Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More

Unless you have been sleeping under a rock, re-living The Wackness, or endlessly obsessing on the veepstakes, you have probably heard that Sub Pop Records is celebrating its 20th anniversary this week. Friends and readers of this blog will recall that I am interested in the history, character and characters of the Northwest, and Sub Pop embodies that just as much as old Hank Yesler or Tiny Freeman or the Skid Road, or the houses of ill repute below it. Apparently, see above, there is actually a Sub Pop logo flag flying at the top of the Space Needle, which is painted to look like the their 7" record labels. I could go on, but instead I recommend pointing your browser toward the General Bonks for Sub Pop-related stories, videos, and unfettered genius in blog form. Here are a few choice quotes:

"I always liked that Bruce assigned a catalog number to his daughter Iris when she was born. It really stymied all the completists."

"The crazy economics of the time, economics that allowed penthouse space for a couple of self-proclaimed losers, were a big part of putting Seattle on the cultural map."

"Lots of hungry crazies would come in, mistaking the SUB POP for SUB SHOP. It was fun."


Happy birthday, Losers.

Mudhoney Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More mp3

The Dopeness

Emily and I also saw The Wackness last weekend (we saw a lot of movies last weekend).



I don't think it's going to go down as one of the most memorable films ever, but it's a great summer movie and worth seeing. Olivia Thirlby and Ben Kingsley are particularly good. Method Man shows his, um, range as a Jamaican drug dealer, but his accent is a little too perfect, and things get a little matchy-matchy when he pops in a tape of "The What," his own real-life collab with Biggie. Still, I was very entertained for two hours and The Wackness does a nice job of capturing the feeling of New York in 1994.

June of that year was the first time I ever came to New York City. I was really into hip-hop and I was dying to go to the New Music Seminar that summer—so for my graduation present, my parents pooled their money and bought me a plane ticket, an NMS badge, and a room at the YMCA on the Upper West Side for a week. I would very happily stay there again. The room was $38 a night, the showers down the hall were clean, I pretty much had the whole floor to myself, and it was fully air conditioned. That came in particularly handy, considering it was over 100º the entire time I was here. I saw a lady faint on the Second Avenue F platform, it was so hot.

I got to see tons of shows—the Gravediggaz' first release party, the infamous Supermen DJ and freestyle battles, Jeru with Group Home and Premier, a big showcase with KRS-One and a bunch of other people where Ol' Dirt McGirt kept rushing the stage—and best of all, the Rocksteady Crew's anniversary party up at Rocksteady Park, where among tons of other good performances, Mad Skillz reprised his legendary freestyle from Stretch & Bobbito's radio show, and the crowd went freaking NUTS. I went to Fat Beats on the first day it opened on East 9th Street and maxed my credit card, picking up tons of stuff that was impossible to find in Seattle. I ate breakfast at the Carnegie Deli almost every day, on my way to the Seminar. I walked everywhere and when I couldn't take the heat anymore, I rode the subway to different parts of Brooklyn or Queens or Uptown, and walked around more. It was mind-blowing and I knew I would have to live here someday.

KRS-One Hip Hop Vs. Rap MP3
Mad Skillz & Q-Tip Freestyle (from WKCR 89-tek-9, April 94) MP3

Straight Six

Wooooo no.6 is on the way! We're about to copy edit the last interviews, and Andre is designing the magazine as I type. I don't know how ol' Crombie does it—every issue outdoes the one before it. I can't disclose the contents at this time but suffice it to say that they will make you feel free, like the wind, like you want to get on your steed and just ride, like the young warrior pictured above. Stay tuned right here and to Wooooomag.com for updates.

Unrelated clever blog title reference no.98997:
The Mountain Goats Straight Six mp3
(Sub Pop Singles Club, November 2001)

Party and Bullsh*t

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My bud Byron has a new band and they're playing their first show tonight—quickly, loudly, and with questionable ability. It's on at 8pm, at Club Europa...must be Polish. 98 Meserole Ave at Manhattan Avenue. I will not be in attendance as my dad is getting into town today, but I guarantee it will kick ace and I recommend it. Also on the bill is Pink Reason, Talibam, and Seattle's own PWRFL POWER, who is to music as Eagle vs. Shark is to movies.



