This clever ad campaign is for the College of Creative Studies, an art school in Detroit. Clever, but oh how true. Click “Read More” below for additional images.

“Everything should be beautiful, if you can just start from there.”- AJR

Meet A. Jason Ross, the designer and master craftsman behind a stunning collection of accessories for men and women rapidly advancing into the realm of ‘must have’.  In truth, Ross already has a cult following of fashionistas as well as those who love to indulge in quiet luxury – his designs are absent of, so-called, ‘neon-sign’ labels.

Ross’s design studio is housed in the former Monarch Luggage factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn.  It’s a fitting home for the designer who crafts leather accessories under the name Artemas Quibble and the Creatures of Mme. Du Barry. Upon entering, you know that you are in an artisan’s lair. A visitor is immediately greeted with the sweet smell of leather and the various rhythms of cutting, sanding, hammering, pounding, forging, casting, soldering and buffing, this as artists are busy at work.  Hand-crafted tools, designed by Ross (he has 27 hammers), share wall space with leather swatches, thick, antique leather remnants, deconstructed keys and crops from other metal artifacts. Ross, with the help of lighting designer Robert Ogden collects a lot of antique materials. Huge windows usher in natural light – showcasing the beauty of the rough-hewn wood floors and the artful chaos of the studio’s walls.

The day I caught up with Ross, he was preoccupied with a new collaboration forged with Donna Karan – a stunning collection of belts for Karan’s ‘Casual Luxe’ line. Of course, that’s not all that’s keeping Ross busy these days. He pedals his wares at Urban Zen. There’s a venture with ABC and handbags for Henry Beguelin. He has also developed a bespoke service with Barney’s called the ‘Watch Transformation Project.’  This is not your father’s watchband, nor is it you your mother’s.  It’s a bold, innovative design embellished with an antique metal over-leather hinge, with a short or long, sinewy strap with or without a buckle. The leather’s rich patina lends a sublime elegance to the band.  Says Ross, “The watch mechanism is a very beautiful thing and I love the idea of having the raw, rougher antique metal work next to say a 19^th, 20^th or 21^st century watch.” A WTP band is a final flourish of one’s dress that uniquely presents a vibe that is both rugged and refined.

It’s a curious mix that is representative of Ross himself. Ross is a history and archeology-buff or “geek” depending on how you look at it. It’s that respect for the past that clearly informs his design sensibility. “My daily read is Archeology.org, Arts and Letters Daily and I also read the latest Discovery and that usually leads me to some kind of interesting website which might lead me in a new direction in my work,” he says adding, “I can look to any ancient period to find inspiration.” Ross admits that as a kid he was eager to dig up dinosaur bones in the yard of his family’s home, alas it never happened. During summer camp in Maine however, he recalls digging up old bottles and fragments of old bottles on the site of a former hospital. “I remember that as being tremendously exciting,” he says adding, “I like, with my work, to have history.”

Ross, who is also a guest lecturer at the Parsons School of Design, describes himself as an ‘abstract perfectionist’. When you look at his work, to the untrained eye, it looks like an accident when in fact there are blueprints, laws, rules and ‘illustrated tales’ that describe everything. “When you work with primitive tools which is part of the process of my work and part of what informs it, you have to have laws that govern the construction of the piece because there’s a certain randomness that happens,” according to Ross. He also gives credit to his girlfriend Natasha Chekoudjian, “She is a muse to me and is really amazing at sourcing ancient references.”

A Philadelphia transplant, Ross has been in Manhattan about a year and a half. The decision to make the move from Philly to Gotham was simple: he had a growing list of clients and business contacts in the City and wanted to be more accessible to them. “The reality is, there was not a store in Philadelphia selling my work,” according to Ross. He grew up on Philadelphia’s Main Line in a home appointed with French antiques, “a lot of gilt bronze,” he says. His mother, the late Caren Ross, in the 70’s, created a line of accessories including belts made of bullets under the label Bang Bang. His father Milton Ross was an inventor and manufacturer with an appreciation for Savile Row suits and Mr. Fish shirts. Ross, the younger, was educated at the elite Haverford School before attending Boston University.

