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Taylor Momsen for NYLON: It’s late, on an uncommonly warm Sunday afternoon in February, and the Manhattan skyline glows sunset-orange through the windows of a Chelsea studio, high above the still-snowlined New York City streets. As Taylor Momsen goes through the paces for her photoshoot, Soundgarden blares from the studio stereo, loud and then louder—a tonal approximation of Momsen’s own high-octane shows with her band, The Pretty Reckless. Momsen debuted as Jenny Humphrey on Gossip Girl when she was 13, by which time she was not some dewy-eyed ingenue but already an industry veteran, having begun her modeling career, in her hometown of St. Louis, when she was two years old. That experience shows now: She handles the camera expertly, all long legs and long, ash-blond hair, bright blue eyes incased in her now-familiar cloud of black eyeliner. 

Momsen may have begun as a model, and found fame as an actress, but it’s music that she hopes will define the rest of her still-young career. It’s a few days before the U.S. release of her debut album, Light Me Up. Soon after this photoshoot, she’ll fly to Los Angeles, where she’ll celebrate the album’s release; appear, with her band, on the late-night Lopez Tonight show; and kick off her U.S. tour—all while featuring prominently in blog posts asking questions such as “Who had the [more] inappropriate look of the day—Taylor Momsen v. Lindsay Lohen?” (For the record, Lohan was appearing in court, while Momsen was attending a premiere party for Never Say Never, the 3-D Justin Bieber biopic, an event at which one assumes the dress code would be slightly looser than, for example, your own arraignment on a felony grand theft charge. Also, Momsen “won,” with 88% of the public vote.) 

If a curious fan Googles “Taylor Momsen dressed inappropriately,” that fan will have approximately 615,000 webpages to choose among. Speaking of Google, if that same curious fan begins to type Momsen’s name into Google, the automatic fill-in function’s top four suggestions include variations of “Taylor Momsen flash” and “Taylor Momsen tampon,” the second a reference to a photographer’s too-intimate picture of Momsen, captured, up-skirt, while she performed at a Warped Tour show in San Francisco. 

For an average 17-year-old from Missouri, this might seem like reason enough to set up an alternate community in a polar region, without access to Internet, television, or radio. Taylor Momsen, though, is no average 17-year-old. 

* * * 

Once the shoot is over, Momsen and I retire to the studio’s lounge. She is incredibly beautiful up close, as perfectly pretty as a punk-rock china doll, with blue eyes rimmed in kohl and streaked with what appear to be two lines of gold across her dark-grey lids. She has just finished touring with The Pretty Reckless in Europe—Glasgow, London, Cologne, Paris; New York, her home, is a pitstop before beginning the band’s U.S. tour. “I’m definitely a New York girl,'” says Momsen. From our seats we can see the sun as it sinks into the Hudson River: It’s a picture-perfect winter evening. “I love it here. I like how grimy it is. I miss the cold when I’m in L.A. The snow has been following me for weeks—we started in France, and it was snowing there; then we went to the U.K., and it snowed everywhere. Then we got snowed in in Germany, and drove to Amsterdam, where it was snow, everywhere. And then we came home, and it’s still snowing.” 

Momsen seems relaxed and content as she describes the European tour—presumably free of the puritanism that dominates so much of America’s relationship between the audience collective and the objects of its attention. “It was awesome, it was amazing, it was incredible,” she says. “We sold out 2500-seat venues in Glasgow and Manchester and London—in the U.K., they knew every word to every song. It was the most amazing feeling ever.” Momsen’s live shows in the U.S. have so far been limited to last summer’s Warped Tour: “That’s a very different kind of tour,” she says. “It’s a festival. There’s 80 other bands. You’re playing during the day, and it’s hot outside. I like [stage] lights.” Momsen and her band will play the Punk Spring festival in Tokyo in April; she says she hopes to follow that with an appearance in Seoul. The only Korean person she knows, she says, is this magazine’s editor in chief: “I really like her!” Momsen says. “She’s super nice.” She wants to visit Seoul: “I’d love to go shopping in Korea,” she says. “They’ll have to tell me where to go.” 

