QUIÑ

It’s 5PM and I’m wandering through Silver Lake in Los Angeles with a pixie-like figure as the sun goes down. We’ve moved from sipping mint tea and chicken broth at Café Casbah and are making our way to House of Intuition to shop for crystals. Passing natural birthing centres, juice bars and restaurants with names like ‘Forage’, the east of L.A. feels different, a welcome respite from the flash and fortune of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. People are rambling through the streets rather than rolling to the next stop, and there’s even talk of going paddle boating in Echo Park nearby.

Said pixie is Bianca Quiñones – the L.A.-born half Mexican, half Puerto Rican singer ‘Quiñ’. To the average listener, Quiñ’s music is a modern twist on R&B, her voice sweet like Cassie but hypnotic like FKA Twigs when layered over distorted backing vocals and electronic synth. Her own description, however, captures the essence of Quiñ far better. Wrinkling her freckled nose so her septum ring shimmers and scrunching her blonde curls on top of her head, she explains: “It’s called fantasy soul, as my music comes from a little fantasy world in my head. It is kind of like my higher self is writing my songs for me.”

Like Silver Lake, Quiñ is the antithesis of Hollywood; she proved this when she gave the finger to her first label after they told her to take out her septum nose ring: “I said no because they didn’t realise that none of that shit matters. If I took it out it would have defeated my whole purpose on earth, which is showing that it doesn’t matter – these beauty ideals – none of it matters. How am I supposed to change the world if I am dumbing myself down for a world I don’t believe in?”

She is now making music on her own and is in control of her own image and message, releasing dreamy, all-encompassing tracks like The Cure and Dragging Me Down while gigging around L.A. at Whisky a Go Go, On The Rox and The Roxy. Her show later that night at The Lyric with Mindfield is sold out and the opening of her new music and performance night No Service at The Standard reached capacity last week. Her latest project is called Nine Lives and is coming out in chapters of three. It’s about her on a dead planet where the only way to escape is through her dreams. She laughs, “The dream world is a whole other thing though,” and we decide, for today, to stick to Silver Lake.

for the full article get issue 10 here.

you can check out QUIÑ'S music here, and follow her on instagram.

words: Serena Guen // photos: Olivia Seally

PHILLIP T. ANNAND

My name is Phillip Toussaint Annand, age 24 and I was born in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. I’m the founder of Madbury Club; a creative house that shoots, directs, consults and creates. Within Madbury I am the “Director of Near Death Experiences”… we just try to not have titles, but Director would be the short version.

I went to a private middle school after going to a public elementary school and everyone there was really smart but had only experienced one sliver of life, in Princeton, New Jersey. So I got into all the best private high schools in the nation but once my parents got the bill, even with the scholarship, it was just crazy… it’s like paying for college twice, just to go to high school. So I left and went to public school but they pushed me so hard in private school that when I got back I was just bored… I was like a year and a half ahead of everyone else. Nothing really grabbed my attention, so I started doing graffiti because I was bored and always drawing and in suburban Jersey no one else was tagging, so it was just me, running around and fucking shit up. My first tag was OREO8…

I tagged this 40 foot piece on the back of my high school and everyone knew it was me.

I just got dumb and was having too much fun (laughs) so I realized I should maybe do something a little more positive with my art. So I’d draw on tees and sneakers and we were always in SoHo, buying Bape and Stussy. And then I knew the Hypebeast guys, from being featured on the site. So once I started putting things out there, that got attention.

My first real break-through was a street wear line called Award Tour.