He says he never thought he’d be making accessories. He started off making boxes constructed of reclaimed wood, lined with antique papers from engineering drawings. He then began making furniture. Ross developed an interest in accessories after becoming fascinated by leather machinery belting he saw at a wood-worker’s shop he was renting space in. Eventually, he began incorporating leather into his woodworking. At some point, he was asked to make a bracelet for a friend, Doub Hanshaw, who wore it to work. The buyers she worked with became interested in the bracelet and that ultimately translated into an order from Free People.

The label name, Artemas Quibble and Creatures of Mme du Barry, was initially a character to hide behind, as Ross didn’t see himself as an accessory designer – it was so distant from his woodworking. Nor did he see himself in the world of fashion because he was partly intimidated by it. In any case, Artemas Quibble, borrowed from the Arthur Cheney Train novel, had a quirky, enigmatic appeal. The Creatures of Madame du Barry has its roots in a guide to France from the late 1900’s. The curiously charming collision of the two names to create a label for his brand is also partly Ross railing against the machine. The ‘machine’ that, in a world of texts and tweets, compels ppl 2 shrtn evrythng.

With keen attention to detail a hallmark of who Ross is, intrepid photographer Weston Wells and I were eager to ‘pick his pockets’ and examine the details of his existence.

“I cannot walk out of the door without a journal and a pen in the same way I can’t walk of the door with my inhaler, I don’t know if I’m going to need it but I always have to have it,” says Ross adding that as an artist, “You have to be able to archive your ideas.” Ross makes his own journals using antique book covers. He mixes his own ink for the Mont Blanc pen he carries, “Hopefully it looks like the burnt umber you might find in da Vinci’s notebook or something… I dunno.” The specs are antiques. The two leather cases, Ross made for himself. One is a combination checkbook holder and wallet. The other case, in the photo, plays host to miscellaneous items including business cards, his iPhone, which is great for inspiration photos and mapping. A pocket-knife adorns the keychain. “It’s very functional. It seems like I’m always needing a little blade to open a package or cut a piece of leather,” he says. A final detail, not photographed, is what appears to be a remnant of a shirt or other much-loved article of clothing which has been resurrected as a scarf or roughly tied ascot.

Photography by Weston Wells

Our friends at Family Bookstore are having an opening reception and book launch signing for the LA-based Rap group OFWGKA. Golf Wang features captured moments these friends have spent together and features work from Odd Future, Vyron Turner, Wolf Haley, Brick Stowell, Taco Bennett, Lucas Vercetti, Julian Berman and Sagan Lockhart. I imagine it should be an interesting evening. Here is some music to take you out. Click “Read More” for specifics. Onehundred.

The current vogue for “ruin porn” – the sensationalized and aestheticized images of dereliction and decay – was on our minds when Salome Oggenfuss and I visited the Uranian Phalanstery on a hot and humid day last September. Salome had heard from a colleague about two decrepit old interconnected brownstones on East 4th St, between Avenue C and Avenue D occupied by hoarders who gave their disposophobia artistic and spiritual pretensions. They were set to move at the end of the month and we decided to plan a visit before they vacated the premises. We knew a bit about the Uranian Phalanstery from an online search and would soon find out more from our guide, Medhi Matin, who was living in a room on the top floor. In 1959, artist couple Richard Oviet Tyler and Dorothea Baer founded the Phalanstery in New York City while living in a still-active synagogue serving Ukrainian immigrants. When the synagogue closed in 1974 the building became the headquarters of the Uranian Phalanstery. Designed as an “anarchist utopia commune for practitioners of art and cosmology,” the name comes from the philosophy of the visionary Charles Fourier, who in the beginning of the 19th century designed the Phalanstère: a sprawling structure that would hold his own imagined utopian community. Soon the couple would buy the building next door and create the First Gnostic Lyceum of New York.

