B EAST Magazine website

July 2, 2009
By Vijai

Living in East Europe, we no strangers to Lagos crack dealers, or ponzi scheme pranksters for that matter. Prague’s Radost was the ground zero for the city’s smiley-smiley Nigerian hustlers in the 90s, and so was Moscow’s Cabana club. A shout out to the glorious Eugene, whose tight white T-shirts were cool before they became fashionable elsewhere, and who made some Moscow gays very happy with his performances at gay mecca, Chance.

But what do we make of K.O.F.Y, a self-confessed crack dealer from Lagos who claims on his myspace page to have shared a cell with Fela Kuti? Unlike his hip-hop compatriots, our K.O.F.Y, who’s inspired by a former UN Secretary General, prefers to rap about African dictators, make strange calls to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and complains about slow download times on the internet.

The Afrojetset tracks are all set in a downtempo, ambient beat with some rap and globalbeat rhythms filling in the space. The brainchild of Belgrade hipster Vuksa Velickovic—who’s written a novel and writes sharp, satirical articles for local zines—K.O.F.Y is just so out there (a Serbian dude painting himself in blackface in 2009 for god’s sake) and politically incorrect. Fortunately, the tracks are laced with enough absurdity and strange, paranoid lyrics to make even a Mugabe choke on his lunch. And, hey, spoofing African dictators is a welcome change from run-of-the-mill celebrity impersonation, and ‘pussycontrol’ obsessions.

Check out our man, when he rings Hosni Mubarak on the track, They Call Me KOFY.

Hello Mubarak, this is KOFY …
We ask you not to use the washing machine
And the dryer
In the laundry room during the following times:
Monday to Friday from 12 until 2 pm

And here is our favorite video from the Return of the Secretary Genearl EP-Mugabe’s Lunch.

June 15, 2009

French-Yugoslavian Mikael Vojinovic—better known as Mix—is an old skool B.East, sending us highly-charged, shot-from-the-hip fashion shoots since our inception, all featuring an endless parade of uber-sexy, young models. Though we tended to diss him at first as a ‘mens-mag-clicker’, his leery, dripping-with-sexuality aesthetic is a refreshing change from the overwrought images that pass as fashion in most magazines. As porn and fashion have merged in recent years, with the advent of Terry Richardson, Mikael has emerged as one of fashion’s new criminals, with New York mags saying he cocks the camera like a gun. He has been called a mixture of Charles Bukowski and Keith Richardson. Having moved to Paris from New York last year, has only amped up his output. And, yet again, whether Manhattan or Paris, he finds the freshest, sassiest & naughtiest models out there.

June 11, 2009
Photographs by Vijai
Model: Maria Zhakarova

Kiev’s biweekly Top 10 listings magazine is actually quite a cool zine: A well-designed, edgy contrast to the mainstream Time Out and Afisha. Unlike other local listings mags, Top 10 is more aspirational, choosing often to cover the Venice Biennale or Ibiza than events happening closer to home, despite the fact that a vast majority of Kievans have never ventured beyond Turkey and Egypt. But the magazine, like a transplanted New Yorker for an emerging Kievan elite, sets it sights high and thus separates itself from its competitors, which choose instead to shine shit and hype the local scene instead. So far so good. Somewhat edgy fashion shoots and trend mag design have endeared the publication to us during our stay in Kiev.
However, the praise only makes sense within a local context. Compare Top 10 to the doyens of the trendy listings scene in Europe – Portugal’s Diff or Athen’s Ozon – and it comes across as wanna-be, and desperately unironic. It’s ‘I Love Kiev’ campaign is so so 80s, and except for the heart on the T-shirt being slighty bloodied, it might as well be a children’s hospital in Oregon feeling good about itself. And when the magazine writes about the West, its coverage verges on adulation. Where’s the Beasty vibe, the ‘Eat the West’ attitude that demonstrates local pride.
So, just to show them we’re onto their game, we tore up a recent copy of Top 10. Ok, we admit, we were also bored, not much else going on now that it’s 33 degrees outside. What better thing to do than sip champange in a cool studio and have fun being bad.