It started so innocently… like I look back on the stuff I did and I don’t know why kids liked it so much. I just made like a hundred shirts, that were terrible,

and sold them in my high school for ten bucks a piece at lunch and made a killing. That was really the foundation that everything started on. It was just what I was doing in New Jersey, like hanging out with Flatbush Zombies before they were Flatbush Zombies, and just bull shitting and drawing. I was probably seventeen or eighteen when it was at it’s biggest… Award Tour was sold in fifteen international stores at one point, so it was pretty crazy. It got multiple people interested in buying it or wanting to run it and tandem with me, which was cool I just never really knew the people approaching me and they were taking it way more seriously than I did (laughs). Like I just give these shits to my friends… but I definitely see people, like my friend Micah who does ONLY NY, and I see where they’ve taken the brand to and how big it’s grown. So sometimes I wish I kept at it, but it wasn’t fun anymore, it wasn’t what I wanted. Everyone had a street wear line, everyone was making tee shirts. It just reached a super saturation point. And it wasn’t even about what other people were doing, it was just that I’d look at shirts and have no interest in figuring out what to put on them any longer.

Five years ago, in 2009, I was a freshman in college going to school for graphic design, for one semester and then I got the fuck out of there. The classes were just painfully slow; they started from a very basic point, foundational art classes. And I already knew how to make money off it from my clothing line, Award Tour, and I wasn’t super big on the fine art aspect so I left. Then I just started taking random classes at Rutgers… first class I took was about hippies and counter culture movements of the ‘60s. So I was never working towards a major, I was taking all these classes that I was actually stoked on. That’s why I was killing it with a 4.0, because I would sit there and actually listen everyday. That was around the time that I was getting bored with Award Tour and Madbury Club was just beginning.

It’s crazy to see how far Madbury has come, from that first very first shoot. I can barely even credit the first couple of years of Madbury to having anything to do with what we’re doing now.

And I don’t know what we’ll be doing in another two years, which is kind of the beauty of it. So I definitely feel like we’re sophomores in our field.

At this point, we’re established but it hasn’t even come close to being fully realized. We do a lot of work, but it hasn’t even turned that corner to what it can be.

It’s a funny process I see happen all the time though; you do something, you work really hard at it and you get known for what you do.

Once you get notoriety people start coming to you and the more and more work you do for others, the further you get from those things that drew people to your work in the first place.

Well… this is what we put in work for right? To get paid to make art, you can’t really say no or shy away from it. But then sometimes it takes a couple of years to realize that your work is no longer your work, it’s your clients. So, for example, I had this mental thing where I had to make Nike a client, I worked really hard to get us to that point. When we got there it was fucking awesome! We were shooting these things, had all these opportunities… and I just had to realize, this is work. I transitioned from feeling like our Nike work was going to be the beginning of our legacy, to realizing that it's just work to get done, in order to open up lanes and opportunities to do our own stuff, the stuff we really want to be doing.

Now we have eight people full time off Madbury, that’s fucking great.

But you have to come full circle and step back and see what it is we’re really doing.

With Madbury, we’ve never had a physical manifestation… we had a funny office in Hoboken at one point, but what do you make in an office? Fucking office work. We never used it because we were restricting ourselves by having that space. The biggest priority for me now is to have a physical manifestation of what Madbury is, and allow it to grow. I see it like Willy Wonka’s factory, I want that… you come through and do whatever you want; every resource, everything you need is at your fingertips.

I want to make a kung-fu movie (laughs) with every new New York rapper as a character in the movie, which would be hilarious. Like Bodega Bamz as the villain, Action Bronson! Meech and Juice as spiritual gurus! So I’ve been writing that script… film stuff is fun. We just stumbled into that… doing the music videos for the Zombies; that just happened because they needed videos so we just got it done. But yeah, we just create shit.

Would I consider myself an artist? Yes, but I don’t think I’ve made any art in like five years…

there are little experiments I do that’s fun, like I made that bench *points outside. Or if I make my kung-fu movie, it’s not going to be an art movie… I just like kung-fu movies, I have funny looking friends and I think it would be cool to put them all together. We just experiment and create.

FF- A lot of your success has come from the fact that your team is so close, are there any cons in working with your friends?

PA- I spend all day constantly thinking about how to optimize Madbury, like how the pieces fit together. I look at it as a sports team so that’s how I approach it... I have to coach. So I’m like Phil Jackson, the Lakers… then you have Kobe, you got Shaq, you got Derek Fisher, you got Ron Artest… you got all these fucking personalities. Especially because we have four photographers within Madbury! It’s a lot of egos, but everyone has to have that common goal. For example, Ellington just shot Lebron James the other day… everyone on the team would’ve loved to do that.

