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Photography By Luc Delahaye

There’s a line in Jean-Luc Godard’s 2001 Eloge D’amour (In Praise of Love) that sums up the director’s take on film nicely: “Things are right in front of us, why make them up?” Despite Godard’s infamous disregard for scripts, it seems unlikely that the line, spoken by a character who is also a director, is meaningless. Which is always the rub with Godard. What did he mean by that? Was it a reference or something new? Can there be new things in film?
     Was the New Wave really new? Technically, sure. Godard, for one, employed jump cuts, crossed-over audio, and hand-held cameras in Breathless, shaking up the film establishment and translating the youthful malaise of the 1960s into celluloid. Of course the Situationists would say he just stole their ideas, diluted them, and turned them into movies.
     As a critic himself, Godard probably knew that they would, although the criticism is not entirely fair. Yes, Godard is referential in his work, as were many Situationists. He also focuses on themes of alienation, tends to work without a script, edits based on gut instinct and feeling without regard to linear storytelling, and layers soundtracks over one another to obscure dialog or create new sounds. Still, Godard’s work stands as something entirely his own, even with all of its references to the work of others.
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Tam Tam Art Direction & Design by Tom Recchion + Joseph Shuldiner

Tam Tam Books specializes in English translations of 20th-century French provocateurs such as Boris Vian, singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, and the Situationist International’s Guy Debord. Vian’s To Hell with the Ugly and The Dead All Have the Same Skin come out this year, and a 600-page biography on Gainsbourg will follow in 2009. Owner and editor Tosh Berman sat down with PLANET° to discuss his personal campaign against blandness.

Where does the name Tam Tam come from? Josephine Baker, an African-American entertainer from St. Louis who went to France and became a mega-star in the 1920s, made a movie called Princesse Tam Tam. For me, this name symbolizes the bridge between U.S. pop culture — especially black culture — and French culture. So why is it important for English speakers to read these authors’ works? These days, artists are not willing to provoke their audience. Once upon a time artists were there to destroy everything; now they’re there to accept everything — meaning money and a career. The art world has become very corporate in its mentality. The words “career” and “art” don’t really mix, yet now they do. In that sense, the dictionary definition of art has totally changed.
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bacaronyc.com

Tucked away on the most southern street of the Lower East Side, this new hip and quaint destination is welcome and already well-frequented. Local creatives crowd the bacaro, or tavern in Italian, to meet for the cicchetti, Venetian style tapas, like the satisfying Pasta e Fasioi (pasta and bean soup), the surprisingly tasty Carciofi e Breasola (artichoke and beef), and the favorite Gnocchi con Funghi in a brown butter. The wine list boasts more than a hundred Italian wines listed by type and region. The two-level establishment is split with the street-level bar and tables downstairs, with low-beam ceilings and stone- and brick-vaulted walls. Like traditional bacaros, the ambiance is very neighborhoody: simple, dark, and elegant in its candlelit cavernous enclaves. Most large tables are shared, which lends a congenial surprise to a dinner out with friends: the opportunity to meet new ones.

136 Division Street    +212.941.5060

When Florence Welch first walked onstage she had the sweetest rag-doll style, keeping time with a wiggle of her hips. The 20-year-old immediately whipped London’s Working Men’s Clubs crowds into frenzies, even coaxing reluctant A&R types out of their dark corners and onto dance floors. “I had always hung out with bands,” she begins. “I could never do anything, play guitar or drums or even really sing, but I was very accustomed to that old rock and roll formula.” Her first venture into the spotlight was in 2005 at the final show by Camberwell’s ragamuffin blues boys, Ludes. Girlfriend of the keyboard player, “Flo” was encouraged onstage to sing backups. “I was sure I couldn’t sing, so when I got up there, because I was so nervous I kept yelling and drowning out anything else…I promised never to sing in public again.” However, the initial whirring of The Machine was in motion.
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Design by Chris Jacobs & Rolf Mohr

