Listen Now

Jake Rosenthal's job is institutional fun. As (former) co-owner of the beloved (and former) Glasslands Gallery(RIP) and current co-owner of PopGun Presents and Elsewhere, Jake and his partners run NYC's most established independent music booking company and Brooklyn's largest independent venue. PopGun, and, by extension, Glasslands, are known for booking acts just at the cusp of international popularity. Just by way of eg, as the list is long, Glasslands, a room with ~300 capacity, hosted MGMT, Yeasayer, Lana Del Ray, Disclosure, Icona Pop, Deerhunter, Tame Impala, Haim, and Jay Reatard, most of them for their first NYC shows.  In this interview, we talk about third party security, building "as legal as possible", inspectors, service to a community, working with emerging artists, growing while staying independent, being a purist in an art business, the commercial support infrastructure for touring artists, running a music venue bar vs a normal bar, being music venue history nerds, and getting that tot money.

Szeki Chan is designer for and owner of 7115 by Szeki, a low-volume vertically-integrated clothing company. 7115 has a manufacturing facility in Guangzhou with a full-time staff of technicians and craftspeople producing their clothing and housewares year-round, as well as two retail locations here in NYC. Szeki is responsible for forecasting, designing, manufacturing supervision, retail merchandising, customer support, and everything in between. In this interview we talk about her business model, the challenges and advantages of vertical integration, the challenges of working with specific materials, and how the design process is influenced by information bubbling up from retail and back from production.

Adam Bailey began his makeup career as a teen with a correspondence course from Dick Smith. Since then he's made severed heads with embedded cameras, stigmata wounds, silicone boobs, all kinds of horrible injuries, all kinds of bald caps, a million masks, fake orthodontia, age makeup, alien makeup, and likenesses for film, TV, and stage productions. He's done makeup for Samuel L Jackson, Martin Short, and Cynthia Nixon among others. In this interview we talk about casting, gore, prostheses, teeth, scars, all kinds of rubber, pyro, makeup effects, digital effects, contact lenses, and John Landis. 

Cody Masters got his start as a nutritionist and cut his teeth as a chef in the restaurant kitchens of New York, but his job is more like that of a chemist than either of those trades. The recipes he makes are produced on industrial scales and sold in national grocery stores and chain restaurants. He calls them 'formulas' (we know, it's 'formulae'), and they're expressed in percentages and mixed in machines called vacuum tumblers. Cody has a some perspective on how industrial food operations can feed the world with integrity. This interview leaves us with more questions than we came in with.