BLISS Magazine
Transcription
BLISS Magazine
BLISS inherent glamour BLISS regional chic photographs from Urth Caffé by HEATHER ANDERSON photographs from Uganda by DAVID SAND URTH caffé SERVES THE WORLD’S MOST VALUABLE CUP OF COFFEE BEBE: farmer’s kids in Mbale, who help with the coffee farms. Endangered mountain gorilla, lives in the same habitat as coffee trees. Shallom Berkman with the Ugandan coffee farmers in the village of Mbale. How does a cup of coffee in Los Angeles BLISS6 135 help save the economy and endangered wildlife of Africa? BLISS global culture WORDS GO UP W. S. Merwin Jim Harrison Ted Kooser Pablo Neruda Dana Levin Carl Phillips A. Van Jordan Dennis McNalley Sebastian Mathews etc. BLISS LIT the deep-structure of cultural innovation LETTING PEOPLE SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES BLISS BLISS RATE SHEET A FULL PAGE AD IN BLISS IS $2,500 contact: Christopher Webster cell: 505-660-9933 BLISS IS DESIGNED FROM COVER TO COVER TO ELEVATE THE ART OF ADVERTISING AND PRESENT EACH AD WITH ULTIMATE VISIBILITY AND IMPACT. WHO READS BLISS? From the Robb Report to BOMB to ReadyMade to Dwell, every magazine boasts an elite demographic of conspicuous consumers with disposable incomes. Advertisers want to know that their ad will be seen by people who are: ACTUAL WORDS FROM VARIOUS MEDIA KITS smart upwardly-mobie environmentally conscious ultra affluent sophisticated privileged highly educated design seekers discriminating homeowners young intelligent trend setting consumers owning 3+ homes traveling by private jet watching 2.5 movies per month and the list goes on and on B BLISS The people who read BLISS are in love with their life. The people who read BLISS are Bankers, Lawyers, Publishers, Professors, Critics, Designers, Writers, Artists and Entrepreneurs. BLISS readers are aesthetically-minded creative professionals (men and women) between the ages of 20 and 60. BLISS started off as a free, locallydistributed arts & culture magazine in Santa Fe. But after 5 successful issues, the new BLISS 6 will be distributed nationally through Disticor (disticor.com). ����� �� ��������������������������������� �� ��������������������������� ��������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������ � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ����������������������������������� ���������������������������������������� Bliss master.indd 1 � � � � � � � � ��������������������������������� ������������������������� ���������� � � � � � � � � � � BLISS 12/2/04 12:43:02 PM S A N T A F E summer 2005 bliss#3 TM all about design signs signifiers desire FE BLISS T ATTITUDE PLENITUDE NO SANTA BLISS AWP pdf-96.indd 1 9/6/05 14:01:45 BLISS SANTA FE WINTER 2005 APHY ATURE, PHOTOGR , IN INTERVIEWS, LITER SON, W.S. MERW LEVIN FEATURING BARRY AND VIRGIL ORTIZ WILL WHITEHORN CE FA to FACE 22/11/05 10:57:19 blissFALL 96page.indd BLISS 1 P L E N I T U D E N O T BLISS 5 R SANTA FE Disticor is a Canadian-based distribution company that specializes in the marketing of boutique Arts & Culture magazines. Disticor oversees an international network of wholesalers to place BLISS Magazine in every major bookstore in the US and beyond. The new BLISS will be marketed as a general interest Arts & Culture magazine. � � � � � � � � ���������������������������������������������� A T T I T U D E SUMMER 2006 ������ © LERAY IMAGES bliss SPRING 2006 2.indd 1 5/4/06 19:44:53 INTERNATIONAL ARTS & CULTURE BLISS6 C O N V E R S AT I O N S W I T H : ADBUSTERS PUBLISHER KALLE LASN UNDERWORLD FILMMAKER GODFREY REGGIO V I S U A L A RT I S T R O B E RT S T I V E R S G U I TA R D E S I G N E R U L R I C H T E U F F E L SUPERMODEL MARIACARLA BOSCONO WORLD POKER TOUR CEO STEVE LIPSCOMB U RT H C A F E ’ S S H A L O M B E R K M A N FORMER US ARMY GENERAL JANIS KARPINSKI BLISS LIT POETS CARL PHILLIPS A . VA N J O R D A N A N D A RT H U R S Z E BLISS6 The new BLISS 11” wide by 12” tall. 232 pages heavyweight gloss stock publishing 3 issues a year luxury coffee-table format BLISS is designed with lots of white space, to eliminate clutter and enhance the reading experience. 