America is having a powerful cultural moment. Beyoncé delivered a highly political Super Bowl half time show after surprise-releasing the video for her totally brilliant new single Formation, a black queer feminist f**k off to white supremacist heteropatriarchy. I love the fact that Queen Bey has expanded the conversation further by including New Orleans-based trans singer and rapper Big Freedia aka ‘The Queen of Bounce’. Incidentally, despite the themes in the video, nothing was shot in New Orleans. It was all shot in Los Angeles. The Southern Gothic set was actually an historic Pasadena home. But frankly who cares? This is the biggest music video in recent memory and a call to action from the most powerful woman in show business. It is time that we all got in formation: “[She] did not come to play with you hoes. [She] came to slay, bitch.”
Heart to heart
My sister forwarded a bundle of mail which included The Oratorian, a magazine for alumni of The Oratory School. It gave me a bit of a jolt, especially as it arrived in the week of my 40th birthday when I'm feeling unusually nostalgic. I never think about my days there. That period between 13 and 18 years old was a kind of purgatory. It wasn't until I left school in 1994 that my life began. But the founder, John Henry Newman, interests me. The Oratory Fathers wanted ‘Eton minus the wickedness’ and so The Oratory was founded by John Henry Newman in 1859. Newman (21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890) was a theologian who converted to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism in October 1845. In early life, he was a major figure in the Oxford Movement to bring the Church of England back to its Catholic roots. There was an article in the magazine on Ambrose St. John, John Henry’s ‘husband’ for 32 years, although of course it didn't refer to him like that. Newman insisted three different times that he be buried in the same grave with St. John: “I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Father Ambrose St. John’s grave -- and I give this as my last, my imperative will,” he wrote, later adding: “This I confirm and insist on.” Newman died of pneumonia on Aug. 11, 1890 at age 89. The shroud over his coffin bore his personal coat of arms with the Latin motto, “Cor ad cor loquitur” (Heart speaks to heart), which he adopted when he became cardinal. Their joint memorial stone is inscribed with a Latin motto chosen by Newman: “Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem.”(Out of the shadows and reflections into the truth.”) They shared a small grave in the English town of Rednal until the Vatican removed his remains in an attempt to cover up the relationship. With beatification, Newman is now only one step away from official sainthood. Canonization would make Cardinal Newman the first English person who has lived since the 17th century to be officially recognised as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. He was beatified on 19 September 2010 at an open air mass in Birmingham. He is already a saint to me and I hope he and Ambrose are having a ball up in gay heaven.
Leaving London
Today I am doing something that I never thought I'd do: I'm selling up and leaving London. I am deeply grateful that I got to own a flat in a city where people are scrambling to get on the property ladder. It was a godsend to have my own bolthole. But I am in a different place now and I want this next chapter in my life to be here in LA. Hedging my bets, keeping a door open on my old life would leave me in limbo. Half measures availed us nothing: for this to work I had to fully immerse myself and commit. It took a lot to get out here and I have faith that if I'm brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward me with a new hello. Sounds cheesy, but that is my experience. A clean slate. A blank canvas. A fresh start.
Here are a few things I love about America....in no particular order:
Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris)
Julia Louis Dreyfus (Veep & Seinfeld)
Mid-century California modernism
Houses on stilts hanging off hills
Austin
Ojai
Catskills
Silverlake
Fire Island
San Diego
Big Sur/beaches
Great Outdoors/National Parks
Canyons/coyotes
The sound of crickets at night
Big open roads of West Texas
Spanish moss
Tales of the City
Coca Cola + Root Beer floats
RuPaul
Bette Midler
Dolly Parton
Miley Cyrus
Sigourney Weaver
Barbra Streisand
Burt Bacharach
The Carpenters
Bill W
Pia Mellody
Jennifer Aniston
Frasier
Golden Girls
Jaws
Steel Magnolias
REM
Michael
Janet
Cher
Madonna
Roseanne (the show)
Will & Grace
Obama (thanks to him gay marriage is legal nationwide as of June 26, 2015)
Hillary
Weejuns
John Grant
Murder, She Wrote
Jeeps (the older ones)
Star Wars
Its love affair with dogs
Stonewall/Black Cat
Gore Vidal
Postcard from Laurel Canyon
Laurel Canyon is a mountainous neighbourhood in Los Angeles with a snaking boulevard that connects West Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley. Just five minutes from the clubs down the hill on Sunset Strip, where countless musicians of yore have honed their craft, it has served as a bucolic paradise for decades. Back in the 30s, Errol Flynn had a huge pile up here before Sonny and Cher, Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison made Laurel Canyon their home in the 60s and 70s. Joni Mitchell was living here when she wrote “Ladies of the Canyon” and “Clouds”. Mama Cass, the den mother of the L.A. music scene, had a house on Woodrow, which became a creative nexus for the canyon’s innovative musicians as the folk scene exploded.
