Tag: Luxury

Aaron Brown is one half of directing collective FOCUS CREEPS. They've done videos for everyone, including Girls, Neon Indian, Cass McCombs, Wavves, Smith Westerns, Delorean and more. He's also a good friend and has a cool bird named Birden that he and his girlfriend Natasha, who is a stylist in LA, take everywhere. This year, he and his partner Ben Chappell have wrapped up their two-year long wave of videos and creative direction for Arctic Monkeys.

Aaron's ability to lower people's defenses with his chill charm and dope clothes and knowledge of obscure Bay Area rap makes him a perfect choice to continue our TRIBUTE series here, exclusively on Dazed.

A few days ago, Vince & I got online and asked him a few questions.

MAINLINE:

YO

THIS IS VINCE & AG

your inviewers

AARON BROWN :

hpwdy

howdy

we've both already typo'd

MAINLINE:

hello Aaron

you ready

AARON BROWN :

no

MAINLINE:

ill fix your typos in post

AARON BROWN :

ok

yes

you better

MAINLINE:

we'll do our best to make you look good

AARON BROWN :

that's a tall order

MAINLINE:

lets get started w some questions

AARON BROWN :

ok

MAINLINE:

I'm smoking weed in-between your long pauses in responding

AARON BROWN :

lets commence the circle jerk

MAINLINE:

perfect

question 1

Where did you find the main kid in your film?

AARON BROWN :

There's a skateshop out on Atlantic in East LA. They have ramps in the back room to keep kids out of trouble in the ghetto. I started hanging out there on the weekends to stay outta trouble too

There's three kids that I would cruise around with, they seem like the leaders

Everyone said, you'd like to hang out with this kid Meklo, he's crazy

His name is Meklo, cause he has green eyes and looks white, like the guy named Meklo in that bloods and crips movie

MAINLINE:

Was there any issues with you hanging out somewhere you really didn't belong, were the kids suspicious of you?

Being that you're much older, and not from east LA?

AARON BROWN :

i made friends with the owner first and said i was making a skate video but with no skating.

it wasn't really weird, it was more about keeping them not bored.

MAINLINE:

So Meklo was immediately responsive to you wanting to film him?

AARON BROWN :

he was, yeah. he has a positive attitude in the midst of a potentially really shitty environment, and how he keeps that attitude was fun to explore

he does a lot of pranks and manipulates people a lot

he's the kinda person who would say 'yes' to anything and figure out what's in it for him

AARON BROWN :

immediately

MAINLINE:

did he manipulate you or potentially the process of the film, or who he truly is? Did he put on show or pretend in anyway?

AARON BROWN :

When you hang out with people for interviews you first encounter a kind of shell they've made up, but if you stick around long enough you see who they really are, darker stuff but also funnier stuff. I just went back a few times and could see that stuff coming out more and more.

It was more of the vibe, like: "why the hell do you keep coming out here? "You're weird, haha, lets go hang out."

MAINLINE:

What was that place he took you to? And WTF was that mound of prescription pill bottles?

AARON BROWN :

Some homeless guy had lived there forever and had just died. It was a kind of memorial. We actually all found it together while wandering around the river.

there were kids kinda taking turns watching his encampment, kids would actually come and relieve the kid that was there before, it looked like they slept there

but they weren't homeless themselves

they must have just been friends with the dude that died. obviously he looked like he was fucking awesome

MAINLINE:

Last question, what was it like to be part of their clique for a day, and why do you think it's important to pay attention and capture youth?

AARON BROWN :

they had a lot of ways to elevate above getting in trouble like it seemed a lot of their peers do. the irony is the way they would do it was by breaking different laws

but they were individuals.

but they were coming from a place of 'how to have fun' instead of being desperate.

This piece is mostly about that, their good attitudes.

that's the thing you forget a little, getting older you get more pissed at stuff. when you're fifteen that doesn't really exist.

MAINLINE:

Thanks Aaron, we're super excited about your film, thanks for not blowing us off.

any last words?

OH and one last last question, was it weird seeing your girlfriend get her head shaved on set for a Scorsese film?