It’s easy to imagine why Momsen might enjoy spending time outside the U.S., where she has presumably been offered a bit more latitude to remake herself as the classic rock songstress she is set on becoming, rather than the starlet actress we expected—following, perhaps, in the footsteps of Gossip Girl co-stars Blake Lively and Leighton Meester, who are busy bouncing between the TV show and film roles. Viewers with particularly long memories will remember Momsen first as apple-cheeked Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, starring Jim Carrey as the titular Dr. Seuss creation; other films followed, but her big break, by any metric, came seven years later, when she first appeared as arty outcast Jenny Humphrey on the teen-dream hit Gossip Girl. The show was a sensation, dictating the national conversation about fashion, parental television controls, and teen sexuality and mores; Taylor Momsen was at the heart of it, as a wise-beyond-her-years Brooklyn teenager whose skills as a seamstress were only exceeded by her ability to make trouble for her elders and betters. After nearly being raped by Chuck during the show’s first season, Jenny wound up losing her virginity to him in its third; following her appearances in a few episodes during this latest, fourth season, Jenny was shunted off screen. While the reasons for this could have read as straightforward—Momsen’s prioritization of her music over her co-starring role on the show— American audiences have been unforgiving of this transformation, both professional and personal. Internet gossips peppered reports of her leaving the show with descriptions of her as “increasingly volatile.” Project Runway mentor Tim Gunn, who usually restrains from publicly criticizing teenagers, reportedly called her “a brat,” “a diva,” and “pathetic,” to TV outlet E! News. 

Even given the typically acidic treatment of celebrities in the press, the reaction that greeted Momsen’s decision to step away from the show was weirdly vituperative. Momsen is beautiful, young, and willful, a combination that seemed to enrage many of her critics, who assailed her new dress sense, as Momsen’s rock-and-roll lingerie and corsets replaced Jenny Humphrey’s relatively sedate uniform at Constance Billard. Momsen views this evolution as a return to her true self. “When you sign a contract to play a character, you have an image to uphold—in the beginning, they want the public to identify you with your character,” Momsen says. “The stylists who were styling red carpet looks for me….” She trails off. Where she is otherwise wholly articulate, for a 17-year-old or a 47-year-old, here she stumbles slightly, as if this particular disagreement, between herself and her critics, is mystifying. “I was told I couldn’t—I dress the same way I dressed five years ago. I couldn’t wear my eye makeup in public. I couldn’t dress the way I do. But if you look at pictures of me from home, I look the same way [as I do now.] People are like, ‘She changed from so sweet to so whatever.’ But I’m, like, ‘I’m really just the same person.’ People just have to see me as myself rather than Jenny Humphrey, because I’m a very different person from her.” 

* * * 

Momsen’s relationship to the press hasn’t always been so confounding. She was two years old when she first modeled, three when she starred in her first commercial (for the meat preparation mix Shake-n-Bake), and even younger when she began to sing: “There’s a video of me humming before I could speak,” she says. “I’ve been singing and writing as long as I can remember.” Her first song was “something about my dad’s dead dog.” She was “about seven” when she debuted as a singer-songwriter, on a St. Louis news broadcast. “I wrote a song for the Humane Society about rescuing a pet, because I used to volunteer there,” she says. “And then I sang it for the news.” That video has since been unearthed by and broadcast on an entertainment channel. “It was kind of funny, because I hadn’t seen it since it aired,” she says. “I don’t know how they found it.” 

Does it bother her to have her childhood replayed—for the consumption, titillation, and criticism—of her audience? 

She demurs. “I’ve been in this industry since I was two,” she says. “But the public eye part of it—the tabloid aspect of it—didn’t start to happen until Gossip Girl. I just ignore it.” 

It seems impossible that she would able to do so. I tell her this. 

“I don’t read it,” she says. “Put it this way—if somebody says something about you across the world, you wouldn’t know unless you looked it up. Everybody’s always going to have something to say. All those stories are spun so negatively—they’ll take something I say and spin it into something entirely different from what I meant. But I think people are smart enough to know that it’s not true—that it’s entertainment.” 

I tell her that I doubt that. 

“I’m an entertainer—I’m here to entertain. If someone spins a story out of something I said and it entertains people … then cool. Read it.” 

Momsen gets endless flack for dressing as she does, at the age she is, but little credit for the poise for which she handles her assaults in the press, perhaps the biggest mean girl of all. 