1 SAMPLE PAGE LAYOUTS FROM UPCOMING BLISS 6 Interview with Kalle Lasn, publisher of ADBUSTERS Magazine in Vancouver MEDIA for more culture jamming, check out adbusters.org ads for jewelry or something. Who wants to have a magazine with jewelry ads in it? I don’t. I used my local advertisers to pay for printing. How did you finance your printing? After I got the first few issues done I was so excited about the prospects of launching a magazine like this and have this independent political force that you control. I just couldn’t stop. So I ended up mortgaging my house and putting the squeeze on some of my wealthy friends. So the first few years of ADBUSTERS was done like that. But then again, we took huge risks. I was half a million dollars in the red before the magazine started to take off. And then it took us another 3 or 4 years after that to pay the half-million back. But then we were in the 7th year of our existence and all flush and all paid off and all the hard times had forged a pretty powerful vehicle. Many of the people working on the magazine had become pretty seasoned magazine types. You haven’t given yourself over to the celebrity cult either. These people who worship celebrities have no thought in their brain at all. Right from the beginning we saw ourselves as a movement, as a culture jamming movement. We were born out of political battles we had right here in the pacific northwest. We put all our energy into those political battles, talking about them and critiquing consumer culture and trying to launch this culture jamming movement. So in a sense, we didn’t have time to run around and get money from advertisers. I don’t think ADBUSTERS would have succeeded with that kind of formula based on consumer culture. In some senses we have a similar agenda in BLISS magazine, which is to improve culture. But my idea of change is not through politics or culture-jamming activism, but rather through a kind of aesthetic or spiritual transformation within the individual. Yes, perhaps. A few years ago we engaged the designers and artists with the “first things first” manifesto that we came up with. It basically said that we artist and designers are the people who create the tone of our culture. We are the people who create the aesthetics of magazines and web sites and we have a lot of power. We have a kind of “under the radar” aesthetic power. So instead of just selling our skills to corporations, to help them sell their products, we should be thinking about how our special skills can change the culture in which we live. So when I say political, I don’t mean going out there protesting and doing what the political left usually means by changing the world. But right across the board, it’s about changing the aesthetics of a culture or changing the aesthetics of a people who run a TV station. The idea of cleaning up the toxic areas of our mental environment—this can be done in a myriad of ways. And I think that what you just said is what needs to happen. We need to stop thinking about political action in a narrow way and widen it to mean the changing of all of life. N S A L S O IN ST E AD OF J U S T S E L L I N G OU R S K IL L S T O C OR P OR AT I O N S , T O H E L P T H E M S EL L T H E I R P R OD U C T S , W E S H OU L D B E T H I N K I N G A B OU T H OW O UR S PE C IA L S K I L L S C A N C H A N GE T H E C ULT U R E I N W H I C H W E L I V E . E L L Yeah, well I might be reaching here but the suicide bombings of the World Trade Center are probably the most effective and powerful show of protest I’ve seen lately. It was a grand form of theater, like the photos from Abu Gharib—those political spectacles have effected tremendous change in the world. Yeah somebody actually said that September 11th was the greatest artwork of the century. I think you’re right. The future could well be created by the A K — people who are spiritually ablaze enough and have the guts to sacrifice themselves. I think that art and politics are mixing in all kinds of really fascinating and fresh ways that we’ve never quite figured out in the past. I think September 11 and Abu Ghraib and alot of the stuff that is happening in the political world of the US, it’s of a kind of caliber that we’ve never seen before. I’ve been around for over 60 years and I’ve never seen anything quite as fascinating as what’s going on now. So why did you say “existential divide” in your recent opening essay in ADBUSTERS? It seems like the divide is much deeper than merely “existential”. What’s deeper than an existential divide? Well, maybe a spiritual divide. I think what motivates people to do the things they do, whether it’s blowing themselves up or fighting for a cause is ... Well for me that word is a little different. To me when you say ‘spiritual divide’ I immediately start thinking about religion like “okay you guys are Muslims and I’m Christian so that’s a spiritual divide between our religions”. But when I say “existential”, for me that is philosophically as