AARON BROWN :

haha, was hysterical, long story

MAINLINE:

aight dude, thanks again, well talk soon

MAINLINE:

cool dude

i think thats it

AARON BROWN :

THANXoXo

lets hang soon

MAINLINE:

most def

love ya dude

AARON BROWN :

im around all week

MAINLINE:

same here

go see Killing Them Softly

Ben Mendelsohn kills it

AARON BROWN :

dude, YES

WHEN AND WHERE? looks so good

MAINLINE:

i saw it

but arclight

i would go again maybe

AARON BROWN :

okk

steph emailed about some party thurs?

going to that?

MAINLINE:

ya

its Caviars party

AARON BROWN :

aight, that's a start

MAINLINE:

should be cool to drink free drinks and make fun of AG

it's what I do most of the time

AARON BROWN :

we could go get your truck stuck somewhere this weekend?

its not 4x4 is it? has that nice lift

MAINLINE:

ya it is

dude

its full on

wheel locks and everything

AARON BROWN :

SICK! LETS GO SOMEWHERE

my brother and i sleep under his truck haha

if you drink enough you make it through the night

As well as being a self-employed writer, I’m now also a freelance usher at one of London’s most esteemed cultural hotspots. It’s not a bad gig – free entry to all the events when I’m not working, which is quite a lot of the time. Even though I need the money, I find it difficult to accept any more work than the minimum required to prevent myself from starving. That’s because we earn just above minimum wage, and while a lot of people’s answer to low wages is to work more hours, my attitude is to work less. That way, there are fewer hours in which I feel like I’m being taken for a ride.

The staff at the cultural place are mostly aspiring film makers and actors, which means I’m witnessing heartbreak and borderline mental illness every time I clock in. There’s one guy here, Tommy, who works an eighty hour week, stretching his life between a sandwich chain and the relative comfort of the cultural place. He’s selling himself to these jobs so he can buy a camera to make a film. And he’s developing a twitch.

Tommy laughs manically at the smallest things now. Just last week I speculated that maybe he was losing his mind a little because he was shaking his head and talking to himself in a Loony Toons voice as he poured some wine into a glass, but all he did was laugh hysterically, either in recognition or denial, I couldn’t tell. The only girls he dates now are customers, but because he works so much, all he does is invite his potential future wives to the cultural place to go see something on their own while he’s bartending.

On one of my many days off recently, I caught up with a former member of staff at Pret A Manger who was fired for forming a union. Andrej Stopa is a kind of steam-punk Braveheart turned union organiser from the Czech Republic. He was protesting outside the St Pancras station branch of Pret with a banner, a megaphone, a bandanna, a pair of Cyberdog trousers and a pair of aviator shades. But before being moved on by the police, Andrej and a small band of activists were demanding not just that Pret buck their ideas up and stop firing union organisers, but also that Andrej be reinstated.

“Pret A Manger! Reinstate Andrej!” they chanted. I couldn’t understand why Andrej, a finance student at London South Bank University, would want to go back there, so I asked him. And what he said made him seem selfless and kind of heroic.

“I want to keep organising the staff against the bad treatment,” he said. “I don’t care if they treat me so badly. But I really cannot stand when they also treat the other people as bad as they treated me. There were five of us, then our numbers started increasing, but after I was fired they intimidated the staff. So the activity is very low right now.”

One of the other founding members of the Pret union has since been hounded out. But Andrej says regardless of whether he gets his job back, his goal is to get Pret to pay the London living wage of 8.55 an hour to its all staff in the capital.

The living wage is a noble and essential cause. Being able to survive and feed your family, or even save up for a camera, without getting another soul sucking job, is no joke. But as this thunderous tract points out, it’s not as though low wages are the only blight of the contemporary workplace.

While I recommend reading the whole thing, in particular it highlights the alarming methods of control used by large companies in the catering and service sectors. In this instance, Pret, which is at the forefront of getting inside the heads of its staff. At Pret, and no doubt other multinational restaurant chains, not only are workers’ outer actions controlled by the company – the tasks they agree to do for their wages – so are their emotional responses to those tasks. So they don’t just have to make coffee and operate a till, they have to be super happy and enthused while they’re doing it. While I don’t like sweeping floors, I object more to being told to look happy while I’m doing it.

