I found grapes, a green plant, one lemon, a clove of garlic, and some bacon bits. Add it to some pasta and one’s got a miracle. It’s a light hearted dish for an easy evening with a glass of something tangy and crisp.

Leaving the morning fog, we spend the day above the streets of Istanbul from rooftop terraces of restaurants and bars. Yeni Raki, glasses of wine, Turkish coffee. A Bossa nova DJ and conversation on the whimsical nature of “gabe-style” moving. Toss the keys in and walk out? I say drain the glass, walk out into the night for another adventure.

Like the water, Istanbul never seems to end, stretching to the horizon. Here, Europe meets Asia and the sailboats skim across the glimmering Bosphorus Strait. Architecture of the city – centuries old, perhaps as old as the 7th century BCE – build up on top of each other, ultimately peaking with the gold tipped minarets of various mosques. Since its beginnings, this location (Byzantium – Constantinople – Istanbul) has seen the rise and fall of numerous world powers including the Roman Empire, the Byzantine, the Latin, and the Ottoman, finally establishing itself as a Republic in 1923. And despite the sunshine and the sailboats, one can still feel the heavy echoes of centuries gone, the deepness of culture and memories.

This young one shot out of nowhere, dashing up onto the docks, intent on swinging her legs out over the water. Stripy shirt, a dark cardy, cuffed shorts, and red sneakers – she’s doesn’t even have to TRY sporting the look. With such a pervasive sailing culture, I suspect she even knows her way around a yacht.

There is perhaps nothing so sublime as a glass of wine at sunset by the water in the company of a dear friend. Would you disagree? We enter the garden at the luxurious THEHOUSE CAFÉ in Ortaköy and sit at the water’s edge. My former desire for Turkish coffee fades to that for a glass of rosé. Ferry boats, tankers, and sailboats drift across lazily as we sip notes of young fruit and fresh summer. Time seems to stop but the sky creeps through washes of blurred pastel. Eventually the sky blushes down to a soft pink and across the Bosphorous, the minarets dotting the horizon pierce up into the fading glow replaced by villa lights flickering on to glimmer down towards us.

Even within structures of very specific dress regulations, these Turkish ladies in Istanbul express themselves in style with the patterning of their eşarplar.

VERSUS

www.allgaeu-orient.de

www.oecher-safari.de

www5.mercedes-benz.com

The decline of passenger standards since those days, is glaringly obvious with the mass of disheveled faces and sweatpants swarming around me. But the elegance of James Bond, Downton Abbey, Titanic, Hitchcock films, or Murder on the Orient Express, need not be exclusive from our own travel affairs.

The recent turn of the season necessitates movement. It’s time for change, to shake off the dust of hibernation, to find an adventure. Laugh, giggle, and add sunglasses to the day’s repertoire. It’s sunshine and fresh water, the softness of cotton and cashmere, a surge of creativity, activity. The opportune moment to infuse elegance and style back into the art of travelling.

As for me “I’m homeless” I tell people with a disarming smile. If you’re dressed smartly, it deflects any trace of seedy imagery. Rather one comes across as merely sorting out one’s international affairs; a true journeyman, a Man of Mystery and Intrigue. It helps that the statement isn’t all that misconstrue – I do live out of three black leather bags.

The last apartment grounded to my name was a breezy studio with a wraparound balcony above the Levinsky spice markets of Tel Aviv. I had two leather bags then and a couple of suits. I ripped open the door, left the keys swaying on the doorknob, and walked out, bags shouldered, into the light of a hot October day. I dove into the back of a cabbie headed to the air-conditioned Departure hall of Ben Gurion Airport.

Tel Aviv – Provence – Berlin – London – Brussels – Berlin – New York – Houston – Edinburg – Austin – Houston – Edinburg

Winter passed in a frigid blur of cities and airports. Amongst all that, I’ve been pleased with a luggage addition. Three leather bags now – solid luggage being crucial to living on the go – and still a couple of suits, I follow a fundamental rule: Pack light and dress smart. Suits. Shirts. Ties. Toiletries. Passport. Work gear. Yes, the precious articles slightly crinkled upon arrival, but why voluntarily suffer the sub standard levels of the wardrobe?

The phone rings.

It’s time to repack. The Kooples bomber folds into the bottom of the SurfaceToAir weekender; I’ll pull it out for the Italy job. Filippa K, soft and supple, under the Hucklebury shirt – Italian milled Egyptian cotton and beautiful to the touch. The Forage tie will work in Athens. The black silk for dinner in Istanbul. Always have a black tie for black tie evenings. I pack one suit and wear the Cavalli for travel. Toiletries on top for airport security, and photography gear and a spare shirt in the rucksack to carry on. The itinerary is yet to be another flurry of destinations.

