#sublet 2020

[zanephillips]

NIV NISSIM and TAMIR GINSBURG Sublet (2020) dir Eytan Fox

[filmap]

Sublet Eytan Fox. 2020

Seaside הירקון 87, Retsif Herbert Samuel St 94, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel See in map

See in imdb

[preseriesdean]

for @spnficrecfest day six: case fics 🧡

Ions in the Ether by @nigeltde-fic 10.9k words, rated E, published 2019 When was the last time you trusted happy.

Gospel Truth by Cerberuss 15.2k words, rated E, published 2020 ‘DOES YOUR BROTHER KNOW THAT YOU WANT HIM?’ Individually placed letters, bold and tinged brown with the weather. Sam can’t look away and he prays, dream dream dream. This sort of introspection could have come from no one but himself. His secret, his affliction, on display as a reminder. He put this here. Don’t forget, Sam, you’re abhorrent. This is all you.

the constant vow by deadlybride / @zmediaoutlet 119.5k words, rated E, published 2022 With Crowley apparently dead and Sam's soul back in place, even though Eve is a worry and Castiel's fighting a heavenly war, Sam and Dean at last have some space to get back to what passes (for them) as a normal life. They've just finished up a pretty standard job and are killing time in snowy Wisconsin when Dean wakes up no longer looking like Dean. That's just the start of their problems.

Almost At Home by balefully 24.3k words, rated E, published 2008 Sam graduates from high school in early June in rural Tennessee. He and Dean start the summer with an all-nighter of celebration; the day after, while both fight hangovers, John calls to assign them their first hunt by themselves.

Suave & Complicated by OldToadWoman 56.9k words, rated E, published 2015 Sam and Dean discover a useful, little, magical artifact. No one is forcing them to do anything. No one is going to die if they don't. They don't even feel a strange compulsion. But… it would be really helpful if they powered up the magical stone… and… all they have to do is kiss.

Crossed Wires by @rivkat 10.9k words, rated E, published 2015, check warnings Dean thinks Sam is dead.

Yesterday, minnesota by @goshen-applecrumbledore 29.7k words, rated E, published 2022 Any initial awkwardness filtered away over a hundred miles of highway as Sam thumbed through the missing witch’s diary again. Some people had secret coke habits or secret second wives, and some people had passionate, pitch black, no-kissing sex with a family member every four to six months and never talked about it. You had to find ways to cope.

Sight Lines by kickflaw/kissyn 21.3k words, rated E, published 2012 Dad's on a hunt, Dean's acting strange, and Bilton, NY, is the last place on earth Sam imagined he would figure out how to make everything fit right.

They Then Ate the Sailors by coyotesuspect 24.3k words, rated M, published 2013 The summer before Sam leaves for Stanford, Sam and Dean sublet a student apartment in a heat-wave gripped Chicago. With John tied up with a case in Iowa City, Sam and Dean are left to figure what's behind a recent spate of drownings. Sam wrestles with the weight of the secret he's keeping from Dean, while Dean struggles with his feelings for Sam. Things come to a head when a young girl goes missing and Sam nearly drowns.

a thousand dreams within me softly burn by dooping_star 14.6k words, rated T, published 2020 "there is something fierce and terrible in me eligible to burst forth, i dare not tell it in words," - walt whitman, ‘earth, my likeness’, leaves of grass

[shirtlessmoviestv]

Niv Nissim, Tamir Ginzburg : Sublet (2020)

[goldenbloodytears]

imma pose you a question! what is your most out there ghostface headcanon? the one that has you like this

trying to explain your thinking and reasoning if there even is any

Hi! Thank you for the ask! If you had asked me this back in 2019 I probably would have answered with either my headcanon (now canon) of his dad being a military man or the other headcanon where he’s an ex-Mormon/uses being Mormon as a cover.

I’ll talk about the Mormon one, since while it’s not exactly “out there” the way believing in Bigfoot is, it’s not a headcanon I see come up often (like at most its jokes about him being from Utah).

In 2019 and 2020 I fell down a rabbit hole of Mormon true crime thanks to Netflix. The documentary about the Salt Lake City bomber was a particular inspiration due to the focus on document forgery. It made me consider whether Danny might have some loose links to the ‘subculture’ if you will, as either personal knowledge or connections would help him when it comes to forging a fake identity.

As it stands I don’t think Jed Olsen is the only identity he’s used, I think he’s used others. I also don’t think he just uses completely falsified documents, but probably steals actual identities sometimes.

Back to the Mormons. There’s a big survivalist culture, like, if you actually check the LDS church website you can find resources on making survival kits/bug-out bags. There’s a lot of fascinating quirks in the culture of the church like this. I felt like the survivalist aspect would build nicely into the fact he’s a drifter. He knows how to pack and he’s ready to go at a moment’s notice, if he needs to ditch his car he can easily do so and make an escape on foot.

I’ve generally tweaked this headcanon over time to where Danny himself isn’t a church member, so he’s no longer ex-Mormon in my headcanon, but I feel like it makes a lot of sense that he would still have picked up elements and some of the quirks. I like the idea that some of his family are Mormon, and through this he learned that a lot of people won’t question those who act “godly” and “righteous” especially if they’re religious themselves. A funny quirk he’s retained is that he doesn’t drink coffee, instead his apartment and desk at work are littered with cans of cola.

Another quick headcanon that is funny is I like the idea that he carries a VHS player with him. It’s one of the first purchases he got as a young man and he paid a good amount of money to get it so it moves with him. He tends to sublet properties that already come with furniture, which suits him just fine, but not everybody owns a VHS player. If a current property already has one, you’d likely see two VHS players, which would be pretty weird to see if he had somebody over. Good thing he doesn’t usually lol

[lyannasjon]

John Benjamin Hickey and Niv Nissim in Sublet (2020)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Adam Zivo

Published: Jun 6, 2024

At a trendy cafe in the bohemian Florentin district of Tel Aviv, Niv Nissim, a 30-year-old gay Israeli, described the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas as “maybe the worst moment for everyone who lives in Israel.” He spoke of an acquaintance who perished at the Nova Festival massacre. “He went to dance and he was murdered. Most of the people that got murdered and kidnapped are people with the same values that I have — peace advocates,” Nissim said.

He was shocked to see international queer activists glorify Hamas in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre. “They don’t know what Hamas is. They think Hamas is like a group of superheroes — and that’s the thing. It’s a terror organization. Same as al-Qaida,” Nissim said. “For gay people around the world to be pro-Hamas right now is crazy. And it’s wrong.”

After Hamas massacred more than 1,100 Israeli civilians, LGBTQ activists across the western world mobilized. On city streets and university campuses, they called for the destruction of Israel and carried “Queers for Palestine” banners alongside rainbow Palestinian flags. Claiming that queer and Palestinian advocacy are inextricably linked, they minimized the brutality of Hamas, who they portrayed as freedom fighters.

What are we going to do now? What can we do? How could we fight for human rights (in Gaza) after what happened?

-- Niv Nissim, talking about October 7

Their behaviour ignited a global debate about western queer activism. Commentators noted that not only does Hamas murder gay people, Israel is the only country in the Middle East that supports queer rights. Was it not delusional for activists to side with Hamas?

And what exactly did people mean when they shouted, “Queers for Palestine”? For some, the slogan represented a principled commitment to the human rights of the Palestinian people, without supporting Hamas. But for others, it meant the dismantling of the Israeli state, which implies the ethnic cleansing of millions of Jews, and the glorification Hamas’s war crimes.

Throughout this debate, the everyday lives of LGBTQ Israelis and Palestinians — their fears, trauma and triumphs — were largely ignored. In May, I visited Tel Aviv through a trip spon.sored by the non-profit Exigent Foundation, a Jewish group that focuses on public education. Arriving a few days early, I independently spoke with queer people in the city to find out what their lives were really like, what they thought of the war and how they felt about western activists’ views on the conflict.

I interviewed four gay Israeli men, each with distinct experiences and perspectives. They were by no means a comprehensive cross-section of Israel’s LGBTQ community, but they opened a window into their world. Amid tight timelines, I was unable to secure interviews with gay Palestinians, who can be notoriously difficult to track down because they fear revealing themselves, so as an imperfect substitute, I asked my Israeli interviewees to share their insights on them.

These are their stories.

Actors and meteors

Niv Nissim is an actor who gained moderate fame after starring in “Sublet,” a 2020 Israeli film about a gay travel writer who rents an apartment from a film student. Unsparing in its depiction of gay hookup culture, the widely acclaimed film could not possibly have been made anywhere else in the Middle East.

Nissim said he has not personally experienced homophobia in Israel. “I’m not scared of walking hand-in-hand with my partner,” he said, before clarifying this was likely because he lives in Tel Aviv, which exists within its own cosmopolitan bubble. Homosexuals from across the country, indeed the entire world, flock to the city, with official statistics suggesting that roughly a quarter of the local population identifies as LGBTQ.

[ Niv Nissim, a 30-year-old actor and a gay Persian-Israeli living in Tel Aviv in May 2024. He says he empathizes with Palestinians notes they are a “big part” of the city’s underground queer scene. ]

Gay life is different in Israel’s smaller towns, as well as in Jerusalem, which is known for being religious and conservative. In those places, being openly gay could sometimes be “frightening,” he said, because of the possibility that religious Arabs or Orthodox Jews might beat you. Still, he said he felt extremely lucky to be Israeli considering the lethal homophobia elsewhere in the Middle East. His own family had fled from Iran, where being gay is legally punishable by death.

Palestinians are “a big part” of Tel Aviv’s gay community, Nissim said. One of his close friends is a Palestinian fashion designer who organizes parties in the city’s underground voguing scene (voguing is a flamboyant style of dance closely associated with queer culture). “It’s not even a weird thing. We don’t look at them as different or something,” he said.

Many gay Palestinian men, facing violence back home, escape into Israel to live in relative safety. Organizations across the country help them find shelter and get back on their feet (the same services are also provided to queer people fleeing Orthodox Jewish families). “If you are a gay person who needs help, no matter where you come from, you’ll get help,” said Nissim.

He said he was unaware of any serious anti-Palestinian racism in Tel Aviv’s queer scene. “(It is) really weird if someone will be racist here in the gay community.” Nissim is a Persian-Israeli, and while the relationship between the Ashkenazis (European-descent Jews) and Mizrahis (Middle Eastern-descent Jews) may have been fraught decades ago, everyone is now quite “blended.”

For gay people around the world to be pro-Hamas right now is crazy. And it’s wrong.

-- Niv Nissim, 30, Actor

Like many artists, Nissim and his friends are politically progressive and empathize with the Palestinians. “It’s not a real life. They don’t have real rights. They can’t go anywhere. Kind of open-air prisoners,” he said. For much of his life, he advocated for Palestinian self-determination within the framework of a two-state solution. “We wanted to say, enough with the oppression. Enough with the war — both sides — let’s not advocate war. Let’s advocate peace.”

Under the leadership of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Nissim said artistic productions that criticized the government or featured positive Israeli-Arab relationships — “impossible love stories,” he described them — faced increasing censorship. Over time, he and other Israelis came to see Netanyahu and his allies as corrupt and autocratic. “It was starting to look like a very Third World country.”

In a bid to stay in power, Netanyahu formed a coalition government with several ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties in November 2022. Two months later, the new government announced its intention to impose controversial reforms that would curtail the independence and influence of the country’s judiciary.

While Israelis rebelled against Netanyahu’s reforms in nationwide protests, many within the LGBTQ community worried their rights would be rolled back. Nissim said it is rare to find gay supporters of the present government; it’s like “shooting yourself in the leg,” he said.

Neither same-sex nor interfaith couples can marry within Israel, as only religious marriages can be conducted in the country. However, Israel fully recognizes international civil marriages, including same-sex marriages, so queer Israelis simply tie the knot abroad. Some of these marriages occur over Zoom, through a legal loophole that allows officiants in Utah to provide virtual ceremonies to couples anywhere in the world — these marriages are quick, cheap and valid under U.S. law. Fearing Netanyahu’s coalition partners might restrict same-sex marriage rights, Nissim and his boyfriend decided to get a “Utah marriage” last year, just in case.

Then Oct. 7 happened, and the political tumult of the preceding months was, briefly, vaporized. In recent weeks, large protests against Netanyahu’s coalition government have resumed, especially in Tel Aviv.

Like the rest of Israeli society, a chasm now exists within Tel Aviv’s gay community — one side calls for a ceasefire and the other supports Netanyahu’s plans to fully eradicate Hamas, whatever the cost. Nissim supports the first camp, though he could see both sides.

His heart was filled with uncertainty. He said he used to chant, “Free Palestine,” but now felt he no longer had the right to do so while there were still hostages in Gaza. “What are we going to do now? What can we do? How could we fight for human rights after what happened? How can we do it?” he asked.

He understood the hate by both Palestinians and Israelis. “What happened was the worst thing — for me, for them, for everyone. Killing and raping and burning and taking people. And not only people, like good people, who fight for peace. It’s the worst thing … When gay people wanted our rights to be given to us, we didn’t burn buildings or kidnap people. We didn’t kill people. We shouted and we went to the streets. We protested for our rights and for peace,” he said.

Nissim has learned to adapt to the heightened tensions of war. When Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel in April, he and his boyfriend simply sat outside and watched the Iron Dome shoot them down. They looked like meteors or shooting stars. “It’s surreal, but this is our life here. You have to develop some kind of rough skin. And just somehow be cool.”

A soldier finds his home

Michael Tubur, a 31-year-old gay soldier with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), sits at a sunlit park, recounting his experiences evacuating wounded soldiers from Gaza last October and November. “It’s very difficult to do surgery on the field. Our job was just to give them the first aid, just to stop the bleeding and stuff, and take them outside very fast,” he said, smiling often.

