#025 ☼ Eternal Summer: Frank Ocean

Vintage Decor & DJ Lounge • 80s Pastel Tech • Daily Tab Inspiration

Mar 02, 2023

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ISSUE 025

Sex on the Beach

With tasting notes of 80s pastel tech, legends like Erykah Badu, Anthony Bourdain and Grace Jones, a spacious San Francisco home with a DJ lounge, prints encapsulating the use of colour in films, Nigeria’s first skate collective for women and daily inspiration delivered to your browser.

The good life beckons once more!

CURATE WITH US

Our question this week is:

What’s the most interesting website you’ve stumbled across recently?

Let us know in the comments 💭

Further down in this issue, we’ll share advice for feeling more creative explored last week!

Hot Hyperlinks

☼ Vintage decor and an in-house DJ lounge make this renovated San Francisco home one for the books

☼ The golden era of pastels in 80s product design with Seiko, Philips and Bang & Olufsen

☼ Inside the legend Erykah Badu’s spiritual home filled with wonderful objects including a car radio with a CD player she stole back in 1983

☼ Dencity Skate is Nigeria’s first and only women’s skate collective defying the opposition founded by Blessing Ewona

☼ Prints by The Colors of Motion visualise the use of colour in movies with each line representing the average colour of a single frame

☼ Red fanta is the offering of choice at Thailand’s spirit houses

☼ The world’s largest collection of obsolete and disappearing sounds, remixed and reimagined by artists all over the world

☼ Get your fix of architectural inspiration every day with ArchDaily’s Chrome extension which randomly shares an image from over 38,000+ curated projects when you open a new tab

☼ Don’t Eat Before Reading This: Anthony Bourdain’s 1999 essay uncovering the trade secrets of Manhattan restaurants

☼ Icon Grace Jones still dominates at age 74, starring in the 2023 Wolford campaign

SUMMER-ENHANCING PEOPLE

Eternal Summer: Frank Ocean

Frank Ocean is arguably the one of the most tight-lipped musicians since David Bowie, allowing his music to do the talking. Despite the huge successes of his albums Nostalgia, Ultra and sequels Blonde and Endless, he seldom performs live, with his hotly anticipated performance headlining Coachella this year his first in years.
Though shrouded in mystery, a few things are known about Frank, born Christopher Breaux. He’s a deftly talented songwriter with an expansive creative universe, extending to photography and apparel to his own luxury jewellery company. When asked, he displays a keen knowledge of architecture, furniture and constructing space. He has a deep love for cars and summertime that dates back to dreaming up all kinds of things during childhood. Upon diving deeper — as much as Ocean will let us — Palm Report finds itself in good company.

Highlights

On his beginnings and releasing when you’re ready: “When I worked on my first project, Nostalgia, Ultra, I hardly told anyone. Even people I was working with at the time didn’t know about it. There’s something that happens when you say what you’re doing before it’s done, and most of it is not positive. You’re accountable for that version that you talk about, when it very well may undergo change. It’s usually better for me to make what I make, put it out or don’t, and then talk about it freely. And so I’ve done that from the beginning.”
On his aesthetic taste: “I have a Pierre Paulin sofa at home, and it’s futuristic, but also natural. Paulin started out as a sculptor who was interested in flowers. I think there’s something peaceful and high-tech about the natural world. There’s an interplay there that is interesting to me. I use green a lot, because it is the stem of a flower and all colour works with it. I like Brazilian modernism. Sergio Rodrigues’s furniture is beautiful, warm and inviting.”
On his obsession with cars: “When he was nine, Frank Ocean's godfather subscribed him to Robb Report, a magazine for the ultra-rich. Less interested in fiduciary smarts, it's a catalog of conspicuous consumption, highlighting tropical vacations, invaluable antiques and, as Ocean came to know, really expensive cars. Though he comes from a middle class family, he obsessively read the magazine's classified ads, fixating on exorbitantly priced used Bentleys and Maybachs. "I would just fall in love with all their cars. That was the start."
Frank’s own car collection from a white Ferrari to McLaren and Porsche as well as a detailed analysis of every single car Frank mentions on his albums
On trusting his intuition: “Trusting it more, more — that has been the trend for me. Trying to access that place as much as possible, because a lot of the decisions in my life — the day-to-day and the creative choices, even how you assemble a song — it’s a bunch of choices in a row. Each line succeeds the line before it; each note succeeds the note before it. It’s all a lot of choices, and you have infinite possibilities, infinite ways to take a melody, a whole lot of ways to take a chord progression, infinite ways to take a turn of phrase. And as meaningless as some of those decisions are, even those are moments where I try to access that place.”
Watch a rare 2012 interview with Frank Ocean about his process and influences
Homer is Frank Ocean’s luxury jewellery company: “I’m interested in creating things that are mine, stay mine and belong to my family. Things that I can pass on.” Peruse the original Homer catalog
Prada x Homer collaboration featuring pastel anoraks and backpacks
On the layered narratives on his second album Blonde: “That was my version of collage or bricolage. How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves, we know the story, we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.”
The story behind the Blonde album cover shot by Wolfgang Tillmans, whose own music Frank featured on Endless
Expanding his visual universe, Frank Ocean is reportedly writing his first feature film with the help of A24
With endless odes to summer, Genius analyses Frank Ocean’s love of the season by tracing the lyrics of his songs
Frank Ocean in the 2016 #mycalvins campaign for Calvin Klein

COMMUNITY CURATED: CREATIVE ADVICE

Last week, we exchanged advice about how to feel more creative. Check out the comment section for a range of tips. A couple of highlights:

I can’t say this enough: Romanticize your life. Pretend you’re in a Wes Anderson movie. Try to view things through Studio Ghibli glasses. Take as many photos of as many things as possible. Go out to eat alone. Lay in the park, read and book and people watch. Smell a perfume you haven’t worn since high school. Visit places in your hometown that feel nostalgic to you and let your memories wash over you.

— via Nicole

My advice is always the same on how to feel more creative: curate inspiration every day. Take even 30 minutes per day to browse a space full of inspirational content (in whatever creative area you're excited about) and save anything you like (even if you don't know why) into super specific/niche buckets with the tool/platform you like best. You'll start to see connections between things you didn't see before, and you'll notice trends appearing before they hit the mainstream.

— via Marty, plus his favourite places to browse

Hop in the comments this week as we discuss the most interesting website you’ve stumbled across recently.

SUMMER-ENHANCING VEHICLES

EXHIBIT A: 1990 BJ 73 Land Cruiser • EXHIBIT B: Singer DLS Caroline Commission • EXHIBIT C: 1957 Ford Thunderbird

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🌴 Say hey, or drop leisurely content you’ve discovered in the comments below!