Just around the corner from the Nuyorican Poets Café, the Phalanstery and Lyceum were very active until Richard succumbed to face-cancer in 1983. During this period they hosted a Tibetan Burial Society and spiritual tattoo studio (at a time when tattooing was illegal in New York), celebrations of various solstices and equinoxes with music and dance, and a printing press for artist publications and Gnostic pamphlets – all the while envisioning the space itself as a constantly evolving artwork. From the outside there was nothing extraordinary about the Phalanstery, which looked like a normal, if shabby, building in Alphabet City. After answering the door Matin, 32, introduced us to the place and their dedication to individual and communal expression and creativity. At the time of our visit, only he and Dorothea were living there. It was only three weeks before they had to move out, after selling the buildings for over $3 million to partially pay a tax lien and relocating uptown to Hamilton Heights.

After our quick chat Matin handed us a pair of flashlights and graciously offered to let us wander around for a bit. There were no overhead lights and the electricity came from extensions chords anchored in the building next door. The piles of folk art, musical instruments, stuffed animals, tchotchkes, etc., make it tempting to think of the Tylers as so-called outsider artists, but the fact that Richard and Dorothea had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and that the former had sold works to the Museum of Modern Art, the Rockefeller collection and the Smithsonian bellies that somewhat condescending label.

We followed Matin down a dark creaking staircase into Richard’s basement studio. Entering the room, the first thing he pointed out was the bed in the corner where Tyler died. Matin said he’d show us Richard’s series of self-portraits detailing his facial deterioration but he never mentioned it again and it felt too macabre to remind him. The studio perfectly provided the context for Richard’s work, both temporally and thematically. My flashlight first fell upon newspaper clippings of mug shots from the Chinatown gang the Ghost Shadows, prominent in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The roof of the studio was completely covered with A4 posters, Tibetian prayer flags and prints reminiscent of William Blake. Chapbooks from the Uranian Press sat on a pushcart, seemingly ready to be hauled to the market. Bookshelves lined the walls crammed with artist books, books on cosmology and assorted esoterica. FBI most wanted posters for the likes of Mark Rudd of the Weather Underground and Puerto Rican separatist William Guillermo Morales, and other members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberaction Nacional, sat besides a hand-written quote about beautiful destruction from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. Medhi left us alone to explore and I nearly stepped in cat vomit as I looked up at a print of Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son. On one table there is a series of photos of Richard in the Pacific Front in World War II. Despite the mélange of objects and images the aesthetic felt oddly coherent.

The rest of the house, starting in the Lyceum on the ground floor of the next building that held their collection of rare musical instruments from around the world and an assortment of folk art, did not feel as unified in its aesthetic as Richard’s studio. Nothing really felt out of place in the rest of the house: not the flat-screen in the temple room, not Matin’s laptop sitting on a desk in his living quarters, not an icon of Jesus with four arms holding a hammer and sickle, nor the working kitchen.

Matin lived in a room on the third floor of the Lyceum. On the second floor landing, the walls covered by a mural, we passed the door to Dorothea’s room. It was locked and off limits during our tour. We continued up the stairs to Matin’s room. At first, walking in felt like walking into a normal East Village apartment. There was a mattress on the floor, a shelf with clothes and books, and the afternoon sun and the cross breeze made the room feel light and airy. Adjacent to his room, however, was the space that felt the most remarkable in the entire house. There was nothing in the room but an old mattress, covered with dust and rubble, sitting on a rusty iron frame. The roof is half caved in, the light fixture hanging on by a bit of wiring. Two dead monarch butterflies sat on the windowsill, the remnants of a performance. I immediately thought of one of Dorothea’s works we saw in the basement studio: the skeletons of small animals – a bird and some kind of rodent – that had simply been left to decompose. Perhaps counter-intuitively, despite being devoid of the clutter of accumulated objects, the room somehow felt like the most personal and private space in the house. It was where, via the display of the decay of the architecture and the decay of bodies, the weight of the passage of time itself bore down upon us.