It took two weeks for Tubur’s unit to enter the Gaza Strip, as the IDF had to ensure that the surrounding Israeli land had been cleared of Hamas fighters. By that point, Gaza had been heavily bombed. The destruction was unlike anything he had ever seen before.

One of the first things the IDF did was take everyone’s phones away. Hamas had used fake social media accounts featuring stolen photos of beautiful women, to install spyware on Israeli soldiers’ devices, allowing them to eavesdrop and track their locations. For three weeks, Tubur was completely cut off from the world. The situation was tense and uncertain, and he felt afraid.

“At the beginning, we thought that we are going to see an actual army. And we discovered it’s not going to be like that. They went into the tunnels. You don’t know where they’re going to come out from,” he said.

Hamas fighters would ambush soldiers with rocket launchers or guns and then melt away. After these attacks, it was imperative for the Israelis to confirm whether they were being lured into a trap. On several occasions, Hamas purposely used smaller assaults to attract medics and then followed up with larger, lethal bombardments. Tubur’s unit would wait on standby, keys in the ignition, ready to race in once they knew the situation was reasonably safe.

Suddenly you saw gay warriors and commanders, like major commanders, people who were in the intelligence, in the Air Force, in everything. Then you saw gay guys who were killed.

-- Michael Tubur, 31, Soldier

“You just act. You don’t have time to think. Someone else’s life is on the line,” he said. “There were days that nothing happened — and you’re just sitting and doing nothing. And days when everything went from zero to 100, and I was just dying to go back inside the sleeping bag and close my eyes.”

He maintained the IDF did its best to minimize civilian casualties amid a “very, very complicated situation.”

At the beginning of the war, Israeli soldiers would automatically attack unknown individuals within a 400-metre radius around them, he said, but the response to anyone further away was scrutinized and debated. To protect civilians, that radius was later reduced to 50 metres. That meant Hamas fighters could freely roam nearby so long as they were unarmed and pretended to be non-combatants. These fighters would then access weapons caches hidden throughout Gaza, launch lone-wolf ambushes, and then abandon their weapons and pretend once again to be regular Palestinians.

“So, then the mission became much harder. And the progress was very, very slow — because now you need to move house by house, building by building, and make sure there is no weapons there,” said Tubur. Sometimes the IDF would miss caches or tunnels, which allowed Hamas to attack from behind.

While critics, including the International Court of Justice, claimed that Israel is committing “genocide,” Tubur found this accusation perplexing. If that was true, he said, the IDF could have simply been ordered to “just bomb everything,” rather than commit to a complicated ground operation at the cost of Israeli lives.

“I’m very sad that people got killed — children and mothers. But it’s a war and war is complicated. Everyone wants to do the best and try to make as less casualties as they can.”

Tubur, who has Arab friends, believed that Israelis and Palestinians could peacefully coexist. But this would require Palestinian imams to embrace more moderate interpretations of Islam, he said.

[ Michael Tubur, a 31-year-old gay soldier with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), shown in Tel Aviv in May 2024. He hopes the Israel-Hamas war at least helps conservative families broaden their perceptions of the LGBTQ community and be more accepting of their gay sons. ]

In some ways, he was grateful for the war and how it helped show traditional Israelis that gay men deserve equal rights as they are “equal in death.” Many traditionalists believed that queer people simply party in Tel Aviv, parade naked on the streets and disregard everyone else’s troubles, Tubur said. “Then suddenly you saw gay warriors and commanders, like major commanders, people who were in the intelligence, in the Air Force, in everything. Then you saw gay guys who were killed.”

Shattering stereotypes is important for Tubur. He came from a religious family that had never seen a gay person until he came out of the closet. They thought all LGBTQ people were drag queens or transgender, which made it hard for him to accept himself. He struggled to reconcile his homosexuality with his masculine persona and some of the traditional values he cherished, such as starting a family.

When he finally came out at age 26, his parents assumed he was a “special gay,” because he didn’t fit the stereotype. Over time, they met his gay friends, including some in the military, and realized they were just people.

Tubur hoped the war would help other conservative families broaden their perceptions of what it meant to be LGBTQ, and make it easier for them to accept their gay sons. “There was a story about someone (who) was in the closet and got killed. And his boyfriend posted a letter where he said, ‘I cannot tell you your name. But I miss you so much. And I cannot share it with anyone because you’re in the closet.’ When I read it, I was crying, because how can someone bear this kind of pain by himself?”

Military service is mandatory for almost all Israelis, which makes the IDF a microcosm of wider society: progressives and conservatives serve side by side. During the quieter days in Gaza, Tubur and his comrades spent hours talking and learning about their lives. “You are a unit, and you need to sit next to each other, be with each other. You don’t have any other option,” he said.

He recalled a fellow soldier, an Orthodox Jew, who told him that being gay was unnatural. Rather than take offence, Tubur talked things out with him. They did not agree on many issues, Tubur said, but they developed an understanding.

“He still doesn’t accept the way I live, but now he knows how it is. He knows what it means. He knows how it feels. I think that, in the long term, this thing’s done very good. Because when the war will be over, people will go to their houses, people will go to other places, but they are a different person — you understand?

“This time, he won’t be so against the gays. He will think a little bit before he will shout,” Tubur said.

The filmmaker and gay Palestinians

Yariv Mozer, a documentary filmmaker in his 40s, met me at the Haaliya Community Country, a new recreational building that acts as a de facto hub for Tel Aviv’s LGBTQ community. Rainbow flags hung above the pool and the gym was packed with gay men. As we entered, a trans woman who helped manage the place welcomed us warmly.

Ten years ago, Mozer directed a documentary, “The Invisible Men,” which followed the lives of three gay Palestinians who had fled to Israel and then found asylum in the west. Through this film and other projects, he is keenly aware of the challenges gay Palestinian men face.

[ Yariv Mozer, a documentary filmmaker in his 40s, at the Haaliya Community Country in Tel Aviv, in May 2024. He is in favour of a two-state solution that has nothing to do with Hamas. “Hamas is a brutal, extreme, fundamentalist religious group, which believes in the power of violence to achieve their goals.” ]

Not only is Palestinian culture deeply religious and conservative, Mozer explained, but communities are also organized into sprawling tribes where a family’s reputation is paramount. “You can be gay, so long as no one knows about it. But if someone will catch you or see you, or you will be exposed as being gay, this can harm the honour of the family. So you hear a lot about honour killings and punishments.”

These murders are tolerated by local authorities and occur in parallel to state-backed violence against sexual minorities. One of the characters in Mozer’s film was tied up by his father after his family learned of his homosexuality. The man escaped with his life, but not before his father sliced his face with a knife, leaving him with a permanent scar.

Mozer said both Israeli and Palestinian security forces prey upon the vulnerability of gay Palestinians and blackmail them into acting as intelligence assets. “A lot of men are very much afraid of being openly gay or being suspected as gays, because they will know that they can be exploited by both sides.” Mozer recalled the story of one of his interviewees who the Palestinian Authority had suspected was a gay collaborator. They interrogated him for hours, beat him and held his head in a toilet.

Caught between violent relatives and predatory security forces, many gay Palestinians from the West Bank flee to Israel for safety (those in Gaza, where the borders are sealed, escape to Egypt). But even in Israeli cities, they cannot breathe easily. In 2022, a 22-year-old gay Palestinian man, Ahmad Abu Marhia, was kidnapped into the West Bank and beheaded — he was waiting to emigrate to Canada at the time of his murder.

The Israeli government has historically refused to grant asylum to queer Palestinians, out of fear that could lead to a flood of false claimants, said Mozer. In recognition of the genuine dangers this population faces, the government instead issues temporary residency permits on humanitarian grounds, which must be renewed several times a year.

Approximately 90 Palestinians hold such permits but, until 2022, they were not allowed to legally work, which forced many of them to survive in the underground economy, particularly the sex trade. Those who cannot secure these permits often choose to simply live undocumented, as illegal migrants.

With such a precarious existence, many of these queer Palestinians eventually seek asylum in the West. But in February, the Tel Aviv Court for Administrative Affairs ruled that Palestinians fleeing persecution based on sexual orientation or gender expression are now eligible for full asylum. The wider implications of this decision, including on third-country asylum claims, remains unclear.

While filming his documentary, Mozer found that gay Palestinians were “very much isolated, with a very small group of people that they could trust.” He said they were often afraid of meeting or dating Israelis because of issues with racism. He speculated that Nissim’s contradictory experience might be a generational difference.

Hamas represents humanity in the most darkest times of our history. That is Hamas. No freedom for women. No equal rights for LGBTQ.

-- Yariv Mozer, documentary filmmaker

Mozer is empathetic to the Palestinians, but has a scathing hatred of Hamas. “I’m in favour of a two-state solution. That has nothing to do with Hamas. Hamas is a brutal, extreme, fundamentalist religious group, which believes in the power of violence to achieve their goals.”

Seeing Western queer activists romanticize Hamas in the aftermath of Oct. 7 felt like a betrayal to him. “I see it and I’m amazed. How stupid are you? You are building them to become a legitimate part of this world … It’s shocking,” he said.

“You’re almost unable to be openly gay in Ramallah. So, you want to be openly gay in Gaza? No way. That’s the most extreme religious society in this area of the world.”

The activists are not helping the Palestinian cause, he said, and in fact, are making the situation worse through their embrace of extreme and polarizing rhetoric. “Wake up to understand that you don’t share values with those people. Hamas represents humanity in the most darkest times of our history. That is Hamas. No freedom for women. No equal rights for LGBTQ. All the things that we value as democratic countries — freedom of speech, freedom of art, music, dance. All of this doesn’t exist there.”

Mozer is now working on a documentary that follows 15 survivors of the Nova Festival massacre, one of whom is gay. Upon reviewing the footage shot by Hamas’s fighters, he noticed that some of the terrorists repeatedly jeered “omo, omo, omo” — homosexual — at captured male Israelis who had piercings or earrings. “It’s a small moment that explains so much about Hamas and the way they treat gay men,” he said.

Mozer did not have kind words to say about Netanyahu, either. He called his far-right coalition “one of the most negative things that happened to our country. It’s a mixture of all the evil and bad things that this country could bring together in one government.”

[ The pool at the Haaliya Community Country in Tel Aviv, Israel, a new recreational building that acts as a hub for Tel Aviv’s LGBTQ community. ]

Mozer came out of the closet in the 2000s, when the Israeli LGBTQ community was bursting into the mainstream. He is grateful for the generations before him who, through persistent legal activism, set the stage for LGBTQ acceptance in the late 1980s and 1990s. “A lot of gay men had to sue the country for their own equal rights,” he said.

While he has seen LGBTQ rights steadily improve, he believed influential ministers in the Netanyahu government wanted to undo some of that progress. “They wanted to make a big legal revolution in Israel and change a lot of things and take them backwards. They didn’t succeed because there were a lot of protests,” he said.

Mozer said that most of Israel’s queer community falls within the political centre-left, like himself. While the country’s conservatives want to erode LGBTQ rights, the far left is anti-Zionist and does not support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. “I see myself as Zionist. My grandparents came here from the Holocaust. I truly believe that this is the right place for Jews to live independently, but not at the expense of the Palestinian people.”

Amid war, debates about social policy have temporarily taken a back seat for many Israelis. “Now, the main goal of all of us is to bring (the hostages) back home, stop the war, go into ceasefire. It’s this goal that is above everything,” said Mozer.

A drag legend gives up

Tal Kallai, one of Israel’s most famous drag queens, who performs under the name “Talula Bonet,” talks on a patio beside the Tel Aviv Municipal LGBT Community Centre, The conversation is repeatedly interrupted by gay men who greet and hug him.

Kallai was born and raised in Jerusalem, where, despite its conservative reputation, had a vibrant gay scene in the early 2000s. He wanted to be an actor as a teenager, but found that theatre roles for women were much more interesting than those for men. At age 16, he saw his first drag show at a gay bar and fell in love with the art form.

[ Tal Kallai is one of Israel’s most well-known drag queens, Talula Bonet. He is surprised that there are Western queer activists who support Hamas: “You are supporting a movement that the first thing it will do is kill you because you’re queer — you’re so stupid.” ]

At first, drag was just a hobby for him — one he continued to develop after moving to Tel Aviv to study at the Nissan Nativ Acting Studio. Then he was scouted by a local producer to do professional performances in the city, so he and three other drag queens from Jerusalem created a troupe called the Holy Wigs.

In the beginning, the Holy Wigs saw themselves as more intelligent and cultured than their competitors in Tel Aviv. “We weren’t doing like folk songs and stuff. We were doing musicals and theatre. We were very snobbish. We thought all the drag in Israel is so low-level,” said Kallai. Their ambition was encouraged by “drag mothers” (industry mentors), who taught them how to produce more theatrical performances.

As a professionally trained actor, Kallai wanted to move drag from the bars into the theatres. So that’s what the Holy Wigs did. Soon fans brought their parents and heterosexual friends, who were more comfortable seeing drag in a “respectable” cultural setting. Things snowballed from there.

With their popularity skyrocketing, the Holy Wigs hired a director and costume designer and went on tour. “We did all the history of Israel in drag, and it was very funny,” said Kallai. There were over 100 costume changes during the show, which they performed more than 350 times around Israel, predominantly in larger venues and theatres.

Throughout, Kallai continued his regular drag performances in Tel Aviv’s gay bars, including a weekly open stage event for new drag artists. He hosted this event for 11 years, helping countless performers establish themselves. “Now there is a very big drag culture in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and in Israel,” said Kallai. “It’s 50 shades of drag.”

He recalled that during the early 2000s, gay Palestinians in Jerusalem had “their own community and their own parties — because they were very under the radar and not legally there.” The scene was “very big,” but hidden, with the use of “secret places with secret codes.”

