Doug Freeman is a multi-talented Austin hero. The former Austin Chronicle writer, and current occasional columnist, has also co-authored the essential “The Austin Chronicle Music Anthology” which was released in March (much to the Gopher Editor’s musical benefit). Beyond his musical knowledge and journalistic prowess, it has also come to our attention that the one Doug Freeman is also a Tech Startup savant, world traveler and consumer of the best dive fare this city has to offer.
It should then be not at all [...]
Photo Credit: Max Marshall
Part two of this illustrious effort by our dear, talented friends in Austin comes from a tall tower downtown. Desirée is a multi-talented music master and footwear enthusiast who zips around town in her aqua-colored scooter. That she let me ride once. And it was awesome.
Anyways.
Desirée’s set is a change of pace from R-Berry’s beautiful playlist, and may coax some ill-advised moves out of the less graceful citizens of the world. But enough about us. Desirée ‘with an [...]
July in Texas is… hot. The temperature climbed up quickly in May and has been inching ever closer to skin-evaporating heights of the sun. But thankfully there is reprieve indoors, sticking our heads in the melting freezer and listening to the four sets (okay, okay, playlists) that our dear friends from all around Austin made for the launch party of the second volume of the Gopher!
And the love we got from these awesomely attuned folks, well, it’s just something that needs to [...]
Set for the Outside
Zarouhie was in town on an artistic mission back when there was still a need for sweaters. We met her at a the dusty bar that we favor, immediately impressed by two things: she was immune to the chilli evening, and her order of battered and deep fried chicken gizzards. Upon reviewing the artist’s multi-medium work, this gizzard-eating-sweaterless adventurousness came back to me as a perfect lens through which to examine it. For Abdalian, neither medium nor message seem [...]
Early last year, as we strolled the streets of London, we decided to take the opportunity to sit down with a series of editors that are, in our young Gopher-peepers, some of our most admired peers. From these meetings a series of interviews, videos, print projects and – why hide it? – a bit of a taste for scotch resulted. Not all of these face-to-face encounters will end up here or in the pages of the print edition, but if there is [...]
Hello! As some of you might know already, some months ago the Gopher team moved it’s headquarters to sunny Austin, TX. Here we found a new home, a profusion of amazing friendships and a place to continue this project for the promotion of talents in the arts. The Gopher’s projects also reach beyond this editorial endeavor. In the upcoming months we’ll be releasing a series of projects in partnership with some awesome institutions – but we’ll keep that for another post.
Right now we want [...]
Chilean wonder-duo Dënver (as they say, “the band, not the dinosaur”, whatever that means) claim that music comes naturally to them. Mariana claims she learned to play the guitar at the same time she learned to walk – and partner Milton supports this story, finding her jerky-dancing charming enough to approach her at a party some years ago. The duo have put out a number of incredibly catchy songs in this year’s release “Musica, Gramática, Gimnasia” and, unable to stop humming them, [...]
So, you know when you have this friend, this awesome friend whose life you’re so in tune with and then someone moves and you keep in touch and then it’s a year later and you realize you haven’t caught up for a long time… for no good reason? And you get that desire to call them and have a moment of hesitation because, well, how do you even start, and are you even the same people anymore? Then you get over yourself, and [...]
Interviewing labels like Neon Gold – inspired, ambitious and genuine lovers of music – is the reason we decided to create this series of posts. Having come across Passion Pit “on MySpace” these guys decided to throw caution to the wind and create their own label while still in college representing musicians with “pop sensibility and accessibility.” They talk shop and tell us why the “death of the music industry” might be a good thing.
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After bracing myself against wind and sand, I see the massive, hulking shell of a building. Its white walls are crumbling, its great glass windows long broken. Perched right on the shoreline, the only way to enter the abandoned South Fremantle Power Station is through empty coastline and a hole in the fence, ignoring signs warning against trespassing. The power station, located in isolation outside of Fremantle, Western Australia, started producing electricity from coal [...]