Decay is intertwined with the experience of time and the philosopher Dylan Trigg claims that the philosophical value of decay is its resistance to representation and stasis. Community groups failed in getting the city to grant landmark status to this pair of brownstones to prevent their redevelopment, claiming that the buildings were built around 1840 and have been virtually unchanged since – they hadn’t even been rewired since the beginning of the 20th century. While it’s difficult not to feel as though the neighborhood lost something when the Phalanstery moved uptown, there is a sense that it is perhaps not a bad thing that it moved before becoming monumentalized as a sort of time capsule from a time where artists could actually afford two buildings in the East Village to pursue their esoteric creative goals individually and communally, as a subsequent stop for tourists visiting the nearby Tenement Museum.

Conceiving of this piece as another obituary resulting from of the wave of gentrification that has now subsumed all of Alphabet City also seems both obvious and beside the point when considering the Phalanstery. It was a time capsule, but not one that has been hermetically sealed. Richard’s studio had not been preserved so much as it was left alone. Decay also powerfully evokes the death and nothingness that awaits us all. Unlike visions of death that focus on continuity and the life that emerges in and from death – pullulating, swarming, breeding – there was a musty stillness to the Uranian Phalanstery. I asked Matin how they plan to recreate this milieu in their new building uptown. “Recreate isn’t really the right word,” he answers. “More like reassemble.” What one imagines would be impossible to transpose is the palpable sense of rot that one felt walking into the Uranian Phalanstery.

We left Matin and went out into the ridiculously humid afternoon, our clothing smelling of a combination of mildew and cat piss. Unlike the ruins in places laid waste to by deindustrialization like Detroit, which bears witness to a society squandering its resources, there is nothing tragic about the fate of the Phalanstery. Not coupled to dereliction, the structure had been allowed to decay while it was inhabited and culturally active. The Phalanstery was never intended to remain cemented in the riverbed against the flow of history or to serve as a bulwark against complete and total gentrification. For better or for worse, Alphabet City has changed drastically since Richard and Dorothea founded the Phalanstery. The Phalanstery changed as well, although at a considerably slower pace. Walking through the different levels of the house, one was exposed to not only the history of the neighborhood, but a more geological, natural history – to living ruins.

All photos by Salome Oggenfuss

After the recent heat wave, one doesn’t need another reason to leave the city behind for the beach but just in case… It’s the last weekend to catch New York-based artist Richard Phillips’ Point of Purchase exhibition in East Hampton. As its name indicates its focus is the on commercial, highlighting Phillps’ retail and pop-culture collaborations—from MAC Cosmetics to Jimmy Choo to Gossip Girlto Visionaire—from 1999 to 2010 and exploring the artist’s interest in creating art that lives beyond gallery and museum walls.

Point of Purchase is showing at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller (87 Newtown Lane, East Hampton) now through Monday, August 8th.

Richard Phillips with Art Production Fund. Scout (Prop Art), 2010. Giclee prints on stretched canvas over a wood frame. 40 x 27.34 inches. Above: Richard Phillips with Visionaire. Visionaire #54 Sport – Lacoste (Coco), 2008. Lacoste printed polo shirt.

It was 104 degrees yesterday in Central Park with a heat index of 114. That’s two degrees shy of the record temperature ever for New York City. The heatwave is expected to continue through the weekend. I saw a lot of open fire hydrants yesterday, and read an article that talked about people just riding the subway all day because they don’t have air conditioning. These photos were taken from a Times slideshow. I especially like the one of the cop in the sprinklers. I mean, what else can you do?

Click “Read More” for additional images.

Fireworks are a funny thing. They celebrate and illuminate and gather people together on the streets and in fields and make them stare at the sky. I’m all for staring at the sky, and this year a week or so before the 4th, I had the idea to have people share with us their firework moments so that we all could stand together in this electronic field and/or street and revel at their power and beauty. Wherever you are when you look at these, think of how life can be an explosion in the dark or when it can be bright in the darkness or how we all are together even when we are not in the same place. ‘Cause baby you’re a firework/Come on show ‘em what you’re worth/Make ‘em go “Oh, oh, oh!” as you shoot across the sky-y-y/Baby you’re a firework/Come on let your colors burst/Make ‘em go “Oh, oh, oh!”/You’re gonna leave ‘em fallin’ down-own-own.
Click “Read More” to go boom boom boom.