Edinburg – Houston – New York – Berlin – Istanbul – Athens – Milano – Brescia – Roma – Brescia – Milano – Berlin – New York

We’ve perfected technology and the mode of travel haven’t we?; one can even pay to enter space these days. But how do we perceive the in-between spaces, the dash “-” between the cities? I refer to the platforms and the corridors, the queues and ticket lines, departure halls and arrival exits. They’re painted quite bleakly through theoretician Marc Augé’s definition of “non-spaces.” And assessing the fashion visuals around me at 7:13am, I’d quite agree.

But oh, ladies and gentlemen, fellow travellers and journeymen, it could be…so. much. more! But ultimately, that potential is explicitly a personal responsibility. For true journeymen, it never was, nor is today, simply a matter of traveling in a certain flight class, but rather a holistic approach that governs their entire lifestyle from doorstep to doorstep.

photos: Hucklebury shirts accredited to Hucklebury for editorial use.

GabrielDesigns has made a couple of new addition to life.
1: Nikon D300s
2: Nikkor 85mm
Dropping the professionalism briefly, I’m doing a DANCE suckaaaaaaz!!!

A walk through their workshop is a step into history, straight back to the 50s and 60s, the golden industrial-ridden age of the printing press. The smell of freshly inked paper mixes with that of oil and machinery. Over the assaulting drone of the metallic monsters spitting out the latest print jobs, Alex and Kon talk origins of Coeur Noir.

“We were big fans of Harry Crosby and the Black Sun Press and we loved the iconography. With the black heart thing, we went through a thousand other iterations. Finally we actually stumbled across the Harry Cosby iconography of a little black sun and we said: That’s Amazing! What if we did a little black heart?”

But despite the intent to creatively name their upstart with an image, their research uncovered some problems. “We came to the realisation that we couldn’t name our company as a little image of a black heart. You can’t file as an image, you have to have a NAME, an original name.”

“So we like OK, black heart. What do we do with black heart? Joan Jett had taken care of copyright on everything that said black heart up and down…”

“So then you went French?”

“Actually we had given up on it, and we were listening to a song by a band called Death in June. You familiar with them? Kind of post-apocalyptic fascist folk music. But in one of the songs, a line goes: Il est dans le coeur noir. And we were like: There you go, Coeur Noir! But of course impossible to spell and no one remembers what it is…”

“Unless you understand French and then it has a nice ring to it…”

“Yeah! Well, it can. Not for everyone you talk to. Venders are like: coyer-noyer? And I have to spell it twenty times a day to customers. But it’s worth it, it sticks, and I think it was Arnold Schwarzenegger that said that the harder your name is to pronounce, the harder it is to forget or something like that…So that’s how we got to the black heart!”

With the backstory behind Coeur Noir, Alex and Kon show me around the floor, giving insight behind projects and each piece of machinery. The walls of their printery are lined with type specimens dating back to the mid-1940s and they admit that despite the bygone years, the prints still continue to inspire.

Yet nostalgic professionalism is hardly their idyllic world. Recent developments in the New York printing scene has see the unfortunate proliferation of under qualified hobbyists capitalising on the rediscovery of letterpress printing and “mucking things up for actual trained professionals by way of unseasoned price quotes and sub-par standards of quality.” The result? Artists and designers growing weary of specialty printing.

Nonetheless, Alex and Kon have drawn an extremely high expectation of quality, and they’ve held that line taut. Their reputation now precedes them, guaranteed by some of their prints landing in the likes of MOMA, and Coeur Noir about to successfully celebrate their official 10 year anniversary come August. With the Interview below revealing details on their lives and inspirations, I arm up with my camera to visually explore their Williamsburg workshop.

+ What brought each of you to NYC?
-Kon | Alex originally moved to NY to pursue a career in the publishing world. I moved out a couple of years later specifically to open Coeur Noir.

+ Going all the way back, what’s the story on how you two met?
-Kon | We met at a friend’s house party in high school. Alex and I are both Russian by ancestry and we got into a conversation about the tattoo of the Russian Imperial Eagle I have on my arm while drinking 40ozs on the porch.

+ When you first opened Coeur Noir, you said it had an authentic 50s look. What did that look like?
-Kon | Our palate was battleship gray, black and wood. All the furniture was carefully curated 50′s modern (Jens Risom floating top walnut desks, Eames conference table and fiberglass chairs, etc) to match the era during which the equipment we had at the time was manufactured and originally used. We also framed and hung period-appropriate type specimen sheets around the studio that were published by paper companies to show of the quality and printability of their paper. These specimen sheets were some of the earliest examples of modern graphic design and were designed by the likes of Eric Gill, Hermann Zapf and W.A. Dwiggins, who is actually credited with coining the term “graphic design”. We hung them to inspire us and we told ourselves that we would not hang any of our own work on the walls until we did something that was worthy of hanging next to the work of these masters. We’ve yet to hang any of our own work.