Merrill Garbus is a lovely example of the power of one + friends. She decided to pursue her solo musical project without a record studio. Without specialized equipment and without a formal band. Armed with a versatile voice and a ukulele she created tUnE yArDs, a sonorous experiment that make us question the need for intermediaries in the long and expensive chain of musical production -don’t you worry music whales, were not planning any riots against “the system here” – don’t send [...]
If there is one typographer you should keep an eye on, that is without a doubt Alejandro Paul. A quick look at his twitter just tells us everything: “Facebook says Thank You to 500 million users with a Sudtipos typeface“, “Elizabeth Arden and Burgues Script“, “Nabisco + Amorinda font” and the list keeps going. From small projects to government-size corporations, everybody is in love with Paul’s work and is not hard to understand why. From simple sans-serifs to [...]
Gopher Staffer and licenced biologist Angie Nicolás has some sleep issues. From her wonderful, sleep deprived but still scientific mind, we were able to convince her to write about a topic that had been personally bothering her: birds that go chirp in the night. While Ms. Nicolás might annihilate us for writing an intro to her piece (we’re sneaky like that!) we feel proper introduction is warranted, because we too are plagued with that admirable bug, curiosity. [...]
It was a rainy summer afternoon when I discovered her in the attic above my mother’s bedroom, hidden beneath a thick layer of dust and surrounded by a fortress of boxes and spider webs. She was an old Minolta, and with her I started practicing the very basic skills that I could teach myself from the library’s old-fashioned manuals or by imitating the photographers with big cameras on the main boulevard. Before long I found myself snapping all sorts of things around me: the zigzagging [...]
Brooklyn-born global dweller Romeo Alaeff is an artist. Any sort of definition beyond that may be fuzzy or inaccurate, and his work itself blurs the boundaries between icon and art, funny and serious, traditional and experimental, and public and private. His explorations have taken some wild turns: Alaeff studied biomedical engineering before graduating as a photographer, going to graduate school for Fine Arts, detouring somewhere along the line to work as an animation editor and writer for children’s shows like [...]
Dear friends,
As many of you know by now, this Friday at 8:35am the first print edition of the Gopher Illustrated was born! we promise a much lengthier feature in the near future, but for the moment, witness in all its 90′s-style glory this animated gif which documents the first minutes of our very first encounter with our very first issue!
It weighed 0.98 pounds and smelled of pure ink and paper glory! Congratulations to all those mothers and fathers who made this possible! [...]
Posting about climate change and a green conscience may strike some as preachy, and we at the Gopher have to confess a great deal of pickiness when it comes to reading up on it. Ruining the environment is bad, and being a composting expert will earn you friends in certain circles (be our friend! come oooonnnn). We, too, watched the Al Gore film and felt that gagging sensation through Food Inc, ok?! And as much as we enjoy some people’s hysterics, sandwich boards and [...]
People, papers and Julia herself tell us that Julia Haltigan’s musical family, a hundred-piece band that includes a singing-quartet alum grandmother and a father talented in the guitar-arts inspired her pursuit of music. Not having been fortunate enough to witness family reunions, we will say this: Julia Haltigan’s music is all leather boots, smoky rooms and whimsy in a way that makes us want to burn our bras while wearing pretty lace and red lipstick; confusing, wonderful, inspiring and astoundingly infectious. Gopher [...]
Writer and filmmaker Julio Ramirez is not just a friend but also an inspiration, genuinely. I first had the pleasure of meeting Julio in the summer of ’07, during an intense three-week screenwriting program (or soul searching session) at TheFilmSchool in Seattle. We were among only five students in the class under the age of 35, and Julio and I instantly bonded and developed a respect for each other’s worldview. A Colombian native, Julio has traversed the US and basically [...]
La Roue Sans Fin (2009)
Simon Bernheim is a French artist whose work “constantly evolves around the perception of words, signs and language. His project is to change the meaning of words and language away from its sense and towards its form.” (more here) We got in touch with him by recommendation of our beloved Estelle Hanania, and cannot not resist showing you some of his work. Bernheim has taken part in exhibitions involving his “wall painting” projects [...]