With its steep hills and winding dirt roads, the canyon provided a woodsy refuge from the urban bustle of Los Angeles. Along with beautiful views of the city, it offered an escape from the social turmoil that defined the 1960s: the Watts riots in 1965, the violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in response to the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968. That dark reality rarely invades the music made in or inspired by Laurel Canyon, which is defined by its folk-rock guitars and its dusty harmonies.
Back then you lived in Laurel Canyon if you were too poor to live in Benedict, Coldwater or Nichols Canyon. There was a time, 1965 to 1969, when you could hitchhike up and down it. And then the Manson Family thing happened a few canyons over and the hallucinatory joyride was dead: beauty had turned to brutality. People started rolling up their windows, locking doors, putting fences around their property—and taking coke. All things must pass.
Architecturally speaking, it is about as schizophrenic and precarious as you could wish for. Laurel Canyon was the Bel Air of its day, and many of the English Tudor and Spanish style homes can still be seen in the canyon today, while several modernist Case Study houses were built here between the mid 40s and mid 60s. The cabin-style homes teetering on stilts, cantilevered atop perilous hilltop bluffs, may or may not be still standing after El Nino hits. In fact, residents of this woodsy utopia are being told to stock up and hunker down, with previous El Nino storms causing cars to be washed away by the apocalyptic deluge. If this year’s “Godzilla” turns out to be the monster it has been predicted to be, some of the rickety old canyon abodes may just float away. And if the floods don’t get you, the earthquake will, or there are always the coyotes to contend with. Let your pooch get loose at night and it’s sayonara to Pickles. But that’s the price you pay for living in Neverland, right?
When I first came out to L.A. [in 1968], my friend Joel Bernstein found an old book in a flea market that said, ‘Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live and they’ll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they’ll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they’ll say Lookout Mountain.’ So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain.” —Joni Mitchell
Postcard from New York
As a transplant I see it as my mission to understand my adopted country. A year ago I upped sticks and moved to LA with a dream of becoming a freelance writer. Other than hearing stories about how LA is having a moment I didn’t really know what to expect; it was more of a hunch, an innate calling to explore the sprawling, schizophrenic city that has served as a backdrop to countless movies and tv shows.
Turns out that I chose exactly the right spot to road test a new way of living and working while I straddle the poverty line because most folks I know there are cash poor time rich, a budding something or other. It’s an expansive place of possibilities, the seat of all myth-making in the West, a destination for dreamers where 'portfolio careers' are de rigueur.
In New York (and London) every inch of space is prime real estate; in LA there is room to breath. Consequently it’s relatively affordable to live there. A friend has recently moved from London to New York. She and her husband have settled on a snazzy one-bed apartment just across the Brooklyn Bridge. She is paying, wait for it, $4,500/month, and even though she has a well-paid job at a reputable ad agency she has to stump up 4 month’s rent in advance plus a deposit given she doesn’t have the required credit rating in the US yet. With the broker's fee on top she's looking at paying $30,000 before she’s even been to Ikea, which is a chunk of change. Not everyone will go the broker route of course.
That New York is hemorrhaging creative types to other cities is not news but now I understand why. Much like London, NYC is fast becoming a resort for the jetset (it was un-affectionately called "Dubai with blizzards" recently). That’s not to say all the rough edges have been smoothed away. The Lower East Side has mercifully held onto its grittiness but a one-bed in a Delancey St tenement will cost you $2100/month. There are dishevelled fixer-uppers in Harlem and parts of Brooklyn are still pretty ghetto but it’s hard to start from scratch in New York anymore, you have to come from money, be married to it, or earn a hefty pay package in a corporate job. That thrilling, dangerous pre-AIDS era of crumbling ruins, black outs and abandoned piers in 70s New York is long gone, but so is the 90s fallacy of living in a Friends-style apartment in Greenwich Village. If your job’s a joke, you’re broke, and your love life’s DOA, better move to LA.
That's not to say Los Angeles isn't also becoming a playland for the global money set. With a GDP of $825 billion and 330,000 high net worthers worth a total of $1.2 trillion residing there, Los Angeles is a growing force in its own right. “Los Angeles in an incredible city and is the center of a creative explosion right now” said Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s chief creative officer. “There is an amazing and inspiring mix of people from the worlds of film, technology, music, architecture, food and culture and now fashion, all doing interesting things there”.