+ It was music inspiring the printery name. Does music still continue to inspire your work today?
-Kon | I don’t know if music inspires our work today per se because being a trade shop, our job is to faithfully realise the creative visions of the designers with whom we work, but from metal to experimental noise to 90′s Bay Area rap, there’s always something blaring in the background to help us while away the hours. 

+ What’s so exceptional to you about machines, ink, and paper?
-Kon | There’s something very visceral and satisfying about commanding a massive piece of machinery and meticulously coaxing it into producing something as fine as a line of perfectly inked type on a pristine sheet of paper. The process is almost violent, but the finished product can be very delicate. I find that dichotomy to be romantic in its own way. 

+ Your favourite item or inspirational object in the printery:
-Kon | There are actually two. The first is a relatively newly acquired broadside that was given to us as a gift. It’s a reproduction of Beatrice L. Warde’s famous “This is a Printing Office” broadside originally created to showcase Eric Gill’s then new titling face Perpetua in 1932. It’s not so much the broadside itself, but the quote that inspires me.

The second is a quote on one of the aforementioned type specimens that’s hanging in the studio for a font called Bulmer, originally designed and cut for the printer William Bulmer by William Martin at the Shakespeare Press in 1786. The quote goes:

IMHO, every graphic design student should be required to memorize this quote before they’re allowed to graduate.

+ If you could travel back in the history of printing, where would you end up?
-Kon | It’s probably going to sound cliché, but I would love to see Johannes Gutenberg’s original hand press in action. Knowing what I do about what it takes to make certain projects look good with all the modern technology available to us today, I think it would be very interesting to see what lengths he had to go to in order to get what he considered “quality printing” off of his (rudimentary by comparison) equipment. That said, I wouldn’t want to stay for too long.

+ Your favourite hangout is…
-Kon | Bed. My wife and I just had a baby and I don’t know if there’s anything more sublime than that little girl asleep in my arms. Life changing.

+ Thanks Coeur Noir for helping us rediscover the old arts! And congratulations to Kon for the new family addition.

www.coeurnoir.com

Haberdasher (noun) \ˈha-bə(r)-ˌda-shər\ – a dealer in men’s clothing and accessories

Over a year ago, I chanced across a posting on Trashness of a Drakes paired with an Ascot Chang. I’ve been on the hunt since for a paisley piece.

Though the chase is still on, the search along with random doses of migratory plane hopping led me to STAG AUSTIN where I picked up this elegant find with the words “Yours Till Niagra Falls” hand sewn into the back. A little digging revealed a renovated tire factory in Philadelphia, now housing FORAGE HABERDASHERY – dealers, or rather creators, of men’s accessories. Stephen Loidolt and Shauna Alterio are the duo to blame for scrounging up custom textiles, fabric remnants, and deadstock to artfully compose these neatly packaged gentlemen’s neckwear.

Hopefully a VOIX article will be in order some day if the opportunity poses itself?

After moving to New York together and seeing ten years in that charging machine of a city, John Earles and Jennifer Blanco decided to transplant their steely edge to attacking design, and inject it into their roots in Houston. They co-opened Workhorse Printmakers as well as SPINDLETOP DESIGN, specialising respectively in quality letterpress printing and creative branding. Jennifer muses: “I don’t think we literally set out to introduce a hyper speed to Houston. But it became apparent early on that we’re workaholics and we’ve attracted the ideal people we’d like to work with in both the printing and design fronts. We’ve managed to meet some of the sharpest, interesting people that also have big aspirations for the city.”

Their studio at 1304 Malone with wood rafters spaciously vaulting the ceiling, was apparently a 50′s manufacturing warehouse for a furniture maker. Since, the space has been re-interpreted as a bachelor pad for a bike enthusiast, a photographer’s studio, and a sumer children’s camp. Now secured as Jennifer and John’s design headquarters, a portion has been sectioned off as a pristine white-toned, computer-humming design studio while the other half is the audibly mechanical portion of the printery.

I take a closer look at all the noise and whirling gears to which John explains: “Things aren’t made like this anymore. These days a button is pushed on a box, something happens inside and a job, be it a printed piece or soup being warmed, is done without the user seeing the process.” But not so at Workhorse!