PWRFL POWER Alma Song mp3

The Battle of Evermore

We interrupt the steady barrage of design, fashion, art direction and high-speed camping to bring you this brief acknowledgment of weightier issues. In this week's New Yorker, Seymour Hersh has another ultra-informative/ultra-spooky article on the administration's secret operations against Iran. Read "Preparing the Battlefield" here and/or listen to an audio interview with Hersh here.

For a short history of our involvement in Iran (with a nice running start that gives you some background on Iranian history) I recommend Stephen Kinzer's book All the Shah's Men.

Talkin' New York

This week's issue of New York features a series of articles on the magazine's founder, Clay Felker, who passed away last week. One of them is written by Felker's first employee, Tom Wolfe. There are also comments from, among others, Felker's wife Gail Sheehy and former New York staffers Pete Hamill, Gore Vidal, and Gloria Steinem (Felker financed the first issue of Ms. magazine). Former New York editor Kurt Andersen also has an interesting piece.

I never really knew anything about Clay Felker before I read the Times' obit, but reading about him this week has been an eye-opening, fascinating crash course in how the magazine got started—how any magazine gets started—and how much New York has shaped magazine publishing since. Andersen writes that "Probably all outsiders (if they are, in [E.B.] White's genius phrase, 'willing to be lucky') mentally compile a New York City field guide and playbook when they're in their twenties and thirties, but Felker did so literally, and published it in weekly serial form." On the art direction tip, there's this little nugget from Milton Glaser, New York's founding design director: "We tried to design a magazine that you could understand completely in ten minutes just by flipping through the pages and using those overarching heads that we always had, and those subheads that sort of explained things."

I'm still kind of processing the whole thing, but it's ultra-inspiring and I recommend checking it out if you're obsessed with magazines, as I am. The whole thing is online, but do yourself a favor, head for the newsstand and pick it up as it was meant to be read.

P.S. On thinking a little more about Felker's approach—Andersen calls it a mix between the descriptive (i.e., about people) and the prescriptive (i.e., about what people should buy or see or experience)—it seems odd to me that no one mentions fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, (or even Vanity Fair, on some level) which had been publishing that mix themselves before New York. They were probably considered fluff, or with a more limited audience, though, and what Felker did was something like that approach, but mixing in "harder hitting" reportage and literary sensibilities, changing the fashion to status, and giving it some ritalin and locality.

Still processing...

Book It

At long last, this baby is headed for the printer. Should be in stores early next month.

Wonderful, Wonderful, Wonderful

On a lazy Fourth of July afternoon we finally had a chance to dig into our our Netflix and watch Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969, trailer above, check it out). It stars Robert Forster as a cameraman in Chicago who meets a single mother, played by Verna Bloom (who you might know from such roles as the boozily scorching Mrs. Dean Wormer in Animal House). Forster's character covers various local news events and eventually the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, and the story is intertwined with actual footage of that and the riots that went with it. It's a visually beautiful film—one of those, like Easy Rider or Cool Hand Luke or Killer of Sheep that makes you love and hate your country in a really melancholic, mixed-up way. (Trying to explain things like this makes it clear I am not a writer... just trust me, it's good.)

Chicago blues-funk heroes Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield and others provide a really stellar, psychedelic-Bullitt kind of score, with one interlude from the Mothers of Invention that I'm hoping I can find on vinyl some day.

The Voluptuous Horror

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Last night we watched Burnt Offerings (1976, 116 minutes) on one of the second-tier Showtime channels—which is to say, one of the eleventh-tier movie channels.



The trailer makes it look scary, but trust me, this is a film remarkable only for its ability to sustain a protracted, utterly mediocre level of terror. The second-to-last minute is thoroughly chilling, mainly because you've wanted to be scared for the previous 114 minutes, and because you knew Karen Black was a total weirdo and were wondering what the hell was going on behind her weirdo eyes. Then the credits come. You've been through a trying experience, and you feel oddly satisfied that it's over.

After that, we watched Factotum, an adaptation of the highly esteemed Charles Bukowski novel, starring Matt Dillon as the lovable Henry Chinaski, and Lili Taylor and Marisa Tomei as his special lady friends.



It was good, a worthy adaptation without having the budget to be a full period piece. Seemed like a good way to end a Fourth of July weekend.

Some Day

Jasper Johns Flag (MoMA, New York)

Eddie Vedder I Am a Patriot MP3
Pearl Jam Patriot MP3

Man's Got Style

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You might think Pacific Standard has all got poncey and posey this week with the predominance of fashion-related posts. Don't think that. I write about whatever comes to mind—it really is by random chance. This stuff has come up lately for whatever reason, and I think it's worth noting.