But you just got to believe that everyone’s turn is going to come, if we’re all in this together then your good is work is my good work, you shine, I shine… and that’s a hard thing to buy into sometimes.

Also, those guys are all my best friends, since before Madbury’s existence, so I know their weaknesses, what pisses them off, what they’re good at etc. So in traditional work environment you get performance reviews, we don’t have that at Madbury. I don’t sit down with my guys, like “come into my office” (laughs), that’d be weird as fuck. There have definitely been moments where I felt it would’ve been easier if I just did stuff myself, but I wouldn’t want to do it any other way. Everyone always says don’t work with your friends, I’m like what could possibly be better than working with your friends!? If you could find how to make it work, that’s so noble. And there couldn’t be anything more fun than making money with your friends… dude, we take pictures of basketballs and sneakers… that’s what we’d be doing regularly!

Everything we do; running around, traveling, creating, I’d pretty much do it for free. So I wouldn’t want it any other way. The capabilities of Madbury are greater than just the capabilities of me, myself.

FF- Suggest a few people who inspire you.

PA- Hyun Kim is a good one, he’s like the producer at Madbury, he used to write for Vibe and a bunch of hip hop magazines, he did a bunch of shit… he’s a little older. But he has this writer’s brain, where it’s almost as if he can’t hold a normal conversation because he’s interrogating people all the time. But he has a very good way of stepping into a situation and is naturally interested in everyone’s story. There’s always a follow up. So it’s fun to see him interacting. And I’d say

(Kilo) Kish is another good one. Just from seeing her theory and approach with her work, I don’t think she gets enough credit. She has a conceptual art approach to the music she’s making and the way she puts her projects out.

The last show she did was for a project about collaboration; every song was with someone else. So she had every piece of correspondence with everyone she collaborated with on a huge gallery wall; every note, every email, printed out - everything about the project. It was manifested there in front of you and the only thing people really say is like Kilo Kish H&M ad… but it was just really great seeing it first hand. I also have to say my father would be number one… my dad is the coolest guy I know. He doesn’t make any mistakes, I’ve only seen him fuck up a couple times in my life. I just mean little shit, like I’d hammer a nail and hit my finger, I’ve never seen him do anything like that… once you hit 45 you just start moving slower and it’s like I’m not gonna knock this glass off the table! You just see things and fix them (laughs). It’s just his thought process, when someone speaks to him he listens and thinks about it and then responds articulately. He really taught me the beauty of language. Whereas with me, everything’s always just breaking and being thrown around! At one point I know I’m going to slow down, and it’s gonna be fire.

FF- So when you do slow down, where do you see yourself? What, to you, are the qualities of a life well lived?

PA- Family is the biggest for me. If you had to bust your ass for your family all your life, and you worked in a coal mine or something… I don’t know if you would stand up proud at the end of it and think you lived your life the way you wanted to. But if you can give your family opportunities based off the work that you did, that’s a life well lived. That’s how I approach Madbury as well as my own family, I’d do anything for those guys.

you can check out Madbury Club here, and follow Phil's instagram.

as told to: Olivia Seally // photos: Olivia Seally

JEFF LAUB

My name is Jeff Laub, I’m 30 years old and I’m originally from South Jersey. I’m the co-founder of Blind Barber and within that I’m a producer; I maintain and create visions and concepts that operate and exist within the Blind Barber umbrella. We are a barber shop, with a bar, a café, a restaurant, with a product line, with a content side… but in all actuality it’s just a barber shop that wants people feeling good about themselves. I just wanted to make cool stuff and feel good about what I was doing and once I realized I was able to do that for myself I wanted to pass that on to someone else. It just happened to occur through hair cuts, beers and pomades.