“I just think of it as I’m living my life, and I’m not living it for other people,” she says. “That sounds so contrived, but I’m not. People can say what they want about the record, or the way I look, or whatever, but in the end, I’m happy when I’m performing, and that’s all that matters.” 

* * * 

About the performing: Momsen’s poise isn’t the only thing about her that’s preternaturally mature. Momsen’s voice is a powerful thing; it’s deep as a chasm, born in her throat and shot through with late nights and hard choices. It’s entirely at odds with her waif-like build; more than anything, it’s a surprise, that something so big and raw can emanate from such a small vessel. It’s in all of the songs on Light Me Up, but it hits you in the face watching her perform, for example, on an otherwise ho-hum video made for the BBC’s Radio Live Lounge: just her and a guitarist, on a mash-up of The xx’s “Islands” and Eminem and Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie.” Her voice is throaty, just above a whisper, at its start; when she enters Rihanna’s chorus, it explodes. It’s hugely affecting. Given that power, it seems cruel and capricious to criticize Momsen for wanting to exploit it, and share it with her audience. 

“Music’s the only thing that matters to me,” she says. “It’s such a tough industry—you have to not be able to live without doing it, and I can’t. You have to have that passion for it.” 

Did her decision to pursue her music career come as a shock to her friends? 

“People in my life knew I’ve been in recording studios since I was little,” Taylor Momsen say. “I was working with [celebrated composer] James Horner when I was five, for The Grinch. They were, like, ‘Oh, great, fantastic, congratulations on the record,'” Momsen says, with a healthily dismissive tone. “But for people who knew me as Jenny or an actress—to see you not as your character but as a musician who writes and plays and really loves it and isn’t doing it for any other reason than that … I think that there are still people who won’t give the record a chance because of whatever, because of preconceived ideas they have of me.”   

I ask her what she makes of some of the reviews of her music, which have offered an unlikely mix of sartorial critique and personal condemnation—all while the commentary about the actual music is otherwise positive. 

“I know, it’s begrudgingly positive! Like, ‘I really don’t like her, but whatever, the music’s good. It’s fine,'” Momsen mimics. She shrugs. “It’s cool. It’s better to prove people wrong than have them think you’re going to be good, and suck.” 

* * * 

A few days later, we speak again. She’s filmed her appearance on Lopez Tonight—“George is awesome, really funny, the nicest guy ever”—and The Pretty Reckless are about to play their first tour date, at Los Angeles’s El Rey Theatre. She sounds ebullient: on tour again, traveling with her bandmates: “It’s Led Zeppelin and music DVDs on the bus,” Momsen says, with intervals of South Park. “I watch it every night,” she says. “Everyone does voices. I suck—I’m the only one who can’t do it, because they’re all guys.” 

Momsen takes her role as the band’s singer-songwriter seriously. “Most of this record was written at night because I was filming [Gossip Girl] during the day,” she says. “I’d write and record all night. It was a very strange thing. I love writing—it’s what’s kept me sane throughout my whole life—but I think every writer will tell you that it’s incredibly hard, creating something from nothing and wanting it to be good. At times, when you’re not inspired, it can be absolutely torturous—it’s up and down. But it’s worth it, the pain and the suffering. What makes a record good is the honesty and the pain and the suffering that you’re expressing.” 

It’s an adult album, in its theme and its sound, a million miles from the pop expressionism of current charts-dominatrices like Lady Gaga or Katy Perry. “Here we are and I can’t think from all the pills, hey,” starts the song “Just Tonight”; the video for the barn-burning “Make Me Wanna Die” features Momsen stripping down to her underwear (and then a bit more) as missiles streak across the night sky. If Momsen didn’t sound so fierce, you’d want to give her a hug, and it’s hard to imagine what those who love her—like her parents—would make of the material. 

“They let me do my thing, and I’m thankful for that, especially with writing a record, and the content that I write about,” Momsen says. “If there’s somebody looking over your shoulder, and questioning everything, it makes it difficult to be honest. The one thing I can say about the record is that it’s very honest, and and you know, I have to thank them for not sitting there and analyzing it to death.” 