There were even two Palestinian drag queens in the city during that period. One was an Israeli-Arab, married with six children. “He snuck around them and did the shows without his wife knowing,” said Kallai. The other queen was an illegal migrant from Gaza who eventually received asylum in Sweden. Kallai was glad that the Gazan queen found a safe home, even if she had stolen one of his wigs. “If this is the price I had to pay for her freedom, I’m happy,” he said.

I’m not trying to run from reality. I’m trying to deal with the reality and this trauma that we all had here.

-- Tal Kallai, aka Talula Bonet

Drag culture may be popular in Israel, but there has always been opposition to it. Kallai recalled seeing “lots of bad responses” when he performed at Jerusalem’s first Pride parade in 2002. The following years were not much better for Jerusalem Pride. In 2005, an ultra-Orthodox Israeli, Yishai Schlissel, stabbed three participants with a kitchen knife. Kallai said that another protester attempted to stab one of his friends, either the year before or after. “He passed me with the knife and went to her, but the police arrested him.”

Today, at Pride events, domestic opposition has been replaced with international scorn from anti-Israeli activists. As an ambassador of Israeli culture, Kallai has performed all over the world, sometimes with the spon.sorship of the Israeli government. In the early 2010s, a man spit on Kallai’s face at Berlin Pride after learning he was Israeli. Around that same time, at London Pride, pro-Palestinian protesters amassed in the audience of one of his shows, shouting and waving flags. He said that many famous drag queens are afraid to perform in Israel because of the potential backlash. For the ones who do come, “you can’t see any of it on their social media.”

For many years it was “very trendy” to be anti-Israeli within the LGBTQ community, but he was surprised when, after Oct. 7, Western queer activists supported Hamas. “You are supporting a movement that the first thing it will do is kill you because you’re queer — you’re so stupid.”

He used to spend considerable time on social media explaining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to anyone who would listen. He even made a viral Instagram video, where he and another drag queen, in full costume, deconstructed the contradictions of “Queers for Palestine” social influencers. But it was like “talking with deaf persons,” he said.

After getting ignorant comments from internationally famous drag queens, he decided to stop caring about what the global drag community thinks. He gave up explaining.

When the theatres reopened after Oct. 7, Kallai debated whether it was appropriate to start performing again. He decided Israelis wanted to be cheered up, so he returned to the stage. But he emphasized that what he does is not “escapism.”

“Many people are using this word, you know, escapism, escapism. Like, I’m drinking beer with my friend — it’s escapism. I’m walking on the beach — escapism. No, I’m not trying to run from reality. I’m trying to deal with the reality and this trauma that we all had here,” he said.

He once advocated for Palestinian rights, but Oct. 7 changed everything. He was struck by how the residents of the kibbutzim around the Gaza Strip were gleefully murdered, even though they were “peace fighters,” who helped sick Palestinians find medical treatment in Israel.

“In the past, I was a person who believed with all his heart that there is a partner for peace. Now, I’m not sure,” Kallai said.

==

Do you think there's an LGBTQ swimming pool in Gaza?

🤔

[haveyoureadthispoll]

With the verve and bite of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the whip-smart, wisecracking sensibility of a golden-age Hollywood heroine, Marlowe Granados’s stunning début brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York City. Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. After a sojourn across the pond, she arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time. In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Money runs ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than their precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa’s bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill. Happy Hour announces a dazzling new talent in Marlowe Granados, whose exquisite wit recalls Anita Loos’s 1925 classic, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, updated to evoke a recent, golden period of hope and transformation—the summer of 2013. A cri de cœur for party girls and anyone who has ever felt entitled to an adventure of their own, Happy Hour is an effervescent tonic for the ails of contemporary life.

[thebaronmunchausen]

Sublet

dir. Eytan Fox, 2020

© CINEMA BRAVO

[fillejondrette]

lol remember in 2020 when i was looking for a room to rent and got in contact with a girl who was subletting her room, and she told me that there were 2 girls and 2 guys living there (counting her). but then when it came to actually signing paperwork i found out that the other girl was actually a trans woman bc he hadn't legally changed his name and his male name was still on the lease. now personally i didn't have a problem with living with 3 guys, and the trans woman ended up moving out pretty quickly and being replaced by some other guy anyway, but still. i feel like it was just dishonest and weird.

[mardelivros]

Mostra Internacional de Cinema Virtual chega a terceira edição com filmes inéditos no Brasil

A terceira Mostra Internacional de Cinema Virtual, realização das secretarias estaduais de Cultura e Economia Criativa e de Relações Internacionais em parceria com consulados de 13 países, será exibida entre os dias 1 e 15 de dezembro. Como nas duas primeiras edições, todos os filmes estarão disponíveis aos espectadores na plataforma de streaming e vídeo por demanda #CulturaEmCasa, gerida pela Amigos da Arte. Entre longas-metragens, curtas e documentários, 21 títulos farão parte da Mostra que contou com a curadoria dos representantes consulares. Embora sem temática definida, a seleção dos títulos levou em conta, principalmente, o ineditismo da obra no Brasil. “A Mostra é uma grande oportunidade para que a população possa conhecer um novo panorama de produções cinematográficas que são um verdadeiro intercâmbio cultural. O envolvimento e a participação dos consulados em São Paulo fazem da Mostra um evento de forte apelo público e um marco de sucesso nas parcerias intersecretariais paulistas”, destacou o secretário de Relações Internacionais do Estado de São Paulo, Julio Serson. Cuba, Índia, Cabo Verde e a província de Québec apresentam nesta edição o maior número de filmes, com três obras cada. Na sequência, aparecem Israel, Itália, Bélgica, França, Chile, Holanda, Espanha e Moldávia, que serão representados na mostra por uma produção. “É uma honra para a Secretaria de Cultura e Economia Criativa do Estado de São Paulo participar da organização e da viabilização da terceira edição da Mostra Internacional de Cinema Virtual de São Paulo, que oferece ao público amante do cinema a oportunidade de ver online, de modo gratuito, filmes oriundos de dezenas de países de todos os continentes”, afirma o secretário Sérgio Sá Leitão. “É uma oportunidade fantástica de acesso a uma produção cinematográfica de altíssima qualidade. O melhor do cinema internacional sem precisar sair de casa, via #CulturaEmCasa”, finaliza. A maioria dos filmes têm classificação indicativa livre, e apenas três são recomendados para maiores de 16 anos, como “O que arde” (Espanha) e os longas-metragens da Índia “Baahubali: O início” e “Baahubali: A conclusão”. Nesta edição, Cuba traz três documentários, “Professora (Maestra)”, “Silvio Rodriguez – Mi Primera Tarea” e “A Gota d´Água”, que abordam o processo de alfabetização cubano nos anos 1960; a trajetória do cantor Silvio Rodriguez; e as dificuldades enfrentadas pela ilha em função do embargo dos EUA, respectivamente. O consulado da Índia, por sua vez, escolheu três longas, “Neerja” (O Poder da Coragem), além de “Baahubali: O início” e “Baahubali: a conclusão”. “Neerja” é baseado na história real do sequestro de um avião pela organização terrorista Abu Nidal em 1986. Em “Baahubali: o início”, o menino Shivudu escapa da morte após o assassinato de seu pai, o rei Amarendra Baahubali. Essa foi considerada a obra mais cara da Índia, a um custo de US$ 40 milhões e o longa indiano de maior sucesso nos Estados Unidos. Cabo Verde será representado na Mostra por dois documentários (“MAMA” e “Os 47’s, depoimentos que ficaram”) e um curta-metragem (“Mansu, Mansu”). Os dois documentários estrearam este ano em Cabo Verde. “MAMA” aborda a experiência de uma filha que registra a perda de memória da mãe e “Os 47,s, depoimentos que ficaram” retrata a fome que viveu o povo cabo-verdiano ao longo dos anos 40. A província do Québec selecionou dois filmes experimentais “Kuujjuaq” (Confiança), de Sammy Gadbois que traz o olhar de um adolescente sobre sua vila natal e o documentário “Ute Kanata” (Aqui no Canadá), de Virginie Michel, que enfoca a importância dos povos aborígenes na formação do Canadá. “Sublet” é um filme israelense de 2020. A obra, um drama LGBTQIAP+, é dirigida por Eytan Fox e estreou em abril de 2020 no Festival de Cinema de Tribeca (NY). No ano seguinte, entrou em cartaz na Europa. O Consulado Italiano trouxe para a mostra “Il Giovane corsaro”, filme-documentário lançado este ano e que investiga a vida e obra de Pier Paolo Pasolini, um dos principais nomes do cinema da Itália. “SpaceBoy”, da Bélgica, estreou no ano passado no Brasil e conta a história de um menino que constrói secretamente um balão de ar para provar para o pai que tudo é possível. A França preferiu um filme de amor. “L´autre Continent” conta a história de Maria e Olivier, ambos com 30 anos, a ��nica característica comum ao casal. De repente, os dois se encontram em Taiwan e, a partir daí, uma incrível história da força do amor acontece. “C.R.A.Z.Y”, filme do Canadá, foi um sucesso de bilheteria e aborda os desafios de um filho homossexual, criado por um pai conservador. O chileno “Cachimba” de 2014 é uma comédia, protagonizada por um casal que encontra uma coleção de quadros no interior de uma casa antiga. O suspense “O número 10” foi lançado em mais de cem cinemas na Holanda em setembro do ano passado. O filme, o décimo do cineasta Alex van Warmerdam, traz a história de Günter, encontrado em uma floresta alemã aos quatro anos e que cresce em uma família adotiva. Vencedor do Prêmio do Júri da mostra Um Certo Olhar no Festival de Cannes, “O que arde” é o filme espanhol desta edição da Mostra Virtual. O longa fala de Amador Coro, condenado à prisão por ter provocado um incêndio. Com direção de Oliver Laxe, “O que arde” é o filme galego mais visto na Espanha e o primeiro a chegar a Cannes. Por fim, a Moldávia, pequeno país do Leste Europeu, prova mais uma vez que é gigante em sua produção cinematográfica. Nesta mostra, participa com o documentário “O Pequeno País com um Grande Coração”. Lançado este ano, o filme explora o verdadeiro significado da hospitalidade por meio de uma história pouco conhecida. Neste ano, a Moldávia, um país com menos de 3 milhões de habitantes, recebeu mais de 450 mil refugiados ucranianos, que localmente eram conhecidos como ‘convidados’. A obra mostra como o país foi solidário à causa dos refugiados. #CulturaEmCasa A plataforma de streaming e vídeo por demanda #CulturaEmCasa tem a missão de ampliar o acesso da população a conteúdos culturais de qualidade, 100% gratuitos e difundir a intensa produção cultural do Estado de São Paulo, seus equipamentos e municípios. Em dois anos, a #CulturaEmCasa atingiu 4,4 mil cidades do Brasil e 166 países. A plataforma foi responsável pelo emprego direto e indireto de mais de 21 mil profissionais do setor, entre artistas, produtores e técnicos. A ferramenta reúne também conteúdos do Teatro Sérgio Cardoso, do Teatro Estadual de Araras, além de diversos programas de difusão cultural como o Festival de Circo Online de São Paulo, o #CircuitoSP Online, a #ViradaSP Online, e o #SPGastronomia. Integram ainda a programação da plataforma, diversas iniciativas das instituições da Secretaria de Cultura e Economia Criativa do Estado de São Paulo, entre as quais a Osesp (Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo), a Jazz Sinfônica, a Pinacoteca, a São Paulo Companhia de Dança, o Conservatório de Tatuí, o Projeto Guri, Fábricas de Cultura, TV Cultura, Bibliotecas, e os Museus da Imagem e do Som, MIS Experience, do Futebol, Índia Vanuíre, Casa de Portinari, Felícia Leirner/ Auditório Claudio Santoro, além dos museus casa-literários, Casa das Rosas, Casa Mário de Andrade e Casa Guilherme de Almeida. Plataforma #CulturaEmCasa: www.culturaemcasa.com.br Imagem em destaque: Divulgação da Secretaria de Cultura e Economia Criativa do Estado de São Paulo. Read the full article

[figsandfandoms]

oh god okay firstly i hope i'm not derailing your post op feel free to tell me to shove off if so...

but lie, i was thinking about this the other day, and how it seems like so many people are calling out 'plot holes' or 'things that don't make sense' in non-2020s television- and primarily what's really got my goat is people saying that 'friends' is unrealistic coz the characters live in such large apartments.

and this is such a modern complaint! if you said that to someone during the 90s when it was airing, the other person would have rolled their eyes at you and reminded you that it was set on a sound stage in front of a live studio audience so where else are they gonna put the cameras?

we knew it was a tv show and it was on a fake set and we suspended our disbelief and just accepted it when monica said she was on the lease as subletting from her now deceased grandma. did it really make sense? probably not, but it's a tv show. on a set. on a stage. that needed to have room for cameras.

so yes i 1000000% agree with you op, we need to bring back suspension of disbelief and audiences also need to chill tf out when watching tv and movies, accept that they're fake and not real life, and move on

please i love you i'm begging you bring back suspension of disbelief bring back trusting the audience like. i cannot handle any more dialogue that sounds like a legal document. "hello, i am here to talk to you about the incident from a few minutes ago, because i feel you might be unwell, and i am invested in your personal wellbeing." "thank you, i am unwell because the incident was hurtful to me due to my childhood, which was bad." I CANT!!!!

do you know how many people are mad that authors use "growled" as a word for "said"? it's just poetics! they do not literally mean "growled," it's just a common replacement for "said with force but in a low tone." it's normal! do you hear me!! help me i love you please let me out of here!!!

[dankusner]

Kanye West Bought an Architectural Treasure—Then Gave It a Violent Remix

The Malibu house bought by Ye has about four thousand square feet of indoor space.

