Caroline Ryder

Golden Globes party coverage for New York magazine

2012-01-24T12:35:00.000-08:00

I was a fly on the wall at Harvey Weinstein's ultra star-studded Golden Globes party at the Beverly Hilton. Congrats Harvey on the awards success of The Artist, a great film which is looking like a major Oscars contender. And thanks New York Magazine for getting me into the hottest party in town! I still have a champagne headache!

Read the story here.

Rooney Mara

2011-12-13T00:20:00.001-08:00

Here's the beautiful cover shot of Rooney Mara for January 2012's Dazed & Confused. The magazine will be out soon, with my interview inside.

Adanowsky for LA Weekly

2011-11-07T19:41:00.000-08:00

Not only is Adanowsky the son of one of my favorite film directors on the planet, Alejandro Jodorowsky, the dude can sing. Here's the story I wrote for the LA Weekly...

Like a latter-day Serge Gainsbourg, the singer Adanowsky emanates cosmic sensuality, leaving a trail of fluttery-eyed females in his musky, potent wake. Such was the case as he glided through Harvard and Stone last week, all furrowed brow and crumpled shirt, looking like a broken-hearted mariachi without a guitar.

Adanowsky, whose real name is Adan Jodorowsky, was in town from Mexico City to perform songs from his latest album, Amador -- Spanish for 'lover.' It's a collection of croony folk ballads designed to inspire long afternoons in bed and prolonged eye contact.

Amador is second in a series of four records, geared at exploring "the corporeal, the emotional, the sexual and the intellectual" in that order, he tells us, sitting in the cramped smoking area behind Harvard and Stone. "It's the earth, water, fire and air." Each album sees Adanovsky adopt an entirely new character and this persona, the Amador, is quite simply "obsessed with love," Jodorowsky continues.

Adanovsky wrote the record after a gnarly break-up with his girlfriend of four years. Rather than drown in his sorrows, he visited a mystic up in a mountain in Mexico, and underwent a psychedelic healing experience that could have been straight out of his father's film epic, The Holy Mountain.

Indeed, his dad is cult movie director Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Salvador Dali of 20th century cinema, and one of the leading figures in avant garde cinema. His film El Topo become the first midnight cult film, resulting in John Lennon giving him $1million to make The Holy Mountain. Jodorowsky's failed attempt to make the film Dune -- before the project was handed to David Lynch -- is considered among the greatest films never made.

"I decided to go to the mountain because the healer told me I had a closed heart," says Adan, in his honey-accented English. "He started to do magic on me--without drugs--and after five days of healing I went back to Mexico City, almost dying. I went to the shower and I was lying on the floor; I crawled to my bed and looked up at the ceiling and I felt my chest opening. And suddenly I felt alright, like I am going to start a new life."

Read the rest here

I am LA correspondent for Monocle magazine's new radio station, M24

2011-11-03T09:28:00.000-07:00

Tyler Brulé is the brains behind Monocle magazine, a super sexy print publication. Kind of like if The Economist made a baby with that guy from The Sartorialist.

Brulé

just launched M24, Monocle's new radio station. Here's why...

“Why radio? It’s still, after almost a century of regular broadcasts, the most intimate medium in an ever expanding buffet of choice. Would you prefer to be seated at a cosy table with four dazzling hosts with the best tips and tales or in a crowded room full of shouty people? I know what our readers would prefer?”
M24 has invited me to be their "Woman in LA", and I'll be phoning in my reports on what's happening in the City of Angels twice a month...keeping it classy.

Rooney Mara for the cover of Dazed & Confused.

2011-11-02T13:11:00.000-07:00

Rooney Mara is about to become one of the most famous women on the planet. We hung out yesterday at Fred 62 in Los Feliz, something she won't easily be able to do once David Fincher's "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" comes out, with her in the starring role...she said she was in denial...she's trying not to think about what her life will be like once the film is released.

She said her favorite thing to do is sit alone in her room and Google shit. She hates the desert. She is a vegetarian but she's not into vegetarianism. She's an Irish Catholic. She had never heard of Flannery O'Connor. I asked her if she is a weirdo. She said yes.

Selena Gomez for the cover of Cosmopolitan

2011-11-02T13:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I visited Selena Gomez at her gigantic ranch-style home in LA and we talked about love, her relationship with the Beebs, and entering womanhood for the Cosmo's January cover interview.

She's half my age, and way more mature than I, that is a fact...

A GWAR IS Born: GWAR's official biography in the can

2011-10-19T01:42:00.000-07:00

I spent two years working with the wonderful Bob Gorman of GWAR, finally putting down on paper the weird, brutal tale behind the weirdest, brutalest band in heavy metal. Last month, the completed manuscript, titled 'A GWAR Is Born' was delivered...one of my proudest moments. Now we've just got to wait for publication. Expect hundreds of amazing archival images.

Milla Jovovich for Dazed Anniversary Issue

2011-08-31T23:35:00.000-07:00

Rankin shot some incredible photos of Milla at Siren studios in Hollywood, and then I did a video interview with her...print interview coming in the magazine soon. She's one of the most beautiful people on this earth.

Christina Ricci BULLETT magazine cover

2011-08-31T23:21:00.000-07:00

My cover interview with Christina Ricci for BULLETT magazine is out. She looks amazing! The magazine also features Ewan McGregor, Christina Ricci, Christopher Walken, Debbie Harry, David Copperfield, Jason Schwartzman & Jonathan Ames, David Cross, Mary-Louise Parker, B.J. Novak, Parker Posey, Gus Van Sant

The Real Witches and Wizards of Los Angeles

2011-08-17T22:10:00.000-07:00

The full moon was in Aquarius and Mercury in retrograde as members of L.A.'s cosmic mafia -- a fashionable collection of white witches, black wizards, Crowleyites, healers, shamans, alchemists, magicians, cult members, Aquarians, Santeria priestesses, bohemian artists, mystically-minded musicians, pagans and acid hipsters -- gathered at Cinefamily on Saturday for a crash course on witches, and why we love to hate on them.

The night was sold out, which was no surprise -- magic and occultism are alive and well in Los Angeles, and in the popular culture in general. Black mass images, upside-down crucifixes and pagan imagery have infiltrated fashion magazines everywhere, not to mention musicians' minds -- take witchhouse artists Salem, demon rappers Odd Future and even Lady Gaga, all of whom have been borrowing from the grand library of the occult.

Read the rest of the story here.