“I like that the entire process is laid bare. The machines groan, creak, clank and tick. They rotate and move and there’s no attempt to hide that work is being done. You hear it, see it, and feel it. These were the pinnacle of printing technology and it all boils down to mass and applied pressure. 2,800 lbs applying 1,200 psi to transfer ink from 12 pt type to a wedding invitation. It’s Sisyphean in its marvellous inefficiency. And the best part is that the record of it is left in the impression on the paper. It’s an artefact of the process that all the applied technology in the world can’t duplicate.”

How could I refute such a poetic outlook?!? Especially when some of these machines, chugging and groaning, impressively date back to the 1800s as revealed by the interview below with Jennifer and John. But their flair to history doesn’t keep them from developing high-stake plans for world domination. Speaking with these two, I urge you Houstonians to stop by (by car) the black-painted facade of Workhorse Printermakers. For quality and custom printing, or even for a creative chat, no doubt you’d be welcomed just as warmly as I was.

+ If I may pry, you two go back a number of years – where does it begin?
- John | Jennifer and I met in the undergraduate Fine Arts Painting program at University of Houston in 1999. Jennifer had always wanted to live in New York and when I was accepted to the MFA program at School of Visual Arts, the perfect opportunity presented itself and we moved there in August 2001. We’ve been inseparable ever since. In retrospect I would consider us meeting to be the defining moment in both of our creative lives.

+ What originally inspired or generated the idea of opening your studio space?
- Jennifer | We started our first company, Product Superior, while still living in Brooklyn in 2008 and I’d been doing quite a bit of freelance work in addition to a full time design job. Running a design studio wasn’t really a goal for me, so I’d only been doing the freelance work because it was occasionally fun. Very early on we shared a small office with a photographer friend and now the fourth studio later, we’ve found a great space of our own on the edge of the oldest neighbourhood in the city, the Heights.

+ There’s plenty to love about living in New York… But what do you love about life in Houston?
- John | For me I love the sense of inclusiveness. In other cities many of the cool or interesting things are guarded with exclusivity or by only having a select few participate. In Houston there’s a big push to get everyone who’s interested involved. There’s a huge community of craftspeople and individuals making astonishing things that are just becoming aware that the rest of the world would be interested in what they consider a hobby. It’s an exciting time to be here and the best part is that everyone gets to participate in making their city a better place to live!

+ What’s so exceptional to you about old machines, ink, and paper?
- Jennifer | Running the presses—especially the proof presses—is to me kind of like punk rock. I appreciate many have spent hours and days meticulously setting a message to print, but there’s also something so freeing about quickly throwing down some type, inking, and rolling paper with the cylinder to press.

+ What’s the story on these printing machines?
- John | At Workhorse Printmakers we focus exclusively on letterpress printing. We run Chandler and Price platen printing presses: a 8 x 12″ old style built in 1898 and a 12 x 18″ Craftsman built in 1929. Both are hand fed meaning the paper and the printed piece have to be exchanged manually. We restored both to their current condition and the majority of our printed work is done on them. 

In addition we have two Challenge cylinder proof presses that we use for larger work or pieces that require more precise printing at the expense of speed. We have a 15MA which has manual inking (ie. you turn a little wheel to distribute ink) and a 15MP which has a powered inking drum. Houstonians will often see our yellow 15MA out at various events where we print onsite as it requires no power whatsoever.

+ How does your studio and your home relate?
- John | Good ideas and creativity aren’t conceived, they’re grown from the things we immerse ourselves in. We live in a midcentury house filled with designed objects we’ve collected, books we love and artwork we’ve created. These are the things we gain inspiration from so for me they’re the most intimate traces of our work.

+ Your favourite tool in the studio:
- Jennifer | For me, a VERY close tie between the box cutter, 12″ L ruler, and the sledge hammer.

+ …Why of course, a sledge hammer!…

It doesn’t matter really where you perambulate in this world, one can always find a culture of tea drinking can’t you? Some are content with electric kettles, styrofoam cups, and a tea bag swimming about. Others hold to bowing over a cup and waiting patiently for tea leaves to softly whisper their drinkable status into the listener’s ear. Sipping on a cup of English Breakfast myself in Austin, I decide to look into the oddities of this global phenomenon and how it is that I’ve come to be sipping British tea in Texas.

EMPERORS OR FARMERS?

Of course China is to blame. There’s quite an infamous legend about a third century Emperor, and quite conveniently a herbalist too, Shen Nung boiling drinking water under a Camellia Sinensis tree. Perchance, some leaves wander in to infuse the water, et voila! tea is served. Another version involves an Indian-prince-turned-Buddhist-monk cutting off his own eyelids after waking from a lax nap. A tea shrub sprouts where his bloody eyelids land on the ground….quite a ghastly tale.