New York's supremacy is untouchable. Like London it is a global center of power and wealth, a world city. And I suppose that's the point, it feels like a more extreme version of London. The cultural distance I feel as a Brit in a foreign country is amplified by being in sun-baked southern California. Moby, a native New Yorker who moved to LA, puts it beautifully: "In New York, you can be easily overwhelmed by how much success everyone else seems to be having, whereas experimentation and a grudging familiarity with occasional failure are part of LA's ethos". He continues: "If you're in New York or London, you're surrounded by a world that has been subdued and overseen by humans for centuries". It's precisely because of its pre-apocalyptic strangeness, its simultaneous ugliness and beauty, that I'm so smitten by LA, always seemingly an inch away from oblivion (be it quake, fire, drought, coyote or rattlesnake attack).
Postcard from Suffolk
Commenting on this tiny island, Bill Bryson once said “if I parachuted you randomly into a place you would be within 5 miles of something globally important and significant, so much has happened in such a small area”. Suffolk is no exception. Locating myself in Woodbridge for a month, a beautiful market town 8 miles from the coast, I discover I am in easy reach of Sutton Hoo, an Anglo Saxon burial ground, Orford Ness, England’s very own Area 51, and Aldeburgh where back in 1948 Benjamin Britten started a little festival which has become arguably the best musical event in Britain. Aldeburgh Food & Drink Festival (with fringe events continuing until October 11) is a good opportunity to sample the main edible players on the Suffolk coast, but it’s worth exploring the jewel in the foodie crown, Orford, at any time of year. With its 12th century castle and a coastal nature reserve just across the river, it is insanely picturesque. For simple, un-mucked-about food in unpretentious surroundings, nowhere does it better than Butley Orford Oysterage: they have oysters and salmon from their own smoke house. A boat trip will take you across to the spooky Orford Ness where intrigue hangs in the air. Top-secret military experiments were conducted here including the birth of radar (snooping on the Russians) and developing Britain’s atomic bomb. Go further inland and architecture geeks will go weak at the knees over Lavenham, a village that grew rich from the wool trade in the 15th and 16th centuries, then lost it all and went into decline. Because the local inhabitants were broke they didn’t have the funds to upgrade to the latest styles of architecture. What’s left is a Tudor time capsule, making it the most complete medieval town in Britain with a glorious ‘wool church’. Far grander and more ornate than a weaving village this size warranted, then, as now, the rich wanted to show off their wealth and this was how they did it back in 1525. Suffolk has long been a meeting place for artists, perhaps drawn by its moody skies and watery landscape. Turns out George Orwell, famous for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four, spent part of his fledgling career in Southwold, a charming seaside town with neat little beach huts and a tat-free pier. OK let’s be honest, it’s the North Sea, Santa Barbara this is not. Like Nigel Slater said, the British aren't good at 'seaside'. But whichever way you turn, major milestones in history have taken place here that emanate far beyond these pebbly shores.
Getting wood at London Design Festival
First staged in 2003, the London Design Festival (September 19-27) is one of the world's most important annual design events. A major feature of the London Design Festival each year is the ambitious programme of special projects and installations.
Assemble has designed “a forest of timber columns” for a V&A exhibition which marks what would have been British furniture designer Robin Day’s 100th year. Titled Robin Day Works in Wood, the installation, a nod to Day’s childhood growing up near the woodlands of High Wycombe, will be displayed outside the V&A’s Britain 1500-1900 Galleries.
One of Day’s last designs was a chair made for Ercol, which was part of a project called Onetree where designers were asked to create objects using timber from a single oak tree. At the time Day said: “As a designer, I greatly enjoy working in timber. Unlike synthetic materials, it has unpredictability, an infinite variety of texture and pattern, smells good when worked and is sympathetic to the touch – it has soul.”
Born in 1915, Robin Day was one of the designers who created a modern British style in the early 1950s. Like other designers of the time, he firmly believed that mass-produced furniture could be well designed and sold at affordable prices. Here, Day at work in 1953 on the Q Stak chair.