Udo Kier for Dazed and Confused

2011-07-09T21:59:00.000-07:00

I'm so happy to be profiling the incredible Udo Kier for Dazed and Confused magazine. We conducted the interview at Udo's home in the desert--the converted Palm Springs library. He is a remarkable man and a gentle, hilarious soul. I stalked Udo after he hosted an evening at the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles, and charmed the crowd for hours with his anecdotes about working with Gus Van Sant, Fassbinder, Warhol, Lars Von Trier, Madonna and...Pam Anderson. Story out soon!

Juno Temple for Dazed&Confused

2011-07-09T21:51:00.000-07:00

I interviewed the delicious Juno Temple for the cover of Dazed&Confused magazine, out soon. She showed me her knickers! We fought off homeless people! Fun.

Christina Ricci for Bullett magazine

2011-07-09T21:44:00.000-07:00

I interviewed Christina Ricci for the cover of Bullett magazine's upcoming "cosmic" issue. She was incredibly sweet, warm, gracious and witty. She likes cutting out blue hearts. She doesn't like sun or earth.

Mother of London; Batcakes; Katie Kay

2011-07-09T21:38:00.000-07:00

I have profiled three fantastic designers for the LA Weekly's upcoming Fashion Issue, out at the end of July...

Mildred Von Hildegard from Mother of London

Satanica Batcakes of Batcakes Couture

Katie Kay of Gather LA

Juliette Lewis for Dazed, photos by Rankin

2011-05-28T12:06:00.000-07:00

I am interviewing Ms. Juliette Lewis for Dazed&Confused magazine this weekend. Dazed co-founder Rankin will be behind the lens...so it should be a pretty special spread!

My Short Story "The Audition" In New British Fiction Anthology

2011-05-10T17:23:00.001-07:00

I'm very proud to say my short story, "The Audition", was published in "All The King's Horses", a super cool new anthology of fiction and poetry written by established and emerging writers.
Other authors include Johnny Thunders biographer Nina Antonia, actress Sadie Frost, and singer Lucie Barat (Carl Barat's sister!)
Read it for free here (my story starts on page 16). Or buy it here if you want the real book sitting on an actual shelf in your house.

90 years old and still dancing...Anna Halprin for Dazed&confused magazine

2011-05-08T20:34:00.001-07:00

Here's the intro to my interview with Anna...coming soon in Dazed mag!

Some time after the Second World War, legendary dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin decided that everyone is a dancer (even if they got no rhythm), that every movement is a dance (even the act of putting one's socks on). And with that, she founded what we now call “postmodern dance”, an expressive arts movement whose egalitarian, anti-authoritarian ideology had more in common with future phenomena like punk rock, street art and flash mobs than with the ballet or modern dance of her time.

Unlike her predecessors, Anna Halprin had a warts 'n all approach to dance. She and her dancers got naked during performances. They refused to be corralled onto a stage, performing their dances in the streets, in nature, or among audiences. When invited to dance at a lunch for important art patrons, they made a stage in the middle of the room, sat at a table, and forced the audience to watch them eat lunch. Often, they wandered among audiences and handed them a “score”, instructing them to get up and join the dance. This approach was seen as inclusive or insulting, depending on your viewpoint.

She especially infuriated those who believed that dance should be purely aesthetic--pretty, polite, and non-confrontational. Not that she cared what they thought. “I never think about making my choices on the basis of whether people are going to like it,” she says, speaking from her home in the coastal forests of Marin, northern California. “I have to make my choices based on whether it is good art.”

By unceasingly questioning authority and shunning homogeneity, Halprin and her postmodern peers helped lay the groundwork for the hippie counterculture, as well as for punks, for culture jammers, hipster aerobicizers and cultural iconoclasts the world over (if Banksy had been a dancer, he’d probably have danced with Anna Halprin. And did we mention her daughter married Dennis Hopper?)

Today she's still dancing (sometimes naked), and still pissing people off. Some audience members walked out of a recent Anna Halprin performance, a nightmarish piece called Intensive Care about what it might feel like to die. "Some people left, but that's OK. It's none of my business." Anna Halprin is, without doubt, one of the baddest 90-year-olds you’ll ever meet.

Cameron Diaz for Cosmopolitan

2011-02-15T17:35:00.000-08:00

Last week I interviewed the gorgeous Cameron Diaz for the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. The magazine hits the stands in May! I'll post links as soon as the interview is published.

Jamie Reid interview in Juxtapoz magazine

2011-02-08T18:29:00.000-08:00

Here's the introduction to my 2000-word Q&A with Sex Pistols artist Jamie Reid. Read the full story in April's issue of Juxtapoz magazine!

Artist, punk druid, and nature-lover Jamie Reid likes to plant things; sweet peas, carrots, shallots—and dissent. In 1975, he was asked by his friend the late Malcolm McLaren to conceive the entire visual language behind The Sex Pistols, resulting in some of the most controversial and enduring pop culture imagery of the 20th Century. Like his smiling Queen of England with swastika eyes and a safety pin through her lip, which became synonymous with the punk rock movement, and the garish fluorescents and cutout block letters from the cover of “Never Mind The Bollocks”, appropriated by art students, ad men and t-shirt bootleggers the world over. Much of the Pistols imagery was based on the output from his Suburban Press, the underground publishing outfit that Reid ran between 1970 and 1974. Ordinary people would see these images wheat pasted on walls, on stickers in shops and splashed across the covers of newspapers, and they couldn’t help but react. Sometimes they’d be scared, sometimes they’d be amused, and sometimes they’d start wondering what was really going on.
Born in 1947, Liverpool-based Reid has always been inspired by two things: the anarcho-Dadaist ideas of the Situationist movement, and the magickal utopianism of his Great Uncle, George Watson MacGregor Reid, a turn-of-the-century socialist reformer and Chief Druid of the British Isles. This explains why his work has evolved from socio-political protest art to the predominantly Gaian, shamanistic work he creates today. So what’s up with all the magick? It’s just another side of the consciousness coin, as far as Reid’s concerned. “If there’s one thing I’ve always been aware of it’s that if you need political change, you also need spiritual change,” he says. Either way—whether he’s creating abstract paintings inspired by Druidic ritual, or angry collages that say “Fuck Forever”, Jamie Reid’s art urges us to look around, examine what’s really there, and open our eyes as wide as we dare.

Art show at THIS

2011-01-19T11:31:00.000-08:00

I'm part of a three-person crayon art collaborative called Tres Leches. We are unveiling our first work, called "Eat Your Meat", at THIS gallery in Los Angeles at their "THESE FRIENDS 2" show. Other participating artists include Rony Alwin, Justin Blyth, Richard Colman, Mike Delahaut, Shepard Fairey, Aaron Farley, Piper Ferguson, Roger Gastman, Shane Jessup, Anthony Lister, Cleon Peterson, Retna, Revok and Aaron Rose.

