Front Tier

Daniel Peddle, casting director, artist and filmmaker, is a frontiersman of the first order. Eighteen years since discovering his calling, he’s finding talent for Givenchy, Phillip Lim and Comme des Garçons, among an über roster of fashion houses. Meanwhile, he’s still keeping a very healthy stride with his longtime passions for painting and filmmaking; he shot his first experimental short Last Things while studying graduate film at NYU and has since produced three epiphanous feature films. His agency, The Secret Gallery, formed with longtime partner and fellow visual pioneer Drew Dasent, is the go-to source for undiscovered beauty and uncommon edge. An artist with multiple and multi-layered projects, Peddle comingles his gifts to form intense moments of awakening coupled with more private windows of retreat. His craft is the art of refined exploration, of sifting through the human morass and unearthing its coveted delights. As he put it, “The streets of New York become like streams for me, a never-ending source of potentially amazing people.”

“If we win today nobody goes to work tomorrow. And if we lose today nobody goes to work tomorrow.” -Spectator Emmanuel Clinton on the Ghana vs. Nigeria match 3-0, 2/03/08

Outside In

Sometimes being an outsider at the African game is better than being an insider. It’s not about the ticket price or the public profiling or being able to actually watch the match. Attending the game from outside the stadium is more about the maelstrom of feeling; the pre-game tension, the collective concentration, the unleashed euphoria of the lifeforce that is African football and the lifeworld surrounding it. It is a hazing, to be sure, an initiation into the cult of the authentic. It’s something comparable to taking up ranks with an underground league of nations – a joint reserved strictly for the “outsider” insiders.

Palm wine drunks, pickpockets, pimps, a band of Togolese chefs on exodus from Lomé, a posse of Nigerian rude bwoys from the backstreets of Lagos all commingle in a mash-up of culture, religion, tribe and a shared obsession with football. You wade among this sea of the new familiar. You participate in this rite of passage that is specific to place (Accra, Ghana), event (The African Cup) and subject (football). As one sportscaster put it: “I never watch a match without my heart medicine close at hand.” It’s a kind of metaphysical, multinational, transcultural workout that leaves you feeling stripped down to the bare essence of heartbreak, jubilation and reckless abandon once, and if, you make it out the other end.

Small Kings

There’s been talk about hitting Passa Passa ever since you arrived back in Kingston. The first Wednesday came and went; your excuse was that the street dance starts too late, usually around 3 AM, and you were tired and couldn’t find a ride. Still, you woke up on Thursday morning feeling empty with disappointment because having been before you know that the weekly ritual is the stuff of life. Passa Passa’s Wednesday night throw-down is as notorious for its eye-popping divas and screwface shottas as it is for its battle soundbwoys and young lords of the dancehall. The experience has been sitting in your body since the last time you made it to the dance, hibernating like a muscle memory, waiting to unleash its lyrical force.

The following week you make definitive plans. You ask your friend Grant to drive you and take a long afternoon nap in the sun. You agree to meet some locals at the uptown club Fiction around midnight, intending to make your exodus in time to arrive for the Passa Passa warm-up. All goes as scheduled until the uptown posse decides it’s too dangerous for you to show up on your own; one foreigner too many, they say, too much static, too much unnecessary risk. These are tough times, they tell you, especially in the Tivoli Gardens quarter that has been home to Passa Passa for close to a decade. And anyway, they say, it’s their party, not yours.

As you sit and you listen, you focus on the activity in the parking lot and check your watch for the time. When Grant finally pulls up, you say your goodbyes and are relieved suddenly to escape the atmosphere that is doing little to steer you off course. If anything, Passa Passa is the ultimate ghetto ball fused with the archetypal house party. The magnificence of scope, feeling and attitude is something you haven’t found an equivalent to anywhere, ever. The nocturnal panorama of young Kingstonians riding the pendulum between hard fury and a poetic sublime is the kind of medicine that only Jamaica can provide.

Puma commissioned a hand-selected, seven-person editorial team to document the 2008 African Cup of Nations in Ghana, focusing on key Puma-sponsored teams and players. This included over one month spent researching, developing and writing pieces exploring the local culture surrounding the annual African Cup of Nations, as well as focusing on four key teams and players: Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Cameroun whose striker Samuel Eto’o was the tournament’s biggest star. As the only writer on board, I was responsible for locating and developing stories on the teams as well as lifestyle and sports features that were specific to the home ground of Accra. Alongside the team, I acted as an on-the-ground Ghana-based liaison for the Puma offices in Boston and Germany. The creative assets from this project resulted in a traveling gallery show and viral campaign, and served as a reference and inspiration for Puma’s 2010 World Cup communication.

