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Frankly Brilliant
Christopher Paquet, Artist
He has an M.F.A. from Goldsmiths, the most notorious art school in Britain, alma mater of Damien Hirst and Vivienne Westwood. He showed last year at Frieze: The Zoo, a younger, edgier offshoot of Britain’s biggest art fair; is on the roster of London gallery Bearspace; and, last fall, was one of 16 young painters to be included in a 2007 Goldsmiths survey at the White Box gallery in New York (the show inspired Time Out New York to proclaim him a “feisty young talent”).
But we don’t want to use these glittering facts to obscure Christopher Paquet’s actual paintings, which are already in the collections of London’s Ernst & Young and New York gallery owner Lawrence O’Hana. Like Banks Violette’s, Paquet’s work taps into the unabashed sincerity of rock—but despite his great affection for Headbangers Ball and Russian criminal tattoo art, he doesn’t pay homage to the tarry earnestness of Swedish black metal by literally making art about music. Instead, Paquet applies that fearless heart-on-sleeve aesthetic to unsettling and beautiful paintings filled with “personal totems”: hoofed creatures, blood oranges, pyramids, diamonds. Right now he’s painting with a mix of paint and caulk to almost three-dimensional effect—an approach he describes as “a bit wonky ... but I go for that, that awkwardness.
“Art, especially out of Goldsmiths and out of London, it’s been about ‘Oh, that’s a clever idea,’” he continues, “but I can’t make art like that. I like things that have soul.”
This morning, Paquet’s not in London, but sitting in O’Malley’s pub with a stout and a smoke, proclaiming his affection for St. Louis (“I have ‘314’ tattooed on my neck”). The pub’s across the street from his Cherokee-Lemp studio, where he’ll be working until he heads back to New York this fall to take advantage of a $4,000 scholarship to the Pratt Institute.
“Once I get established in New York, I’m planning on coming back here and rehabbing a house and making St. Louis my home base. I can make artwork way cheaper here than I could in New York ... and,” he adds, laughing, “I don’t know if I can deal with being away from McGurk’s for too terribly long.”
—Stefene Russell
Rebirth of Cool
Carrie Drda, Owner of Phoenix Rising
I think Carrie Drda is trying to protest my assertion that she is cool, but I am too distracted by her supercool glasses to listen. Everyone who’s wandered the Loop knows that Phoenix Rising, the gift shop that sells rubber chickens, diamond and silver jewelry and scented candles (to name a scant few items), is the ultimate in one-stop shopping. After all, where else in St. Louis can you find a present to please your pearls-and-pantsuit–wearing mom, your socially inappropriate grandpa and your eco-freak sister? It should come as no surprise, then, that co-owner Carrie Drda is pretty fantastic herself.
Carrie and her sister Molly, who now runs City Sprouts across the street, started working at Phoenix Rising soon after its 1992 opening, when their mother, its original owner, became sick with leukemia. After she passed, the sisters soldiered on, gradually weaning their customers off crystals and pentacles. Today the shelves are filled with a decidedly different fare, though the store may never escape its original iteration. “Every once in a while someone will come in and act surprised, like, ‘Oh, but I loved this place,’” Drda mock-whines, “and I’m thinking, ‘Well, you obviously didn’t love it that much—you haven’t been here in 10 years.’”
All snark aside, Drda can’t help but grin as she talks about her job. “Nine times out of 10, people thank me as they’re leaving, just because they had a really good time—and it’s nice to spend your day interacting with people who are having a good time.”
Of course, when she feels she needs a shopping reprieve, she’s ideally situated. As a bona fide cinephile, she haunts the Tivoli with frequency; when she comes up for air, she likes to take her dogs for a Forest Park frolic. She said some other stuff, too, but I was too busy wondering if I could pull off cute side-swept bangs like hers to notice.
—Katie Pelech
Community Radio’s Caretaker
Nico Leone, KDHX Manager
“Everything I know about how organizations work tells me this shouldn’t work in any way, shape or form—but clearly something’s happening here.”
The memory of that confession by a management consultant makes Nico Leone smile when he quotes it. As manager and music director of community radio station KDHX (88.1 FM), Leone takes pride in its idiosyncrasies—and particularly in the people who power it.
The Byronic 30-year-old oversees operations from a CD-strewn office at the top of a creaky staircase in the station’s Magnolia HQ, a former bakery two blocks east of South Grand. He estimates that roughly 1,000 volunteers of all stripes support the station and its TV affiliates. “We have doctors, we have lawyers, we get musicians, we practically get the unemployed, we have record-store clerks, record-store owners, club owners,” he says. “It’s an incredible cross-section of people.”
Those volunteers, with the station’s small staff and board, embrace KDHX’s creative freedom to share their passions and perspectives with St. Louis at large. In doing so, quite literally, they define the local vox populi.