deep as you can go. Existential is about ways of being—the most fundamental ways of being in this world. To me there is nothing deeper. The way I would use the word, there is nothing deeper than an existential divide between people. Then what do you think is ultimately at stake here? Well I think it has something to do with rich and poor. I know that there are now 200 thousand slums in the world. And 1 or 2 billion people on the planet live in slums. And they live a very basic kind of existence where kids are forced to work and women are forced to become prostitutes and gangs of para-military rule the neighborhoods where they all live. So for them, they live in a very brutal regime. Then they look at the larger picture and they see a global economy controlled by the rich people of the world and by our WTO’s and IRF’s and all the rest of it. And I think that just living a really downto-earth, survival existence in a slum and looking up at the decadence that is going on in the rich countries of the world, there is a clue in that about what’s going on. When I travel around and visit a really poor place, I feel a real spiritual authenticity there, a down-to-earth empathy. Families are still close knit and love is intense within the family and when you do a business deal it really matters and people put their whole heart and soul into that. There is a down-to-earth real living that goes on there that I find so exciting and so wonderful and then I suddenly wander back to LA and all of a sudden people are running around. They don’t even have time or want to talk to me. And the whole culture is like a bubble. Like a decadent bubble. So I think it is ultimately about two different ways of being. And I think we are headed for, ... well if the war on terror is World War III, then I think we are finally headed for a World War IV, which is going to be sort of a righteous battle of the barbarians (if you want to call them that). The barbarians will come to our gates and it’s going to be a war of the rich versus the poor and they are gong to make us pay for this 200 years of injustice and brutality and colonialism and everything that we have perpetrated on them. And after that, maybe we’ll teach them something, but they will also teach us something. And then after that maybe the planet will settle down to some sort of a peace, some sort of a future that means something. But I think that at the moment the poles are far apart. We have a huge portion of humanity living in slums and the other equal number of billions living in total decadence. And that’s the divide. The existential divide and also the monetary divide, the financial divide, the economic divide, the cultural divide. That is the big divide that has to be smashed. BLISS6 >art I N T E R V I E W > L O U I S L E R AY G U I TA R D E S I G N E R PHOTOGRAPHS > 23 STEFAN SCHMID ULRICH TEUFFEL the words that come to mind when I think about “German-Engineering” and when I see your guitars, are words like efficiency, precision, organization—a very rational state of mind—so what I want to know is, when do you let go of all that kind of logical thinking and find yourself in creative underworld or dreamworld or some other kind of imaginative state of mind? tesla midi Well, first of all, you depicted correctly my approach to the work. After years I realized it’s very close to this “GermanEngineering” and probably it’s just a fact that I’m living in the middle of the place where Audi, BMW, Mercedes and Porsche manufacture the cars. They are all only 50 miles from me away. And i’m living right in the middle of them. That means I’m used to cooperating with people who are in the car industry. There is a region here where everyone is concerned or integrated in this large chain of engineering and manufacturing. So this is one of my influences. But my first education was learning to build cars. And after that I went ahead with electric guitar making, (I had started to build acoustic guitars as a teenager). But then I was doing more original copies of a stratocaster. And I studied industrial design. My professor was the designer of the Apple Classic computer. During this study, I learned that when you try to research things, you often tend to stop at a particular point when you imagine it could become ridicculous to go ahead with it. But after that point, when it starts to become ridicculous, from that moment on, the most interesting discovery parts are waiting for you. In this way, you have to cut away your consciousness to work only with your subconsciousness. After