It seems like this would be an opportune moment to again try to pin down exactly what her castmates on Gossip Girl make of the album, but her representative, who has been monitoring our conversation, disagrees. “Next question,” she says, curtly. Taylor Momsen, to her credit, offers what by now is probably a pro forma, if polite response: “The show’s been awesome—they’ve been very supportive of my music career and the transition,” Momsen says. “I really have to thank everyone on the show for allowing me to focus on music.” 

Will she ever act again? 

“The one thing I can’t live without is music, writing it and performing and playing it,” she says. “It’s something I could never give up. I know I’ll be writing and creating music for the rest of my life. Whether I act in the future or not—I can’t decide that. The focus is music and touring.” 

* * * 

That being the case, Taylor Momsen has much to celebrate. The Pretty Reckless debuted at #2 on the iTunes chart; over the next few weeks, she and her band will perform dates across the U.S. and Canada, including New York, Dallas, Toronto, and St. Louis, her hometown. “I never think beyond a day in advance because everything’s so chaotic,” she says. Her future may or may not include acting; it also may or may not include developing her own fashion label: “I’d love to have a line, but I wouldn’t want to just put my name on it,” she says. “I’d want to be involved in every step of the process.” What is certain is that she’ll continue to be viewed as a symbol; whether as a good-girl-gone-bad, a cautionary tale, or a hard-working artist is likely beyond her control. At least, she knows they’re gunning for her. 

“Everyone loves to see someone fall apart—it’s entertaining,” says Momsen, at the end of our first conversation, as she gets ready to fly to Los Angeles. It’s a dark sentiment for such a pretty sunset. “It’s a story. It’s something to write about.”

Plenty of people expect you to fall apart, I say. 

“Of course people would,” says Taylor Momsen. The expression on her face is caught somewhere between a smirk and a sigh. “There are people who would thoroughly enjoy that.”

With that, she’s off to meet them.

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Sebastian Junger for NYLON: When Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington came to the Sundance Film Festival in 2010 with Restrepo, neither could have known that just three years later, Hetherington would be dead—killed by mortar shelling during the Libyan civil war in April 2011—and Junger would return alone, with Which Way Is the Front Line from Here?, a new documentary celebrating Hetherington’s life and work. We spoke with Junger about Hetherington’s artistic legacy, the siren song of war, and what he hopes audiences will take from the film.

NYLON: What is this film to you—an elegy? A celebration? A memorial? 
Sebastian Junger: I wanted it to honor Tim’s life and his work—I guess that’s an elegy. But I also wanted it to be an exploration of the ideas that he was exploring, about young men and war and violence, about the appeal of war and the moral consequences of war for the people who are in it—including journalists.

Even having seen Restrepo [Junger and Hetherington’s year-long portrait of American soldiers at a remote Afghanistan outpost], I was surprised to see how much fun war looked like in this movie. 
People in the West, and particularly liberals—and I’m liberal, so I know the thinking—just see war as this terrible thing that no one involved really wants to be part of, except some crazy lieutenant colonel in Vietnam. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. War has been around since the earliest times, and men haven’t been dragged into it unwillingly—they’ve rushed to it, enthusiastically. And that includes war reporters. We go out there because we’re fascinated by it—the drama of war and the fact that it’s a test of manhood, or seems to be one.

How close do you think he was to giving it up? He says in the film that he was finally ready to retire—or is that just what addicts say to themselves? 
Personally I don’t think he was quite ready to give it up. I think he wanted….

Wanted to want to? 
I think he wanted to want to get married, to settle down. All of those things he wasn’t sure he wanted but wanted to want. He went to Libya because he wanted his next big project to be something that was entirely his own thing. He wanted to radically change the conversation about war through his photos—to take it out of this moral realm, [to instead explore] why young men are drawn to war, how they act in war. So it was partly ambition and creative ideas—and I think he wanted to be where the action is. So he went, on his own. We were supposed to go together, for Vanity Fair, and at the last minute, I couldn’t go. I felt very guilty. I felt like I should have been there to save him, that it should have been me and not him. I even thought if we hadn’t made Restrepo, massive things in Tim’s life would be different, and he probably wouldn’t be in Misrata [Libya, where he was killed].

It’s been almost two years. Have you reconciled that guilt?
I don’t feel guilty about it anymore. I do feel very sad about it.