I had planned from probably before 8th grade to be a lawyer. That’s what I said when they would ask ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ That’s such a bullshit question… it should be ‘What 18 different things do you think you’d be interested in when you’re 30 years old?’ So I had always been told that I’d be a phenomenal lawyer, from people watching shows and never having worked in the field. But that was my plan up until about five years ago. In 2009 I was working in a law firm that I hated. I was working as a legal assistant, a tier below the lawyers, at the number one law firm in the world. I was at the pinnacle of something that I planned for so long. I remember being in a meeting when the financial crisis happened, with every world bank sitting there, with the White House on a conference call and I just hated every second of it… it wasn’t for me, wasn’t what I was interested in… I didn’t feel good, I didn’t feel like I was pushing myself. So I hit rock bottom, I was depressed... I spent $200k+ on NYU, I had a plan, my plan sucked and what now?!

I used to work odd jobs at cool salons with my Mom, who would manage the salons. When I went to NYU that’s what I knew, so I would get part time jobs doing that. I realized people are making $100k+ a year at this, if they really dived in and did it well. I knew with my attitude and rapport with the customers, if I really dedicated and educated myself, I could do it! So Cravath was from 9 to 5 and then I enrolled in Aveda cosmetology school and was going there from 5 to 9. Aveda was probably more detailed and strenuous than any other education, just in terms of punctuality. It was a nice introduction to learn what it took to be a cosmetologist, what it took to be a service professional.

I went to Aveda when I realized my first path of being a lawyer wasn’t going to happen. But I realized very quickly that that wasn’t what I wanted to do either… even touching hair grossed me out! Honest to God, I threw a temper tantrum. I literally threw a round brush on the ground while I was sectioning hair and walked out (laughs). I went back because I hadn’t had the plan yet and then one day I was talking to my Granddad and told him I’m going to be cutting hair and he said

“my favorite place to hang out is the barber shop”.

And it was that simple sentence… I was like that’s what I want. That’s what I liked about the salons, it wasn’t cutting hair, it was walking in, hearing some gossip, a bunch of babes walking in, flirt with them a bit, go to lunch, see people and most importantly, every single person walking out felt great. So I really wanted to harness that feeling and produce it for my friends, the way we would want it. So every day after cosmetology school I went back to my desk and spent an hour writing the plan; a friend helped me with an inspiration deck and I called businesses to write a business plan and got numbers from bars and salons, then I added in my view, my story, my passion.

I found out that Josh Boyd, who owned Plan B, Gallery Bar and Ella, was selling his first bar Plan B across from Tompkins Sq Park in lower Manhattan, and I had no money, like zero dollars… but I had this finished business plan that I spent a year and a half writing. I didn’t think Josh really wanted to part with it because it was his first bar that set his life in motion, so I told him I’d buy it from him with this great idea that we could be open basically 24 hours a day; I could run the salon portion and you guys teach me your bar section and we’ll work it out. The name caught his attention and I think he felt my excitement towards it. The only hurdle after getting Josh to agree to the idea was me confessing that I lied about having any money (laughs).

I had to hustle my way into a partnership, I just told him I’d wash windows and earn my way… and I did.

And once Josh saw the people coming around, all his homies, the neighbors coming by, he felt it! We were building another neighborhood staple. When we first opened both my partners, Josh and Adam, thought the barber shop should close at 9 because they didn’t want to risk loosing customers not knowing that there's a bar behind the shop. So they were like let’s open up the bar door after 9 and shut the barber shop. I said no fucking way! They have to enter through the barber shop. Trust me when I tell you… it’ll be slow for the first few months, but once they discover it, you’ll never loose that customer because at that moment, they found their bar. That became their hidden space, that they found. And once that proved true, people started to switch their own mentalities and be like OK what would I love within a bar? Rather than what would make me money?

So far, all the locations have come to us. We’re in no rush to expand, like I said our primary goal is to put out a feeling of confidence. So products, content and service are number one. The spaces are exceptional and super cool but very difficult to run, so it has to be perfect. After pitching Josh on a plan and a space that went from a neighborhood staple to another neighborhood staple, having parties there, one of Josh’s friends mentioned that he had a space available. So we drove across country to LA and said sure!