The opening is February 4, come down and say hi!

Feb 4 2011, 7-10PM
THIS los angeles
5906 North Figueroa Street
Los Angeles
CA 90042

Poem in Debacle magazine

2010-12-17T15:14:00.000-08:00

I wrote a poem last year called "Gas Station Coffee", illustrated by the mighty Michael Hsiung--the poem and the illustration will be published in the debut issue of Debacle magazine, early in 2011. Can't wait!

Anna Paquin for cover of Dazed

2010-12-16T10:44:00.001-08:00

My interview with the lovely Mrs. Anna Paquin is on the shelves now. Photos by Terry Richardson.
Read the interview here!

Odd Future for Dazed&Confused mag

2010-12-16T10:39:00.000-08:00

I wrote this:

Amid the graffiti’d freeway overpasses, lofty palm trees and downbeat liquor stores of central Los Angeles, eight of the ten members of hip hop family Odd Future are huddled together in their studio. They’re sticking close, staying alert as the countdown begins. Tick. Tock. There’s a tidal wave coming – and they’re it.

Odd Future is Tyler The Creator, Jasper Dolphin, Domo Genesis, Matt Martians of the Super 3, Left Brain, Mike G, Hodgy Beats, Taco, Syd and Earl Sweatshirt. They often go by the acronym OFWGKTA – Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. Aged between 16 and 19 years of age, they hang out at stores on the streetwear mecca that is Fairfax Avenue, where it intersects with Melrose. There, Tyler and his buddies are faces – kids who skate around, hang out at stores like Supreme and Diamond Supply Co, and make weird beats and videos. Their sound is a stripped-down, dark and heavy synth drone, and their rhymes reflect a comedic obsession with ass-rape, Jermaine Dupri, scat, dead bodies, weed, brain tissue, swastikas, the morning chat show host Steve Harvey, bacon, and pretty much anything else that sounds funny at the time.

Odd Future was too weird for the rap underground to get its head around, and certain key blogs flat out refused to support their music. Beyond a few online “fuck you’s” the kids in Odd Future didn’t sweat the rejection too much – they carried on skating Fairfax and making beats and videos for themselves and their friends, and self-releasing solo albums, EPs, and mixtapes on their Tumblr blog… all of it available for free.

Read the whole story here.

Life of the Party

2010-12-13T12:28:00.000-08:00

Thanks to my lovely agent Jamie Brenner of Artists and Artisans, I'm working with Lisa Baron on her political memoir "Life of the Party". It's about her time as the right hand woman to ultra-Conservative founder of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed. The book comes out July 2011 and is a must-read, whether or not you're interested in politics. It's saucy as all hell.

Steve Jones for the LA Weekly

2010-10-28T18:21:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for the LA Weekly.

It was perfect weather for pirates on Sunday, a gray, shadowless and drizzly evening, as Cap'n Steve Jones barreled into the CBS Radio building in Culver City wearing a grimy sailor's cap.
Portly and formidable, he swept through the lobby like a latter-day Blackbeard, passing logos of the many radio stations housed in the same building — JACK FM, K-EARTH — and headed straight for the KROQ studio.

He sat in his chair and put on his headphones. It was October 17, his first night helming the KROQ galleon live on air, and pillaging conditions looked favorable.

His producer, First Mate Mark Sovel, aka "Mister Shovel," eyed the crow's nest — KROQ's two giant transmitters, known for beaming all manner of pop-metal treachery (Linkin Park, System of a Down) to the station's 2 million listeners. On this night, however, the skies belonged to Cap'n Jonesy, who had in mind something a little different for the landlubbers. A spot of Best Coast, Zola Jesus, 22-20s, new Klaxons or some Sufjan Stevens, perhaps?

Armed with the best of today's skinny-jean indies, Jones leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, watching the seconds count down to 7 p.m. He let out a soft burp — baaarp — and glanced at his co-conspirator. "You ready, Mister Shovel?"

Read the full story here.

Odd Future for the LA Weekly

2010-10-14T14:25:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for the LA Weekly:

The Future Is Odd

Missing the energy and vision of early Wu-Tang? Meet L.A.'s Odd Future, your new favorite hip-hop anarcho-surrealists

The 10 teenage members of L.A. hip-hop skater "family" Odd Future are natural magicians, mini wizards in Nike dunks and Supreme hoodies who, at some point during the short, cold summer of 2010, cast a powerful spell on chin-rubbing Pitchforkers, hip-hop superheroes, Fairfax sneakerheads and U.K.-style cognoscenti alike, hypnotizing them until they were all chanting the same thing: "The future's odd."

Led by a 19-year-old visionary who goes by the name Tyler, the Creator, Odd Future (or OFWGKTA, an acronym for Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All) puts out tracks that un-self-consciously blend anarcho rap with retro post-hipster humor. Or sensitive, S.E. Hinton–style nihilism with sheer evil. Or a love of bacon with a hatred of talk-show host Steve Harvey. The Odd Future crew, all between 16 and 19 years old, is already way too cool for art school.

Read the rest here.

MOCA Graffiti/Street Art show

2010-09-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

As well as freelance writing, I work with Roger Gastman, one of America's leading graffiti experts. One of the projects we have been working on at the office is an upcoming show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. Jeffrey Deitch tapped Roger to co-curate a major street art/graffiti show at the museum, along with Aaron Rose. I've been working on some outreach and press stuff for the show, and Zio Fulcher, my colleague and LA's leading female authority on graffiti, deserves major hugs for pretty much pulling it all together.

It's going to be the first major museum study of art on the streets and all I can say right now is...it's going to be BIG. And a game-changer...Deitch is calling street art/graffiti the most important art movement since Pop Art.

Mister Cartoon's bus (in the photo) will be part of the exhibit.

Read the LA Times story about it here.

Magnetic Poetry

2010-09-11T19:45:00.000-07:00

Sanrio 50th Anniversary book

2010-09-08T14:13:00.001-07:00

Just saw some preview copies of the big 50th anniversary book for Sanrio. I edited the text, and the photography and image layout is amazing...thanks to Shane Jessup and Adam Wallacavage. Book comes out October 2010.

