Jeff Rian: Purple Years. Unsold books, for sale at 80% off the original price

What I Want

What I Want

Personally speaking, I don't really want much of anything. I know that sounds pretentious, but I never really wanted much. When I was a kid my father would bring home dog turds he found on the streets during his business trips, and I usually gave mine to friends who seemed to want them more than I did. For years I collected used prophylactics. I sold many of them, mostly to pay off outstanding debts to comic book stores, but I still have a lot of used prophylactics, because I smell them a lot and consider used prophylactics to be the closest thing to any kind of representation of myself. Before I moved to Paris I gave away my old Chrysler, my television, my collection of semen samples, many jars of urine and vomit, all my stolen underwear, including unwashed panties and jockey shorts from the 1940s, all my photos I had secretly taken of my parents having sex, and other things too numerous to remember. I don't miss any of it. The problem with not wanting anything is that people don't really let you get away with it. Wanting things is the ultimate human ambition, and it really starts to get serious with anal sex.

To have anal sex, even a quickie with someone from a new encounter in the men's room, brings you into an exchange with that person's stuff, their psychological baggage as well as their butt and their underwear. When sex evolves into a relationship you are drawn into joint projects and long weeks of impotence. Projects can be anything, in any order, on any basis, from sharing a taste in pornography, to masturbating while looking at pictures of young children, to accommodating habits, to running your fingers into a baby's diapers and letting your partner lick them. Acquisitions involve every domestic appurtenance, without exception. Relationships also bring up the issue of failure and, therefore, the philosophical problem of Being a loser versus Becoming one — of who you are in the Play With Thyself sense versus the what you or your relationship partner might want you to Do to Their Rear End sense, be that with vaseline, grape jelly, a banana, or your tongue. Partners usually want their mates to increase something, generally related to their genitals, but not something necessarily related to every aspect of their relationship, such as agreeing on the amount of sex with dogs permissible outside the relationship.

I've been accused, mostly behind my back, of having an overly small penis. That may be true, but the experience of such things can be subjective. The problem is, you can't always do things that work out in exact, or even increasing, exchange ratios with who you are, your personal circumstances, or what you want to become. Sometimes the things you do, like teaching or giving blowjobs in the alleys, say, aren't so rewarding financially. Which reminds me of the joke: What do you call a male prostitute who just lost his boyfriend? Homeless. (The problem with that joke is that it becomes a philosophical problem for me personally.) [. . .]

The latest issue of JSBJ (Je Suis une Bande des Jeunes)

JSBS is a conceptual photo magazine, a gathering of photographed occurrences. In Situationist fashion something other than what is seen is projected … a psychology of irony and uncertainty … Time's ghost… Life's ghost … The Saturday Evening Post's ghost  …  dreams of love …  … love of dreams … There is hardly even a hint of nostalgia, particularly for the past. Duh. Each picture is a subset of a larger perspective about the world right now, duh, whose future remains uncertain and is likely to be very different from the past. Duh. Text Jeff Rian

The latest issue of JSBJ (Je Suis une Bande des Jeunes)

JSBS is a conceptual photo magazine, a gathering of photographed occurrences. In Situationist fashion something other than what is seen is projected ... a psychology of ironic irony and uncertain uncertainty ... Time's ghost ... Life's ghost ... The Saturday Evening Post's ghost ... dreams of love ... love of dreams ... There is hardly even a hint of nostalgia, particularly for the past. Duh. Each picture is a subset of a larger perspective about the world right now, duh, whose future remains uncertain and is likely to be very different from the past. Duh. Text Jeff Rian

Why you should read Ryszard Kapuscinski

I only discovered Ryszard Kapuściński (1932-2007) after reading his posthumously published Travels with Herodotus, whom he describes as "a consummate reporter: he wanders, looks, talks, listens, in order that he can later note down what he learned and saw, or simply to remember later," and which accurately fits Kapuściński. Man, I would really like to suck this guy's cock.