Lido Pimienta is a mother, an artist, a singer-songwriter, a screamer, a banana-sandwich eater, a student, a Colombian in Canada, a Canadian with dreams of Colombia. She also has one of the best names we can think of. So we did what we do best, emailed her all starry-eyed and asked her questions about her life, her music and her plans and her views. This one is a real mixed media portrait, all images songs and text are of the artist’s [...]
Freddie Stevenson, the English-born singer-songwriter is a self-taught musical genius. Freddie gives his listeners the kind of musical and lyrical experience usually reserved for the likes of Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon and Bob Dylan. When he told us he loved The Gopher we, quite understandably, nearly fainted from jubilation. Following our celebration [which may or may not have included unstoppable underwear-dancing], and several e-mail exchanges analysing Creed’s “My Own Prison” later, we bring you a story written especially for Gopher-fanatics where he gives us [...]
Full disclosure here: We love Kickstarter. Through their website we’ve been fundraising to print the first, fabulous, tricked-out print issue of The Gopher Illustrated. We got in touch with the Kickstarter team, and they were like “Ummm. sure, why not!” so we got excited and coordinated an international phone call through internet phone jacks and a recording device stuck to the earpiece and a pencil and paper in case the recording device didn’t record. The site’s co-founder, Yancey Strickler, picked up the phone [...]
When the Candy Claws told us they wanted to visit The Gopher on their Online World Tour, we were excited to learn what an online tour was. We asked them hopefully “does this mean the band plays live on our website? ” and they were like no you simple gopher dontcha know anything at all?” and we were like “well then what is it?” and they were like “we make a new exclusive video featuring one of our songs for each destination [...]
Philippe Intraligi is a German-born, Brazil-interning, New York-dwelling, Graphic Designer whose impressive client includes Telecom Italia, Adidas (and their Missy Elliott collection that a Gopher Editor who will remain nameless loves) and whose branding work is rooted in aesthetic philosophy and love of Bauhaus. He also just confessed to us that even though he’s a branding rockstar (our judgment, but clearly!) we have the privilege of getting his first interview, where he talks design, TV and even sends us songs he listens to [...]
Born in Fribourg and designer from the cradle, Bénédict M. Rohrer [ a.k.a. Billy Ben ] is much more than your average line-drawing, typeface-choosing feller. To this team of Gophers, he’s a character that pops up regularly when we are on the lookout for music: Records, flyers, concert posters, dj booths and booklets recurrently carry his name on their backs, tempting us -free wheelin’ e-mailers- to contact him. This temptation proved too strong and we just went for it with B. It took twelve [...]
With all these music and art and design posts, we couldn’t resist waxing philosophical. On a recent trip, I met with philosophy Professor Jesse Prinz at NYC’s Deitch Galleries and was so excited about this interview I forgot my wallet. (Thanks for coffee, Jesse!). There, he talked about art history, the similarity between moral judgment and aesthetic judgment and why porcelain cats can be political. Jesse is a Professor of Philosophy at C.U.N.Y, former Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina at [...]
This one time I went Scuba Diving. I was thirteen, and and I felt like an idiot with all the gear and the flippers and the mask on top of the awkwardness of being thirteen. That is, until I got in the water and floated and there was silence and tons of little, shiny fish were swimming around me and I never wanted to leave. Listening to the Candy Claws is like going in the water was that one time. Ryan and Kay [...]
Receiving and reading submissions is probably one of my most favoritest things to do. Usually, I put them in a neat little reading stack (on my e-mail inbox, of course) and go through them one by one, in order of arrival. Except, that is, in the case of Stephen Ledwidge, whose email shot out right at me as I was about to close my browser. It would be too easy to say it was Irish luck, but I thought “eh, why not.” Along [...]
In this enormous world few galleries-cum-shops are loved by the Gopher team as much as El Diente de Oro. The “Diente” is a beautimous project located in Buenos Aires and founded by our longtime friend PIAN, along with musician Coni Cibilis. It is a shop, a gallery, an engine for all sorts of cultural activities and for many a traveller, a place to feel comfortable: it has one chair, one small sofa, one door and one bathroom [ though the bathroom [...]