In any case, here's a video from the International Herald Tribune of Lanvin's Alber Elbaz explaining his cruise collection. It's interesting to hear him talk about his work—the dude is a genius, pure and simple, as you can see in the smattering of looks above from over the past several years. He's also just a funny little guy, like a Triplets of Belleville-style rendering of what a master tailor should look like. Check it out:

Sunshine & Sunshine

If Sunshine & Shadow gets more press, Lily Raskind might literally catch on fire. This morning her screen-printed denim bags are featured in The New York Times' style section. Check it out here.

More press clips, plus current and past collections at sunshineandshadow.com (design by me).

Some Joseph Looking For A Manger

This is completely out of season, but I was thinking about McCabe & Mrs. Miller recently.



The movie takes place in Eastern Washington in the early 1880s, not long before Washington got its statehood. The set was built in British Columbia in a town founded by draft resistors. Leonard Cohen's music throughout is mind-blowing. The opening credit scene is maybe my favorite of all time, and a really beautiful use of Helvetica (actually it might be Akzidenz...?), an interesting juxtaposition of modernism and the frontier. I don't love every Robert Altman movie, but this one is truly sublime.

That is the first time I have ever used the word sublime seriously.

TOH-toh-KYE-oh

Impulse is a womenswear boutique in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, named one of the top ten avant garde boutiques in the country by Lucky magazine, in the company of shops such as Opening Ceremony and Bird. As far as I know, Impulse was one of the first such boutiques to use only a blog as its online presence. When customers saw something they liked on the blog, they would call owner/proprietor Jill Wenger and order it. That was working almost too well because after awhile Jill had people calling her from all over the world and it became clear she needed to expand. Thusly, Totokaelo.com was born.

Jill and I met up a few times in New York and I designed the site with her input, based on the idea that she wanted to retain the blog, but also allow online ordering. Most of all, she wanted to foster a sense of community among the various people around the Northwest and everywhere else who were into the clothes, commenting on the blog, and taking an active interest in what was coming next.

The site was super-expertly coded by Jennifer Maas. It's in beta mode at the moment but it is taking off extremely quickly—there are already thousands of members and it just launched last month. Basically what you do is go to the site, fill out a little membership application, and then you can post a photo and a profile, view other members' profiles, and browse and shop from the site. It's kind of like a mini-Facebook for this interesting, forward-thinking corner of the fashion community.

I'm predicting big, big things.

Check it out at Totokaelo.com

Hi, We're in Delaware

Not the state—the water gap. This weekend we took our rig for a little test run over to the Pennsylvania/New Jersey border for a one-night, high-speed camping trip at the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

It is surprisingly close (an hour and a half from NYC) and surprisingly remote-feeling once you're there.

Emily stress-fractured her foot walking around the hard-ass streets of New York in flats the day we went to galleries and MOMA with my mom, and has had to wear a little boot thing, so we weren't able to hike, but it was a fun drive and nice to get out of the city for a minute.

We lucked out with the weather, and these little guys were going nuts among the flowers at the edge of the Delaware River.

The closest town to Dingman's Ferry, where we camped, is Milford, PA—home of Gifford Pinchot, the former Pennsylvania governor, conservation pioneer, and namesake of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Southwest Washington State. Since we were high-speed camping (sleeping in a campsite but eating all our meals in town, so we only have to bring a tent, sleeping bags, and a lantern), we had some beers and nachos at one of the local restaurants and a good breakfast Sunday morning at the diner.

The car held up very well and got almost 23 miles per gallon. Not bad for a truck. The only thing we noticed is that there seems to be some minor problems with the electrical system—the windows sometimes lock by themselves. Note to self: no driving off bridges.

Wax Paper

The new issue of Wax Poetics is out this week. I consulted on issue 28, and with no.29 they brought me in as senior art director to tighten up the magazine a bit. For the cover I put a spot varnish on the people (Herbie on the front cover, Spoonie Gee on the back) and the background is matte, so there's a textural difference to catch your eye. On the inside, I re-did the grid so it's all based on squares (i.e. the shape of a record cover), set some new styles for typography (the body type will always be the same, but the display font will change every month) and unified the color (there will be four accent colors per issue; they'll appear on the spine so when all the issues are lined up in the future you'll have a big spectrum of color on your bookshelf).

