office magazine issue 5 - Maxine Ashley

December 27, 2016

Interview Marc Palatucci
Photography Jesper D. Lund
Styling Louise Borchers
Hair Dylan Chalves
Makeup Ozzy Salvatierra – Streeters
Manicure Marisa Carmichael – Streeters

Maxine Ashley

In the video for her single Lobster, Maxine paces in reverse through the stairwells and front rooms of an austere apartment complex, staring into the camera with a look of laidback menace, passing through groups of friends and family as they drink, smoke, and dance. Over loopy, muffled chimes and brittle percussion she sings with a rapper’s territorial swagger, announcing her presence and dismissing the haters. The sentiment is simple enough, but consider the context—she wrote the track while signed to one of the various labels she’s worked with since she was barely a teenager, labels she claims have been keeping most of her music captive. By Maxine’s account her official releases, which include collaborations with Grammy-winners Pharrell and Kerry “Krucial” Brothers, and range from mellow neo soul to raucous baile raps, represent a frustratingly small fraction of her output. So eventually she tore through the red tape and posted Lobster to her own YouTube channel. The industry suits threatened to get litigious, but a year later the video is still up, sitting on over 100,000 views and serving as a defiant statement of her intentions—buck the labels, stick with the people she loves and trusts, and finally, forcefully, seize ownership of her art.

Maxine sat with me in the courtyard of her weathered Hollywood highrise, airplanes and AC units droning overhead, to talk a little about where she’s come from, and where she’s at.

Interview

office magazine issue 5 - Harmony Korine

October 31, 2016

Introduction Marc Palatucci
Photography Stef Mitchell
Styling Zara Mirkin

Harmony Korine
in conversation with
James Franco

I’m trying to get Harmony on the phone. Rather, I’ve got him on the phone, but as I’m realizing with heart-wrenching panic, the overlapping recording apps I’ve opened to ensure I capture the conversation have created an echo chamber, parroting every word we speak in psychedelic recursion. Harmony’s too entertained to be fazed. We’ve arranged for him to talk with actor and artist James Franco, a recent collaborator of his, who mercifully has yet to join the call. Meanwhile Harmony ad libs with the eerie sound effects, amusing himself as I scramble to sort things out.

As a writer, director and artist, Harmony Korine loves to experiment with discomfort. His script for Kids, written for photographer and director Larry Clark after the two struck up a conversation in Washington Square Park, tracks a wayward group of downtown New York teens satisfying adolescent compulsions—fucking, fighting, getting high—with the looming dread of AIDS casting the story in a particularly harrowing light. The now infamous film, shot with convincing realism and released in 1995, made audiences squirm and kicked off Korine’s career with high-profile controversy. Over the next two decades he would write and direct about twenty projects, from shorts to features, continuing to polarize but often impressing critics and festival juries by sowing his oddly intimate brand of unease by casting non-actors, disarranging narrative structures, and providing insight into deranged and neglected pockets of America. With his most recent film, the backwater Florida crime caper Spring Breakers, he used guns, girls, and stars—including Franco, Selena Gomez and rapper Gucci Mane—to reach a more traditional viewership with a tale of bikini-clad party girls drawn in and quickly corrupted by a showy dope dealer. Though more garish and glamorized than his earlier work, the movie is characteristic of his canon—unsettling, bizarrely entertaining and sordidly human.

Minutes later our technical issues have been sorted, nerves have settled, James has joined us on the line and the audio is clear. But as I preface the call and do my best to gracefully settle into my role as eavesdropper, Harmony just can’t help but to make things weird, leaving me with a wry, discomfiting threat.

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