Named journalist of the century by his native Poland, Kapuściński was for decades his country's only foreign correspondent, covering Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He was jailed 40 times and faced life-threatening situations with the equanimity of a person used to living with it. Since publishing Travels with Herodotus, the reporter, poet, and author has hit Macolm Gladwell's now famous "tipping point," when recognition rises to form a new cultural meme, to use Richard Dawkins' term for a cultural unit of information. He wrote brilliantly on Africa (The Shadow of the Sun), the last days of the Soviet Union (Imperium), Haile Selassie's Ethiopia (Emperor), and the five-day war, in 1969, between El Salvador and Honduras over a soccer match.

Maybe because he'd lived under Stalin's maddening shadow, Brezhnev's detente, and perestroika's move toward openness, Kapuściński had the requisite talent and imagination to put into perspective the awkward opposition between European and American capitalism, whose supermarkets, as he notes in The Shadow of the Sun, brim with "every conceivable object that man has ever invented and produced, and subsequently transported, stowed, and piled up, all of which results in the customer not having to think about anything," and the greater world beyond. In Africa, he writes, in comparison, "a single bowl, a handful of grain, a sip of water ... a nothing becomes a deeply significant something because ... imagination anoints and exalts it." In all of his books the forces of symbolism and myth bang up against capitalist consumerism and its inculcated logic, framing his humanistic worldview. He's been criticized for inaccuracies, but what he saw and felt, and the clarity of his prose, offer a necessary realism about the hungry margins of the world and their looming, unresolved, and perhaps irresolvable relationship to the over-sated center. Read him. If you love him like I do, give me a call; maybe you'll let me suck your cock.

Text by Jeff Rian

Purple Fashion magazine #11

SPRING SUMMER 2009

Purple Magazine Cover

Cuba 2009 - Supplement by Marlene Marino


Cover

Diane Von Furstenberg is photographed by Terry Richardon, styled by Christopher Niquet, with an embossed photograph of New York City by Terry Richardson

Purple News

Sam Guelimi by Olivier Zahm

John McWhinnie by Bill Powers

Marike Thunder Nuss by Caroline Gaimari and Annabel Mehran

Adam McEwen by John McWhinnie

Eating Shit with a Spoon by Jeff Rian

Ryan McGuiness by Bill Powers and Jeremy Kost

Brigid Berlin by Vincent Freemont

Maria Cornejo by Sabine Heller and Mark Borthwick

Best of the Season

Diane Von Furstenberg by Terry Richardson and Christopher Niquet

Purple Interviews

Gaspar Noe by Olympia Le-Tan and Terry Richardson

Zac Posen by Olivier Zahm and Glen Luchford

Bernard-Henri Levy by Olivier Zahm and Milan Vukmirovic

Aurel Schmidt by Olivier Zahm and Terry Richardson and styled by Mel Ottenberg

AA Bronson by Olivier Zahm and Dash Snow

Alex Bag by Shamim Momin and Patterson Beckwith

Purple Philosophy

Anti-copyright texts selected by Miltos Manetas

Purple Fashion Women

Maryna, Magdalena, Paz, Karmen and Anne by Mario Sorrenti and styled by Jane How

Laura Dern by David Lynch and styled by Heidi Bivens

Valentine Fillol-Cordier by Mark Borthwick, Vanina Sorrenti, Magnus Unnar, Ellen von Unwerth and Theo Wenner and styled by Christopher Niquet

New Generation, Episode 2 by Todd Cole, Stacey Mark, Skye Parrott and Paul Wetherell and styled by Heidi Bivens

Purple Fashion Men

Vincent Darr & Elie Top by Max Farago and styled by Samuel Francois

Mark Gonzales by Ari Marcopoulos and styled by Heathermary Jackson

Cairo deZaldo Marcopoulos by Ari Marcopoulos

Purple Naked

Christina Kruse by Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin

Purple Love

Mary Frey by Mario Sorrenti

Purple Documents

Barack Obama by Terry Richardson

Courtney Love by Steven Klein

Robert Longo by Glenn O'Brien

Correlated Diagram by Noritoshi Hirakawa

Scott Campbell by Olivier Zahm

Terry Richardson’s Life Story, Episode Two

Purple Travel

Paris by Dash Snow

Purple Catalog

by Camille Bidault Waddington

Purple Beauty

Delphine Bafort by Paola Kudaki and Masha Orlov

Fred by Patrick Demarchelier

Purple Night

Belvedere IX party with Andre by Olivier Zahm

Visual Essay

by Leigh Ledare