Now while I do hold my personal suspicions about such propaganda – by all means, I do agree it sounds more convincing on a Marketing Plan should an emperor or prince be the ultimate source of tea, as opposed to a realistic sounding version of a plebeian growing herbs? – point being, tea originates in China.

GOING WEST

Still, the Western World has to wait a few centuries for the Dutch to show up on the international trading scene. Looking for a way to best the Portuguese at their game, the first consignment of tea reaches Holland in 1606. Tea spreads across continental western Europe as a fashionable beverage, though reserved for the wealthy. Wanting a slice of the pie, the infamous British East India Company builds up a monopoly on British trade with India and “the Far East.” (Thus the company’s eponymous name, very original, well done chaps.)

But British being British, tea – considered mostly as a foreign curiosity – has to wait again for another key individual, Catherine of Braganza, to step into the light. A Portuguese and the queen to Charles II, she’s an avid tea drinker and uses the nation’s trading company to satiate her drinking habits. Naturally what a queen entertains, the nation desires. So by the 18th century, the East India Company is quite a lucrative organisation making a fortune through taxation of tea.

THANKS TO ORGANISED CRIME

Now to get to the tea bag floating about in MY cup, the narrative diverges here; inextricably linked, one develops further within the UK and the other crosses the ocean to the Americas. The steady rise of tea taxes in the UK culminates in an organised network of tea smugglers slipping tea into the country under the noses of the East India Company. Without the necessity to cover the taxes, store owners are selling illegal tea at lower costs, opening up the esteemed product to the masses in the UK.

As a result, the East India Company finds itself without much business, and looks to America to rid itself of its surplus stock. We all know where THAT goes: the Americans taking care of the “ridding” in Boston, which wasn’t so much of a Native American themed costume soirée, but more of an instigator for revolution. Once firing ceases, America – namely the merchant houses of Thomas Perkins, Stephen Girard, and John Astor – sets up direct trade with China by building the fastest ships on the market. This golden age of the American Tea Clippers break the iron first of the British tea trade monopoly and the beverage finds itself streaming into the United States.

BAG IT, SELL IT

So it is that we come to 1908 and a New Yorker tea merchant by the name of Thomas Sullivan, who gets tricky with his packaging strategy. Until this point, tea was in loose leaf form and prepared in tea pots. Sullivan starts sending out his samples to customers in small silken bags, a nice marketing touch that speaks of the product’s quality and value. Except his lazy customers simply assumed that the object was to be plunged straight into a cup of hot water, rather than having the contents emptied into a teapot. Noticing this, Sullivan makes a few improvements to the packaging and we have the origins of the Tea Bag.

Which, considering their history, was a slap in the face to Britain and their tea-making rituals. So it takes yet another war or two to seal the Anglo-American bond, and the postwar 1950s desire to economise life, that tea – now in convenient bagged form – enters the UK by means of Tetley. Other tea giants including Twinings of London, established since 1706, quickly takes up the cause.

Skip forward to today and much of the Western World has adopted bagged tea as the standard. We’ve even completely erased any trace of the art behind drinking tea and have created pre-made teas, purchasable in plastic bottles; a shocking insult to Mr. Shen Nung! Though the danger packed glory days of the Tea Clippers are mostly forgotten, the import and export of tea across the world is to this day, a streamlined operation. Still I find it rather strange to think that English tea left British shores for America, only to have it returned with a 50s ideal, and then re-shipped back to my local grocers for my personal enjoyment. And as my tea’s grown cold and I reach for another English Breakfast in American bagged style, I wonder who I’m upsetting more: the Brits, the Yanks, or the Chinese?

NO. SEVEN is here, just in time to compliment my morning coffee – a perfect duo as the opening act to the weekend. And this one even promises ice creams! I’ll keep this one brief as a teaser for the latest issue of Kinfolk: A Guide For Small Gathering. Stay informed here for a lengthier article soon on the GabrielDesigns experience with this journal…

Straight out of the post, it already exudes that lovely scent of an untouched and freshly printed world. Now time to brew that coffee and some inspirational reading.

+ A heavy duty canvas rucksack
+ A big knife for when pirates show up. One can either join them or repel them
+ Camera for candid photos
+ Sunglasses for going incognito
+ A wide brimmed hat to avoid any tanning. Also contributes to the incognito look
+ Blue jean jacket to harmonise with the context
+ Boots – sandals expose your grubby toes
+ iPod for cancelling ocean wave sounds
+ Extra shirt in case one ends up being thrown into the water
+ Sketchbook and pencils for recording treasure findings