The Publics

Freelance Aristocrat: a decently educated, cultured individual who skips from metropole to metropole but rides the subway in every city he (or she) inhabits. These types are similar to the Monocle demographic, but stripped of their overpriced attachés, tailored shirts and contrived obsession with all things “design”. Magazines, marketers and brand engineers have sought to define and capitalize upon the traffic patterns of this overachieving global underclass, but those who fit the bill remain unaffected and unaffiliated.

Aran Darling, a Paris (via London, NYC & Vancouver)-based illustrator is about as close as one can get to achieving this vision of a free and easy sophisto-tramp lifestyle. He has a website, and it details his trans-continental adventures in a way that reads like a long lost sketchbook from a Grub Street poet. The following is a communiqué he sent me a few weeks back.

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Although it’s sold out at my favourite magazine spot, I’m pretty sure you can still pick up Adbusters #78 at select stores throughout whatever city you may be living in. If not, there is of course, always, les internets. I wrote a couple articles for the issue as well as an untitled piece of speculative short fiction. The story explores our intensifying relationship with the ‘net and the increasingly bizarre forms of social interaction that taking place all over the web.

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Way back in 2005, I was living in Tokyo working as a menu translator slash photographer’s assistant and I launched a film project that tragically never ended up seeing the light of day. The storyline followed a despondent romance between a depressed ramen waitress and an insomniac deliveryman, both of whom worked the late shift in a near-future megalopolis that was subject to ongoing street-level terrorist attacks. Jeff Priest, a highly talented animator turned urban studies academic, was kind enough to help me out with the project and produced a series of conceptual imagery for the press kit.

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Sayaka is a twenty-something female artist from Japan who depicts Japanese females in subtly fantastic erotic situations. Much like her contemporaries who practice the neo-nihonga deconstructional style , Sayaka juxtoposes traditional techniques to creat entirely original representations of modern Japanese aesthetics.

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I recently wrote an article for the current issue of Elemente Magazine entitled “Aerosol Interiors“, which details the exploits of Graham Oatman - graf writer turned interior/graphic designer extraordinaire. Since finishing the article, I’ve grown quite fond of the wily yank and we’ve collaborated on a few projects here and there. The most recent and tactile of these collabos is the ongoing redesign of my century-old kitchen, which is being transformed through the science of design and the magic of “art” from a mess of vomity salmon pink nonsense into a cool n’ breezy Iberian-style la cucina.

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I was quite struck by DDB Berlin’s award-winning campaign for Funk Sunglasses “No one needs to know what you did last night” . The eyeball-narrative illustrations, which contain references to ecstasy, marijuana and cocaine, succinctly communicate the two following ideas:

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Japan and Iran both have excellent snacking cultures that exist on opposite sides of the snack spectrum. As the Japanese are naturally inclined towards mass production and hi-tech innovation, their snacks come in a variety of easily consumed forms that range from complex potato chip flavours (fried mayonnaise, raw egg, etc) to biscuity micro-snacks like Pocky and Pretz. The Persians on the other hand favour healthier and more natural snack forms like sangak w/ tahini humous, peeled walnuts and unripe plums.

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