Jennifer Herrema story for the LA Times

2010-08-22T19:31:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for the LA Times

Denim and rock 'n' roll go hand in hand, so it makes sense that indie rock goddess Jennifer Herrema would eventually come out with her own jeans collection, a series of patched-up, skinny-fit, shred-to-hell designs that blend two unlikely extremes: high-fashion and "hesher" culture (hesher being a slang term for music fans of the raggedy-haired, headbanger variety). Think Brigitte Bardot meets cult film "Heavy Metal Parking Lot," and you get the picture.

Six feet tall, with heavy blond bangs, Mick Jagger pout and more often than not a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, Herrema is a Nico for our times, an underground rock icon blessed with supermodel stats. Her look is consistent with her lifestyle — 24/7 rock 'n' roll, on and off the stage. On the L.A. music scene she's known for her distinctive style: custom deconstructed denim, which she stitches with strips of leather and fabric and whatever else catches her eye, worn with oversized Ralph Lauren plaid shirts, cowboy boots and dip-dyed foxtails that trail behind her, attached to her belt loops.

It's no surprise she's been approached in the past to affix her name to a brand. But not until self-styled "outlaw" surf skate brand Volcom came calling last year, looking for help amping up its women's division, did she take the plunge. For Volcom, the launch of Herrema's jeans this year marks the company's first time entering into a design collaboration with a musician. And the new line, released as part of Volcom's Road Tested collection, exudes the unique blend of influences that shaped Herrema, frontwoman for the band RTX.

Read the whole story here.

Lady Gaga story for Variety

2010-08-18T10:52:00.000-07:00

I wrote a story about Lady Gaga and her impact on the music video world for Variety. It ran today. Read the full story here.

Party in a Packet

2010-08-17T19:50:00.000-07:00

Dakota Fanning cover for Dazed and Confused

2010-08-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

My interview with Dakota just hit the stands. And the cover photo is gorrrrgeous.

My Ariel Pink interview for Dazed&Confused

2010-08-05T11:29:00.001-07:00

Dakota Fanning for the cover of Dazed and Confused

2010-07-06T12:57:00.000-07:00

I spent a lovely hour or so chatting with Dakota Fanning in Hollywood this week. We talked about punk rock, platform boots, werewolves and love. Tomorrow morning I'll be talking to Cherie Currie, who Dakota played in the Runaways film, "Cherry Bomb".
This is going to be an awesome cover story!

Banksy

2010-07-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for Variety

Despite a paper-thin marketing budget, a bare-bones website, and very little lag time between completion, its Sundance screening and April 16 release, "Exit Through the Gift Shop," the film by notoriously secretive street artist Banksy, has emerged as the top-grossing limited-release documentary so far this year with $2.4 million.

That's music to the ears of the handful of industry veterans brought on by "Exit's" producers to devise what was probably the most lo-fi marketing campaign of their careers.

"We didn't have the kind of advance time that one would ordinarily prefer to prepare the marketplace, to organize trailers and posters and materials and screenings -- the things one ordinarily does to create awareness," says marketing consultant Richard Abramowitz, who says that though the marketing budget was tiny, the film created substantial awareness and word of mouth beyond the limited arthouse audience.

The pic's minimalist one-screen website features a six-minute movie trailer, a list of screening dates and venues -- and that's it. There are no Facebook or Twitter widgets. No links. And unlike most indie film sites, visitors are not asked to leave their email addresses for later communication.

John Sloss, who was repping the pic at Sundance, decided to release it himself via his Producers Distribution Alliance label.

Sloss purposely relinquished control of the film's Web and social networking presence, allowing Banksy's fans to do the work for the marketers. And work they did, generating a wave of Twitter, Facebook and FourSquare activity about the movie -- data which the "Exit" team carefully monitored, and responded to, in real-time. A fan created a Foursquare badge which became a badge of honor for artsy filmgoers to unlock.

"If the film was sold out at 7 p.m. in a market, then we'd tweet, '7 p.m. is sold out -- 10 p.m. is available,'?" says Marc Schiller, founder of street art blog Wooster Collective and CEO of boutique media agency Electric Artists. Adds Sloss: "We know for a fact that the people who were coming opening weekend are not regular moviegoers. They don't read the newspapers or traditional movie advertising -- we were connecting with them online, from within their community."

Prior to release, at least two tastemaker screenings were held in every market, with "very specific" people invited from the creative community. Once the film opened, if a community said it wanted the film, the "Exit" team responded, allowing for quick shifts in the distribution pattern.

Since the April 16 opening of "Exit Through the Gift Shop" in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, which widened eventually to 46 theaters, the energy has continued, with audiences gradually skewing older and more mainstream.

"There are two basic approaches to the distribution of a specialized movie," Sloss explains, "One, that there is a finite audience that is incrementally used up by doing pre-release screenings, or two, that there is a potentially infinite audience that is accessed and expanded by doing such screenings. We chose the latter approach and it worked."

Cher's son Elijah Blue

2010-06-23T12:08:00.000-07:00

Paz Vega

2010-06-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for Hollywood Life magazine

Heather Graham

2010-06-23T11:36:00.000-07:00

Video for Hurley.com

2010-06-22T13:07:00.000-07:00

I produced some artist videos for Hurley.com. Here are a few. Shot and edited by Greg Roman. (If the videos don't load properly on this site, click on the link beneath each video box)

MIKE STILKEY

View this video at Hurley.com

MICHAEL HSIUNG

View this video at Hurley.com

NATALIA FABIA

View this video at Hurley.com

PIPER FERGUSON

View this video at Hurley.com

GARY BASEMAN

View this video at Hurley.com

LEVON JIHANIAN

View this video at Hurley.com

Henry Rollins

2010-06-14T18:12:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for the LA Weekly:

"Like being licked by a cat for four hours" is how Henry Rollins describes his own show which, depending on whether you're a cat person or not, can be a fantastic or torturous way to spend an evening.

At Friday's Largo show, the first of three nights in LA, he held true to his promise of several hours of cat lickery. And at the end, relaxing the tense, war-like panther stance he had assumed for much of the show, Rollins apologized for the "endless barrage of words" he had just expelled.

We checked our iPhone clocks--dayum, yes it had indeed been three hours of non-stop verbiage, during which Rollins, possessed by the combined oratorial spirit of Hamlet, Billy Graham and Al Sharpton--on Adderal--took us on a guided tour of his super-charged mind.

Read the rest here.

