Interview articles from August 2008

Interview archives from August 2008

Summer Bishil: it's a very long journey from Pasadena to Hollywood (especially with a stopover in Bahrain).(FILM)(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the new film Towelhead, the first feature directed by Six Feet Under creator and American Beauty writer Alan Ball, Summer Bishil stars as a 13-year-old Arab-American girl who struggles with her own sexual coming...

Shiloh Fernandez: once an American Apparel stock boy who had taken it off for an ad, he's now doing Beyonce (onscreen) and speaking Diablo Cody--wrought dialogue.(FILM)(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Picture Shiloh Fernandez, at age 15, posing on New York City street corners in various stages of undress as American Apparel founder Dov Charney snaps away with his camera. Fast-forward eight years to Fernandez at...

Gillian Jacobs: sure, she can hose blow like a cokehead and dance your lap off, but that's pure stagecraft.(FILM)(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] On the first day shooting the new film Choke, 25-year-old Gillian Jacobs found herself standing on a stage wearing nothing but underwear and a pair of 5-inch heels as she tried to convince everyone on the set that...

They did it Norway: so long, Sweden. The hottest music exports out of Scandinavia hail from one country to the West.(MUSIC)
August 1, 2008... Ever since the Hives' front man Howlin' Pelle Almqvist busted out his first bolotied move for transatlantic audiences back in 2000, Sweden has been a main preoccupation for those with ears pricked toward the young and the new. But this year...

The cool kids: old-school rap for the new millennium.(MUSIC)(Antoine "Mikey Rocks" Reed and Evan "Chuck Inglish" Ingersoll)(Interview)(Brief article)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Young'uns today may not remember, but there was a time when rappers met in parks to battle one another with mics and turntables powered by streetlights. Antoine "Mikey Rocks" Reed and Evan "Chuck Inglish"...

Eimer ni Mhaoldomhnaigh: in revisiting Brideshead Revisited, the film's costume designer put some serious pop into the wardrobes of young British aristocrats.(DESIGN)(Interview)
August 1, 2008... When Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited was made into an 11-part British miniseries in 1981, a cult quickly surrounded the program. In it, a very young Jeremy Irons played Charles Ryder, a University of Oxford innocent who befriends...

Jeans.(FASHION)(Brief article)(Photograph)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Fall's hottest jeans hug the body so tightly. a lot of other people will want in. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] TOP ROW (FROM LEFT). MELINA, KELLY, SAMIRA & RUIS, SAMIRA, MELINA, REMINGTON & ANDRE. SECOND ROW (FROM...

Heartthrob: Jesse Siminski makes dance music more potent than viagra.(MUSIC)(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] With a funk musician for a father and a childhood spent at a jazz studio, it's little wonder that Jesse Siminski (a.k.a. Heartthrob) would end up making music that you can dance to--even if the 33-year-old musician's...

Does it offend you, yeah? This indie-electronica foursome is gearing up to play its biggest show yet--the apocalypse.(MUSIC)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Just when you thought the long-lamented practice of guys quoting The Office had begun its final descent down the great swirling drain of pop culture, along comes Does It Offend You, Yeah? to scoop it out, dry it off,...

Jon Hamm: talking to Mad Men's main man in the gray flannel suit.(TELEVISION)(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] On the television series Mad Men, Jon Hamm plays mercurial advertising executive Don Draper, he of the dashing good looks, battle-weary wit, idyllic family, shadowy past, and slow-brewing maelstrom of inner...

Duffy: she's got the look and sound of the '60s, but don't expect this singer to keep belting out the same note.(MUSIC)(Aimee Anne Duffy )(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Do not confuse 24-year-old Aimee Anne Duffy with Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse, Kate Nash, or any of the other female singers from England who've been infiltrating our ears over the last couple of years. For one thing,...

Justin Spring: what other uniform inspires as many competitors as that of the U.S. Olympic team? Here's a top contender for the men's gymnastics squad showing off Ralph Lauren's iconic design for team USA.(SPORTS)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Three weeks before the Olympic Trials in Philadelphia in June, gymnast Justin Spring--one of 14 U.S. National Team members competing for six spots in Beijing--has an ankle that hurts like hell. At a meet last April,...

James Toback: as a writer and a director, he's made a career out of probing the lives of complicated men--enduring his own share of LSD freak-outs, gambling binges, and booze-fueled burnouts along the way. Now, with his startling new documentary on former boxing champ Mike Tyson, he takes on one of the sports world's most brutal, polarizing figures. and things get bloody.(FILM)(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] New York filmmaker James Toback has always had a kind of manic energy that mirrors his hometown of Manhattan. Since bursting onto the independent film scene in 1974 with his autobiographical script, The Gambler,...

Appaloosa and cat power: cat power's opening act this summer used to be her East Village roommate and moneylender. Their music has gone different ways, they have not.(MUSIC)(Anne-Laure Keib and Chan Marshall )(Interview)
August 1, 2008... When Anne-Laure Keib and Chan Marshall first met each other in the wee hours of the early '90s, the two women were living out their own respective versions of the classic New York story--struggling young artists trying to make it in the big...

Danny McBride: to kick-start his movie career, he ditched his job scanning old pictures of Abe Lincoln and tore a page out of the indie filmmaker's playbook--and another one out of the Karate Kid.(COMEDY)(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There are a couple of ways to explain how 31-year-old Danny McBride became one of our busiest comic actors. The first is that he did it the old-fashioned way: by making his own opportunities. Born in Georgia and...