Last night at their boutique in Soho, Cole Haan celebrated their collaboration with textile masters Les Toiles du Soleil. The name of the 150-year-old factory from the Catalan part of France means “fabrics of the sun,” which given New York’s blistering weather was quite apropos.

As far as the collection went, Les Toiles’ signature patterns and color play were the underlying theme, as attendees pursued iconic stripes of red, blue, yellow and green crafted into shoes, purses and even bow ties. The new goods were also on display via partiers, who each sported a vibrant piece from the partnership. Meanwhile, waiters in cuffed khaki pants and white button downs topped by thin black suspenders poured Vueve Clicquot and served popsicles in complementary juicy shades, and employees scurried about in navy blazers and both bow ties and shoes from the collection, which is only available for a brief two weeks either online or at the Soho store.

Twin Shadow’s music has been christened many things: a resurrection of synth-laced 1980s tunes! Hazy new wave-tinged pop! Bedroom electro-disco! All of these revival features have garnered the band’s founder George Lewis Jr. enough cred to earn him the moniker the “black Morrissey,” and not without merit. His songs have wonderfully danceable beats, yet the tinge of perpetual melancholy in his voice adds emotional depth.

Twin Shadow is Lewis’ brainchild. And, yes, he is a twin himself (fraternal). The Dominican-born performer grew up in Florida and currently lives in Brooklyn—if absently, as he’s been touring steadily to promote his debut album, Forget. The album is the result of both Lewis’ solitary bedroom-indie experimentation and the influence of Chris Taylor’s (of Grizzly Bear fame) production. After hearing Lewis’ demo recordings, Taylor elected to release the album on his label, Terrible Records.

Lewis is not solely known for his music. He’s responsible for some awesome remixes, from Lady Gaga’s Born This Way to Surfer Blood’s Floating Vibes. He’s also known for his impressive and self-conscious style (as if to confirm this, he changed between our interview and his stage performance). His look samples from Prince and Little Richard, riffing on each icon’s signature pompadoured coif and trim mustache. We met just before Twin Shadow’s performance at La Machine du Moulin Rouge in Paris, where Lewis playfully discussed his formative influences, who he cops style ideas from and his nostalgia for the virtues of certain cable television programs.

Sarah Moroz: You’ve lived in various places and you’re currently on a European tour; how much does place influence your work?

George Lewis Jr. : I’d say that it’s more people than place. I mean, people, place, they go hand in hand. But I’m influenced by people, and [places] where I haven’t met anyone interesting, haven’t left much of an impression on me.

Sarah: Your home base is in Brooklyn. Given how much music comes out of that borough, what does being a “Brooklyn musician” mean to you?

George: I’m almost never there, actually. Since November, I’ve spent maybe… 20 days there? So I don’t see much of ol’ Brooklyn. I don’t know if there’s an identity… The thing I love about Brooklyn is that it seems there could be this sense of community there if you really seek it out. And there are a lot of young people trying to do things together, and I think that’s appealing. Not that I’m a part of it in any way, because I don’t have the time.

Sarah: You’ve done a variety of remixes, from groups like Bear in Heaven to Oh Land to Gaga—how do you go about deciding which songs you want to reconfigure?

George: Usually people approach me, and based on how good the song is, how good the vocal is, I say yes or no. I say no a lot more than I say yes. It’s something I got into because people asked me. I had never done that before, and I was interested in doing what I’d never done before.

Sarah: Is it something you do on your own, or it is collaborative?

George: It’s usually just me working with the song. But part of it, in doing that, was to try to start moving towards getting some co-writing and working with other people.