Sun Araw

2010-06-10T10:47:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for the LA Weekly:

Sun Araw is mandala-powered postmodern psychedelia, strange fruit that compels the listener to sit down, unpack his soul and just surf the gravitas. "My music is pretty committed to the true psychedelic ethos of mantric ideals, like basically, angle after angle after angle on the melodic object," explains Cameron Stallones, 26-year-old chief architect of Sun Araw, whose default mood is seemingly set to "whoa." His name is not pronounced Stal-lones, as in a herd of sweaty Rambos charging across the L.A. jungle, but Staaa-lins, as in a pluralized Russian dictator. For the record, there's nothing even remotely Stalinist about this amiable mystic, except maybe his magnificent mustache.

Read the whole story here.

Maja

2010-06-02T17:49:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for the Whole Life Times.

Read the rest of the story here.

Sanrio

2010-06-02T17:41:00.000-07:00

I am working with Sanrio on their 50th Anniversary book, coming out soon. It's going to be CUTE. Like, seriously, adorably, teeth-dissolvingly cute.

STAYHIGH

2010-05-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

I edited a book about the iconic 1980s New York graffiti writer STAYHIGH 149. It's out now, on Gingko press.
Check it out here.

Not counting my boyfriend...

2010-05-28T15:20:00.001-07:00

Teen, Inc.

2010-05-28T15:11:00.000-07:00

I talked to the bruddas Teen Inc. at their house in Mount Washington and the conversation got mad deep! The print story comes out in Dazed and Confused soon, and I'll post the full interview transcription here once the magazine is on stands.
Love, Caroline

Ariel Pink

2010-05-28T15:02:00.000-07:00

Dazed and Confused magazine invited me to spend some quality conversational time with Ariel Pink for a big Q&A that will be running in the magazine soon! We talked about everything from Sasha Grey to Ethiopia to making out with animals and...farting! Farts are funny! Don't forget to listen to his very excellent new single "Round and Round".
(PS: The very first time I saw Ariel Pink was in 2006 at a Doug Aitken art opening at the Schindler House in West Hollywood. It was very high brow...Ariel was covered in chocolate.)

healthy

2010-05-19T14:00:00.000-07:00

I talked to a man called Sean Kelly. His life mission is to help people eat less junk. Here's an excerpt from the story I wrote about him for the Whole Life Times.

You may be surprised to learn that Sean Kelly, founder of America’s first healthy vending machine company, was once a Twinkies-and-SunnyD kind of guy.

“I freaking loved vending machines when I was a kid, because all I ate was crappy junk food,” says Kelly, who grew up in the picturesque lakeside town of Traverse City, Michigan. “Even though my parents were health nuts and my dad was a dentist—along with my sister, grandpa, great grandpa, uncle and cousins—I just loved to eat junk.”

Today, his company H.U.M.A.N., which stands for Helping Unite Man and Nutrition, builds and distributes vending machines that sell healthier fare, such as granola bars, trail mix and dried apricots—basically, the absolute opposite of the trans-fat-laden, obesity-triggering sodas and candy bars he loved to pillage from vending machines as a kid.

Read the full story here

The Bots

2010-05-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I interviewed a band called The Bots, over at their house in Glendale. My boyfriend Bingo came too and bonded with their super cool mum while I chatted with the boys. I loved sitting on the couch and getting to know them. It is so comforting to know that the youth of today is so polite and well-spoken and sweet. They are super excited to be playing Warped tour this summer, and seem very settled and secure in their identities as musicians, despite their tender years.
You can read the story right here, in Dazed and Confused magazine.

	Yay The Bots!

THE BOTS, story by Caroline Ryder

Richard Barbieri from Porcupine Tree

2010-04-26T17:15:00.000-07:00

Richard Barbieri is in the prog metal band Porcupine Tree, he used to be in the New Wave band Japan, and he RULES, as evidenced by this Q&A I did with him on a lawn at Coachella a couple of weeks ago.

You call yourselves “genreless” and there are indeed many different influences in your music. How do you sit down and write it all?

We kind of write and record in two ways. We do sessions as a band where we go out into the English countryside and lock ourselves away in a remote studio for a few weeks. On the other hand, Steven writes on his own and brings stuff to the band and then we work on it. For this album, he started writing something and carried on and on and on. And he said I think this piece is getting longer and longer and he realized that it was going to be one long piece with a theme that flowed throughout. We wanted to separate that one piece from the other tracks that we had done, so that’s why we made it a double album.

Were you listening to any bands in particular at the time you recorded this album?

I think Steve tends to wear his musical influences more on his sleeve. He listens to a hell of a lot of music, in fact. Personally I am not influenced by music. I mean—I love music. But it doesn’t come out in what I do. I am more influenced by sounds, atmosphere, places, films. Just things in life, basically. I work in a more abstract way. I’m a bit of a non-musician compared with the rest of the guys. I tend to work more with sounds and electronics.

You’re like the texturizer, basically?

That makes me sound like a blender. But yeah. It can be very odd. You know how you can be on a ship in Scandinavia traveling from Sweden up to Finland and you are passing these fjords and all these remote islands and ideas come to you? You get a sense of feeling that you wouldn’t get anywhere else? It’s like that. I am also influenced by the sounds you hear over Tannoi systems or when you tune the radio in and you’ve got two stations clashing and it sounds quite interesting. It creates a new kind of music. My upbringing was working with electronics and sounds and I wasn’t a technical keyboard player, so I don’t concentrate on the keys so much as I do the actual sounds. I learned to make one sound do something very special, more special than two hundred notes.

How do you get into that zone, when you’re writing?

I don’t know. I’ve been a musician since I was 17 and because I don’t understand normal music theory, I don’t follow any rules. I can break the rules. It’s like when Orson Welles went to make film and he went to the camera man and said “look I don’t know anything about making a film” and he broke all the rules. Not to aggrandize myself, referencing Orson Welles, but it’s an example. It’s a bit of an attitude in that if you don’t know and understand the theory, then you are free to do other stuff.

So you think it is better to not know the rules.

Yes. For me, that is. If all the band were like that, then it would be a disaster. But it’s nice—I’m the opposite of Gavin, our drummer, who is a master of his instrument. It’s unbelievable.

You’ve gotta be pretty brave coming at it from your perspective. In that you operate from a position of complete innocence. As in “I have no idea what I am doing or how this is going to turn out. I have my tools…I’m just texturizing.”

It seems to work.

You call yourselves prog—what does the word “prog” mean to you? It’s such a loaded word.

Its not such a dirty word now, like it was a while back. To me, it just means being progressive, looking forward. If you look in the dictionary, progressive is moving forward and finding new ways of doing things. I see Radiohead and Muse as progressive bands. And the Mars Volta. I’m not thinking back to 1970 when I hear them.