you research the technical content of a thing, you begin to design it. For my guitars, the shapes are exciting, but they are only partners of a concept. For the “birdfish”, the concept is detaching or fractaling a guitar into it’s functional units and putting them together in a different way so they are open to modifications by the user. The “tesla” has a concept dealing with the archaic sounds of a broken guitar of the old-times, of electric guitar playing in the 50’s. The “coco” dealt with the technology of carbon fibre. Each guitar has it’s concept and the shape is only about 30% of the design work, in my overall process. So how do you switch gears in your mind to go back and forth between those two worlds? Well one very important thing for me is that, after 20 years of guitar making, I have the security of a background that allows me to produce anything that I can imagine I need for my guitar. When I first started, I used parts from different sources. But now, the pickups, bridge, tuners, etc., I manufacture by myself, because then I can start to design guitars entirely. I am not constrained by the guitar parts you can buy on the market. Part of my education as a car builder taught me to work with all sorts of metal. And to work with woods, resins, plastics. After 10 years of guitar building, when I was really eloquent in making traditional guitars, I realized that I have the ability to do more. And I felt the security of having this background to challenge myself to a new project. What is it about German culture that reinforces this extremely efficient engineering state of mind? Does America have that? I think one of the big differences is that German manufacturing culture started in the 1830’s. In the beginning of industrialisation, we had overpopulation in Europe and starvation. Many people in the countryside, who worked on farms, became worthless, became unemployed because of too little harvest. As a result of the “Heritage Policy” in Germany, the farms were separated into smaller parts, so that a single farm couldn’t feed the family any more. So the people had to start to look for another kind of work. And during this time, many people started to work as manufacturers of matches in the Black Forest region, clock and watch building, machinery manufacturing etc. This was a process that went for about 100 years in Germany and people became educated on how to use the small equipment they had to build beautiful things, and reliable working things. And it took time to develop that. This is the difference to America, where every impact of a new technique began to develop very fast. It goes back to the history of settlement. America had a big conquering from the east to the west and there was no time to look for solutions that are very sophisticted. Solutions had to be helpful in that moment or situation to conquer the continent. birdfish with interchangeable tonebars and pickups BLISS6 Interview with experimental guitar designer Ulrich Teuffel from Germany 49 SAMPLE PAGE LAYOUTS FROM UPCOMING BLISS 6 Interview with supermodel Mariacarla Boscono from Italy One of my favorite photographer’s of this time is Paolo Roversi. Oh he’s great. I work a lot with him. But the first time I worked with him I was really young and he pissed me off so much. I was supposed to work for 3 days and I told my agent “no way, I hate him, I want to pull out now and never work with him no more in my life.” I was like naked all the time and he was shooting my ass and I didn’t like it. But next day he shot my face more than my ass and he kind of like fall in love with me as a model, and we started to do a lot of work together. He did a book and I was in that and it’s very sweet now. We work great now. We take a long day and shoot for a few hours and then take our time to have a long Italian lunch all together, everybody. We went to Rome together and worked all night shooting til 6 in the morning and he never does that because he’s older now, but everywhere he goes he has this old medium-format camera that is super difficult to move around and it’s really amazing the way he shoots. It’s a little like Sarah Moon. Do you know Sarah Moon? Yeah. She’s great too. She’s like the person who discovered me, kind of and made me big. I learned so much from her. She’s one of the most difficult photographers to work with, ever. Because she uses a 2 minute exposure, which is impossible to hold the poses for that. And she does really odd poses where you lose the feeling in your legs. And she moves around the