Issue # 32
Archive stories

Livingston Manor: Driving to photographer and filmmaker Marianna Rothen’s house in Sullivan County on a Friday afternoon, I see more people walking along the highways than usual for New York’s country roads. The scene up here on this Sabbath day—groups of boys and men, many of them bearded, in large hats or kippahs, tzitzit poking out…

London: Sometime in the earlier years of Archy Marshall’s media coverage, rumours spread that his stage name, King Krule, came from King K. Rool, the villain in a Donkey Kong video game. In fact, it comes from the film King Creole, starring Elvis Presley as a struggling singer in New Orleans, avoiding the temptations of a…

Riverside: John Divola is a well-kept secret among directors and cinematographers I know, someone we tend to discuss when we talk about our favourite photographers. If you are lucky enough to acquire some of his prints, you will be the envy of anyone who gazes through those beautifully vandalised windows to the spectacular sunrises or sunsets…

Since 1970, I have been making photographs in a relatively continuous manner. My world over the past five decades has primarily been southern California, and my photographs are specific to this place and this moment in time. Early on, I began to see in photography the ability to collate a wide range of cultural and…

New York City: A         In your debut novel, Freshwater, you write: ‘Many things begin with a name’. ‘Akwaeke’ means ‘python’s egg’ in Igbo. The first years of my existence, I was told it meant ‘precious’. Later I found out that it is called precious because the python is the physical manifestation…

Paris: Vincent’s Darré’s life has been full of grand influences; he was the nephew of Jorge Semprún (one of the key figures of Spain’s transition to democracy) and the late Karl Lagerfeld was his mentor. I’ve been lucky enough to know Vincent since I was six or seven years old, and we are still connected now…

Los Angeles: Though Ruby and I have been within each other’s orbits for years, we didn’t meet until this interview. We have a lot in common beyond mutual friends. We both grew up in Inverness, California; our fathers and mothers were artists; we each had a lot of freedom growing up; and we both went to…

Tbilisi: Nona Gaprindashvili—who in 1978 became the first woman to be awarded the title grandmaster rank among men by the International Chess Federation (FIDE), and who holds five World Championship titles and 11 team and nine individual gold medals at the Chess Olympics, and who was named the best Georgian Sportswoman of the 20th century, and…

House with an Earthen Floor is the smallest residence of Kazuo Shinohara’s realised works. Completed in 1963 on the outskirts of the mountain resort town Karuizawa, the house was designed as a retreat for photographer Kiyoshi Ōtsuji. Measuring a perfect square at only 24 shaku (approx. 7.3 metres) on each side, the plan is divided…

The kid meets us downstairs in the morning. Jae and Manny sip their coffee, wrapping up their kitchen routine. And I’ve made a point of staying awake to greet my nephew, although most days, this fucking early, I’m well into my fourth dream. This room’s big enough for all of us. Light filters in through…

Huntington Beach: Both Ed and Deanna Templeton have achieved global success and respect over the years as artists. In 2021, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City acquired 82 of their photographs for its permanent collection. Yet they remain in their ‘70s-style Huntington Beach ranch house in a nondescript suburban neighbourhood now dotted with…

Here on the following eight pages are some of the Templeton’s images—paintings by Ed and photographs by Deanna—that bring to life so vividly the weird and sometimes dark slice of that only-in-America SoCal suburban lifestyle they grew up in. Whether depicting an old man watering his lawn in front of a cinderblock wall or a…

London: Anthea Hamilton’s home and studio occupy separate units in a semi-industrial building in London’s Stockwell. When I arrive, Anthea hasn’t quite decided where to settle for our conversation; we hover at the door of the apartment before she finally steers us down a couple of flights of stairs to her studio, a place where she…

Hornby Island: I consider it a gift to have grown up on Hornby, a small Gulf Island off the west coast of Canada, home to draft dodgers, barefoot back-to-the-landers, hippies, and artists. I remember the smell of sandstone beaches and freshly chopped piles of red cedar. I remember that islanders could seemingly build or grow anything…

Los Angeles: Wedged between the Eastside’s working-class enclaves and the Westside’s Botox bubble, the slopes surrounding Silver Lake have long been a locus of Los Angeles bohemia, and Louise Bonnet and Adam Silverman have long been a local presence. In 1991, Adam co-founded the streetwear company X-Large; Louise, fresh from Geneva, soon signed on as an…

Los Angeles: In the late ‘40s, Touko Valio Laaksonen, a young Finnish war veteran, spent his evenings drawing homoerotic scenes. At that time, mainstream society considered gay men morally and physically weak. Touko imagined himself and his comrades much differently. With all the propaganda skills he acquired from his advertising career, the master draftsman began a one-man…

The trip from Zurich to the lower Engadin takes three hours by one of those trains that could be from a Wes Anderson movie. Arriving in Sent, a tiny, picturesque village, and entering my hotel, I bump into Not. The house where he was born, as well as his studio, are a stone’s throw away…

London: I can’t remember exactly when we met, but I do remember the first images I saw of their world: One was of Jago Rackham dressed as a satyr at one of their parties, and one was of Lowena Hearn undressed, tying bows of pasta for a dinner. I call it ‘their world’ as worldbuilding is…

I wake, and I know that no one’s scheduled to arrive today. A line from a Jorge Luis Borges short story wraps itself around my bones: ‘You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream’. I recall the dream I had on my first night in solitary confinement, about two months ago,…

Imagine an infinitely vast matrix of nearly identical, inescapable four-and-a-half-mat tatami rooms which can be (re)entered through door, window, or hole bashed through wall—you could call it a ‘tatami galaxy’. My translation of mega-popular, anime-adapted author Tomihiko Morimi’s The Tatami Galaxy came out in 2022. Originally published in Japanese in 2004, the campus novel unfolds…

The motel sign reflected in the pool. A neon jellyfish convulsing. Paradise Inn, it said. Maybe The House of Rhapsody. Or Cloud Nine Motel. (Something in that vein.) My son floated in the pool at the centre of his inflatable doughnut. Pink, aquamarine, and purple were his favourite colours: the same colours flashing in the…

1. Gather the ingredients: two onions, green lentils (washed), chickpeas soaked overnight, all-purpose flour, oil for frying, bunches of ksboor and parsley, three stalks of celery, the spices—cumin, turmeric, zanjbil. Black pepper, English pepper, paprika-in-oil (optional), Osem chicken soup powder, a cup of intriya or cut vermicelli, tomato purée (for colour), meat (something fatty like…

The ‘reality’ I’d get back to, in due course, was that I was, in actuality, a really well-known artist, hitting the contemporary art circuit at 22 with a research-based praxis and legion of erratic paintings that people seemed to admire.  Thinking clearly about life was just another way of saying low self-esteem.  Almighty to save…

Some medieval miniatures allow us to intrude into the monastic space we know as a ‘cell’, from the Latin cella, which means ‘tiny chamber’. In the cell, little, very little can be possessed, and almost nothing encroaches from the outside world. This is because the cell exists to house another world, unlike this one, immense,…

Luther Vandross’ 1985 The Night I Fell in Love (Epic) rises up tall in an arty Black neighbourhood lush with evergreens like New Edition’s eponymous second album, Sade’s Diamond Life, and Prince’s Purple Rain. The mood of Vandross’ eight-song Night glides from relatable charade to trembling intimacy to the resignation that love and loneliness are…