So…are you prog in your entire realm of existence? Meaning, do you read progressive literature? Like, I dunno…Umberto Eco. I can’t read Umberto Eco.

No, I couldn’t read Umberto Eco either. The Name of the Rose is fine. Then there was Foucoult’s Pendulum. I couldn’t do it. Tried.

Me neither! I’m glad I’m not the only one. I read that and I was like “you’re a wanker!” You know, like progressiveness for progressiveness’s sake. I dunno if sometimes that compromises the soulfulness of whatever’s going on.

Yeah, yeah. Whatever you do you’ve got to be fairly honest. It’s not always easy to do because you get very cynical. But if you can work on that honest basis…I know this sounds sort of pretentious…but in a sort of spiritual way, that’s the best way of doing things for me. Me, I like dumbing down…I like a lot of basic things as well.

Like what?

You know. Like TV.

Like EastEnders? (British soap opera)

No I like Curb your Enthusiasm.

Where do you live?

Greenwich. I’m a South London boy

So you guys are going to be touring a lot over here? Why are you doing Coachella?

To be honest I don’t really love festivals and I’d never go to one. It’s not the way I’d want to experience music.

How do you experience music?

On my own. On my own.

My friend’s life coach was saying that he was really into your song Voyage 34 – it really changed his life

That was a really trippy, kind of trancy track

That’s what he was saying! That it was trippy and kind of an acid thing. Do you guys still do acid?

Steve has never done a drug in his life

Oh cool, I love it when that happens. So he is just naturally trippy?

Apparently. Neither did Frank Zappa. Do any drugs. Apparently. When I was young, I did things. You experiment. So I went through all that kind of thing.

But you don’t find you need it to get in to that zone anymore, when you’re writing, or texturizing?

No. Although when you think about it, most of the great albums were probably made under the influence of some kind of drug. There are very few that aren’t.

I was listening to Café Ethiopia the other day and I was like ‘damn! do you think it would have sounded this good if she wasn’t totally high?’ And my friend said ‘I think she was sober when she made this’. So I don’t know.

I am reading a David Bowie book right now about his time in Berlin when he made those albums and some of them he just didn’t remember, he was so coked out. He was so heavily into coke that he could not remember an album that he made.

That is amazing! Especially because coke isn’t what you’d think of as being the most creative of drugs.

No, it’s weird. I had a little bit of a similar experience. I used to be in a band called Japan in the late 70s, early 80s, and got into coke a little bit. And there are real lapses of memory about that time.

Just like black holes?

Yeah. Yes. It’s very odd. I know I was there. And I know we did it. But there are certain things I just cannot remember. I really wonder…

You’re like “what did I do?”

Yeah. It’s quite weird.

It’s always been interesting to me—rock bands and their relationship to cocaine. I think of marijuana and mushrooms and acid and even heroin as being more creative than cocaine.

Well coke is a nasty drug. It’s a bullshit, selfish, paranoid kind of drug.

Do you think it just emboldens you to push further, creatively? Just be like “fuck it—I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do that with the drums, and I’m going to texturize like that.”

Well yes. That’s what’s I’m into, yes. I like the idea of everything sounding not as it should sound. You know—we’re experimental to a degree.

And finally. before I get I trouble with Dave (tour manager who is hovering around looking at his watch), let’s talk about your solo stuff. What are you working on?

I made a couple of solo albums in the past three or four years. But I don’t really like working on my own. I don’t really enjoy solo albums.

Really? I thought you liked listening to music on your own?

I like listening to music on my own, but not my own music. The most enjoyable thing about music for me is working with people and hearing what I do in context with other peoples’ ideas. I think I am far more interested in context than I am on my own stuff, standing alone. Also, it’s a social thing. And you get feedback on things. If you are just working on your own, you lose perspective. I’m not interested in me. I’m interested in me and how that works in relation to other people.

Right. As texturizer, you need the raw material to texturize with.

Yeah. And I think if you are doing something a bit weird you need someone who is doing something more…normal. To make it sound interesting. As I said before, if everyone in the band started going off their heads writing really weird stuff it really wouldn’t have any substance or form at all. So I still make solo albums and I probably still will do. But I’ll try and get more people involved.

Coachella

2010-04-26T16:59:00.000-07:00

I wrote this story for ArtInfo.com

With music titans like Jay-Z and Johnny Rotten’s Public Image Ltd. playing within spitting distance of each other at this month’s Coachella music festival, it would have been easy to miss the more niche sonic experimentation taking place, testing what can — and can’t — be achieved through the ever-evolving marriage of music, art, and technology.

In the electronica-heavy Sahara tent, for instance, Berlin-based DJ and producer Richie Hawtin unveiled “Plastikman LIVE,” his traveling stage show that pushes the boundaries of real-time music performance. Like a sci-fi Wizard of Oz, Hawtin, who remains unseen for the majority of the show, pushes buttons and twiddles knobs while encased within a giant custom-built LED cage, its lights pulsing and throbbing in tandem with his sounds — resulting in a futuristic environment that evokes a demonic cabaret for droids. Audience members communicated with Hawtin during the performance via the Plastikman LIVE iPhone app, allowing them to send sound and photo files that informed his manipulation of the light show, while also allowing audience members to watch the show from Hawtin’s perspective. A heady effect, to say the least.

“Let’s just say I wanted to create something deeper than just an hour of “'boom boom boom,'” joked Hawtin before the show, which he had spent a week setting up on the festival grounds just outside the desert town of Indio, California. “One of the things that people continually ask about electronic music is, 'Who’s controlling who’? Is it the human being that is the magical component in electronic music, or is the human just one among several components in the musical circuit? That’s the question at the heart of this show.” It’s a high-concept narrative that may have been lost on some of the crowd — many of whom were quite obviously high on something, whether it be on music, life, or another stimulant. But those revelers may have been missing the point. “Technology, after all, can heighten human experience as much as anything else,” says Hawtin.

Sonic innovators Porcupine Tree, a British progressive metal/ambient band that for 25 years has prided itself on being “genre-less” (and which has inspired acts like Gary Numan and New Order), played early on Saturday at Coachella. Keyboard player Richard Barbieri (formerly of the band Japan), emphasized that while technology can be alluring to the avant-garde musician, it is by no means a substitute for traditional, organic creativity. “It’s not about the gear — that’s the whole thing,” he said. “A lot of people say, ‘If only I had this bit of gear, then I could do this kind of music,' but actually you can limit yourself with too much technology. If you know what you want to do, you can do it on anything. It’s an attitude, an intention — the gear comes second to that.”