Four miles to the west, on a grassy bluff overlooking the Pacific, is a forty-two-thousand-square-foot Ando mansion.

The owners are Beyoncé and Jay-Z.

Tony Saxon is a wiry, tattooed man in his early thirties who is proud of what he calls his “Jersey gonzo” work ethic—that is, “I’ve got a guy, or I’ll get a guy.”

His legal surname is Netelkos, but he prefers the one that his father adopted while performing as a lounge singer with an Elvis-inspired act.

The younger Saxon had a sometimes chaotic and druggy youth; he now sustains himself with Red Bull and can talk loudly and without interruption—but still with some charm—for four or five hours.

When we recently met in Boyle Heights, in East Los Angeles, he arrived in a 1963 Ford Thunderbird convertible.

Four years ago, Saxon moved to California from northern New Jersey and sublet an apartment in North Hollywood.

He worked on TV commercials and as a handyman; he played in bands and recorded music.

In September, 2021, a woman who introduced herself as Bianca inquired about his availability for construction work.

He was available.

A few days later, she texted, asking him to come to Malibu immediately.

In a response that eventually led to a lawsuit against Ye, formerly Kanye West—the music and fashion star who in the past two years has become known for his public antisemitism and admiration of Hitler—Saxon said that he’d get his tools.

He drove down to the Santa Monica Pier, then headed northwest on the Pacific Coast Highway.

For about ten miles, the road follows the ocean’s edge: if you live on the beach, you also live next to a four-lane highway.

But just past the Malibu Pier the highway and the ocean separate, and for a few miles the beachfront properties line a calm residential street, Malibu Road, with speed bumps and dog-walkers. Stan Laurel used to live here.

The houses stand shoulder to shoulder, allowing little more than a glimpse of sky between them.

Saxon pulled up to a two-story façade of smooth gray concrete.

On the upper floor, the surface was interrupted only by an arrow-slit window; at street level, there was a wooden garage door, and a front door and a window, both made of milkily opaque glass.

A few months earlier, when the house had had a different owner, a visitor would have entered a little gallery-like space, with concrete walls and gray limestone floor tiles, filled with contemporary art.

The house withholds its big Pacific reveal, and the clouded glass casts the gallery in pale light.

The art here once included photographs of nuclear-weapons-test clouds and a life-size statue of a man, no longer in his youth, with his fists in a boxer’s pose.

The sculpture, cast in aluminum and painted blue, is by the French artist Xavier Veilhan.

It is a likeness of Tadao Ando, the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect.

Ando, who had a brief boxing career, designed the house.

Now eighty-two, he has kept his practice small.

He has one office, in his home city of Osaka, and has never employed more than thirty people.

He works on only a few designs each year.

Some are museums; many are houses; nearly all, including the house on Malibu Road—finished in 2013, for Richard Sachs, a former money manager—are made of concrete, poured on-site, and left unclad and unpainted, indoors and out.

In what has become an Ando signature, the concrete’s velvety surface is marked by evenly spaced holes—small and shallow enough to be plugged by, say, a marshmallow.

The Malibu Road house has about four thousand square feet of indoor space.

Another property of this scale, on this street, might sell for twenty million dollars.

When Sachs put his house on the market, in 2020, he asked for seventy-five million.

Sachs’s price, like his aluminum statue, suggests the extent to which an appreciation of Ando can take the form of veneration.

For very wealthy people who spend some of their wealth on art, no living architect seems more likely to make them feel that they’re buying not just a fine home but the work of a major modern artist.

An Ando house will require expensive and exacting construction; it will have a controlled, sober beauty that photographs well and that plainly communicates contemporary, if not avant-garde, taste.

And it will be rare.

The client will receive personal validation of the most tangible, bombproof kind.

Ando has said that, after being introduced to potential clients, “my decision to accept their projects depends mainly on their personality and aura.”

An American real-estate agent who has had some interactions with Ando recently told the Wall Street Journal that “it was like working with God.”

Saxon was let into the Malibu Road house by Bianca Censori, the woman who had texted him; she was in her twenties.

The house is a box partially embedded in the continent’s last, low step of land.

The structure then stretches over the sand, propped up by four pillars at about the high-tide mark.

(The beach here is narrow.)

Although the house appears from the street to be two stories, the front door is on the middle of three floors—the main floor.

A short corridor leads from the gallery to an open living area where the house delivers its vast, binary view of sky and ocean, through floor-to-ceiling windows.

Censori mentioned that the house, which was empty of furnishings, had a new owner, but she didn’t name him.

A few other people were around; they had ladders and tools.

One or two were identified as co-workers of Censori’s and, like her, were dressed all in black.

Others, like Saxon, had been summoned that day.

Walking around, Saxon registered bathroom walls lined in marble—“gorgeous black-and-white marble, like something in a New York hotel in the nineteen-twenties,” he told me—and custom wooden cabinetry that, he estimated, had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Downstairs, the ceilings were lower than on the main floor.

Three rooms, each with a little bathroom, had ocean views.

There was also a laundry, and a room where Saxon saw devices that controlled the house’s heating and other systems.

On the upper floor, two extravagantly wide staircases—more suggestive of a college library than of a beach house—descended to the main floor.

One staircase was inside, one was outside: they ran alongside each other, separated by a wall built partly of glass.

At the bottom of the outdoor staircase was a courtyard with a fire pit.

At the top was a concrete hot tub.

The top floor was mostly terrace, with the primary bedroom opening onto it.

Sachs once kept a sculpture of the Incredible Hulk, by Jeff Koons, midway up the indoor staircase.

In this area, Saxon noticed, Censori’s black-clad colleagues were doing something involving large blocks of foam.

He remembered being told that they were turning the stairs into a slide.

Later—as the house’s interior was dismantled—Saxon would spend nights here, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by Clif Bars and Red Bulls, and bothered by seagulls.

Later still, Censori would become a fixture of the paparazzi-oriented media, as the romantic partner of the house’s owner: Ye.

For nearly a year, Censori, who is Australian and had studied architecture at the University of Melbourne, had been working for him on various design projects, alongside other young architects.

Saxon saved her number on his phone under “Bianca architect.”

(Censori did not respond to requests for comment.)

In the fall of 2021, Ye was forty-four, and his wealth was estimated to be nearly two billion dollars, thanks in part to fashion deals with Adidas and the Gap.

That February, his wife, Kim Kardashian, had filed for divorce.

Saxon, who’s unimpressed by most music recorded after 1969, now takes some pride in having been oblivious of whom Censori meant when she referred to “the owner,” and why there was some hubbub in the street and a security guard posted outside.

People paying closer attention to Ye’s life might have read a TMZ story, published a few days before Saxon’s visit, headlined “Kanye West Drops A Whopping $57.3 Million for Malibu Home/Sculpture.”

Censori asked Saxon to paint over the shelves, cabinets, and closets—along with the bathroom marble—in a shade that would disguise the boundaries between these surfaces and the untreated concrete of the walls.

She said of the owner, “He doesn’t want any of the wood to show.”

Saxon had a moment’s pause: the paint would look bad (and soon peel off).

But he likes to contrast his pluck with what he perceives to be uniform lassitude among Californians, and he didn’t protest.

He gave Censori a quote and drove off to buy paint samples.

That afternoon, Saxon did some test-painting on sections of wood.

Censori sent photographs of these to the owner.

They waited.

Censori then told Saxon to remove all the wood; she allowed him to call a friend to help.

That day, Saxon recalled, he and his colleague “ripped the cabinets out, we ripped the entire laundry-room wood out.”

They worked all night, filling the garage with splintered pieces.

Saxon eventually went home to sleep.

A few hours later, Censori woke him with a call:

“Do you think you could come help me get the foam off the stairs?”

She meant now.

“And he wants to meet you,” she added.

In 2001, Tom Ford, the fashion designer and filmmaker, bought twenty-two thousand acres of land in northern New Mexico.

He asked his preferred architect, Ron Radziner, of the L.A. firm Marmol Radziner, to design some buildings for the new property.

But, as Radziner recently recalled, Ford also requested permission to stray, architecturally:

“Tom said, ‘I’m not going to do this if you really don’t want me to. But how would you feel if I hired Tadao Ando to do the horse facility?’ ”

Radziner, who admires Ando—it’s always “Mr. Ando,” in his telling—approved, and offered to become Ando’s local “executive architect” (in charge of permits and planning) and general contractor.

To secure Ando’s blessing, Radziner flew to Japan.

Ando’s career had been founded, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, on ingenious single-family homes, often on tight city lots in Osaka.

After Ando won the Pritzker, in 1995, his practice became increasingly international.

Kulapat Yantrasast, a Thai-born architect, joined Ando’s firm in 1996, and came to spend much of his time overseas, frequently on projects for fashion-world figures.

In France, he worked on a house, never built, for Karl Lagerfeld. In Italy, he oversaw the construction of a theatre in Milan for Giorgio Armani.

Yantrasast, who now has his own practice, told me that such clients often have feelings of awe, touched with envy, for the rooted solidity of an Ando building.

The work “is mysterious, it’s anchored, it has such a quiet presence,” Yantrasast said. “Whereas fashion and music are about dynamics and movement and change.”

Ando once wrote that it would be hard for him to build a house in America, because he wasn’t “familiar with Americans.”

But by the time Radziner visited Osaka, in 2001, things had changed.

Ando had designed a house in Chicago for Fred Eychaner, a media entrepreneur, and two institutional buildings: the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, in St. Louis, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, where a reflecting pool generates a mirrored double of the concrete-and-glass façade.

“Well, if it’s anything like the last million years, I think we have a lot to look forward to.”

Ando’s Osaka studio is about the size of a large town house, and is organized around an atrium.

Alex Iida, an American architect who joined Ando’s staff in 2010, has described the studio as “five stories up, two stories down, and one big void in the middle,” adding, “So, pretty much, we can hear everything that’s going on.”

Radziner recalled that, during his visit, he witnessed an impromptu staff meeting.

Ando’s usual workstation, at the bottom of the void, put him right by the office’s only phones.

That day, Ando had overheard a staff member’s phone conversation that didn’t sit right with him, and he had called the meeting to say so.

He stood at the bottom, making his complaint to employees arranged above.

That scene of staff supervision, or surveillance, has an analogue in the way an Ando work is meant to be experienced.

With a client’s assent, an Ando house makes unignorable decisions about how people, and light, should behave in it.

Ando has stressed the importance of a “coexistence” between humans and nature, and his designs often try to thwart a too sharp division between indoor and outdoor life, to the extent that a client’s art collection allows.

A famous early house in Osaka was unheated, and obliged its inhabitants to cross a courtyard to reach the bathroom.

Ando has said that when the client “came to me and asked me what he would do when it became too cold in the house, I told him to wear a sweater. When he asked me what would happen if it got even colder, I told him to wear many sweaters.”

Some contemporary architects foreground the idea of a building’s future flexibility.

Ando isn’t one of them.

Yantrasast, in explaining his decision to leave Ando’s studio, in 2003, told me that he wanted to explore a less “controlling” architecture.

He said that he’d once shared with Ellsworth Kelly, the artist, a worry that people might dismiss his post-Ando designs, which have often used concrete, as mere offsprings.

Kelly, reassuring him, contrasted what he described as the prescribed severity of Ando’s spaces with the more “open-minded” aesthetic of Yantrasast’s.

Ando’s method for casting a concrete wall on-site is unremarkable in its fundamentals.

A contractor fashions a narrow rectangular mold from plywood sheets.

One way of helping the mold withstand the weight of wet concrete is to pass metal rods, known as form ties, horizontally through the width of the box.

Each tie has two nuts on it that are tightened against the plywood mold’s interior.

The concrete is then poured in, typically over a forest of vertical rebar.

After the concrete dries, the contractor removes the wood, the ends of the ties, and the nuts—leaving little holes, which can be filled in or not.

Ando requires contractors to do all this with unusual precision, and he carefully manages the effect of the lines where one sheet of plywood meets another, and the pattern of the tie holes.

But, as Radziner came to realize when he visited numerous Ando projects in Japan, the result isn’t immaculate.

“They’re striving for perfection, but it’s not about actual perfection,” he said.

The concrete may dip a little around the tie holes, like around the button of a mattress; it will have tiny cracks and variations in color.

“And that’s what makes concrete concrete,” Radziner said. “You feel the nature of it, the strength of it.”

He has wondered whether some of Ando’s international clients miss the point when they decide to use white cement in the concrete mix:

“You think, Oh, that could be plaster.”

Radziner is confident that Ando’s preference is for uncolored concrete, whose hue of gray is determined, in part, by local materials.

Radziner began work on the Tom Ford project.

Ando’s designs came to include a low house and a reflecting pool.

(Ford dropped the idea of building a mausoleum for the future remains of himself, his husband, and their fox terriers.)

Construction wasn’t quite done when, in 2007, Radziner first heard from Richard Sachs, who had retired in his forties after working at such firms as Bear Stearns and Salomon Brothers.

Ando had agreed to design him a house in Malibu, and had recommended Radziner as executive architect.

Ando, outside his studio, in Osaka, Japan.

He has stressed the importance of a “coexistence” between humans and nature, and his designs often try to thwart a too sharp division between indoor and outdoor life, to the extent that a client’s art collection allows.

At Radziner’s office, in West L.A., he showed me photographs of the Sachs House under construction.

The process required many times as much concrete as a more ordinary American house of the same size.

The walls and floors were made of thick concrete.

Twelve concrete caissons were built, reaching sixty feet beneath the dirt—or the sand, on the ocean side.

“You do it at low tide,” Radziner explained. “But you’re still pumping water out as the concrete’s dropping in.”

Underground, the caissons are cylindrical, but, where they are visible, holding the house about fifteen feet above the beach, they’re square in section.

That’s a pain to do.

But such effort “is all about the look,” Radziner told me.

