Employees Of The Month

JESPER DAMSGAARD LUND & LASSE BECH MARTINUSSEN

Jesper and Lasse are two Danish photographers whose work lives up to their amusing, elflike names. They met in 2007 in New York City, where they worked for design agencies and bonded over shared interests in photography and boat shoes. A short while later the chaps traveled to Japan to photograph, you know, Japanese stuff and have since collaborated on photo projects all over the world. This issue contains photos from their recent trip to Cuba, where they documented what they describe as a cold-war anachronism, and what we describe as a perpetual going-out-of-business sale at Fidel’s personal cigar factory. The next stop on Jesper and Lasse’s endless world tour is southern China, where they will use their cameras to capture the story of a dwarf theme park called Kingdom of the Little People.

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CASTROLAND

JIM MANGAN
Jim is a snowboarder and artist who lived in the mountains of Colorado and Utah for the past 16 years and suddenly up and moved to Venice, California, a few months ago. In this issue, we present to you a selection of beautiful nude snowboarding photographs he took back in January in the Idaho Rockies. He calls the series “Winter’s Children” because he’s a hippie, and he made a video to go with it that is really fun to watch. Maybe we will show it to you online. What else? About his photo here, Jim says, “You wouldn’t know it, but I slammed really hard on this mini-ramp and had just finished sliding on my ass right before this shot was taken. I held it together while gritting my teeth and played it cool with a good old-fashioned thumbs-up.” He also says: “I have a spare bed at my house if anyone would like to stay there. Email me at manganjim@gmail.com.” Such a friendly hippie. See WINTER’S CHILDREN

CLAUDINE KO

While Claudine was in California writing her article about tree houses, her apartment in New York burned down. We felt so bad for her, but she seems to be taking it in stride. She moved into a hotel, indefinitely, and says that it suits her well, “in a late-era Nabokovian way.” Claudine has written for just about every magazine in existence, and she was one of our favorite writers at the late great

Jane

magazine, for which she wrote that famous article about American Apparel (you know, the one in which Dov Charney masturbated in front of her during their interview). After eight and a half years at

Jane

, she left to work on the PBS series

Nova

in order to fulfill her wish of becoming a science journalist. “I’m still working on that,” she says. “Mostly I just write about food and perverts.” See more of her perverted food writing at claudineko.com.

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OUR HOUSE

MARK ALLEN
Mark was a famous go-go boy/beefcake pinup model/club promoter in NYC in the 90s and then somehow warped into this incredibly weird writer guy who reads his weird stories on NPR and DJs weird music on WFMU and knows about every weird movie ever made. He’s obsessed with bull riding, skin diseases, male “gunge,” and his own ass. He’s also the longtime boyfriend of our favorite artist, Jim Krewson, and the two live together in the Catskills in what we can only imagine is a magic castle of wonderment. We hope to one day be invited there, NOT SO SUBTLE HINT. For this issue, he interviewed the actor who played Detlev in Christiane F. People have been trying to track this guy down for more than 20 years, and it was Mark who finally found him. Mark’s funny website (which he began as a Flying Lizards fanpage in 1998!) is at markallencam.com. See DETLEV LIVES!