a speech, an excerpt, a poem, and many reviews
An excerpt from my new profile of the fashion label GmbH, and three new contributors.
On Monday, April 15, I opened an email from the editor-in-chief of Them, Condé Nast's LGBTQ-focused publication. The request was simple: interview Serhat Işik and Benjamin Alexander Huseby, the founders of the Berlin-based fashion label GmbH, and turn the conversation into a profile for the publication’s 2024 Now Awards. A week and a half later, I showed up at their studio with 15 pages of notes open on my iPad, sat down for an hour-long chat, and left with an audio file that captured our roving discussion on politics and fashion.
With the profile now out in the world (after three rounds of edits and invaluable feedback from my editors), I’m happy to share the end result. Beyond being really fantastic clothing designers, Işık and Huseby are also deeply committed to speaking out against injustice. In January, that resulted in a 10-minute speech before their Fall 2024 collection that touched on the ongoing genocide in Palestine, among other things. Their words are important, and with the situation in Gaza only getting worse in the ensuing months, I wanted to reshare the full speech again before getting on with the newsletter.
This edition is a very special one for me because, for the first time, the majority of the pebbles come from contributors. After an excerpt from my GmbH profile and a brief musing about an actress judging furniture, I hand over the newsletter to three guests. Scroll through for their Challengers review, musings on Is it Cake?, and, finally, a soul-stirring poem — recited by the poet — about fresh tomatoes (among other things).
Welcome to issue six of 5 pebbles.
01) an excerpt from ‘gmbh shook the fashion world by standing with gaza. that statement won’t be their last'
On January 22, as GmbH staged the final event of Paris Fashion Week’s menswear collections, an electric current rippled through the air before a single model walked the runway. Draped in white keffiyehs, Huseby and Işık delivered an unusual, soul-stirring 10-minute speech calling attention to Israel’s brutal and devastating bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which at that point had already killed 25,000 Palestinians. “We have called for a ceasefire now, a release of all hostages, a free Palestine, and an end to the occupation — all demands we think should be uncontroversial,” Işık said.
The pair then began to quote from Indian author Arundhati Roy’s 2002 speech on post-9/11 prejudice. As they reached the end of their statement, Huseby broke down. Pausing for a moment as many in the audience wiped away tears, he choked out the final words: “Perhaps things will come worse, and then better. Perhaps there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”
It was a rare shout from within the fashion industry’s historically apolitical echo chamber, yet it was par for the course for GmbH. “We felt that we didn’t really have a choice,” Huseby explains to me. “If we hadn’t made a statement, then we wouldn’t have done a show. From the beginning, GmbH has always been about using fashion norms as a Trojan horse of positive change.”
The speech became one of the most viral moments of Paris Fashion Week, and the collection was almost universally praised by critics. But for the designers, the response felt bittersweet. “We were the only ones during the whole fashion season that said something so explicit, which we were disappointed by,” says Huseby.
“A lot of people came to us saying, ‘Oh, it’s so brave,’” Işık adds. “I don’t think it’s brave what we did. It was just our basic human needs that compelled us to do that. I don’t think there was any bravery attached to that.”
To read the full profile, please click here.
02) 5 quotes about modern furniture from an acclaimed actress, spoken aloud in a conference room on the 15th floor of the new york times building
As you may have guessed from my Lana Del Rey length title, the New York Times recently published an article titled The 25 Most Defining Pieces of Furniture From the Last 100 Years. I missed it when it first dropped at the end of March, but I’ve since read through it and have a question. How exactly did Julianne Moore breeze past security, make her way up to the conference room on the 15th floor, and proceed to judge furniture as one of six “experts” in this particular thought exercise? Did she have her alien friends suck them into the sky à la that one scene in the 2004 film The Forgotten, which deeply traumatized me as a child? Did she pump a mysterious environmental illness through the air vents à la Safe to confuse and destabilize the staff? Maybe she simply seduced an inappropriately young staffer in the back room of the Times office who then found a spot for her on the panel of experts gathering to judge furniture.
I’m joking, of course. Obviously, anyone who is anyone knows that Moore isn’t just an acclaimed actress with a devoted (gay) following of avid cinephiles. She’s also an “avid furniture collector.” Whatever chain of events led Moore into the conference room, I have to say thank you. Without her presence, the entire article would’ve been five grumpy people arguing about chairs, sofas, tables, and other objects for three hours (which I would probably still watch as a documentary, to be fair). In lieu of judging their judgment, I would like to present my five favorite lines from the actress, avid furniture collector, and self-proclaimed “huge physical coward,” Julianne Moore.
1. “I hate this chair so much.” (Philippe Starck, Louis Ghost Chair, 2002)
2. “I’m obsessed with craft” (George Nakashima, Slab I Coffee Table, Circa 1950)
3. “I love the Vitsoe catalog, frankly. It’s very soothing.” (Dieter Rams, 606 Universal Shelving System, 1960)
4. “Frankly, I don’t think bros are reading this article.” (Gary Panter and Ric Heitzman; Chairry, From “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”; 1986)
5. “As a person who wants to live with objects, I don’t value a lamp any less than I do a painting. I want to live with them both.” (Yayoi Kusama, “Accumulation No. 1,” 1962)
03) these are not the cum-soaked tennis balls you are looking for (guest pebble)
I was expecting something different when I saw Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. You’ll have to forgive me for my lapse in expectation management, but the promo blitz, the online buzz, and the Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross soundtrack for hard darkroom fucking really pushed a sexy interpersonal drama. I thought that a film about toxic top Zendaya smashing her sloppy bottom Ken dolls together, with tennis as a framing device, was going to be such a “we are so back” moment. For about the first thirty minutes, at least, it was.