During construction, which began in 2009, technical drawings, sometimes annotated by Ando, were in constant transmission between Osaka and L.A. An Ando lieutenant visited Malibu Road every few months; Ando himself made perhaps half a dozen visits.

“Mr. Ando is brilliant in an almost cinematic way,” Radziner told me.

Ando stages an interior like a director:

“As you turn, you experience another view. Maybe the ceiling is a little low—you feel the weight of that—and then you move through, and, suddenly, the ceiling pops up, and there’s this expansive space.”

We looked at images of the wide staircases.

“To do that on a small site in Malibu is a bold move,” Radziner said, adding that it’s unusual to find a client who will value “the experience of space more than how much quote-unquote usable floor space he has.”

(Asked about how accepting Sachs was of the wabi-sabi flaws in the concrete, Radziner smiled, then said, “Pretty good.”)

The house was finished in 2013.

From the kitchen, which had stainless-steel surfaces, one could survey the ocean over a glass-topped dining table with blue-cushioned chairs.

Above the table, Sachs hung a painting of a nude figure by the New York-based artist George Condo.

(While the house was under construction, Condo painted five alternative covers for Ye’s 2010 album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.”)

By 2013, Ando had executed fewer than ten commissions in the U.S.

So it’s an odd coincidence that, while the Sachs House was being built, another team was putting up another Ando house in Malibu, just four miles west.

As Radziner phrased it, “We were working on the Little Ando, and that was the Big Ando.”

The Big Ando was designed for Maria and Bill Bell, whose wealth derives, in part, from TV soap operas created by Bill’s parents, including “The Young and the Restless.”

These clients had first shown Yantrasast their site in early 2003: eight acres on a bluff overlooking the Pacific.

In Yantrasast’s favorable description, an Ando museum can have the air of a home that has expanded to accept institutional duties.

Ando was now increasingly being asked to flip that equation, and design homes built on a museum-like scale for members of what Yantrasast calls the “art-collecting communities.”

Ando designed more than thirty thousand square feet of space for the Bells, including a gallery that could comfortably display a ten-foot-high Koons sculpture, on a plinth, representing piled-up lumps of Play-Doh.

Yantrasast calls the Big Ando, finished in 2015, “one of the best houses in America.”

Radziner agrees that it’s remarkable.

But, he noted, “it’s white concrete. That’s all about perfection.”

The Little Ando, he said, was more special.

“I love this house,” he said. “It’s the classic gray. So I think that Mr. Ando really loves it, too.”

In 2007, several years after Ye’s career had taken off—first, as a producer for Jay-Z and other hip-hop stars, then with his own albums—Ye started a blog largely about art, design, and architecture.

As a child, in Chicago, Ye would read Architectural Digest in a local Barnes & Noble;

he was briefly enrolled at Chicago’s American Academy of Art.

On the blog, he added approving captions to images found online; they showed work by, among others, the architects Moshe Safdie, Rem Koolhaas, and Ando.

Beneath a photograph of a cable-railway station in Austria designed by Zaha Hadid, he wrote, “I want my future now!”

Ye, who declined to participate in this article, sometimes relaxed into a Martha Stewart-like idiom.

A photograph of three dozen rounded gray cushions piled on a floor, like a rock slide, was captioned with a warning that the visual impact of such an arrangement would be diminished by, say, “a 6 year old Ikea coffee table with a stack of 30 magazines and some hard back books with the old paper covers still on em which, sidebar, should have been removed.”

In the three years that Ye maintained the blog, images of architectural spectacle—a tree house resembling an eyeball, the world’s largest swimming pool—increasingly shared space with examples of residential minimalism in Scandinavia and Japan.

Ye and Kim Kardashian began a romantic relationship in 2012.

Ye seems to have often taken the design lead in the partnership—a scene in “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” from that year shows him gently urging her to toss out much of her wardrobe.

They worked together on readying a house for themselves, in Bel Air, that was neither futuristic nor minimalist.

Its terra-cotta-tiled roof and ochre outer walls suggested Portofino (or “Curb Your Enthusiasm”).

Oana Stănescu, the Romanian architect, was speaking as a Ye design adviser when she told W magazine that the Bel Air mansion was “so bad, seriously—it couldn’t be any worse.”

The same article, from 2013, describes Ye working on new songs while Googling modernist legends.

(“How do you spell Mies van der Rohe?”)

That fall, he visited the Harvard Graduate School of Design, at the invitation of students.

“The world can be saved through design,” he told them. “And everything needs to actually be architected.”

Stănescu helped strip away the ornamentation on the Bel Air house, giving it an oddly denuded, shaved-cat silhouette.

Kardashian and Ye didn’t stay long.

In 2014, the year of their wedding, they bought a much larger house in Hidden Hills, a gated community northwest of L.A., which posed similar design challenges: the listing called it a “French Country pièce de résistance”;

Ye has called it a McMansion.

With this house, Ye, whose music career was founded on an unmatched ability to make something beguiling and new out of music recorded years earlier, undertook what could be thought of as an attempt to test the limits of remodelling.

Could some version of minimalism be jammed into a suburban mansion with such farm-housey details as shutters and exposed beams?

The makeover was executed by Stănescu and Axel Vervoordt, the Belgian interior designer, among others.

Ye aptly characterized the resulting look as “futuristic Belgian monastery.”

A client drawn equally to spareness and to architectural bravura ended up with a sprawling interior so relentlessly off-white that judging distances must have been a challenge.

It’s minimalism, but it’s also a lot.

In 2018, Kardashian, who at that point had three children with Ye—their fourth was born the following year—spoke to Architectural Digest about living with them in a house furnished largely with pale blobs:

“I run around the house with towels. You do have to just take a deep breath and say, ‘Okay, it’s going to happen.’ ”

“Soon, she was apologizing for apologizing . . . and then she reflexively apologized for that!”

That year, Ye invited “architects and industrial designers who want to make the world better” to work with him on a new venture, Yeezy Home.

An Instagram post by one of his designers indicated that the mission would include making affordable housing with precast concrete.

By then, Ye had built a spectacularly successful mass-market fashion career, in partnership with Adidas.

(He’d also aligned himself with President Donald Trump and suggested that slavery in the U.S. had been consensual.)

The progress of Yeezy Home, which lacked a multinational corporate partner like Adidas, was hard to discern;

it had to be inferred, in part, from drone photographs of experimental domed structures that Ye had erected in Calabasas, California, and in Cody, Wyoming.

But the consistent suggestion was that Ye’s reach in music and fashion could be replicated in the built environment.

“I’m going to be one of the biggest real-estate developers of all time,” he said.

One evident influence was James Turrell, best known for his monumental and still unfinished land-art project at Roden Crater, in Arizona.

For decades, Turrell has moved hundreds of thousands of tons of earth at the site, building chambers, connected by tunnels, that frame views of sky.

Ye once told GQ that, the first time he and Turrell spoke, on the phone, “I was literally screaming at the top of my lungs about how important it was for us to work together.”

(This conversation likely occurred after the summer of 2015, when Drake—with whom Ye developed a long beef—shot the video for his hit “Hotline Bling” inside an uncredited imitation of Turrell’s work.)

Turrell, now in his eighties, has kept people away from his crater during its remodelling, but he has made exceptions for potential donors to the project.

In 2018, he gave Ye what he recently remembered as a “full day and night tour.”

To Turrell’s surprise, Ye later made good on an offer to contribute ten million dollars.

On Ye’s birthday the next year, Turrell gave him a sketched design of a house.

By this point, Ye had publicly discussed a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

Documentary footage shot in 2018 and 2019, leaked online but never released as a film, shows behavior that one could reasonably connect to that diagnosis.

In one sequence, Ye, wearing a maga hat, forces a political seminar on captive employees at a private-jet terminal in Chicago, shortly before flying off for an Oval Office meeting with Trump.

(Later that day, in D.C., Ye is seen telling Jared Kushner by phone that he’ll keep his appointment at the White House only if he can enter the building “the exact way that a foreign dignitary would.”)

The footage also shows Ye urging employees to build what he calls a “Turrell space” in four months, and enthusing about a proposed foam object that could be “a toilet and a bathtub and a shower and a couch.”

He inspects a prototype dome, with a hole in the roof, and says that it could equally serve as a homeless shelter or an orphanage.

Ye appears to have been working toward a space in which he and his family could live—in one scene from the documentary, Kardashian advises him that her closet area should include a bathroom—as well as a larger community around him, and a housing template that could satisfy millions.

On a monitor, a fly-through animation reveals various enormous Turrell-like structures while a narrator describes “a community of the future . . . a new way of life for the entire universe.”

The camera catches the moment when the minimalist architect Claudio Silvestrin, who had once renovated a SoHo apartment for Ye, first sees an architectural drawing of the imagined community.

The scale dawns on Silvestrin: there are dozens of circles on the page, each representing a separate structure.

“I didn’t realize it was so big,” he says.

Then, collecting himself, “O.K. So you would like a proposal.”

(Ye and various collaborators, including the Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati, have spoken of building a city in the Middle East or an underground campus in Wyoming.)

The documentary underlines an obvious point: it’s hard to do architecture in bursts of enthusiasm and grandiosity.

Ye is serious about buildings—we see him flicking through a book about Archigram, the experimental British architectural group of the nineteen-sixties and seventies—and he has unusual reserves of creative insight and energy, as he has at times himself observed. (“I am Warhol. . . . I am Shakespeare in the flesh.”)

His urgency can be attractive; as he once said, in a conversation with a design publication, “I don’t want to be dead when the world starts getting good.”

When Olgiati worked with him, he praised Ye’s radicalism and called him “probably the most interesting client that an architect can have.”

But the path from an idea to a built thing is long, expensive, collaborative, and difficult to reverse.

You can’t prototype a dozen city blocks, as you can a dozen sneakers or songs, and then pick the one that works best.

And it’s hard not to think that, with Turrell, Ye started in the wrong place.

Ye once tweeted, “We all will live in Turrell spaces.”

More accurately: we won’t.

Turrell’s hallmark Skyspace installations, of which there are more than eighty around the world, are exposed to the elements.

Their acoustics can be challenging.

There’s certainly nowhere to cook or wash.

These are places that allow people to reset their sense of space and time—an eclipse-like experience, without the eclipse.

Yet, even in the world’s most benign climates, they don’t point to a new paradigm of shelter.

The documentary shows that, in what appears to be less than two years, Ye met, separately, with several of the world’s best-known architects, including David Adjaye, Toyo Ito, and Jacques Herzog, of the firm Herzog & de Meuron.

(As Ye clarified, with a laugh, in his 2018 track “Kids See Ghosts,” “Herzog and de Meuron, in an office out in Basel / No, not Miami—Switzerland.”)

And, on a trip to Japan, Ye and Kardashian visited the island of Naoshima, where the Chichu Art Museum, a largely underground structure designed by Ando, includes a Turrell Skyspace.

(Ye has rapped about being “in Japan with Tadao Ando.”)

Ye’s interactions with famous architects in this period—echoing his tendency to enlist a multitude of collaborators to contribute to an album—included reaching out to at least one other major international figure. In a recent conversation, this architect, who requested anonymity, told me that some of his senior partners met with Ye in L.A.

(The architect couldn’t join.)

Ye insisted on flying everyone, that evening, to Roden Crater, where he acted as a guide.

“My guys came back to me with more questions than answers,” the architect said, dryly.

He added, “My understanding is that he’ll ask one architect, and then another, and they would not know that the other was working on the same thing.”

In the Arizona desert, Ye had been “full of visions,” but “the feeling was that there is something about architecture that requires a little bit of contemplation. And, maybe, a little bit of patience.”

Ye has described Ando as the world’s “greatest living architect” and “the Ye of all the architects.”

He and Kardashian often visited the Big Ando in Malibu.

In 2019, the year before Ye ran for President, Kardashian bought some land in La Quinta, California, southeast of Palm Springs.

Later, after the couple separated, she applied for permits to build a house on this land, designed by Ando.

In 2023, Kardashian posted photographs of herself in the Osaka studio, sitting with Ando and his colleague Alex Iida at a desk on which were strewn renderings of the house.

Designs posted online show a form that, from above, resembles a guitar pick with a hole at its center.

“Met with the master himself,” Kardashian wrote. “So deeply honored and incredibly humbled to have the opportunity to work with him.”

(The house reportedly will have a footprint exceeding half an acre.)

In June, 2021, Ye and the model Irina Shayk, whom he was said to be dating, visited Château La Coste, an estate in southern France that is dotted with sculptural and architectural works by Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and others.

He was photographed walking next to a concrete Ando wall that runs alongside a little lake into which an Ando pavilion juts.

The next month, Ye gave a concert at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, in Atlanta, to preview likely tracks on an impending album, “Donda.”

Then he stayed.

For several weeks, at a reported cost of a million dollars a day, he lived and recorded in the stadium.

His accommodations were both minimal and imperial: he slept in a narrow bed in the corner of a small, windowless, harshly lit room of painted cinder blocks, in a building that seats seventy thousand people, with a roof that can open to form a circle against the sky.

Saxon, in the Ando house.

He noted, “It’s funny—and not funny, in a way—to say, ‘I’m the man who single-handedly destroyed this architectural masterpiece.’ But I pretty much did.”

Later that summer, after a second concert in Atlanta and one in Chicago—where the centerpiece of the staging was a replica of the sixteen-hundred-square-foot house in which he’d spent much of his childhood—Ye released “Donda.” (The album was named for his late mother.)

He also bought the Sachs House.

His intention, always, was to reimagine it.

Up to then, Ye’s architectural achievements had been mixed.

Despite his design literacy, his access to half of the world’s best architects, and his almost limitless funds, he had never built an enduring, finished structure from the ground up.

(And in September, 2019, he demolished the prototype domes in Calabasas after the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works started asking about permits.)