Designing a magazine from month to month is always a work in progress and there are some things I will change a little bit for the next issue—but overall I'm happy with the way it came out.

Paper/Cuts

I recently found out that the Smithsonian has the entire library of Folkways releases on its website for digital download. I would actually just prefer to wait and pick up the vinyl whenever I find it. (Plus, isn't it some sort of twisted mercantilism for the government to collect the people's music and then sell it back to them?) But the website has another useful feature: you can download PDFs of all of the liner notes and album covers.

Folkways' packaging is always impressive—the heavyweight paper; the high standards of art direction; the extensive liner notes, often in booklet form—and it's pretty cool to be able to preview that stuff online.

Here are selections from a couple favorite Folkways records in the crates:

Rev. Lewis Jackson & Charlotte Rucell
(New Orleans, LA May 25, 1954)
Tallest Tree in Paradise mp3
George Herod (Near Scott Station, AL May 8, 1954)
O, the Sun Don't Never Go Down mp3
Richard Jolla (Pond, MS June 25, 1954)
I Heard My Old Mother Call mp3

Riding Hood Boogy Man mp3
Sister Suki mp3

Click here to check out the Folkways site.

Year of the Cat

Taco Cat! I completely forgot to mention that Taco Cats won the Wooooo mag t-shirt contest. Get 'em here for 30 bones.

NW/NY 2: Trace Elements

I'm starting a new series on ye olde Pacific Standard wherein I interview people who are from the Northwest and live in New York, or vice versa, or are interesting people who should be interviewed regardless of where they live, if they moved, or where they're from.

So basically it's an interview series. You might be next so get ready.

First up (well actually second, if you count my interview with Byron Kalet from the Journal of Popular Noise) is Mexico City-born, Northwest-raised Brooklyn resident and Creative Director of Trace magazine, Katie Constans.

She just launched a website to show her work, which is truly impressive.

Being a rule-breaker, Katie didn't really answer all my questions—but the good news is that she sent back a bunch of photos, and a picture is worth 100 answers, so we'll just run with that.

Tell me about your path from the great Northwest to becoming Creative Director of Trace in New York City—what's your background?
I spent a lot of time in high school with fashion magazines—this is my closet [in Edmonds, WA] pasted with magazine images of Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista.

All the walls of my bedroom were always an ever-shifting magazine collage.

This is my Grandmother and me standing outside the house she was born in [in Anacortes, WA].

Right after I graduated high school in Edmonds, I won a modeling contest in Bellevue Square with TCM models, a local modeling agency. I won a trip to New York with Terri Morgan the owner. We went to all the fashion shows and my favorite part was getting Cindy Crawford’s autograph. It looks like it’s gotten a bit moldy now.

I ended up modeling for 10 years all over the world. I spent a lot of time in Europe and Asia. This cover from Seattle Bride circa 2001 was my last modeling assignment. It meant a lot to me because it was shot by my favorite photographer based in Seattle, Jim Henkens, who also shot my first test shoot ten years earlier. It felt like I had come full circle.

I studied graphic design at Cornish in Seattle and started doing assistant styling work locally for The Bon, Eddie Bauer and Nordstrom.com. I was always inspired by French fashion magazines and by American artists in the ’20s and ’30s that moved to Paris to pursue and develop their art—Man Ray, Lee Miller, Edward Steichen, and Alexander Calder. I decided to do the same—I moved to Paris to study photography at Parsons in Paris and pursue styling.

This is an example of the type of styling work I was doing there.

I was hired from Paris to come to New York to work at Trace magazine. I started working as the photo editor.

Who and what are your influences?
My biggest inspiration of course is Alexey Brodovitch. I often think about how he used to say “Éttonei Moi!” (surprise me!) when commissioning photographers. I wish I could get away with that but it’s just not the same coming from a Seattle girl without a French accent.

Last question—what are your plans this summer?
This summer I plan on doing a tour of all the beaches near NYC. Visiting my family on Whidbey Island and collecting more of those rocks with the white ring around them. I will be talking on my phone from New York to Seattle and Seattle to NY a lot. Going to as many photo openings, art galleries and museums as possible. Dreaming of images, design and cinema while on the subway. Dancing, dancing, dancing, laughing, riding my bike, going to outdoor concerts, making fun videos and staying inspired.

Check out Katie's work at katieconstans.com