Moreover, in Leone’s three-plus years there, KDHX not only has suffered remarkably little turnover but also has heightened its profile markedly by way of podcasts, regularly sponsored events and a website upgrade. “Our strength as a station has always been the degree to which we’ve been rooted in the community,” he notes, “but we weren’t always systematic about the way we went about that.”
His own savoir-vivre, meanwhile, Leone dismisses completely: “Whatever coolness or hipness I have with regard to KDHX is derived from the greater pool or population of volunteers who come in the door every day.” With that dismissal, he caps an impressive personal playlist: articulate, handsome, youthful ... and impeccably modest.
—Bryan A. Hollerbach
Tiny Dancers
The Kids of COCA
Onstage, they’re beaming. And it hits you: When’s the last time you caught a performance and saw this many smiles? The expressions change, of course, to match the impressive range of moves and music. But even when the kids are swaggering across the stage for a moment of ’tude, it’s not long before exuberance returns.
As it should. They are still kids—11 to 18 in age, taking five classes a week as part of COCAdance (in its 15th year) or Ballet Eclectica (in its second). And they’re at that level where you can sense them improving—sharpening their skills—even as you watch.
Afterward, they’re in street clothes and talking. Jacob Lewis: “The best part is to see that the people actually like what you’re doing, after spending hours and hours working just for them.” Kelly Marsh: “The coolest part is showing the people that you’re not just here to be a person—that you’re a gift.” Ashley Ervin: “We have a second family here.”
The kids, it seems, are all right. They’re graduating from COCA and heading only up—dancing professionally, studying at Juilliard. Ashley Ervin, in her seventh year with COCA, sees her own future clearly: Fordham University, to major in dance. But also: pre-med.
—Stephen Schenkenberg
The Missouri Bellwether
Lewis Reed, President of the Board of Aldermen
Lewis Reed’s handy election win this spring hints at big changes for local politics. Not only is Reed the first African-American aldermanic president in the history of the city, but his hip specs, sharp suits and tech savvy also set him apart from the old-schoolers holding court at Beffa’s cafeteria. Formerly alderman of the 6th Ward, he earned a degree in math and computer science at Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville and worked for years in the information-technology field; it’s not surprising that Reed was the guy who penned the technology bill that radically overhauled the city’s computer system (so think kindly of him the next time you pay your parking ticket online).
“I think that certainly I will be looking within the city for ways to leverage technology so that we can operate more efficiently,” he says, “so that information is more readily available and people don’t have to take a day off work to go down to City Hall and troll through the archives to find what they need.”
Reed’s also the founder of Bike St. Louis, a program he organized with the help of his fellow aldermen and the Great Rivers Greenway District. After $1.2 million in grants, 70 miles of cycling routes were laid down throughout the city; now, county municipalities like Webster Groves and Maplewood are joining up with the group. Though cycling is beloved by progressives because it reduces carbon emissions and allows people to get to know their city in a way that’s impossible when they’re in their cars, Reed says that the ultimate goal of BSL is to clean up the streets—and St. Louis’ image.
“The thing that was really key there is this notion of being able to drive down the perception of crime,” he says. “No matter how safe or unsafe our city actually is, if people perceive our city to be a stagnated urban environment, they will not invest here, both in terms of living here or moving businesses here. Now, especially on nice days, you see droves of cyclists—and when you see cyclists riding throughout a major city, you get a feeling that this is an urban environment on the move ... that this place is happening.”
—S.R.
To Serve Mankind
Anthony Devoti, Owner/Chef at Five in the Grove
No more swill for this swine.
The poor porker lay bare, its carcass slapped on a slab in Five’s kitchen. Armed with a saber-sharp knife, the restaurant’s owner and chef, Anthony Devoti, deftly slices away ribs, chops, loin.
The pig’s dainty hoof? Still attached.
At 28 years old, Devoti’s dream of owning his own restaurant has already come true. By fall he expects to have opened his second, a gastro pub just down the street from Five named The Newstead Tower Public House. Clearly, this young man with curly blond hair and sapphire blue eyes is focused on one thing: the restaurant.
“I work here, I eat here,” Devoti says. “This place is my life. This is what I do. I enjoy it. I love it. There is nothing else I want to do.”
Devoti’s vitae include culinary training at Forest Park Community College and the French Culinary Institute in New York City and stints at Astoria, Zuzu’s Petals and San Francisco’s Zuni.
His goal: “To make really unbelievable food with regional products. It is the way I think everybody should cook and the way people should eat. It certainly defines a region—what you grow is what you eat. We have a very short menu, and we try to do everything perfectly.”
In a measure that is nothing short of brave, Devoti situated Five and the pub to come on a stretch of Manchester intermittently pockmarked with boarded-up buildings. “It seems to be the perfect place to build stuff,” Devoti says. “You are right between 44 and 40, and you’re on Manchester. It seems weird that this neighborhood was allowed to get into this state. It has really cool architecture; it has a lot of character”—and soon, two Anthony Devoti restaurants.
—Christy Marshall
To read about six other St. Louis purveyors of cool, pick up a copy of our print edition!