But he was pleased with what he’d been able to do in Hidden Hills.

There, playing the role of producer, or curator, he’d shaped “an iconic home that informs a lot of other people’s homes,” as he put it in 2020.

(That’s fair: Kardashian has three hundred and sixty-two million Instagram followers.)

Ye admired Ando, and wanted an Ando, for reasons that at the time may have included spousal competitiveness, but he didn’t love this Ando.

Kulapat Yantrasast, who later discussed the matter with Ye, told me, “To be honest, he did not like the house—he did not like the interior.”

Soon after Ye bought the house, someone representing him called Ron Radziner.

Ye wanted to meet on Malibu Road the next day.

Radziner was unavailable, so he dispatched two colleagues.

The house they saw that morning was just as they’d left it, eight years earlier.

Ye welcomed them and introduced them to James Turrell, who has a long white beard.

According to the visitors, Turrell, describing the house as a work of art, said, “There’s nothing for me to do here.”

But Ye detailed improvements that he wanted Radziner’s firm to make.

These included removing the cabinetry and replacing the stairs with ramps.

Radziner told me that, when he heard of these directives, he said to himself, “This is crazy. If someone wants everything different, just go build something else.”

Radziner knew Turrell a little and e-mailed him.

Turrell called right back.

Radziner recalled Turrell saying, “Kanye’s capable of doing good work. But I think what you have to do is just put it to him: ‘These are the things we’re willing to do. And these are the things we’re not.’ ”

Radziner told Ye that his firm would happily take out the cabinetry but was unable to do much more.

Ye didn’t reply.

When Censori summoned Saxon back to the house, a few hours after he’d left it, he was exhausted.

“I stink, I haven’t showered for two days,” he recalled. “I’m a lunatic.”

He drove back to Malibu, arriving in the early afternoon.

Ye was at the house; it had been a few weeks since his rebuff by Radziner.

According to Saxon, Ye told him, “I’ve heard a lot about you. You’re like a hurricane! I like you. I like your style.”

As they walked through the stripped rooms, Ye kept asking, “You got this out? You did this?”

He began to describe his plans for the house.

Saxon asked, “Are you telling me this hypothetically, or do you want me to do it?”

Ye wanted him to do it.

As Saxon saw it, “He was so sick of everyone around him.”

Saxon demurred; he didn’t have a company or a license.

He was just a dude with a minivan and some stamina.

“But he goes, ‘You can do it! Don’t give me that. You can do this! Don’t say no!’”

Recalling this, Saxon laughed. “Some inspiring shit!”

Saxon warmed to Ye, and not just because of the flattery.

“I’m not in any way familiar with his music,” he told me. “But I kind of got him. We are very similar in a lot of ways.”

Saxon had been given his own bipolar diagnosis and detected in Ye some similar behaviors.

Later, after they got to know each other a little, Saxon brought this up. “I’m, like, ‘Are you on medication for it? I just started taking it a couple of months ago, and it fucking helped me.’ ”

Ye suggested that Saxon wear black and told him to be discreet: there were no permits for work on the house.

Saxon’s storytelling, like Ye’s, can digress, and his experience on Malibu Road, which lasted about six weeks, is now the subject of his lawsuit, which centers on alleged underpayment and a back injury.

But the outline of events is clear, and many of the details are confirmed by photographs and messages archived on Saxon’s phone.

Within a few days of that first meeting, Saxon had become something much closer to a project leader than to a day laborer.

He helped assemble a small crew by enlisting people he knew and a few outside contractors who’d been working at the house when he showed up.

Starting on the day he met Ye, Saxon didn’t go home for several weeks.

He found a mattress at the house; a friend later brought him some clothing in a trash bag, and his guitar.

Saxon began taking the house apart.

A coffee-table survey of Ando’s houses, to which Ando supplied a foreword, has the Sachs House on its cover.

The photograph was taken at the top of the wide outdoor staircase.

The photographer, facing the sea, was perhaps standing in the concrete hot tub.

Below, on the house’s main level, is the little courtyard.

To the left, two cylindrical stainless-steel chimney pipes, serving an indoor fireplace, run up the side of the house, rising several feet above the upper terrace.

The chimneys seem to quote a similar crowning gesture at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Saxon’s videos include one in which he’s helping topple one of the chimneys.

Another shows someone swinging a hammer at a bathroom’s black-and-white marble walls.

A third demonstrates how a handsome glass balustrade, the kind you’re almost bound to find in a modern museum, shatters into windshield fragments when you tap its corner with a sledgehammer.

In a fourth, Saxon and another man are demolishing the hot tub with two jackhammers.

“There was so much rebar in the concrete,” Saxon told me. “It was absolutely brutal.”

Saxon had been hired to carve an oceanside Turrell out of an angular fifty-seven-million-dollar Ando.

Ye revealed to Saxon—although not all at once—that he wanted no kitchen, bathrooms, A.C., windows, light fixtures, or heating.

He was intent on cutting off the water and the power (and removing the house’s cable and wiring, which ran through the concrete in plastic tubes).

He talked of clarity, simplicity, and a kind of self-reliance.

“He wanted everything to be his own doing,” Saxon told me.

In one cheerful text from Ye to Saxon, in response to a report of the day’s demolition, he wrote, “Let’s gooooo . . . Simple fresh and cleeeeeean.”

Saxon says that he negotiated a fee of twenty thousand dollars a week and agreed to disburse additional funds to pay colleagues and buy materials. Initially, he slept in a corner of the main floor, beneath where the Condo once hung. The glass on the staircase side was gone, but the big ocean-facing windows were still intact, and the weather was mild. The spot gave him a view of the front door. Saxon felt exposed to possible intruders. Once, he had to chase out a couple of young Ye fans, who appeared to be live-streaming.

On Instagram, Saxon posted giddy, look-at-my-life content. In one such video, he sits on the wide indoor staircase, accompanying himself on the guitar in a resonant rendition of Smiley Lewis’s 1955 hit, “I Hear You Knocking.”

A caption reads, “Acoustics are too good at my new friend’s house.”

Another video is captioned, “I take rich people showers now.”

His impulse to amass half-ironic selfies, taken against a preposterous backdrop of ocean and concrete, is understandable, and it’s one that he shared with the occupants of the Big Ando nearby.

(Maria Bell, posting on Instagram around the same time: “Another album cover . . . My solo is entitled ‘Girl Brush your Hair.’ ”)

At first, Saxon saw a fair amount of Ye.

One morning, before dawn, Ye drove Saxon and another worker to Home Depot, and then to McDonald’s, in a Lamborghini S.U.V.

Some hours later, Ye announced that he was offended by how Saxon looked and smelled after a long day of labor, and took him to the Nobu hotel, in Malibu, where he had a room.

He gave Saxon some clothes and ran a bath for him.

“My jaw is, like, on the floor,” Saxon recalled. “He’s drawing the water. He goes, ‘You will never forget this moment.’ I said, ‘Damn right I will not.’ We were cracking up.”

On another day, Kardashian visited Malibu Road, with some of the children, or perhaps all four—Saxon isn’t sure.

He recalled helping the kids find foam blocks, from the ramp project, to play with.

He also said that one of his colleagues, arriving at the house, glanced at Kardashian and said, distractedly, “Oh, hello, Bianca.”

(There is a resemblance.)

After the family had left, Ye put his forehead on Saxon’s shoulder and groaned, “Why would your boy say that? She’s the most famous woman on earth!”

Saxon, apologizing, said of his friend, “He’s old.” (A few weeks later, Kardashian hosted “Saturday Night Live,” which led to a relationship with the cast member Pete Davidson. Ye later threatened Davidson with violence.)

Over the next weeks, even as Saxon’s experience rewarded him with moments of exhilaration, as well as a considerable income, his sense that he could handle anything was increasingly tested.

Before long, there was no kitchen in the house and nowhere else to keep food.

Dust got into everything.

Saxon and his colleagues knocked out all five bathrooms.

Nighttime temperatures dropped.

He had to placate the neighbors, who, he was relieved to learn, were rarely at home during the week, and he tried to remain invisible to city authorities: he couldn’t have a dumpster out front, and when the bathrooms were gone he had to hide a porta-potty.

As Censori once patiently explained to Ye, in a group text where he’d shown impatience, “No permitting increases caution.”

Saxon told me, “I was functioning like the sick-raccoon rock-and-roller that I am—just living off of Ensure and Red Bull.”

(He contends that Ye insisted he stay at the house; others say that it was his choice.)

Saxon felt trapped by his night-watchman role and slept poorly.

A big wave would crash, he recalled, “and I’d think somebody was breaking into the house.”

A seagull pecked at him.

He recalled once waking to Ye standing over him and saying, “I thought you’d be working.”

A worker at the beach house destroys a glass balustrade. Video courtesy Tony Saxon

By the end of October, demolition was largely complete.

The process had been interrupted by only occasional moments of confusion.

Once, Saxon thought that he was following Ye’s instructions by smashing up the fire pit in the courtyard.

He sent Ye a photograph of the pit reduced to a circular stump.

“This is not a good job brother,” Ye texted.

He’d wanted Saxon to take out the living-room fireplace instead.

It hardly mattered: all of it had to go.

The project was now starting to focus on additions and enhancements.

Saxon found this phase more fraught; it required engineering—and some planning.

What did Ye want?

Writing to Censori, Saxon observed how odd it was that, “no matter how tight we are with Ye,” they remained unsure of his intentions.

He added, “It’s always an adventure.”

Censori replied, “LMAOOO I know isn’t it crazy.”

Saxon developed a solidarity with Censori born of these conditions.

He encouraged Ye to have her take on a larger role at Malibu Road; in turn, she helped Saxon compose texts to Ye, who had complained of verbiage.

(“I don’t read long text,” he texted.)

Saxon and Censori once had a jokey exchange about marrying, to allow her to stay in the U.S. legally.

Censori: “I’ll get the best wedding dress.”

She added a bride emoji. Saxon: “Fine but we need to have an Elvis impersonator.”

Censori: “Obviously!!!!”

Ye could become distracted.

On the visit to Home Depot to buy tools, he’d spent an age trying to learn who had lined up plant pots in an appealing way.

A sales assistant shrugged.

“Well, I want their number,” Ye said, according to Saxon.

“That’s how I want my plants to look.”

(They didn’t buy any tools.)

While the Sachs House was being transformed, Ye was busy: making post-release changes to “Donda”; running a fashion empire; preparing to open a private school, the Donda Academy, west of L.A.; and reviving his Sunday Service concerts, built around a gospel choir, which he’d begun a few years earlier.

On October 28th, the Friday before the first of these concerts, which was to be held at a downtown warehouse that had been rented for Ye’s Gap business, Censori texted Saxon, “Wowwww so I’m on a 17 hour car ride from Portugal to Paris with Ye.”

(Ye has said that he couldn’t fly directly to Paris that week because he’d received only one covid vaccination shot.)

The road trip was “slightly torture,” she said, but she was grateful to have been included.

She asked Saxon whether he knew anyone who could procure a “giant sphere.”

A new text: “By Sunday.”

She meant for the L.A. concert.

She then sent a photograph of “Unseen Seen,” by James Turrell, installed in a museum in Tasmania.

It’s a sphere that accommodates two people at a time: after signing a waiver, they lie on their backs and are bombarded by colored light.

That weekend’s Sunday Service—attended by, among others, Marilyn Manson, Justin Bieber, and Tony Saxon—appears to have been held without a sphere.

A few weeks earlier, Saxon had shown Ye a part of the Malibu Road house that he’d never seen before.

In the garage, Saxon opened a hatch in the floor, then led Ye down a ladder into a space that, although on the same level as the laundry and the lower-floor bedrooms, couldn’t be accessed from there, and was basement-like in its lack of natural light.

As Saxon recalled it, he explained to Ye, “Look, there’s your water purifier. There’s your A.C. systems, there’s your boiler, there’s your water softener. You know, this is the guts of the house.” Ye, looking around, replied, “This is going to be my bomb shelter. This is going to be my Batcave.”

Ye’s hopes for the house, at least at this moment, call to mind the Atlanta stadium setup.

There’d be a cell-like capsule to provide for some basic human needs, from which one could emerge into a big, semipublic space that was open to the sky.

This was a vision less of a home than of a refuge within a striking concrete art work.

One of the people on the project had discussions with disaster-proofing specialists.

Ye sent Saxon various drawings showing an arrangement of amenities within a small space.

One image contained spherical and ovoid objects—“cooker,” “pump,” “fridge”—but no mattress.

Another included three crates, a “flat pack shower,” and a “robot platform.”

Ye wrote, “Let’s make this in real life.”

Saxon texted, “I love this—it’s genius,” but he had no idea what he was meant to do.

There were similarly desultory exchanges about recycling rainwater and cutting a hole in the floor to make a toilet.

Ye remained adamant about disconnecting the house from the grid; he also opposed installing solar panels.

In Saxon’s view, it would be unpleasant (and loudly indiscreet) to operate tools like concrete mixers using gas or diesel generators.

Ye was unsympathetic.

His usual boosterish tone—“What’s up, brother? Good morning. I love you. Let’s get this shit done,” in Saxon’s summary—gave way to peevishness: “Why is there still power here?”

By the start of November, no work had begun on the ramps, or slides, that had always been a part of Ye’s conception.

Although Ye had been open to the idea that paint could blur the difference between concrete and wood, Saxon recalled him recognizing that the foam had looked shoddy on the stairs.

Saxon had then asked an acquaintance to design a ramp scheme.

A rendering, which Saxon forwarded to Ye, featured new walls and a slide made of stainless steel, like in a playground.

Ye didn’t like it.

On November 5th, Censori sent, in a chat, three renderings of a concrete ramp with Ando-style tie holes.