background during the picture. And you’ve recently been working with Juergen Teller for W Magazine. Oh yes, but don’t bother to look at that one, it’s very naked. Does that bother you? No, it doesn’t bother me, but for my friends sometimes and their parents, it makes me a little shy sometimes. That’s part of the business, don’t you think? Are your parents offended by that? No my parents never worry about that. And photographers have always been attracted to me to be naked. Not sexual...but that’s what makes the photos more interesting. I never felt beautiful with makeup and dresed up. I always had to pretend I was someone else, which was not me. And I can do that. But for a long time it took a big effort. Now it is more like work. So sometimes it happens that I feel too much overdressed, and hair and makeup is not right. On top of that, there is a concept that makes no sense. The photographer will say “raise your hand and look out over there” and I can’t just do it. Everyone is watching and there is no reason for the pose, so I say “you have to arrive there. There is a story that I can act out, but you have to give me a reason. I’m not a zombie. If it doesn’t make sense, I can’t just do it. MARIACARLA BOSCONO So what are you doing these days? I’m going back to school at Strausberg in NY, acting school. And I am in classes at School of Visual Arts, etching and digital photography and printing. I got the new Canon Rebel for christmas so I am excited to learn that. MC’S CLOTHES FROM THIS SECTION AND FROM “EURYDICE FALTERS” this page and others I see new photos of you here and there for ads and fashion shoots and I’m wondering if you’re working again or still on a break? No, I am fighting to be on my break and go to school. And I don’t want to do anything at all. But it’s a challenge. They call me everyday for work and it’s difficult for me to say no, because everytime it’s a good opportunity in a way. light sparkly 50’s vintage dress from mariacarla’s private collection. miu miu sparkle sandles. through window black evening gown by 6267. givenchy “pluto bag” via riccardo tisci. prada black bikini. vintage glasses. I can’t imagine how you wouldn’t miss it because it seems like so much fun. No. No. No. I don’t miss it at all—where I was, what I was. I don’t miss what I was doing. The only thing is to make it very challenging, to ask “Where am I going to go next? How can I work it more? Can I do something more? Can I be something else? Or do I have to just be what I was? That is the big problem now, more than everything. Trying to figure that out. But I should just go for it. That’s what I’m fighting for now. Sometimes the art of fashion is not there anymore. So I would like to create my own pieces of art. vintage egyptian oasis gown swimming BLISS6 >the war who is the scarriest person you ever met? I’ve never been afraid of anyone, but scarry...? Well I’d have to say, hands down, it was Geoffrey Miller. The General in charge of political prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. He’s a different kind of scarry because he’s evil. And the first time I listened to him and met him, he was talking about how you have to treat the prisoners like dogs. If you treated them any differently you lost control of the interrogation. And he was directing these comments to the interrogators, not to me. And I can tell you this: he was consistent. I was so taken aback by his dimeanor. He didn’t care if people looked at him as the embodiement of evil. He wanted to project that. But he also came with this air of power. And his power was derived from Rumsfeld and Steven Gambon, an undersecretary of Rumsfeld. And everybody recognized it. Sanchez kind of rolled over for him. So it wasn’t just that he was evil, but he had been given the authority to use it. SHE WAS THE U.S. GOVERNMENT’S TARGETED SKAPEGOAT IN THE ABU GHRAIB TORTURE SCANDAL You mentioned that Sadaam Hussein was not scary, but he tried to use his charm on you. Please tell me about that charm. What kind of charm did he have and what did he do with it? Well this is what he did. I think it’s more manipulative, than anything. The way he communicated. It was not like he was spitting on me or turnng his back or walking away or refusing to answer. NO, he was gracious. First I told him who I was. I told him that I Her subsequent book “O NE W OMAN ’ S A RMY ” set the record straight and portrayed her story of a rise to prominence in a military controlled by men. was the commander of the military police that were taking care of him. I was a