil war surgeons, each reenactment is like a little terrestrial wormhole, where participants can not only be another person, they can be another time.

The concept of reenactment has actually been around for a long time. In the Middle Ages, people would hold battle tournaments and pretend to be Roman gladiators. But only in recent years has reenactment become an obsess ion, with thousands of so-called “living history” groups across the world.

Why the current boom? Is it because we have more time and money to spend on looking like pirates and gladiators? Or is there a deeper reason behind this modern-day nostalgia? It seems that in the nascency of the 21st century, living in any era is fine—as long as it’s not this one. Contemporary fashion, music, and art all seem to be looking backward for inspiration. Young people are dressing up like Lynyrd Skynrd and singing like Spandau Ballet. Do we retreat into the past because we don’t know who we are anymore?

I ponder these questions while wandering around the annual Old Fort MacArthur reenactment show in Long Beach, California. It’s one of the largest events of its kind, a place where nostalgia and historical role-play are taken to their extremes. Participants often spend months, even years, preparing for their weekend trip back in time. My guide is an Irish fashion designer named Owen Thornton who just happens to be obsessed with playing soldiers. “When I was a kid, I had GI Joe sand Action Man,” he says. “And now I get to look like that too.” He’s taken part in more than 100 reenactments in the last eight years, and his specialty is Vietnam,something that stems back to when he saw The Clash wearing tiger-striped pants. Then he saw Apocalypse Now, and decided that vintage army gear was definitely where it was at.

When I arrive, Owen has already been at Fort MacArthur for a day and a night,setting up a full ‘Nam-style encampment.
He’s dress ed up as an SAS trooper who served in Dofar in the Middle East in 1973. “It’s a very obscure little war that only lasted for a year,” he says. “There isn’t a lot of interest in it. I’m just doing it because it’s kooky.” He is carrying a British self-loading rifle—a deactivated one. But guns are the least of our worries, apparently. “ Watch out for the pirate women.” warns Owen. “ They’re gun-toting, hard wenches. And make sure you call them wenches, otherwise they get mad.”

As we walk through, I see 15th-century German mercenaries carving weapons and antebellum babes strolling by, parasols twirling. In the distance is the sound of cannon fire. I notice a couple of oiled-up gladiators in kilts and silver helmets engaging in some serious swordplay. Nearby, an armored Roman is watching them. “Are you a centurion?” I ask. “No,” he says, “I’m an optio.” An optio is a low-ranking officer, and he’s been one for 17 years. If he hangs around long enough, he might be promoted to centurion one day. “At least I ’m not a slave,” he sighs.

Owen takes us past a trench, where some World War II soldiers are hanging out and puffing on Gauloises. Moments later we’re in a Wild West mining town, complete with undertaker, bank,saloon, and surgeon’s tent, where we find a corpse (fake), a brain in formaldehyde, and a jar of leeches. We try to check out the bank but it’s shut. “I think someone tried to rob it earlier,”says Owen. The saloon, however, is open for business . The swing doors bear a sign that reads: “Cowboys leave your guns at the bar.” Inside, another sign tells us: “This is a men’s bar. Females are tolerated only if they refrain from excessive talk.” I guess some things never change.

As we walk around the different encampments, taking leaps back and forward in time as we go, I wonder what kind of dynamic exists between the various groups of reenactors. I mean, do the barbarians want to beat up the Romans? Do the Elizabethan dudes and the medieval princes compete to see who has the coolest puffball shorts? The answer is yes, according to Steve Nelson, who organizes the event. “When we first allowed medieval reenactors in,some of the later-era folks came to us and said, ‘Don’t you know that medievalists are the lowest form of scum?’ Then we had the medievalists asking, ‘Why do you have to keep those modernists around?’ There’s definitely competition going on.”

But the thing that annoys Steve the most is when outsiders laugh at them. “People don’t feel that we’re artists. They think we’re nuts,” he says. “ But that short-sells us.” He waves across the site. “These people research textiles, plastics, metal, paper. They use restoration skills which require craftsmanship. It takes intellect to research all the detail. Plus, it’s theater. How can you not call this art?”

We move on, and spot more Romans preparing to march in formation. I pull one of them aside. He says his name is Decimus Maxius Carigorious, and he is a probationary legionnaire in the Miles Legio Nano Hispania,stationed in Scotland during the building of Hadrian’s Wall in around 90 AD. He is wearing a pair of caligae sandals hobnailed for traction, over his udonis(socks), which were in high demand in freezing cold Britannia. His helmet was hammered from sheets of iron and bronze. He speaks a little Latin, and is trying to get better. Before joining this group a year ago, he was a medieval reenactor for around 1 5 years. “ Being able to talk to people and look good is the thrill,” he says, looking out from prescription glasses beneath his helmet. “Sometimes I go to the grocery store in my getup, and people stare.” His modern day name is William Stephanson, but he likes to keep things authentic, often spelling his name Uilliam, using the Roman version of the letter “w.”

People like William—sorry, Uilliam—are clearly passionate about their hobby. But some take it even further. “A lot of these guys think they are reincarnated,” Owen remarks. “They say, ‘I feel like I was there.’” Shortly after hearing this, I feel strangely drawn towards an encampment of Polish nobles. I see a statuesque man wearing an enormous pair of feathered wings and carrying a saber. He looks like the angel Gabriel, but his name is Rik Fox, and he once played bass in the hair-metal band W.A.S.P. Now he is a Polish winged hussar by the name of Rotmistrz Pan Ryszard Sulima Suligowski, captain of a hussar unit serving under King Jan III Sobieski. Hussars were 17th-century Polish warriors and, for a while, it was the in thing for them to wear angel wings as they rode into battle.

His is one of the smaller groups at the event, apparently because representing the 17th century is deeply uncool in reenactment circles. “ When I first started walking about in this armor at renaissance festivals, people would make fun of me and say rude things,”says Rik, who wears a luxurious fur hat. “ They would see the wings and ask, ‘Why would a hussar be in Elizabeth’s England?’ Basically, there’s jealousy and condescension towards what we are doing.”

Fox started attending renaissance festivals in the mid ‘90safter giving up metal. “ I came out of music and I realized I was still looking for another platform where I could act and portray something and be on stage,” he says. Then tears start rolling down his cheeks. “When I first saw real hussar armor, the hairs stood up on my whole body,” he says. “I said, ‘I’m home.’ That feeling has stayed with me ever since. I feel like I have found what my goal in life is supposed to be.”

Ashe wipes his cheeks, I realize Rik Fox, Polish winged hussar, has truly mastered time travel. Forget Einstein and wormholes; all Rik needs to bend time and space is a pair of feathered wings and the power of his own imagination. As I walk away, I almost envy him.