The look.(FASHION)(Brief article)(Photograph)
August 1, 2008... TOKYO KIDS HAVE ALWAYS HAD A SERIOUS CASE OF LABEL MANIA. BUT THIS SUMMER. IT'S NOT JUST THE LADIES GOING CRAZY FOR COCO. ON THE CITY STREETS, GUYS ARE CLOBBERED OUT HEAD TO TOE IN ALL THINGS CHANEL WE LIKE TO THINK OF IT AS HAUTE CULT ...

Danger Mouse: so how did music producer Brian Burton go from mix-mastering the Beatles and Jay-Z in his bedroom to the front of the music industry rat race? With ingenuity, A little promiscuity, and one gigantic mouse suit.(MUSIC)(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If music today has become a producer's medium--and some might argue that it has, with fractured audiences, disintegrating record labels, and increasing desperation for foul-weather hits to keep the whole thing...

Richard Lewis: the prince of pain still reigns.(COMEDY)(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Richard Lewis's 2000 memoir, The Other Great Depression, is a veritable chronicle of one man's lifelong quest to contend with seemingly endless pain and suffering. The book details everything from the lack of love...

David Benioff: why novelist-turned-screenwriter David Benioff is determined to give his career an un-Hollywood ending.(BOOKS)(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When David Benioff published his debut novel, The 25th Hour, in 2001, reviewers took note of his talent, not just for storytelling but for dialogue as well, a fact that made the book a natural for a big-screen...

Kid Sister: she's a hot hip-hop star who worked retail counters before working a mic with Akon and Kanye.(MUSIC)(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] While she's waited for her music career to take off, 28-year-old rapper Melisa Young, a.k.a. Kid Sister, has sold everything from baby clothes and scented candles to reasonably priced lingerie. But it took a song...

View August 08.
August 1, 2008... In Martin Amis's novel The Rachel Papers, published way back in 1973, the brooding, sex-crazed teenage protagonist states, "To be against the Beatles (late-middle period) is to be against life." Thirty-five years and zero Beatles studio albums...

Eva: Ms. Mendes is the opposite of blonde. And as smart as she is hot.(Interview)(Cover story)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] It was the casting quandary of the decade: What actress was tough, sexy, and talented enough to play the conniving man- and scene-stealer Crystal Allen in this fall's remake of MGM's The Women? Filmed in...

The raconteurs: Ace Ax-Men Jack White and Brendan Benson called up some friends and built a band that's the best in the land. Photographer Craig McDean and writer Jonathan Durbin got on the bus and on the stage, up close and personal.(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] The Raconteurs are a Frankenstein's monster of an act, stitched together from various rogue agents and bits of other bands: singer-songwriter Brendan Benson on vocals and guitar; Patrick Keeler and "Little" Jack...

Lou Doillon: the French actress, model, designer, and mother adds musician to her resume. And maybe only Milla Jovovich can understand why the two friends discuss taking life seriously and taking a midnight swim in a couture dress.(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There is little question that Lou Doillon comes from French royalty. Her father is the director Jacques Doillon; her mother is the model, musician, and movie star Jane Birkin; and her half sister is the actress and...

Ren Master: "this summer artist Matthew Barney took death for a test ride and it got great mileage. Composer Jonathan Bepler supplied the wicked driving mix.
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] On May 18, 2008, at approximately 6:30 P.M. PST, at a defunct RV dealership south of Los Angeles, artist Matthew Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler took their audience on a psychic road trip into the afterworld. ...

Paris nights.(Brief article)(Photograph)
August 1, 2008... From 1978 to 1983 the nightclub le palace was where the beautiful people partied in Paris. It was where fashion met art,g ay met straight, black met white, and punk met disco, those nights may be gone, but the look is back [ILLUSTRATION...

Edwige of Le Palace: Grace Jones went there. So did Maripol, Mick, Loulou, and Lagerfeld. Le Palace revolutionized Paris nightlife in the late '70s, and the only way to get in was through the club's gatekeeper, Edwige.(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] We asked Olivier Zahm, the editor of Purple Fashion magazine, to interview Edwige, who, as gatekeeper of the legendary Le Palace, was the queen of Parisian nightlife in the late '70s. Le Palace was to France what...

Beyond bling: once thought of as ghetto trinkets, hip-hop jewelry is finally getting the royal treatment it deserves.(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] Back in the '80s when hip-hop started getting hot, the must-have jewelry included phat rope chains, bamboo earrings (at least two pairs, according to LL Cool J), and 14-karat-gold medallions. When hip-hop moved out...

Frida Giannini: after some unsteady times at Gucci earlier this decade, Frida Giannini has the swagger back in the hot-selling house. How did she do it? Lots of rock 'n' roll of course.(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] In February, a Nielsen survey revealed that Gucci was still the most coveted luxury label in the world. Not bad, considering the high-profile turmoil that marked the house following Tom Ford's departure in the early...

Robert Rauschenberg: he was an astounding innovator who changed the course of art. He was also a bit of a prophet. In honor of his passing, we revisit a 1990 interview full of insights that still sparkle today.(Interview)
August 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Up until May 12, 2008, if you polled the cognoscenti as to who was the world's greatest living artist, the winner would undoubtedly have been Robert Rauschenberg. But on that date, Rauschenberg moved into another...

Society pages: the pope, velvet ropes, the met gala, the trains, the smoke and the dope, celebrating Shafrazi, Cannes do's and don'ts.
August 1, 2008... The most pop public appearance tour of the '60s was that visit of the Pope to New York City... It was the most well-planned, media-covered personal appearance in religious (and probably show business) history.--Andy Warhol, POPism On...