I regret to inform you that the rest of the movie is actually about tennis and not the inner workings of a messy throuple.
Again, you would not know that from the trailer or the high praise circulated online, where it has been lauded as erotic and provocative. Outside of the excessive sweat-cum-cum, the film is so light on the sex you will leave the theater as dry as Zendaya’s acting. This is a real shame because with some editing, more (homo)sexuality, and generally more creative audaciousness, it could’ve been a solid ninety-minute movie worth all the discourse we’re now seeing. Despite my personal gripes that it was neither gay enough nor horny enough, Challengers and its reception marks a long-awaited cultural shift: people want sex again.
As Raquel S. Benedict wrote in her 2021 essay Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny, in contemporary blockbusters, “No one is ugly. No one is really fat. Everyone is beautiful. And yet, no one is horny. Even when they have sex, no one is horny. No one is attracted to anyone else. No one is hungry for anyone else.” While I can’t say I thought Challengers was fantastic, I certainly can’t praise it enough for bucking the MCU-ification of culture by trying to be horny. While I think it misses the mark, compared to most else you might see in a mainstream theater, it may as well be a porno. For that alone, it deserves some praise; that praise (and people seeing the film) will hopefully push culture forward.
You’ve probably seen the bizarre alliance of sheltered teens and conservative olds online that harp on about how sex in media is pointless, disgusting, or some sort of moral failing, which is, of course, a right-wing, Christian talking point meant to move the Overton window away from civil rights for women and LGBTQ+ people. Thankfully, this group is loud but small. I can only hope that the kids grow out of their naïveté and watch some movies that don’t exist in a virginal vacuum along with, I guess, Challengers. With this tennis foreplay film moving the cultural needle, I dream of a day when more media, particularly within the mainstream, comes back around to highlighting three important subjects: sex and sexuality, the messiness of interpersonal relationships, and cold women forcing their dumb-as-rocks twunks to fuck each other. 6/10
Touché is a Berlin-based DJ and writer. He’s as known for his winding, afterhours dissertations on niche cultural subjects as he is for his signature vocal-forward House sets on dancefloors across the city.
04) a berlin chef craves beauty in simplicity, is fooled by cake instead (guest pebble)
I’ve been thinking about Is it Cake? Yes, I mean that TV show where people have to guess if an object is real or, you guessed it, secretly cake (they get it wrong a lot). The show (and the viral videos it originated from) is truly smooth-brain, stoner-grade television at its worst, yet it hits me right where I like to be hit after coming home from a stressful night of service.
As a chef, I strive to cook honest food with a mindful connection to time and place; as an artist, I obsess over the materiality of ingredients and the techniques used to transform them. But in cooking, what I really appreciate is when a dish feels effortless — as if nothing was done to it before it made an appearance on the plate. I love a dish that is exactly what it is, made of exactly what it looks like it‘s made of; one that holds no illusions yet is still somehow impressive. Sure, you can make anything look like anything, but to be able to share and appreciate something for exactly what it is and nothing more is truly beautiful.
While I find the deception of Is it Cake? mind-numbingly amusing, it also represents an exaggerated manifestation of my love-hate relationship with the tweezered-to-shit tasting menu tricks of the star restaurant world. When so much of our engagement with food is mediated through images on screens, what I really crave these days is simplicity and honesty: a real connection to living food.
Once, a dear friend invited me to join him at an exceedingly bougie farm-to-table lunch by Ernst, hosted in the garden of Erdhof Seenwalde in the Mecklenburgische Seenplatte. For the opening course, we were served a yard-long green bean with just a dash of salt. A yard! Long! BEAN!!! It was green, crunchy, snapped when you bit it and tasted exactly like a green bean. By no small wonder of nature this bean seemed to me the most surreal experience of the entire meal. We ate it together, sitting in the garden through a comfortable silence, surrounded by the distant hot barn smell of the dairy cows that fertilized it, and listened to the buzzing of the pesky bees that pollinated it. At the end of the meal, we thanked the chefs whose hands nurtured and picked it, dreaming that a green bean alone was special enough on its own to share with others. It was long, and they didn’t cut it in half. If they did, we might‘ve gotten cake instead.
Chris Paxton is a culinary artist based in Berlin, Germany. He is the host of Dreams, a seasonal artist dinner-listening event hosted at Kwia, Neukölln’s queer listening bar, and is a co-founder of Lucky You Studios, a culinary creative studio.
05) ‘answered prayers’ by ana velasco (guest pebble)
Ana Velasco is a poet, writer, music supervisor, and curator. She lives and works in Mexico City, and is the guardian mother of El Cuarto Azul, a beautiful light blue “magical portal in CDMX for dreaming and creating.”
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