I’m sure you’ve lost other colleagues to war. Why was it so important to you to make a film about Tim?
He was an extraordinary artist. I’ve known other people, not nearly as well, who were killed in war—they’re photographers; they weren’t necessarily thinking outside the conventional boundaries of photography. They just weren’t completely reimagining the medium, like Tim was. I wanted more people to know his work and to understand the dangers of journalism—but mostly I wanted more people to experience my good friend. He affected me a lot, and I thought it was possible that a good film about him would affect people in the same way. He lived a really big life; he was very brave, not just in combat but artistically. I felt people could be inspired to act like Tim—not as a war reporter, but in a basic human sense.

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Kenya for NYLON: Holy shit, I think as my caravan of Americans leaves the Nairobi airport for the city proper: not so much because we are in Africa, which I know chiefly through aid-relief sing-alongs and Hotel Rwanda and other entertainments inspired by mass deaths, but because there are giraffes walking alongside the highway. Maybe Kenyans would feel equally disconcerted by herds of, say, Texas longhorns drifting by I-35, I think, struggling for context. This will not be the last time on this trip that I fail to align the First and Third worlds, and in the end I give up and raise my camera like everyone else.

The African safari is, of course, one of the great clichés of travel—especially in Kenya, a poor country that regularly hosts the world’s wealthiest travelers at luxurious lodges. (My trip, airfare excluded, would cost about 25 times the average Kenyan’s yearly salary.) Consequently, there is no small amount of acquiescence involved with it: The conflicted white liberal traveling squeamishly through Africa is an even bigger, and more annoying, cliché, and there is, after all, so much to see.

Our first stop, after a stop at Karen Blixen’s farm, the failed coffee plantation she writes about in Out of Africa, and an obligatory night in Nairobi, is the Maasai Mara, a national reserve named for the Mara River, which transects it, and the Maasai tribe, some of whose members inhabit it. The Maasai drink blood and hunt lions and a troupe greet our plane with a group song and dance that despite the unimpeachably legitimate setting feels a bit Epcot-style World Showcase. We each have a Mara Safari Club cabin, outfitted with a mosquito-net-enclosed bed and a pillow-top mattress, with a porch overlooking the river and the hippopotami sunning themselves on it. To understand it intellectually is one thing, but to experience it is another: It is all so beautiful and indulgent and disconcerting, a five-star hotel room in one of the poorest countries on earth, that at a certain point I begin thinking of the scene in The Matrix where Joe Pantoliano, eating his matrix-fueled steak dinner at a fancy restaurant, declares his contentment with what is a fundamentally inauthentic experience. In any case: What is the authentic Kenyan experience? A per-capita annual salary of $390 and an average life expectancy of 55 and more than two million people infected with HIV? Tourism remains Kenya’s top-producing industry; low wages in the service industry are amply supported by Westerners’ tips. Number two is the exportation of flowers.

The routine for the next few days is as follows: We wake early enough to spot the animals ambling about in the cool that precedes the afternoon heat, and split into two groups, each with its own driver and guide. Everyone wants to be with Philip Rono, our Micato Safaris guide, a married father of two who describes his Kenyan hometown as where all the runners are from—Kenya’s great contribution to the Olympics is, of course, its long-distance runners, who have earned 16 of its 17 gold medals. I do not expect to feel strongly—at least, strongly positive—about someone whose job it is to tell us what to do, but Philip is brilliant. In addition to supplying more information than we could possibly digest on the names, natures, sleeping patterns, breeding particularities, and everything else regarding the wildlife that surrounds us, he does what he can to explain the invisible-to-us cultural currents. There’s a lunch, and a nap, and then it’s back to the car for a second trip out, ever in search of the Big Five: an elephant, a lion, a cape buffalo, a rhino, and a leopard, which comprise the safari-goer’s Holy Grail—a term that feels equally 1930s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and 2007 marketing campaign. We tick all the boxes so quickly that there is not much to do but sit back and regard the next permutation of lions, elephants, and giraffes. There is no small amount of giraffe fatigue, though I could never tire of the zebras and take more than 100 pictures of them.