We know that stacking people in city apartments leaves a smaller ecological footprint than sprawling McMansions across suburbia. Imagine applying the same idea to growing food. Could metropolises transform from parasitic centers of consumption into hot spots of sustainable production? A team of Columbia University environmentalists is designing a “vertical farm” by combining greenhouse technology with high-rise food cultivation. The goal? To create a self-sustaining building capable of producing a year-round balanced diet for 50,000-plus urban dwellers. All crops — including fish and livestock — would be grown organically and ethically, solar panels would power 24-four-hour grow lights, and irrigation water would come from filtered sewage purified via a series of ponds filled with sludge-loving organisms.
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What happens when you unleash 1,000 fancy journals into the wild? Determined to find out, Brian Singer, a 34-year-old graphic designer, started buying notebooks in bulk. Then he got one hundred artists and designers — among them, big names like Joshua Davis, Michael Mabry, and Gary Taxali — to do ten covers each. In August 2000, he sent all 1,000 journals out into the world. Some traveled abroad in the hand luggage of acquaintances. Others were sent to those who requested one via the project website. The rest were left in porta potties and phone booths around his hometown of San Francisco. Singer also asked participants to scan and upload their entries onto the site, hoping it would result in a collective record of the location and content of each notebook.
Six years, fifty states, and more than forty countries later, 998 of the journals are still out there documenting sob stories and art projects and random tidbits of creative energy input by people from all walks of life. Director Andrea Kreuzhage’s documentary, 1000 Journals, tracks down journal participants from Marseille to Zagreb and weaves them into the inspirational story of the designer whose curiosity blossomed into a global phenomenon. “We were all creative people at one point in our lives, and now we all go to work every day and sit in traffic. So…what happened?” Starting in Berlin, 1000 Journals is slated to tour the film-festival circuit throughout the year.
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Asia Argento at the Chelsea Hotel. Black Silk Spider Gown Maison Martin Margiela. Photography by Mary Rozzi

Asia Argento turns 32 this year, but the movie star, cult auteur, sex symbol, and multilingual, multi-tattooed polymath has already squeezed more chapters into her willful, unpredictable career than most people manage in a lifetime. She started out as a teen ingénue in her native Italy, starring in romantic comedies and the horror movies of her father, Dario Argento. Crossing over to American films, most conspicuously as a sultry spy opposite Vin Diesel in 2002’s extreme-sports thriller xXx, she briefly attained It Girl status in Hollywood. Keen to retain her outsider credentials, though, she poured her energies into her own filmmaking, directing herself in two brash, image-warping vehicles: Scarlet Diva and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. She continued to pop up on the periphery of other people’s movies, gravitating to fashionable filmmakers like Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette) and Gus Van Sant (Last Days). And that’s not even counting her extracurricular roles as author, model, musician, and DJ. Without sacrificing her trademark aura of transgression, this international woman of mystery has now entered her mature phase as a serious actress — albeit a serious actress who’s not above tongue-kissing a dog onscreen if so required. Argento’s unofficial coronation as a pan-global art-film icon took place at the Cannes Film Festival this year, where she had the lead role in two new movies by pedigreed directors: Olivier Assayas’s Boarding Gate (which will open in the U.S. this winter) and Catherine Breillat’s An Old Mistress (slated for a 2008 release).
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HISHAM AKIRA BHAROOCHA did Issue 17’s Earth By. “We all have an inner cosmos that reflects our understanding of this planet,” he says. “This image is from my inner cosmos.” The Brooklyn-based artist combines music, visual art, and photography to create multimedia works that have created buzz in the NYC underground community. Born in Niigata, Japan to Burmese and Japanese parents, Hisham has taken his work globally to places like the Watarium Museum in Tokyo and De Vleeshal in the Netherlands. His musical endeavors include founding two bands, Lightning Bolt and Black Dice, collaborations with Doug Aiken and the Boredoms, and his first solo album, Full Bloom, which was released in January. At its core, Hisham’s mission is simple and integrative — he hopes “for each medium to embrace the other — to create and support each other without borders.”

Illustration By Peter Karpick

Over the years, there have been countless random sightings of Manu Chao around the world. Someone saw him playing football in a village in El Salvador, or riding a bike in Serbia, or buying fruit at a market in Mexico City. Many claim to have seen him strolling the streets of the Barrio Gótico in Barcelona, where he allegedly has a small apartment. It seems that Manu, one of the biggest-selling artists in the history of European music, both highly recognizable and a complete chameleon, might appear anywhere, at any time. For Manu Chao, it’s all the same. One World.
     During this last summer, there were confirmed sightings in North America, where his official schedule took him on a month-and-a-half-long tour with his band, Radio Bemba. And there he was, backstage at the Prospect Park bandshell in Brooklyn. On a balmy afternoon just hours before the evening’s show, Manu’s short, compact frame saunters casually around, barefooted, topless, in calf-length shorts and a flatcap. His arms dangled freely at his sides, moving to the rhythm of his loose body. It’s with a rascal’s glee and impatience that he begs the engineers to crank up the volume during the soundcheck. “More, more, more,” he mouths, pumping his arm, finger pointing up to the sky. Indeed, talking to him, a childlike energy comes across: a curiosity, a wonder.
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