The sentiment was echoed by British electronica titans Orbital — the two brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll — who conducted some experiments of their own at this year’s Coachella. After a five-year hiatus, the brothers designed a new show that sees them relying on even less cutting-edge technology than during their heyday in the early 1990s.

“For me, it just gets more annoying, it gets in the way,” said Paul Hartnoll, in the Orbital trailer a few hours before the show. “More technology, that is. We’ve got big old analogue synths. Yes, we’ve got a computer running the digital side of things, running the samples, but we like to keep things analogue, keep things simple.”

Simple, that is, except for when it comes to their trademark flashlight headlamps. “For years we had been strapping flashlights to our heads using these homemade headbands, but this time we got a friend to design our headlights,” said Paul. “They're really nice and comfortable and stay in place — that’s where our technology comes in.”

Malcolm McLaren

2010-04-08T12:57:00.001-07:00

A few years ago I was given a bunch of cassette tapes and told to turn them into a story for Swindle magazine. The tapes contained hours of interviews between Shepard Fairey, Roger Gastman and Malcolm McLaren, who sadly passed away this morning.

Here's an excerpt:

Who is Malcolm McLaren? The white, English eccentric who formed the Sex Pistols? The art -school anarchist who lost his virginity to fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, married her, and opened a punk boutique in London where “nothing was for sale”? The cultural alchemist who was asked to “re-brand Poland”? The egomaniacal marketing Svengali who claims he swindled the record industry?

Viewed with reverence and disdain in equal measure, Malcolm McLaren is, at the very least, one thing: a magnificent failure. Magnificent failure, he believes, is the only real means of effecting change in the popular culture. One could view McLaren’s life as a series of cleverly orchestrated disasters. Some of his experiments have changed the face of pop culture (the Sex Pistols). Some of them haven’t (Bow Wow Wow). Some of them may do so in the future (8-bit music, bootlegged from old-school video games, which McLaren is currently championing).

Through out his career, McLaren has enjoyed taking the artistic spectrum, bending it backwards, and forcing its opposing ends to fuse. He merged waltz music with techno in Waltz Darling; layered square dance calls over hip-hop scratching in “Buffalo Gals”; and dressed the New York Dolls in Communist -inspired fashions, provoking the outrage on which he thrives.

Bu tall of his obsessions (including his la test, the rise of the child intellectual) are, like himself, fueled by one thing: the power of the amateur. McLaren, now 59 years old and based in Paris, France, believes the amateur to be a creature capable of the most magnificent failure. And with Western popular culture split into a dominant, over-produced mainstream and a hidden, independent subculture, remaining an amateur is, for many, the only true path to self-expression available today.

Like him or hate him, never before has Malcolm McLaren made so much sense.

You can read the story in its entirety here...and I'm pretty sure I still have those tapes somewhere!

http://swindlemagazine.com/issue05/malcolm-mclaren/

THIS gallery

2010-04-01T10:54:00.000-07:00

I had pitched THIS gallery to the LA Times, LA Weekly, NY Times and none of them seemed to quite "get" it. A gallery in Highland Park? Whaaa? Whatever.
Then my friends at Paper magazine called and said "hey...there's this new gallery...wanna write a story?"
Apparently you have to be 3000 miles away from LA to actually appreciate what's happening here.
Here's the story as it appeared in Paper...much shorter than I had written it...but still.

http://www.papermag.com/?section=article&parid=3604

The opening was really fun. Lots of friends old and new. I purchased an Aleister Crowley print from the very talented Derek Albeck outside...ran into the lovely Monique from Icey Lytes...met her friend, the very nice young artist Albert Reyes. Good times.

Marlee Matlin

2010-03-07T17:44:00.000-08:00

Oscar-winning deaf actress Marlee Matlin was kind enough to say these words about "Kicking Up Dirt", the book I co-authored with Ashley Fiolek.

“Ashley Fiolek’s incredible story perfectly embodies the adage ‘the only thing that deaf people can’t do is hear.’ Fiolek is an inspiration to anyone who has a barrier to overcome. My hands are waving in the air, and I’m screaming for her; this book should not be missed.”
—Marlee Matlin

And here's the publisher's blurb:

Called “a crusader for gender equity in her sport” by the New York Times, 2008 Women’s Motocross Champion Ashley Fiolek’s inspiring memoir about her life-long deafness, her triumph over adversity, her rise to the top of her male-dominated extreme sport, and how her family and Christian faith helped her get there. Fans of motocross and extreme sports, as well as readers who enjoyed memoirs such as Bethany Hamilton’s Soul Surfer, will be inspired by Kicking Up Dirt.

girl power

2010-02-23T12:00:00.000-08:00

This is for www.artinfo.com
I'll post the link when I get it! Check out the site!

And the Best Actor Oscar Goes To: James Cameron
By Caroline Ryder

This year’s Oscars telecast may actually be worth watching this year, if only to see the look on “Avatar” director James Cameron’s face when his former spouse Kathryn Bigelow walks away with the statuette for best directing—a groundbreaking first for any female director. It’s a look he will surely be practicing in the mirror as we near the March 7 ceremony.

“Just relax James. Smile. Wait, wait…too much teeth—that looks psycho—maybe just half a smile. Yeah, that’s good. A Mona Lisa smile, a supportive nod and maybe I’ll punch the air. I gotta at least look happy for the bitch.”

If James Cameron manages to feign at least some semblance of joy on Oscars night, then truly, it will be the performance of the year.

A pouting Kanye West to Bigelow’s composed Taylor Swift, Cameron was among the first to cattily whisper that if Bigelow does win the directing Oscar for her film The Hurt Locker, then it’s probably because she’s a girl—not because her film is any good.

“I would say that it’s an irresistible opportunity for the Academy to anoint a female director for the first time,” he told MTV. “I would say that’s, you know, a very strong probability,” adding that, of course, “I will be cheering when that happens.”

(Maybe he’s been practicing his cheer in the mirror too.)

“I already got my statues,” he continued. “I don’t feel greedy or needy in that way.”
Really? Because it’s obvious that James Cameron, who doth protest way too much, really needs his name to be in that envelope.

Which looks highly unlikely.

Having already scooped up the DGA and BAFTA directing awards (both of them reliable indicators of how the Oscars will unfold), the 58-year old Bigelow does indeed look poised to become the first woman in history to smash Hollywood’s directorial glass ceiling. This will be a huge victory not just for women, but for American cinema—so long as the media desists from entertaining the bitchy, Cameron-supported notion that Bigelow’s gender is eclipsing her actual talent, and that the Academy, should it award her the Oscar, is merely throwing women directors a bone.