And then the third location, in Brooklyn, came about because I actually wrote the Blind Barber business plan in Second Stop, so I kept an eye on that when I was living there and made it happen. Now we’re just making people feel good, like they can be themselves. We’re selling confidence and doing it through quality services and products. We’ve made our own website, we produce videos, we do photo shoots, we produce on site marketing pop ups, we throw parties, we put play lists together, we have a bar, we have a restaurant, we have a café, we have three barber shops, with products that each take a year and a half… what is Blind Barber?

It’s a bunch of peoples passions all combined into this one thing and we facilitate our growth through, you know, shaving cream.

FF- Do you consider yourself an artist?

JL- Well in Blind Barber, I’m a producer. I think I have an appreciation for everything without having a specific skill set, other than recognizing every one else’s strengths. I have a decent eye, I appreciate art, I understand how to tell a story, I love photography, I know bits and pieces… thanks to my Lynda account (laughs). I understand the service industry, I understand how to connect to the emotions of customers and translate that into customer service, or into a product and really make an engagement. And I’m also teaching myself a lot of new things for the business to take the next step. I’m really diving in to more traditional business ideas and methods. I get to do whatever I want, it’s kind of crazy. I feel so fortunate and blessed. I’m truly living my dreams, but a dream project of mine would be to secure real livelihoods of at least five of the employees that I hold really close to me. I think the way to do it is as an open platform; you could be a barista, a bus boy, whatever… if you have an idea, I’m here to listen. All I want to do is learn, I don’t care where it comes from. That’s how we constantly re-brand and retell our story. I succeed as a producer and boss, because I’m so proud of the people that have helped me build my dreams and

I recognize how talented they are and I’m relentless in making them fulfill their efforts.

FF- So is there a con to working so closely with your friends?

JL- Absolutely! Two cons of working with your friends… One; you don’t hang out with them after work. There’s no more of that. It doesn’t happen. You’re so sick of each other by the end of the day. Two is… I am the boss. And there are certain things that I don’t compromise on. It’s beautiful to have so many different passions and ideas about what should be done within a business, but you do have to remain focused and make sure that you understand what your business actually is. Costs of goods and the excel sheet portion of a business is important, it has to funnel towards one thing so that people understand what they’re buying.  Maintaining that focus sometimes hurts people’s feelings. Sometimes you got to put your foot down and people take it personal. And the resentment lasts a day longer than if they were just an employee, and that weighs on me.

FF- Would you consider yourself a freshman, sophomore or senior in your field?

JL- I’m a sophomore because I have the lay of the land and I can sit with the upper classmen and we can vibe a little, but in the nitty gritty of it, we aren’t there yet. I have to learn more, we have to keep working as hard as we are and probably a little harder and smarter to put ourselves in another position to take advantage of luck and timing. There’s no formula, we just need to work incredibly hard to maintain the integrity, the uniqueness and the consistency of our story. So I definitely want to expand my education and skill sets to really take us to the next level, finance-wise. But on a brand level, we’ve already graduated. You can’t fuck with us… there’s no brand in our arena that can come close to Blind Barber, they aren’t getting calls from Milk Studios, from real estate developers asking to open 50 new locations. The problem is that we’re sophomores and we don’t know how to answer those calls yet. So from a business and personal standpoint, I’m a sophomore. Brand level… youngens can’t hang with us! Because they’re only looking at bottom line and then they copy what’s cool, whereas we work the opposite way.

FF- So when it’s all done where do you see yourself?

JL- Well on the walk over here I was thinking of opening a new restaurant! I also want to open up a creative/ad agency. I want a huge office with real facilities so we can work for clients. Even when I retire I’ll still be doing something! But hopefully chilling on the West Coast with my babe, my dogs, some kids, hanging around with their kids and doing the same thing… I’m doing everything right, right now. I want to continue to hang with family, show up at the barbershop, get a cut, talk about the good ol’ days and laugh.

you can check out Blind Barber's website here and follow them on instagram.

as told to: Olivia Seally // photos: courtesy of Blind Barber