General in the army. And he said “No... No you’re not.” He didn’t believe it. He didn’t say “this is rubbish” like a crude person would. He said it very politely. Like in disbelief. He said, “No, you’re with the intelligence.” And I said, “No, I’m not. These are my soldiers and I just wanted to come by and talk to you so you could see me and know that I’m the one who is in charge of taking care of you now. And if you need anything, or if there is any question or any problem, I want you to talk to the military police and they will communicate that to me.” And then we talked. We talked about the Koran and we talked about the Hadiza??? . We talked professionally. I don’t mean we were chatting. I wanted to establish for him that I knew some background on the Arab culture. I knew the Koran. I wanted him to feel that...well you know he was the president of that country for 30 years and they picked him up in a spider hole and there can’t be anything more humiliating than that. But I didn’t want him to think that that was going to affect the way we took care of him. He was isolated so there was no exchange of conversation with anyone. All of those are necessities, understand. So we were talking about the Koran and he looked up at me and said, in Arabic, “Walahe??” like an exclamation. “We will have a female general in my country one day.” So it was still kind of on his mind, despite the other parts of the conversation, he was still kind of thinking about that. He went back to that. When he realized that yes I was a General in the US Military. He could see on my uniform it 173 said US ARMY, it said KARPINSKI. And I guess the way I was talking to him he realized that I wasn’t with the Intelligence Departmen, I was obviously a soldier. And whatever caused that to happen, he said “We will have this in my country one day.” That’s really amazing. It’s almost as if he had a vision for a more idealistic future for women in his country. Yes. Yes. And he also told me that he had not accepted the fact that he was defeated. He was not about to accept that fact. He made the reference to “my country”. Like maybe this isn’t so bad, this woman general. Maybe this is progress. This is what we should have. He asked me where I learned my Arabic since it wasn’t exact... And I told him no it’s not. But I had worked with the military training program for women in the United Arab Emirate. I asked him if there was anything he needed and he asked me for some fruit. And I looked down on the small table next to his cot and there some apples and oranges. But he told me no, he didn’t want apples and oranges, he wanted apricots and bananas. And he told me this in Arabic. So I tried not to laugh. I just said that I would ask. And he also wanted to go outside and walk, get some fitness everyday. And he also said about his glasses that they were not right. They gave him a headache. So I told his handlers, the CIA guys, what he said about his glasses. And they told me they changed the prescription in them after they caught him. It’s one questions and pictures by louis leray “We will have a female general in my country one day.” —Saddam Hussein the of in theater war BLISS6 Interview with former Abu Ghraib commander Janis Karpinski 65 BLISS is a visually alluring arts and culture magazine featuring intelligent interviews with artists, writers, entrepreneurs, designers, philosophers, fundamentalists, environmentalists and anyone else who is passionate about their work and life. BLISS has no political agenda other than seeking a higher aesthetic in all things. We believe in uncensored, open conversation presented through an elegant design style. contact: BLISS at lerayimages@comcast.net or 505 310-3836 For questions regarding advertising, please contact our publishing director BLISS C h r i s t o p h e r We b s t e r at 505-660-9933 T H E N EW BLISS 2 32 p a ges p e r f ec t bound t r i m S i ze: 10 7/8” x 11 3/4” c i rcu l a tion: 20,000 d i s t r i b ution: Disticor INTERNATIONAL ARTS & CULTURE B LI S S 6 C ONVER SATI ONS WI TH : A DB U S TER S P U B L IS H ER K A LL E L A S N UNDER WOR LD FI LM MA K ER G O D FR EY R EG G I O V I SU A L A RT I ST R O B ERT ST I V ER S G U I TA R D ES I G N E R U LR I C H T E U FF E L S U P E R M O DE L M A R I A C A R L A B O S C O N O W O R L D PO K E R T O U R C EO S T E V E L I P S C O M B U RT H C A F E ’ S S H A LO M B E R K M A N FO R ME R U S A R M Y G ENER A L JA N I S K A R PI N SK I B LI SS LI T P O ET S C A R L P H I L LI P S A . 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