Ye, in another chat, wrote, “When will this be done? I’ve been asking for this for over a month.”

He had bought a house designed by an architect with a history of staircase panache.

The Big Ando has a dazzling, thirty-six-foot-wide outdoor staircase on which you could reënact “Battleship Potemkin.”

But, in 2023, a lawsuit brought by former teachers at the Donda Academy, which shut down soon after it opened, claimed that Ye had discouraged the use of the second floor—because he was “afraid of stairs.”

That may not be true, but he certainly had no regard for stairs.

On what may be the only occasion when Ye has publicly mentioned events at Malibu Road, he told a pair of podcasters that he was “really big on outlawing stairs,” adding, “Everything should be designed like an old folks’ home.”

The ramps that Ye proposed for Malibu Road appeared to be at least four times as steep as any allowed by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and they would have ended not far from the edge of a terrace that, during the demolition process, lost its balustrade.

Someone descending the ramp from the primary bedroom on, say, a skateboard, could expect to shoot off the edge and land some thirty feet below, on the beach.

Another rendering, sent along with the concrete-ramp images, showed a room turned into an unambiguously Turrell-like space, with a large hole cut into its ceiling.

By this point, Saxon was feeling unwell and unhappy: he says that his payments had stopped arriving and that his co-workers were maneuvering to sideline him.

It seems possible that Ye had come to recognize that Saxon, for all his virtues, was unqualified to run an ill-defined project in experimental engineering.

On November 5th, Saxon shared with Ye a link to a 1958 recording of “When I’ve Done My Best,” by the Harmonizing Four.

Not long after, Saxon drove to meet Ye at the Gap building downtown.

(Ye would later be sued for changes he’d allegedly made to this rental: according to the suit, bathrooms had been removed, and a ramp and a tunnel added.)

Ye and Saxon had a fight—about money, electricity, and Saxon’s apparent reluctance to take out the ocean-facing windows in the living room.

In Saxon’s memory, Ye said, “If you don’t do what I asked you to do, I’m not going to be your friend anymore. You’re not going to work for me anymore. And you’re only going to see me on TV.”

Saxon told Ye that he didn’t watch TV.

“And then I walked the fuck out.”

When Ye’s fifth studio album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” was released, in 2010, it was almost universally received as a masterpiece.

A few years later, Ye gave an interview to BBC Radio 1. “‘Dark Fantasy’ could be considered to be perfect,” he said. “I know how to make perfect, but that’s not what I’m here to do. I’m here to crack the pavement and make new grounds sonically and in society—culturally.”

If Ye’s decision-making on Malibu Road shows evidence of incomplete thinking about, among other things, certificates of occupancy, toilets, and the challenge of being a global celebrity in a windowless house on a public beach, it also doesn’t look like a project of heedless destruction.

One can allow that not every aesthetic rebellion yields art of value, and also recognize that a jackass is sometimes just a jackass—to borrow President Obama’s appraisal of Ye—and not an iconoclast.

But Malibu Road was at least an attempt at radical design.

In 2021, Ye had a core architectural team of three people—Censori, Tanil Raif, and Abe Salman—all of whom were still in their twenties.

Ye spent much of his time with them, travelled with them, and talked with them about developing an architecture of “primitive futurism” or “neo-primitivism.”

He was a student among recent students.

Ye’s circumstances were, of course, weird: other architectural apprentices experiment with 3-D-modelling software; he did his experimenting on a three-story Ando.

Yet his public remarks, as well as his actions, have the strengths, and weaknesses, of a spirited young designer.

“I’m very into architecture, but I’m not into the class system,” Ye said in 2021.

Housing, he observed, was just another form of control; the idea of being “homeless on purpose” interested him.

Speaking to the podcasters in 2022, Ye said that he’d wanted to “look at the bones” of the Sachs House—to strip away “compromises” that he supposed had been forced on Ando by his client.

“To get this house, and be able to just take everything out—it was, you know, extremely therapeutic.”

He once told Saxon, “Ando would love this. I can’t wait to show him everything we did. He would love this.”

(A representative of Ando’s recently told me that Ando “does not like to talk much about the House in Malibu” and declined further comment.)

A few months after Saxon left, Ye met with Kulapat Yantrasast, the former Ando architect, and took him to Malibu Road.

Work had continued for a while after Saxon left—Ye persuaded someone to remove the big windows—but then everything had stopped.

(The City of Malibu recently acknowledged that, on December 21st, it issued the first of three stop-work orders on the house, because construction had been done without permits.)

Yantrasast approved of what he saw.

Or, at least, he didn’t mourn what had been lost.

“The classics cannot stay stable for too long—they become complacent,” he told me.

Ye soon became a client of Yantrasast’s.

In the following months, they talked of other projects, and Ye expressed interest in buying the Big Ando.

Yantrasast and Ye returned to Malibu Road several times.

“He wanted to understand how this concrete structure could be enhanced,” Yantrasast said. “Not brought back to how it was, but become completely different, in a way that was very raw.”

Ye and Bianca Censori, his wife. An Australian, Censori studied architecture at the University of Melbourne.

He went on, “I have to say, I really admire what Ye was trying to do.”

As Yantrasast saw it, Ye had used Ando “as a base to build his own language of architecture.”

Inside the Hidden Hills house, Ye had worked to “reduce and reduce and reduce,” and had then understood “that the next step is to really go to the primal rawness.”

Yantrasast said that he’d been reminded of the end of Robert Altman’s film “Prêt-à-Porter,” when a fashion designer sends naked models out on the runway.

Toward the end of 2022, Ye made the antisemitic and pro-Nazi remarks that destroyed his business empire.

Adidas dropped him, describing his comments as “unacceptable, hateful and dangerous.”

(Ye eventually released a general statement of apology, in Hebrew.)

According to estimates made by Forbes, his net worth fell from two billion dollars to four hundred million.

He could no longer afford the Big Ando.

In December, 2022, Ye posted on Instagram a song called “Censori Overload.”

(It included a sample from an interview he’d just given to Alex Jones, of Infowars, in which he’d praised Hitler.)

The next month, Ye and Censori were photographed out together, as an apparent couple.

It was later reported that they had already married.

Censori has since become known to tabloids in part for a wardrobe whose near-nude minimalism also brings to mind Altman’s concluding scene.

Last year, she and Ye were seen with Turrell, waiting for valet parking outside a lobster restaurant in Santa Monica.

They were also photographed at Ando’s Chichu Art Museum, on Naoshima.

In May, 2023, the Bells sold the Big Ando to Beyoncé and Jay-Z, for a hundred and ninety million dollars—the most ever paid for a house in California.

A Ye-oriented Reddit thread introduced that news by quoting from “Big Brother,” Ye’s 2007 track about the mixture of rivalry and respect in his relationship with Jay-Z:

“I told Jay I did a song with Coldplay / Next thing I know he got a song with Coldplay.”

Architectural fame doesn’t guarantee respect.

Americans have demolished houses by Frank Lloyd Wright and Marcel Breuer.

Last year, Chris Pratt, the actor, and his wife, Katherine Schwarzenegger, a self-help writer, bought a house in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles designed by Craig Ellwood, an admired mid-century architect.

They knocked it down and began building something five times as large.

In the nineties, a Pacific Palisades house designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen—working together, as part of the now celebrated mid-century Case Study experiment in residential architecture—was sold to a man who built a mansion inches from its face.

The Case Study house lost its wide view of the ocean, becoming an annex joined to its blocky new neighbor by a corridor.

It’s hard, however, to think of another esteemed house that’s been left exposed to the elements, and to the public’s gaze, after being jackhammered halfway to ruins.

Saxon told me, “It’s funny—and not funny, in a way—to say, ‘I’m the man who single-handedly destroyed this architectural masterpiece.’ But I pretty much did.”

Ron Radziner recalled the first time he saw photographs of the changes made to the Sachs House.

“We were all devastated,” he said. “It was this beautiful piece of architecture, and it’s really destroyed.”

Toward the end of last year, he heard again from Ye’s office.

In Radziner’s recollection, he was asked “to put it all back together.” He expressed interest. He told me, “I’d be thrilled to have the opportunity to bring it all the way back.”

Radziner gave Ye an estimate. (He declined to share the figure with me, beyond acknowledging that it exceeded ten million dollars.) As before, Ye didn’t reply. “The next thing we heard is the house was on the market.”

In December, the news broke that the Malibu Road house was being listed by the Oppenheim Group, which is both a real-estate brokerage and the setting of the hit reality show “Selling Sunset,” on Netflix. The Oppenheim Group listing used the same photographs that Sachs had used when selling it: balustrades, sun loungers, windows. Ye’s asking price was fifty-three million dollars.

In February, I spoke to Jason Oppenheim, who runs the company with his twin brother, Brett. Jason gamely tried to close the gap between that imagery and the cavernous reality. Stress-testing real-estate rhetoric, he argued that an Ando structure is “ninety per cent concrete” and that what has been lost on Malibu Road is “just, really, finish work,” which was already a decade old and ripe for replacement. “So you’re going to be getting, essentially, a brand-new Ando.”

As he noted, Ando is in his eighties, and one can’t just call him up to ask for a design. The house was a “collectible”—all the more so because of the Ye connection. A buyer would be inheriting from two cultural giants. “I don’t know if there’s a more interesting story behind a house,” Oppenheim said. “It’s exciting that you get to be the third iteration. You’re following Ando and West, and then you’re getting to put your stamp on it.”

Oppenheim conceded that it’s hard to think of plumbing, power, and windows as “finish.” There were plans, he said, to do some work on the house if it didn’t sell quickly. “I do think that windows and doors will allow it to be received better,” he said. He estimated that a full renovation, making the house habitable, might take eighteen to twenty-four months and cost “plus-or-minus five million.” (He later said that it was definitely plus.) When I asked Oppenheim about the stainless-steel chimneys, whose demolition had altered the silhouette of the house, he seemed surprised: “I don’t recall any chimney being removed.”

It was a sluggish time in the “ultra-lux” market, Oppenheim said. He did not rule out the idea that Ye’s torn-up house might appear on “Selling Sunset.”

A few days later, I walked along the beach in Malibu. It was around high tide, when you’re forced to pass right by the pillars that support the houses looming over you; you’re close enough to read sour, threatening little signs urging you to go away. Waves occasionally reached beneath Ye’s house. On a narrow staircase that leads down to the sand, the bottom six or seven steps were wet.

Up on Malibu Road, it looked as though someone had attempted to force open the freestanding concrete mailbox in front of the house, near where Saxon had once tried to hide a porta-potty. But the street-facing side of the house was otherwise in unaltered condition and delivered the usual Ando contrast of high precision—holes and lines—and the subtle disorder of the concrete’s shading, with bruises of dark gray, or yellowish gray, set against paler gray.

On the Pacific side of the beach house, where there were once windows and glass balustrades, safety barriers have been installed. They’ve quickly rusted, and the floor beneath them—made of concrete, Ando’s signature material—is now stained red.Photograph by Spencer Lowell for The New Yorker

Inside, I was surprised by the loudness of the surf—even in the dim vestibule where the aluminum Ando statue used to stand. In an empty house with no windows, the sound of the ocean filled every room. Underfoot, the original tiles had been hammered out, and so had the cables and pipes that were once embedded beneath. The floor was now rough concrete, covered in cavities and trenches, like a road that had been chewed up by a milling machine ahead of a resurfacing.

I looked around for half an hour. The seagulls kept their distance. The sun shone. Oppenheim was not quite wrong: the house was still here, in a way that another architect’s work might not be, given Ye’s thoroughness and more than two years of salt and rain. But the fireplace was now a hole between the living room and the courtyard; the concrete hot tub was just a scar. The staircases were as pitted as the floors. It was a scene of violence, even if you could still identify the spot where Sachs once hung a Cindy Sherman. The walls often showed where someone had aimed a blow at a closet or a sheet of marble but instead hit smooth concrete, contributing a rogue mark to Ando’s tie-hole pattern. At some point, on the beach side of the house, where there were once windows and glass balustrades, safety barriers were installed. They quickly rusted, and the concrete beneath them was stained red.

Downstairs, an internal concrete wall, which once stood between a bedroom and its bathroom, lay on the floor in fragments, with rebar poking out of it—I saw this against a backdrop of perfectly blue sky, suggesting an Anselm Kiefer sculpture on vacation. I walked through the former laundry into the control room. Almost no daylight reached this corner, and there was no cross-breeze to dry it out. I was splashing through an inch or two of standing water that looked gray in the dim light. Ye’s Batcave was on the other side of the wall in front of me.