Sarah: Who are the people you would like to collaborate with?

George: Anybody and everybody. I’m really pumped on everybody right now. I’d like to work with Odd Future, The Dream. Madonna, Janet Jackson… I’d love to write Janet Jackson a song. She should ask me. She needs one of my songs. I’m serious.

Sarah: On your website, you’ve posted a few of your own drawings and paintings. Can you talk about other creative outlets, aside from music, that are important to you?

George: Long before I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to be a cartoonist or a painter. And it’s something I don’t have the time to do, to learn to do well. But it’s something that I keep in the back of my mind, as something I’d like to achieve one day. It scares the shit out of me, you know… Sitting in front of a canvas is daunting. While it’s something that I’d like to do, it’s something I’m very afraid of. So we’ll see if I can get over that.

Sarah: But as a musician, especially in the early stages of creating your music, you’re dealing only with yourself internally… Why do you consider that confrontational aspect differently for painting?

George: Yeah, it’s awful. It’s great at first, because nobody is telling you what to do, and I can just have my own way with everything. But at some point you start to talk to yourself and tell yourself that you’re not good enough, that you’re wasting your time—and that’s a scary thought to deal with.

Sarah: So how do you evolve from uncertainty to confidence?

George: Well, it’s not just self-doubt; it’s things that happen in your own mind that you can’t explain. At some point, you climb over the wall. But, I don’t believe everybody can do that. Nor do I even believe I can do it again. There has to be something different the next time. Someone else has to get involved—or they don’t and maybe I fail. I’m just saying that—just like I’m saying about paintings—it’s really scary, and sometimes you go and you make it, and sometimes you don’t. It’s not a better or worse thing. It’s just what it is.

Sarah: Everyone who talks about your work inevitably whips out the comparison to ‘80s music sounds and production. What are you ‘80s-era cultural touchstones, outside of the music scene?

George: Same as everyone’s, probably: John Hughes… USA’s Up All Night is the one that not a lot of people know about. It was this great program hosted by Rhonda Shear and Gilbert Godfrey on the USA Network, and they basically showed horror flicks for kids. This was actually well into the ‘90s. It started in ’85 or something. It was my first time seeing punks and surfers and fake boobs and people riding motorcycles and all kinds of crazy things.

Sarah: Aside from your music, style seems to be really important to you. How do you go about feeling connected to fashion?

George: I painted these shoes. I ripped them off from this guy from The Dandy Project. I mean, mine don’t look like his; these look like a mess. I just pay attention to people around me. New York kids have been slacking a little bit, it seems. But you walk around Paris and… Look at this beautiful gentleman [gestures to Greg, who works for the music agency Super Mon Amour], I like his shoes. I’d get those. It’s just coveting. I love whatever sin that is: I love coveting.

Sarah: You started playing music in a punk band, and earlier you cited wanting to collaborate with The Dream. You’re obviously interested in very different musical genres; do you think you’ll change direction with the music you make at some point?

George: It’s all harmonious to me. I’ve always done music from a performative standpoint. Only when this record happened was I doing it because it was more about me, more about my own creativity, not necessarily sharing it. Well, now I’m sharing it, with a touring band. And to me there’s never been any blockage. I’ve always loved R&B, I’ve always loved punk music—I’ve always loved everything about playing music and I see the beauty in all that. So everything I do from this point on is probably just going to be a continuation of what’s going on now. Because you realize there’s a point where you can’t just spread yourself thin, you need to kind of stick to one thing and do it really well. So that’s what I’m trying to do. Yeah, so, it’ll just be a continuation of this, but if it sounds a little this or sounds a little that, or I collaborate with The Dream…

Sarah…or Janet Jackson…

George: …I’ll try to make her sound more like me.

Its happy space out time. Take a 15 minute trip into unknown landscapes and structures with our friend and Dossier collaborator Josh Slater. So sit back, relax, and strap on your seatbelt. You’ve never been on a ride like this before, with a producer who can rap and control the maestro. Original score by Sahra Motalebi.