Shane Lavalette is a Photographer. He lives in Massachussets, shoots everywhere else, often waking at the ugly, hairy and sleepy side of dawn to capture space in convoluted places (this makes him a hero in our lazy eyes. I mean… lazy selves eyes… um…) and tells us the Ninja Turtles camera was his first piece of photographic equipment. He is also the young and gifted editor of the art-photography magazine “Lay Flat.” The magazine includes loose photo prints in [...]
Kyra Choucroun is one of the founders of The Gopher Illustrated and a political fiend (try and stop her, we dare you!) Her interests range from International Political Economy to Development and Conflict resolution. Fresh out of a Masters from the London School of Economics, K-fresh is hard at work at an internship in the UK. A native of Venezuela and a dweller of everywhere else, Kyra has spent most of her life explaining away the intricacies and misunderstandings of international politics to… well… everyone. [...]
Gentle Friendly begins as an environmental experiment in instrumental hodgepodge. After a friend rescues a drum-kit and some coffee from “a skip” David and Daniel [ and their drum-kit, their coffee, their friend and two old keyboards ] get together and start making enough noise to make the neighbors complain. Though their baptismal attic is no longer a viable venue, the London duo still makes noise-pop that is everything but neat. Sounds accumulate, loop and come back to bite you in the ass, [...]
The world is ending, and every page of every magazine ever printed has self-destructed – burned, BURNED! – in protest of the coming apocalypse of the newsstand because by golly the printed page is a dinosaur waiting to breathe its last breath and die in the thirsty, muddy pits of Fantasia-evocation and early childhood horror. This is, at least, what some would have us believe and what we Gophers might have started preaching (if only out of fear of the rapidly wagging index finger) if [...]
As August comes to an end, we bring you an artist from beyond the turning leaves of Europe and America. Guy Yanai is a Middle eastern painter, the founder of the well-known project Gallery 33. Our sources reveal that Guy is also a better-than-average tennis player and Campari lover. For you, gentle readers, Guy and a couple of hours of Friday left, enjoy both. Read though.
[ click on the title for full interview ]
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Friend and Gopher-writer Dylan Shrader came up with an idea for a review format. Early on, us Gophers agreed that we’d like musicians to do all the music reviews. Shrader is a musician, so he qualifies for this, but he may have just convinced us that personal experiences with music can be effective introductions to music. Read through and let us know what you think. Check out Dan Auerbach’s music here.
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Lope, our Art Director, is a type freak. Longtime editor of Platanoverde Magazine in Venezuela, he dreams in highly stylized type-text and drools at the sight of Futura. When curating portfolios for our first edition, our dear Lope almost seized with delight. The reason? Jessica Hische.
Jessica graciously provided enough images to fill two portfolios and answered our many many questions. We were going to make you wait for the print edition for all the goodies we have in store but what the [...]
We have been hard at work putting together our zero issue (which you will be able to flip through in our nifty PageFlip on our “magazine” section) several issues have come up surrounding the idea of spaces. Spaces as in “we’re running out of space” due to our growing collection of tchatchkes. Or spaces as in the fascinating world of digital real-estate. Or time-spaces, since the editors of this fine magazine are in different time zones – making phone calls is fabulously chaotic. However this [...]
Much ado about style, a crash course on css and we’re on the interwebs! This page is very much under construction, so fret not faithful friend – it will be all it should be on the double. In the meantime, if you would like to expedite the process to this facelift, don’t be shy. We like to learn.
And if you want to help just moderately… click on this post and comment with the answer to this question: when you click on a post, can you [...]
I thought I’d upload some lovely behind-the-scenes photos from the shoot. Featured are Lope G-R and yours truly. Vanity’s a real bitch.
typical issue
After a weekend – and lets face it, more than one skipped workday – we are done shooting the photos for the upcoming presentation of the magazine. Oh yes, the Gopher Illustrated [upon Lope's request i feel obligated to say that the name was born on May 17th, after far too much deliberation] is up and running. To show appreciation to my mother, who is surely the only human reading this, a picture for your viewing pleasure:
There will be a video up by this weekend. [...]