In mid-April, he reduced the price to thirty-nine million dollars. ♦

[internationalrealestatenews]

[ad_1] The Influence of the Pandemic on Hire: How Renters are Coping The COVID-19 pandemic has caused important adjustments to many features of our lives, together with the housing market. As companies closed and hundreds of thousands misplaced their jobs, many renters have struggled to make ends meet and pay their lease. This has led to a rising disaster for renters throughout the nation, with many going through the specter of eviction and homelessness. One of the fast impacts of the pandemic on lease has been the lack of revenue for a lot of renters. As companies shut down and other people misplaced their jobs, the power to pay lease turned a serious concern. Based on a survey carried out by Condominium Record, 32% of renters reported that they have been unable to pay their lease in full for at the least one of many months between April and July 2020. This has left many renters struggling to make ends meet and has led to mounting lease arrears. In response to the monetary pressure brought on by the pandemic, many renters have turned to their landlords for help. Some have been profitable in negotiating lease reductions, deferrals, or fee plans with their landlords. Others have been in a position to entry monetary help by way of authorities packages, resembling rental help funds or eviction moratoriums. Nonetheless, these measures haven't been universally efficient, and plenty of renters proceed to face monetary hardship and the specter of eviction. To deal with the influence of the pandemic on lease, some renters have needed to make important changes to their dwelling conditions. Many have needed to downsize to cheaper housing choices, transfer in with household or buddies, and even develop into homeless. These adjustments have had a profound influence on the psychological and emotional wellbeing of renters, as they grapple with the uncertainty and instability of their housing scenario. Regardless of the challenges they face, some renters have discovered methods to adapt and cope within the face of the pandemic. Some have taken on further work to make ends meet, whereas others have embraced frugal dwelling and have reduce on bills. Some have even turned to inventive options, resembling subletting their residences or turning to short-term leases to generate further revenue. Because the pandemic continues to unfold, it's clear that the influence on lease can be felt for a while. Renters will proceed to face monetary hardship and the specter of eviction, even because the financial system begins to recuperate. It's essential for policymakers, landlords, and neighborhood organizations to return collectively to offer help and help to renters in want. This will embrace extending eviction moratoriums, offering monetary help, and creating reasonably priced housing choices for these in want. In conclusion, the pandemic has had a major influence on lease, leaving many renters struggling to make ends meet. Whereas some have been in a position to adapt and deal with the challenges, many proceed to face monetary hardship and the specter of eviction. It's important for all stakeholders to return collectively to offer help and help to renters in want throughout this difficult time. [ad_2]

[n0resistance]

Bedstuy

    I think my favorite area in Brooklyn will always be Bedstuy. When I first moved back to Brooklyn, I moved to Bushwick. I found a room online, because I only lasted about 2 weeks living with my parents. In this new apartment, I-didn’t have a bed yet, 3 roommates lived with me, and there was no AC, right in the beginning of June. When I moved to Brooklyn from LA, I was lucky enough to have a savings but I was a month late in getting a job. Where all the good hospitality jobs in the summer are all hired by June 1st. 

    It was difficult but I was happy to have my dog back, finally a twin bed from amazon, and an opening to a hotel serving job. I tried a bunch of different serving jobs, they weren’t quite paying the bills, so I had to drop one by one until I found consistency. Also the sublet I had was totally falling apart, and when the roommates asked me to extend, I declined, I was hustling hard for something better, with a lot of rejections. My old friend sent me a text while I was on the subway “are you still looking for a room”. I texted back right away “yes!”. 

    I saw the place, and there was beef between the previous roommates, whom I never met. My room was small, and the closet was very tiny, but I liked the patio area and having the ability to sit outside. I loved the exposed brick, that there were 2 bathrooms, hardwood floors, and central air after dying without AC. I asked where we were located and my friend said “Bushwick”, she told me the price of the room was $750, and I took it. 

    It was 2 weeks later that I found we lived in Bedstuy. My other friend moved down the block, just a street away. I said we lived in Bushwick, and she corrected me that we were in Bedstuy, I kept saying no it’s Bushwick. She goes - Do you wana live in Bushwick?  I didn’t care where it was. I was just told something different. We totally were living in Bedstuy. It was 2019. I first was working at a hotel called Sister City, that came from the Ace Hotel Group. The money wasn’t really good and had to quit, and became an Assistant Front Office Manager at a hotel down the block in Nolita. That kind of job pays okay, but not enough, so I ended up getting a job at the Biergarten at the Standard Hotel as well. Where I finally felt like I was making enough money. 

    The years I spent in Bedstuy got blurry because 2020 had occurred and we all lost our jobs for about 6 months. Thankfully I received unemployment. Spent days hanging with friends, biking to the beach, and taking care of my family. Everyone got sick which was traumatizing, as well as I was going through a breakup, and falling in love all over again. I got close with my roommates and my friend who lived a block away because we weren’t able to talk to anybody else. 

    I had thin walls where even though I wanted to spend time a lone, I felt like I was in conversation with my roommates in the living room. Only a 15 min bike ride away from Williamsburg and  I was a server on the roof of a hotel in Williamsburg. I did a virtual play as well as host my events in Brooklyn. 

   Blogging began again here. I painted my room Blue with a landscape of Buenos Aires, my dream city I’ve never been to. My wall fell down in January of 2021 which was totally scary. Because even though this was a modern apartment, it was decaying on the inside. My dog got sick, the signs was that he completely stopped eating, and then he died of old age while I was living there.

     I grew from the age of 28 to 31 in that apartment. I traveled a lot. Started with little trips like Boston, Upstate, Long Beach Island, then to Dominican Republic, California a few times, Mexico, Belize, Miami, Las Vegas, Nashville, Seattle. The winters were bad in New York, where depression would hit. I also learned a lot about boundaries, and not feeling the need to people please finally, and learning to keep my circle small. When I had money I would treat my nephews with lavish gifts including hotel rooms in New York, a bouncey house, and a piano keyboard.

 I worked in Manhattan and it was a nice medium. I met a boy in Jersey City. We kept separate apartments him in JC and me in Bedstuy, until the rent went up $400 per room a month. So I moved to Jersey City. I had to do my last things to do in Bedstuy; chill in Herbert Von King Park and eat tacos at Warude. Get a drink at Chilos or the rolling creamery near the house. I made a lot and would spend a lot. My rent was a bit more living a lone and I was still in a somewhat a fast life. 

   I dated two guys in that apartment, and went through 4 jobs, different projects. It was sustainable. I learned standards with that apartment and will always have a deep love for Brooklyn and living here.  Bedstuy doesn’t feel pretentious and some interesting things like a bird and Laundry machine store. Cages of birds to sell and laundry machines. It’s not really cheap but not as expensive as Manhattan. There’s amazing arepa truck on Broadway, a 24 hour juice spot, filipino breakfast with Ube lattes, an astrology bar. It gets weird and fun and I’ll always be into a chill vibe now that New York is home. I remember leaving and a tattoo shop just opened next door. It’s a feeling in this part of town and there will always be a big part of me who feels she grew up in Bedstuy. Because I had to start over, had to heal, and had to grow. Thankfully I did it all there.

[ivorypidgeon]

FASHION & SHELTER

Before you can speak, you must hide your nakedness.

In 2023, rent and house prices reached an all-time high while earnings, for the most part, remained stagnant. As houses have been amalgamated from commodities to investment opportunities, 

young people worldwide have entered a state of chaos - 

the housing crisis. 

In recent times, we have become acquainted with many- a-crisis yet 

the housing crisis has always struck me as the most painful, the most wincing. 

A grievance, I have personally understood, having previously made a house out of other’s beds, couches, sublets, train stations and floors.

There is no big mystery as to why many people do not have homes, housing is not a human right 

and the people who could help - aren’t helping.

Aside, the concept of the home is changing. 

The would being increasingly digital, - our sense of self has become fragmented across physical and online spaces, tour physical environment does not dictate much about our identity, 

now more than ever.

Many have found abstracted forms of security online, 

seeking refuge in digital personas.

Groups that were once pushed to the fringes of society, now blossom with hives of users worldwide providing a sense of community that often cannot be found locally. Newer parts of mainstream culture show this trend - veganism, incels, anime, alternative medicine, and meme culture are all at the forefronts of Internet culture - simultaneously occupying and competing with a million other societies.

Most would agree that a home needs a sense of belonging, safety, and security. 

Shelter must affirm our sense of belonging and hide us from danger.

In this context, young people can find these senses within the digital world and aim to replicate the experience in real life.

The physical becomes the temporary present, 

the digital becomes the aspirational future. 

In this context, fashion’s penetration into the post-Internet psyche has taken on a new significance, 

as it not only serves as a means of self-expression but also as a way to connect our physical and digital worlds. Through its visual nature, fashion has become a way to curate and self-promote our idealised online personas, 

allowing us to create a somewhat cohesive and consistent image across both our physical and digital worlds. 

By embracing fashion as a means of connection, we could further bridge the gap between both planes of existence, and create a more integrated sense of identity in the digital age.

Fashion, as it stands, in the current day is heavily centred on persona, identity and image than ever before. 

Brands no longer compete in the space of billboards and magazines but in between photos of your friend’s latest dog update and videos of your brother’s wedding.

In the online arena, brands use these to communicate to buyers and potentials that if they were a person, this is where they would spend their free time, this is what they eat, these are their friends and they’re as real as you and I. 

Balenciaga is an edgy friend from Berlin, and Gucci is a cousin that just discovered cottagecore.

Is this nefarious or just an evolution of how we already associate brands?

On that point, young people who grew up with the Internet have used fashion to develop different personalities and interests, fashion becomes an entry point for subcultures to be entered and returned to with little to no friction. 

You’re excused for buying the Off-White safety belt in 2014, a skateboard in 2016, or the dress -that-must-not-be-named in 2020.

You weren’t entirely a victim of marketing, you were probably just bored.

You don’t necessarily need to drive to the furthest thrift store in your town and ask for old flannels and mud-stained jeans anymore. You can buy them on Amazon

and be grunge for a day. 

And tomorrow, you can dress like Paris Hilton.

The average person is buying 60 per cent more clothing than 15 years ago, while each item is kept for only half as long.

All this spending on clothes…

Do appearances really matter that much?

Within seconds of meeting a person, the brain already picks apart their body, body language, their mouth, speech, their eyes, and eye contact. 

A study by Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov, titled "First Impressions: Making Up Your Mind After a 100-Ms Exposure to a Face" 

found that people make judgments about someone's personality based on their physical appearance within just 100 milliseconds of seeing their face. 

The researchers found that people are more likely to perceive someone as 

trustworthy, competent, and likeable if they have an attractive appearance. 

Another study by Hajo Adam and Adam D. Galinsky found that people consistently judge others based on their clothing choices. 

The researchers found that people make assumptions about someone's personality, social status, and even their job based on the clothing they wear. 

The study also demonstrated how wearing different types of clothing can affect a person's behaviour, confidence, and performance on tasks, concluding that clothing can have a symbolic meaning, affecting a person's psychological state and cognition.

Then we say, appearance matters. 

And does our fashion affirm our identities or hide our true selves?

Does the soldier who wears his army uniform to Walmart wear the uniform to affirm his identity as a symbol of service or to hide his disconnection from civilian life?

Likewise, does a sorority sister dress like her friends to affirm that she belongs in her community

or to hide her personality?

Similarly, shelter operates to hide the true self from the outside world. 

Even in The Fall of Man, after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, 

they become aware of their nakedness and feel shame. In an attempt to conceal their bodies, they hid from God, hastily fashioning cloths from fig leaves. 

Then they were banished, to leave their idyllic home of the Garden of Eden for the wilderness.

In this way, fashion works like shelter, to affirm and to hide.

At home, you can hide. At home, you can be yourself.

I had these thoughts over the course of 13 days as I entered a whirlwind cacophony adventure to rent a room in the East End. The landlord, ‘a true geezer’ named Boris, no, Dave, no, Dan,

 a 65-year-old toddling man Cayman Islands resident with 100 names that led to no end.

The house was a beautiful yet dilapidating Victorian build. A real charmer, yet a husk of what was once probably very beautiful, now clad with peeling wallpaper, cobwebs, and about a thousand health and safety violations.

Boris, Dave, or Dan (whatever his name was) summoned my newfound Spareroom pen pals and me with No Caller ID, then insisted we pay a deposit upon entry. His wife in a long hooded puffer jacket sat in the corner chewing her fingernails, swearing that despite the heating not working, us not coughing up a deposit would be a terrible thing for us.

After demanding heating, we were ghosted and left back on the property search hoopla, which had already been 4 months of web-surfing, bidding wars, and cosying up with the sleaziest real estate agents you could imagine.

I eventually found my place, pulling up to the viewing with all my belongings in bags - 

demanding that the room was mine, and not leaving until every paper was signed.

In the weeks leading up to this article being written, I met Kieran* near Whitechapel Station. 

Kieran had been living without a home for nearly 6 months.

I told him about my essay and he told me how his clothes had played a crucial role in his daily life.

Wearing multiple layers meant storage and staying warm during cold nights. 

A hoodie or a beanie, could help him blend in with the crowd and avoid being harassed by police.

The clothes he got from local shelters and community organisations, had let him go to some job interviews without a worry.

He said that when he was first homeless, he felt like he had lost himself. 

He just got a favourite jacket and he wore it almost every day, which made him feel more confident and more like himself. 

Without a house, clothing is not just a matter of practicality but also a source of 

comfort and self-expression. 

Ultimately, fashion in the present day is more than a tool. It is an important aspect of our identity, our self-worth and our feeling of belonging within a world that can sometimes feel ever so outside of our reach. 

Ultimately, our understanding of this will allow us to fulfil deeper connections with our objects as we, consciously or not, already place a high level of significance on their relation with our lives.

I close this essay to thank everyone that gave me shelter. 

Every girlfriend’s room,

every friend’s failed sublet, 

every train operator,

every couch,

every floor, 

every shed,

every floor.

I am grateful now to have a place I can call my own.

Thank you.

Editor’s Note

According to The Tower Hamlets Council, Kieran* is now living in a council estate in Stepney Green.

His name has been changed in this article to respect his privacy and his account has been given with written consent.

For the remainder of the year, I have decided to support Crisis UK, a non-profit organisation that provides housing and support for people experiencing homelessness. To show my commitment, I will be donating 10% of my salary to the organisation.

I strongly believe everyone deserves a place to call home. While donating money is not the only way to help, I hope that my donation can make a positive impact on someone's life. I encourage others to join me in supporting organisations like Crisis UK, as together we can work towards ending homelessness and building a better future for all.

1 Homelet. (2023). Homelet Rental Index. [online] Available at: https://homelet.co.uk/homelet-rental-index

2 Petrosyan, A. (2023). Digital population. Available: https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/ digital-population-worldwide/

3 Remy, N., Speelman, E., & Swartz, S. (2016, October 20). Style that’s sustainable: A new fast-fashion formula. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-insights/style-thats-sustainable-a-new-fast-fashion-formula