12►

Case Study

I was asked to team with the Pirelli brand and tattoo artist Scott Campbell for a special project at the tire manufacturer’s newest flagship store in Milan, Italy. The project featured Campbell “tattooing” Pirelli tires fitted to a limited-edition Ducati Diavel motorcycle on display at the Corso Venezia store. My role included producing a long-form written piece on Campbell that captured a 360 panorama of his journey from a Louisiana-born punk and motorcycle junkie to a self-taught celebrity tattoo artist to an emerging fine artist on the international circuit. I also interviewed Campbell for the resulting video and worked with the team to produce imagery and text documenting a weeklong brand plus artist collaboration resulting in a launch event that far exceeded expectations.

Never Plead Guilty

Scott Campbell has two loves, velocity and signage, which directly translate to motorcycles and tattoos.“My restlessness is quelled by getting on a motorcycle and just tearing down the road,” he said. “And my body looks like the bathroom wall at Max Fish.” We were at his apartment housed in the Peter Luger building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, early on a Friday morning. Campbell sat in front of a large desk covered with what looked like Wedgwood China skulls and jaw bones, piles of sketches, newspaper clippings, jars of oil paint and hand-made tattoo guns that formed a Braque-like collage of equal parts art and play. He had just been for his morning run and was alert, clear-eyed and talkative. The conversation shifted from reading Camus as a 16-year-old to painting Metallica logos on his punk friends’ jackets with whiteout to recently trading one of his paintings with the actor Orlando Bloom for a customized Ducati bike.

Born in 1977, Campbell, who spent his early years carving skulls into his grade school desk in Louisiana, has risen through the art world ranks with enviable vitesse. After tattooing a host of celebrities, including Sting, Kanye West and Marc Jacobs, he was asked to collaborate with Louis Vuitton for the Spring 2011 men’s collection. Noblesse Oblige, his recent art show at the OHWOW gallery in San Francisco, followed an equally well-received opening in Mexico City last November. Up next is a show in Zurich on soldiers he tattooed in Afghanistan as well as an exhibition at Miami’s Art Basel. For a no-name kid from the southern Bayou, Campbell’s ascension through social hierarchies and creative disciplines has been eye-opening. His modus operandi seems to be distilling culture at large, and moving freely between the high and the low. And his work is as substantive as it is provocative and disarmingly charming. His ability to keep all three in constant rotation is the alchemy behind his art.

thenomadhotel.com

In 2008, I was specially commissioned to create a signature language and brand identity for music industry veteran and hotel visionary Chris Blackwell’s Island Outpost Boutique Hotel Collection. This dream assignment involved a four-month residency at each of the five Island Outpost properties – Jake’s, Strawberry Hill, Geejam, The Caves and GoldenEye – where I interviewed staff and guests, conducted research and wrote original copy for website and branding usage.

I have continued to work with Island Outpost since. In 2012, I was asked to focus my attention on the exclusive rebranding of the Geejam Collection, specifically on creating the branding and marketing language announcing the reopening of three historic, high-end properties in Port Antonio, located on Jamaica’s northeastern coast. The launch of these new properties, including the Trident Castle, the Blue Lagoon and the Trident Hotel, are slated to return Port Antonio to its former 1960s Hollywood jet-setting apex and make the area one of the most sought after destinations in the Caribbean.

geejamhotel.com/
http://www.tridentportantonio.com/

www.artofsocks.com/

The Art of Socks

Socks are one of the world’s most basic necessities. And as legwork aesthetes, we are dedicated to the artistry of transforming these apparent basics into pieces of exception. The “Art of Socks” is a tribute to our affinity for premium craftsmanship, unsurpassed design and a healthy dose of high-end flair. We see socks as bespoke offerings that favor quality over quantity and singularity over convention. In other words, we’ve elevated the craftsmanship of sock making to an artform. Single-minded, perhaps, then again considering that our pieces have attracted instant loyalists from the high to the humble after just one fitting, why not? Call us sock arbiters if you will – the quiet authority on exceptional dressings for your feet.

Speaking of socks, our wordlist aesthetic, accented by hints of British dandyism, classic Americana and Italian tailoring with Japanese details defines each of our collections. Favoring stylish understatement with a classic edge, each creation is a prized array of heel-to-toe must-haves in a range of colors and cuts that are made first and foremost with elegance and wearability in mind. Our palette of luxury yarns, including alpaca, cashmere, merino and wool-silk blends, as well as the classic royal combed and gassed mercerized cottons from Filpucci, Filartex and Filmar, are all you’ll need to keep your feet well-heeled for any occasion.

usopen.org site.