Our brandnew issue mono.kultur #45 with acclaimed writer and raconteur Richard Price is accompanied by stunning images by New York cab driver turned photographer Joseph Rodriguez, from a series called Spanish Harlem, documenting street life in the late 1980s with grit, intimacy and grain. As it happens, the series is currently on show at Galerie Bene Taschen in Cologne, featuring many images that did not make it into our issue. Needless to say, if in Cologne, we highly recommend to drop by.
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Phootgraphs from Spanish Harlem by Joseph Rodriguez

Dear Friends,

mono.kultur #45 is our homage to the great mythical city that is New York. And who better to talk to about New York than Richard Price? The acclaimed writer gained international attention with novels such as Clockers and Lush Life, and his work for numerous films and television serials, including The Night Of and The Wire. But what he is really known for are his gritty observations of urban life and sharp ear for the rhythms of language.

While his books are usually filed in the crime section, they easily transcend all genres with their precise and tender depictions of New York life on street level. Embracing multiple perspectives, his novels dissect the clash of different realities within the same block, listening in on ‘the liars, the heroes, the killers, the killed, the stunned, the clownish, the helpless, the bereaved.’

When it comes to research, Richard Price adopts a hands-on approach: hanging out in different neighbourhoods, talking to strangers and going for ride-alongs with cops to see a darker side of the city. In many ways, it is this wide-eyed curiosity that allows his books to be read as time capsules of a New York in constant flux, revealing an uncanny understanding for knowing exactly what people want, need, envy and resent about the cities they inhabit.

In a conversation peppered with anecdotes and bebop, Richard Price talked to mono.kultur about the need to live in order to write, working for Hollywood, and why hanging out is a professional matter.

Visually, the conversation with Richard Price found its perfect sparring partner in a selection of images by cab driver turned photographer Joseph Rodriguez. And, just between us, we are proud to feature our very first ever foil embossed cover, in the honourable tradition of pulp novels.

Available as ever through our online store mono.konsum, or at the trusted book dealer of your choice very soon indeed.

Enjoy and all our best,
mono.kultur

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mono.kultur #45
RICHARD PRICE: NEW YORK A.M.
“I need to be ever present.”

Spring 2018 / English / 15 x 20 cm / 52 Pages
Printed on Two Different Stocks of Paper / Cover with Foil Embossing

Interview by Max Nelson
Photography by Joseph Rodriguez
Design by mono.studio

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Whatever happened to suburban car tuning?, wondered Max Siedentopf. To help people figure out their individual car style, Siedentopf pimped cars overnight adding cardboard modifications. In an interview with the Telegraph he stressed his concern that the potential of self-expression is often neglected in cars.

Marsha P. Johnson (L) and Sylvia Rivera (R)

The German blockbuster-directer Roland Emmerich has just released a trailer for his new movie Stonewall, and it’s been already discussed controversially, particularly about its lack of authenticity. Just to quickly recap: The Stonewall Riots were a series of protests in 1969 against the police by the LGBT community in New York after a police raid in Greenwhich’s Stonewall Inn sparked a violent backlash. Stonewall is now referred to as the most significant event in the history of LGBT liberation. People critcize the movie as another example of whitewashing. Even though the film is billed as a “true story”, it appears to be told from the point of view of a corn-fed, white, cisgender boy called Danny who is kicked out of his house because of his homosexuality and retaliates by hitting the big city. In reality, Stonewall was started by black trans drag queen Marsha P. Johnson. While Marsha P. Johnson has been given a role in the Hollywood narrative, she is played by a cisgender male. She is only listed two places higher in the credits on imdb.com than “Woman with Poodle”, played by Nathaly Thibault. Fortunately people reacted promptly. Two days after the trailer’s release, a petition to boycott the movie popped up; by now it has been signed by over 23,000 people. Boycotters claimed that the film had “white-washed” and “cis-washed” history, erasing the significant contribution made by trans and queer women of colour and drag queens in the Stonewall uprising. The petition was created by Pat Cordova-Goff, a trans activist feminine person of colour. She wrote on the page:

“OUR HISTORY WILL NOT BE WHITE/CIS-WASHED. History classes throughout our nation have built a reputation of instructing young generations that white, straight, cis folks are the saviors and founders of this land. Wrong. We were taught that light-skinned people are the goal; the goal to assimilate to. Wrong. We were also rarely taught about queer history, but when we were, it probably revolved around white cis gay men. Wrong.”

Emmerich responded to the controversy stating, “I think we represented it very well[...] We have drag queens, lesbians, we have everything in the film because we wanted to portray a broader image of what ‘gay’ means.” His responds fail even more spectacularly when saying in a Facebook comment “We are all the same in our struggle for acceptance.”

No. We are not all equal in our struggle. People like Emmerich – cisgender, white people – are born into a world that gives them unqualified power. If you, Emmerich, cannot recognise that, you definitely should not be doing a movie about the most significant moments for transgender people of colour.

It’s rare to come across an Instagram account that goes beyond the personally mundane and actually captures a little of that something that defines living in our days and time. Photographer Daniel Arnold on the other hand has a whopping 100k+ followers and for good reason: his images speak about our lives rather than his, and they do so with style and acid humour.

Photography by Daniel Arnold

Now that the mother of all streetstyle magazines, i-D, has been swallowed up by the Vice empire for a bright and digital future, it’s only fair enough to cash in on the long legacy of the printed edition with a look back at 35 years’ worth of more than 300 covers featuring that famous wink.

Last night opened the exhibition Fashion Stories, curated by Wolfgang Tillmans at his Between Bridges space, showcasing a broad range of fashion photography from the 2980s and ’90s. More than that, it is a hommage to street style magazines such as i-D or The Face that proved so influential for generations of image and fashion makers – all stories are displayed as they were originally published, in ‘real’ magazines that you are welcome to browse and handle. So if you ever wondered what The Face really was like, or just want to hold it in your hands one more time, here is a rare chance to have so many influential titles accumulated in one place.

Fashion Stories
July 02 – August 01, 2015

Between Bridges
Keithstrasse 15
10787 Berlin
Wednesday – Saturday: 12h – 18h

48 STUNDEN NEUKÖLLN is a forum for artistic projects from the manifold art scene in Berlin today, with a focus on presenting art dealing with societal issues. Since the festival was established in 1999, 48 STUNDEN NEUKÖLLN has become the largest festival of the arts in Berlin. Works of art that have been realized here serve as beacons beyond the limits of the district, facilitating interaction between artists, both here and internationally.

Find out more abut the program, the festival’s focus, the venues, and the participating artists.

48 STUNDEN NEUKÖLLN – A festival of the arts
S.O.S. – Art saves the world
June 26–28, 2015
Events along Karl-Marx-Straße in Berlin

Photo: copyright © Jörg A. Fischer

Another thing going down in Berlin: tonight opens Sebastian Schipper’s highly anticipated rollercoaster of a film, Victoria, which snaffled all the buzz during the Berlinale film festival. It tells a classic story of a (nightlife) adventure turned nightmare, but it tells it all in one single, uninterrupted take. Sounds like a crazy undertaking in and of itself, but the energy transfer is incredible. Breathless.

Tomorrow, The New York Times Magazine (under the art direction of Matt Willey, who also designed our ever so popular issue with Chris Ware) will feature one of the most impressive covers I’ve seen in a while, featuring a giant 50m-tall paste-up by street artist JR, on the theme of walking in the city. Nice idea, perfectly executed, great work.