“You’re not scared of dogs, are you?” As Martine Rose greets me at her studio in Crouch Hill, North London her pit bull terrier, Ralph, knocks over a box of soursop tea and starts eating birthday candles. Fortunately, unruliness is a quality that Martine and the rest of the studio clearly find endearing. Demna Gvasalia, the creative director at Balenciaga who has tapped Martine to consult for his menswear collections, likened Ralph’s pronounced snout to an aerodynamic sports car. Martine reckons he looks more like a horse.

Moroccan-born Meriem Bennani is quickly establishing herself as one of her generation’s most prolific digital artists. At 30, she has already had shows at MoMA PS1, the Shanghai Biennial and London’s Serpentine Gallery, capturing critics and audiences alike with her immersive installations. Combining video and sculpture, Bennani projects her documentary videos onto numerous geometric forms, reflecting the constant stream of visual stimuli we encounter through our phones. Her work short-circuits the viewer’s attention by using a plethora of visual gags and cartoonish sound effects, fusing emoji-filled online imagery with stark offline realities. In her show at MoMA PS1, for example, a Rihanna-singing, CGI-animated fruit fly buzzed across numerous screens, serving as the guide to an internet-saturated, hyperglobalized Morocco. Gold pixels exploded at open-air markets, pedestrians suddenly multiplied, and video game-like sound effects blasted across family dinners. The result was a hilarious, immersive experience that awarded viewers the sensation of being inside a web browser with too many tabs left open.

When I ask if there were any obscure references that inspired her debut album, SOPHIE goes off on a series of tangents. “I’ve always liked Willy Wonka, but people already know that,” she tells me, motioning to her signature wavy ginger bob. “I was just reading a lot of books about octopus brains, like, the consciousness of octopi...the other book was Sapiens, do you know about that? And also books by this author Martine Rothblatt who writes about artificial intelligence, transhumanism and stuff like that.”

One of the first music videos I directed in the late ‘80s was for EPMD’s “Strictly Business”. I was early into hosting YO! MTV Raps at that time, the show that helped take hip-hop culture mainstream into homes coast to coast and around the world, if you paid that cable bill. 

It was on a couple guest verses on EPMD’s album Business as Usual that I first heard Redman, and I knew right away he was sure to blow up. Indeed he did, and today he’s one of hip-hop’s most respected rappers, with over two decades of albums, movies and TV shows under his belt, plus new music out and more projects in the works.

It had been a while since I’d seen Reggie Noble—aka Redman—so when director Diane Martel reached out and asked me to interview him I agreed, thus beginning a cross-country cat-and-mouse game to track him down. Luckily I had to travel to LA for some strictly business of the FAB kind—I finally found Redman at the home of his good friend, the music producer Tony DeNiro, and got the interview just in time.

A “battle vest,” also known as a “cut-off” or “battle jacket,” is a fetish object, a living fossil, a traveling reliquary, a pageantry of faith, a microsoil of ethanol, keratin grease, hemoglobin and tobacco tar. They have made their way through the disquieting orbits of biker, punk, heavy metal, gay, and S&M subcultures and further appropriations thereof. Yet the cultural history of this pop-noir, played out, and promiscuously circulated artefact is not where this article draws energy. Nor are the intrinsic connotations and overt salutations to death metal, black and thrash metal.

One of the first music videos I directed in the late ‘80s was for EPMD’s “Strictly Business”. I was early into hosting YO! MTV Raps at that time, the show that helped take hip-hop culture mainstream into homes coast to coast and around the world, if you paid that cable bill. 

It was on a couple guest verses on EPMD’s album Business as Usual that I first heard Redman, and I knew right away he was sure to blow up. Indeed he did, and today he’s one of hip-hop’s most respected rappers, with over two decades of albums, movies and TV shows under his belt, plus new music out and more projects in the works.

It had been a while since I’d seen Reggie Noble—aka Redman—so when director Diane Martel reached out and asked me to interview him I agreed, thus beginning a cross-country cat-and-mouse game to track him down. Luckily I had to travel to LA for some strictly business of the FAB kind—I finally found Redman at the home of his good friend, the music producer Tony DeNiro, and got the interview just in time.

Visiting John Giorno is like dropping in on an eccentric great uncle. He welcomes you with a kind grin, offering tea before settling into his armchair, stray rolling papers and a little hill of crumbled pot left out on the table beside him. His place is something of New York lore—a 19th Century-era former YMCA on the Bowery that he’s inhabited since the ‘60s, its lofts decorated with motley antiques and heirlooms, the preserved belongings of tenants past, and Giorno’s own colorful artworks.

There are countless cheesy TED Talks, poorly written airport books, and overpriced seminars about the sublime “power of yes.” An entire cottage industry has developed based on the belief that consistently answering in the affirmative can dramatically alter one’s life for the better— there’s even a mediocre movie about the concept, starring Jim Carrey and Zooey Deschanel.

The reporting game has one significant, indeed compelling plus, which is the intimate access it can allow to the significant event, the extraordinary individual. You soon learn that such individuals handle the spotlight in different ways, a few avidly—no names!—but almost all easily. I have spoken with none though as pleasantly offhand about their doings as Alex Honnold.

In short, if all matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes and oceans represented by a film of nematodes.