September 19-October 4 at the V&A; londondesignfestival.com
Kylie pulls a Beyonce
Kylie Minogue and Shaggy have released a duet called Black and White. The track is from a surprise EP with American dj and producer Fernando Garibay which features other collaborations with Godfather of Disco, Giorgio Moroder, and the genius Sam Sparo. Black and White is shot like a lo-fi home movie which signals a new direction for Kylie, who looks as joyful and fresh as she did in the video for her epoch-defining 1990 masterpiece Better the Devil You Know. We salute you Ms. Minogue. Roc Nation who?
Janet Jackson releases cover artwork for eleventh album
Janet is in the midst of a musical comeback.
She made her triumphant return to the stage when she kicked off her Unbreakable World Tour earlier this week in Vancouver. And now we get to see the artwork for her long-awaited new album, Unbreakable. A titular homage to her brother's final studio album Invincible perhaps?
Tom Hardy takes dog Woodstock to world premiere
Tom Hardy is definitely a dude who digs dogs. At the premier of his new movie Legend his dog Woodstock chased a pigeon on the red carpet and ended up stealing the show. The 37-year-old actor took his labrador-cross Woody to the London event where he was snapped jumping up on his owner before darting off to chase a pigeon. It is well-known how much Tom loves pets and he starred in a campaign poster for PETA alongside Woody after adopting the pooch. Last September, he also took his pit bull co-star Zora from the movie The Drop on a number of red carpets while promoting the film.
*Please note the dog above is not Woodstock.
Little America, Helmand
Once upon a time, in a bleak stretch of Afghan desert, American engineers oversaw the largest development program in Afghanistan's history, constructing two huge earthen dams, 300 miles of irrigation canals and 1,200 miles of gravel roads.
The settlement served as the headquarters of a sweeping American Cold War effort to wean Afghans from Soviet influence in the 1950s. Afghans called it "Little America."
The families lived in white stucco homes. The men wore coats and ties, and the women dressed as they did back home, with knee-length skirts. There was a clubhouse where the adults played cards and drinks were served by a Filipino bartender.
The kids played tennis, attended a co-ed school and escaped the heat by frolicking along the banks of the Helmand River. There were cottages in the mountains for weekend getaways, where the men would hunt gazelle and the kids would play games and sing.
The project soon lost its innocence with an unforseen by-product: deadly poppy blooms harvested for opium. Afghanistan currently produces 85% of the world's opium, the key ingredient in heroin. Now over 1 million Afghans – around 3% of the population – have an opium or heroin habit.
Can I get an Amen up in here?
Following Miley's inspired performance at the VMA's surrounded by a sea of drag queens, the Drag Race phenomenon is proving to be an unstoppable juggernaut. Resistance is futile: drag is back.
Sweet Molly passes away
Anderson Cooper is hurting over the loss of his faithful friend.
The newsman's beloved Welsh springer spaniel, Molly, died on Tuesday. He shared the news on Instagram along with a photo tribute to the 11-year-old pooch, which he referred as his "sweet dog."
Cooper, who is cuddling up to his the brown-and-white fur ball in the photo, was often seen with Molly around New York City. She also appeared on his daytime talk show, Anderson, making her debut in 2011. The canine was a little nervous for her big moment and nervously nuzzled her owner's leg.
Ron Jude
Ron Jude’s new book Lago, published by Mackbooks UK, comes out this fall. Ron Jude is a well known, highly regarded US photographer and this is his latest work. It’s about the Salton Sea area of the California desert. It’s highly anticipated and Mack is one of the hottest publishers around now; all of their books are coveted and beautiful. It was started by Michael Mack (formerly of Steidl) and its titles – always by the coolest artists - are always on “best of” lists and consistently sought after. ronjude.com
Gehry revealed as designer for LA River masterplan
LA-based architect Frank Gehry’s vision to revitalize the LA River hinges on turning it into what is mostly overflow from treatment plants and run-off from Angelenos watering their lawns into a water-reclamation project. Transforming the river will be a grand exercise in modern ecosystem manipulation. This is the beginning of a golden era for the LA River. lariver.org
Esalen: community and conscious capitalism
Perched on a windswept rocky promontory on California's scenic Big Sur, Esalen opened its doors in 1962. It recently featured in the final episode of Mad Men. The most significant campus renovation in its 53-year history is in full swing. With Silicon Valley engineer and entrepreneur Ben Tauber at the helm, the conscious business movement is gaining momentum. esalen.org
Chicago Biennial
The inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, North America’s largest international survey of contemporary architecture, kicks off next month. Four new kiosks are being designed to be permanently installed on Chicago’s lakefront: one, decided through an international competition, and the other three, created through collaborations between local architecture programs and internationally-renowned architects.
October 3, 2015-January 3, 2016; chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org