The theoretical term for this is ‘affective labour’, which was given a sickeningly positive reception when Pret was surveyed by a New York Times business correspondent last year. So for example, Pret’s worker bees are disciplined for not smiling enough, or for not creating the ‘Pret Buzz’. And it’s not just an individual worker who suffers, but the whole ‘team’ is penalised for one person failing to be sufficiently ecstatic.

While I admire people like Andrej, global capitalism has proven itself to be pretty much immune to trade unions. It’s just not a fair fight any more. It’s like a team of well-organised rat catchers armed with traps and mallets trying to stop a computer virus. They’re operating on totally different playing fields. One is old and slow, a bi-product of the mechanical age which gets around on foot, whose threats are physical, obstructive and primitive. The other is a complex, nebulous, shape-shifting entity with access to tax havens, devious lawyers, political lobbyists and unlimited reserves of cheap labour from around the world.

What makes this worse is that big trade unions are essentially political structures not unlike a lot of the companies they rile against, whose leaders earn ten times as much as their members. No wonder membership is declining. Besides their dwindling influence and the lack of unity in a global temporary workforce, big old unions just don’t appeal to people who grew up with Tony Blair as a Labour prime minister. Unions embody a 20th Century form of power which struggle see, let alone connect with the thing it’s trying to hit. Even if their interests are aligned, to the young worker toiling in a sandwich chain, big unions are as antiquated and removed from their experience as coal mines and steelworks. Which is why I’m so encouraged by Andrej’s campaign, even if he’s on a hiding to nothing.

Just before I joined, there were rumblings of forming a union at the cultural place, to demand better pay. Again, the London living wage was mooted. While you expect a company like Pret to act like a plantation owner, you’d think there would be more enthusiasm for the living wage in a firm whose director of operations is regularly seen swanning around in a Ken Loach t-shirt. But my friends at the cultural place were just as afraid of losing their jobs to actually form a union as the Prey guys, so they settled for a 20p an hour pay rise from head office, which means we’re still earning less than the guys who serve sandwiches.

Having made an impressivemixfor us last year, the ever-adventurous electronica producer Brassica is back with his new kaleidoscopic 'Temple Fortune' EP on London-based label Civil Music. The quirky lo-fi video for the cosmic single 'Modern Magic', as premiered on Dazed, is atiny budget affair featuring Joe Ryan of Fair Ohs on the drums (as heard in the original track), with a little cameo from Brassica at the end. Here we speak to Brassica about the making of the retro video, and his nods to Jesus Christ Superstar and bad shows at Butlins...

Dazed Digital: How did the idea for the video come about and have you worked with Joe from Fair Ohs before?
Brassica: The video features a longtime friend Joe Ryan, who now plays in Fair Ohs. He played the actual drum parts within the song, so when I met with video maker Phil Whitby, he suggested creating something based around a drum tuition video. As a big fan of 80s VHS musician's tutorials like 'Star Licks Master Series', my mind kinda exploded. Phil and I conversed extensively on ways to elaborate on the theme. The result is a video which explores the blurring of memory, persona, time and space through an essentially ancient musical instrument.

DD: Can you tell us a little about the track?
Brassica: The track is a nod towards (particularly 70s) musical theatre and the kind of music you might expect to hear in War of Worlds or Jesus Christ Superstar. There's a certain magic in sitting slightly too close to a live theatre band that I really dig, whether an expensive West End show or a bad pantomime at Butlins.

DD: What's the story behind the new EP?
Brassica: Modern Magic is one of four tracks from the Temple Fortune EP. The EP is a small selection of music created over a year or so of writing, plus an old banger for good measure.

Capracara's version of Lydden Circuit is a monument. Jonny has an individual approach to making club records that's as warm and sincere as his personality. This is why I asked him to provide the voiceover for the video - it sets a friendly tone for the video in a way I dreamt of.