Instead, on Oscars night America should celebrate, and allow Cameron’s “War of the Roses”-meets-“Mean Girls” campaign to sink, Titanic-like, to the bottom of the ocean bed, where it belongs.

Jennifer Herrema / LA Times

2010-02-11T15:10:00.000-08:00

Jennifer Herrema from RTX got in touch with me last week because she is doing a denim line with Volcom, and they chose one of my quotes from a story I wrote about her to appear in the lookbook or ad campaign (I'm not sure which). The words I used were "Jennifer Herrema is an underground rock and fashion icon you need to know about", or something like that. Damn right!
Anyway it was great to reconnect with her, and now it looks like I'm gonna write a story about her for the LA Times, and maybe work on some other projects.
I first met her about 2 or 3 years ago at the Penny Ante warehouse show downtown where RTX performed at 2 in the morning...a cross between Marc Bolan (style), Brigitte Bardot (face) and Wendy O'Williams (growl), she restored my faith in womankind.
Check out RTX's music here. (I like "The Last Ride").

Michael Hsiung

2010-02-11T14:32:00.000-08:00

The AWESOME artist Michael Hsiung is almost done drawing this bison to accompany a poem I wrote.

The bison is a primary character in the poem. Mike gave the bison a peg leg, which is a genius move on his part.

Watch the awesome video Greg Roman shot about Michael here.

And while we're talking poetry, here is Mike's bio, taken from his web page:

"Michael C Hsiung is characterized by: large mustache (one of the few remaining facially hairy Asians surviving today) with all of the species capable of reaching one ton or more in weight; herbivorous diet; and a thin yellow protective skin, 1.5-5 cm thick, formed from layers of collagen positioned in a lattice structure; and a relatively small brain for a mammal of his size (400-600g). . Michael is prized for its mustache, sometimes his art. Not a true mustache, it is made of thickly matted hair that grows from the skull without skeletal support. Michael has acute hearing and sense of smell, but poor eyesight over any distance. Michael C. Hsiung will probably live to be about 50 years old or more."

Liz McGrath feature for Juxtapoz

2010-02-11T14:22:00.000-08:00

Liz McGrath contributed some beautiful artworks for the Juxtapoz 15th anniversary auction, and on Juxtapoz.com's auction page they excerpted the feature story I wrote about her a few years back.
You can read it here.
I'm still trying to find the whole story online, without luck...although I have the original print copy and it was indeed a beautiful spread. Liz's story, like her work (and her soul), is the stuff of fairy tales.

Rich Colman

2009-12-28T13:19:00.000-08:00

My fave artist in the whole world, Richard Colman, created this genius illustration for a short story I wrote.

The story is called It's Casual, and it is about lusty dolphins.

I read it at the Hyperion Tavern a few weeks ago and I'm still polishing it up.

I'm not quite ready to post it here, but I thought you might like to see the illustration, which gives you an idea of what the story is about.

Thanks, Richard! xxx

Mopeds

2009-11-08T23:10:00.000-08:00

I wrote this for the LA Times.

It's sunset on a Tuesday and members of L.A.'s biggest moped gang, the Latebirds, have gathered at Choke, a Silver Lake shop, for their weekly ride. They lean against their motorized steeds -- Tomos, Puchs, Motobecanes and Peugeots -- on the sidewalk, brooding, smoking and shooting the breeze, looking cooler than Bob Dylan and his Triumph Bonneville. They are artists, would-be novelists, bike messengers, stylists, a mortician and the intermittently employed; twenty- and thirtysomethings for whom riding and restoring vintage 1970s mopeds has become a lifestyle. Some call them "dirt wizards," but their casual-yet-carefully wrought aesthetic -- raw skinny denim, Vans and mucho plaid -- betrays undeniable hipster leanings.

They're joined by members of other, more recently formed gangs, the LA Tigers, the Woolly Bullies and the HalfWits. Cruising through the hills and canyons of Los Angeles County, 15 to 50 of them at a time, they fall just short of magnificent, thanks to the tinny, high-pitched "waaaa" of their 50cc engines -- a migraine-inducing whine that's less "Easy Rider" than it is "angry chain saw."

"You can't take someone on a moped that seriously," says Steve Acevedo, a member of the LA Tigers. "And we don't take ourselves that seriously. That's the whole point -- it's all about having fun."

It's Casual

2009-10-23T17:54:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for the LA Weekly

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.

Read it here.

Get to The Choppa

2009-10-21T12:11:00.000-07:00

There is a death metal band called Austrian Death Machine 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

2009-10-12T18:12:00.000-07:00

(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.

Larry Flynt

2009-10-02T17:14:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for Swindle magazine

Larry Flynt has seen so many vaginas, he can tell what yours looks like by looking at your 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?”

GWAR

2009-10-01T21:27:00.000-07:00

I wrote this 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.

Vogue

2009-08-21T18:45:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for the LA Times.

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.

Low brow

2009-08-03T15:00:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for the LA Times.

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

Holy Grail

2009-06-19T15:24:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for the LA Weekly

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.

More at LA Weekly.com

Gael Garcia Bernal

2009-05-12T13:55:00.000-07:00

I was so excited to write a cover story for Paper mag, about none other than the supremely talented actor Gael Garcia Bernal.

Tiffany Campbell

2009-05-12T13:53:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for Paper magazine

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

Fashion Students

2009-04-24T20:50:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for the LA Times

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."

Read the rest in the LA Times.

HarperCollins

2009-04-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

HarperCollins 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...

Hannah Montana

2009-04-04T11:09:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for the LA Times

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."

Read the rest in the LA Times.

MC5 manager

2009-04-03T14:03:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for BPM magazine.

"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."

Production Designers

2009-02-01T15:03:00.000-08:00

I wrote this for Variety

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

2009-02-01T02:07:00.000-08:00

I wrote this for Antenna magazine during the run-up to the 08 election.

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

2009-01-28T21:32:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-27T17:17:00.000-08:00

I wrote this for Swindle magazine. Photo 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

2009-01-26T21:23:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-25T21:39:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-24T14:10:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-01-11T14:57:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-01-01T22:28:00.000-08:00

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."

Jeremy Scott story for Oyster magazine

2009-01-01T16:47:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-01T16:45:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-01T16:42:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-01T16:06:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-01T15:37:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-01T15:31:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-01T04:35:00.000-08:00

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)

2008-12-02T17:13:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-02T17:10:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-02T17:06:00.000-08:00

'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

2008-12-02T17:01:00.000-08:00

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.