Soon enough, after a transfer in Nairobi and a plane ride that swoons to a stop on a grass runway, we arrive at Campi ya Kanzi, a collection of eco-lodges near Tanzania: Though obscured by clouds for nearly our entire stay, the massive plank of Mount Kilimanjaro, 35 miles away across the border, dominates the southeastern view. Founded by an Italian couple, the camp benefits the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust, which keeps the surrounding land out of the hands of developers and in those of the Maasai tribe—one of whose junior chiefs, Samson, takes us on walking tours across the terrain, more green than gold, as the Mara had been. The young volcanic hills that surround us—only 500 years old—are known here as the Chyulu Hills but more familiar, at least to American high school students, as Hemingway’s titular Green Hills of Africa. This is a less trafficked part of Kenya than the Mara, with apparently more flexibility on the drivers’ parts to trust their instincts: At one point we follow elephant tracks for hours, away from what appear to us as the only recognizable jeep trails. We visit a new school nearby, nearly constructed, and a clinic staffed by a Kenyan doctor trained, in part, at Brown. Samson tells us about going to New York and staying at Edward Norton’s apartment—the actor is the trust’s highest profile supporter, though Cartier is another. This is easily the most spectacular place I have ever been. To accusations that it is not the “real Africa”—luxury eco-lodges and safaris in Land Rovers—there could hardly be one real Africa across the breadth and width of the continent; it is one experience of many, and in this case, one that financially supports many others.

* * *

That was in late November. Two days after Christmas, the opposition candidate, Raila Odinga, lost a contested election to Mwai Kibaki, president since 2002. (Polling problems abounded: One constituency reported voter turnout of 115%.) More to the point, Kibaki is a Kikuyu, a member of Kenya’s long-dominant tribe, while Odinga is Luo; after the election decision, the kind of resentment that is often described as “long-simmering” blew up, with some Odinga supporters attacking their opponents, in several weeks of particularly ghastly violence—three dozen women and children burned alive in a barricaded church, one neighbor beheading another. The fighting would leave up to 1,500 people dead and displace a quarter-million. The fact that tourists would change their destinations—to Tanzania, or South Africa—would mean a few phone calls for them and the unmooring of Kenya’s most important industry: In the first quarter of 2008, revenues dropped by 54%.

Following a power-sharing accord between the rival political parties, brokered by the U.N., Kenyan tourism is recovering, thanks in part to support from powerful parties—including the American ambassador to Kenya, who issued a statement encouraging hesitant travelers: “There have been positive developments that are opening up the economic climate, making Kenya once again the perfect locale for business and tourism.” Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic serves Nairobi from London and supports the national rugby team, was named an elder in a Maasai tribe last summer in honor of the airline’s efforts in the region: he recently attended the opening of a local elementary school and plans to lease land from the Maasai for a new lodge. Multi-million dollar improvements, made possible by years of increased tourism revenue—like those at Nairobi’s historic Norfolk Hotel—are recommencing. “The skirmishes are over,” says Richard Kimenyi, the Norfolk’s general manager, who says completion of his hotel’s construction projects are a month behind schedule. “Now what’s going on is the healing process between the tribes. Even during the skirmishes, no foreigner was injured or hurt, as they were mainly in the slums and outside the areas where tourists go.” The reality is that though the fighting was obviously calamitous for those involved, it was limited in its physical scope: “When there are gang clashes in L.A., you don’t stop going to California,” says Luca Belpietro, the Italian founder of Campi ya Kanzi. “When the Bronx had serious problems, one did not have to avoid visiting Manhattan. Kenya is slightly smaller than Texas, and the incidents were located in very few contained areas and did not at all affect the entire country. Please let your readers know that tourism employs nearly a million people, and ecotourism in particular has a huge economic impact on poor communities.” From here, last winter’s violence can look all encompassing—perhaps the way the poverty unmasked by Katrina seemed to European onlookers. Americans should know better than anyone that everything is local.

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Case Simmons for NYLON Guys: Midway through my interview with the artist Case Simmons, my bikini top, which I’m wearing beneath a spare, loose-fitting shirt, falls off. I am sitting two feet away from him, bewildered, the bikini strings in one hand and my tape recorder in the other, and Simmons doesn’t even look up. He’s not being subtle, or discreet, or respectful, though he is all of those things: He just hasn’t noticed. He’s so intent on what he’s saying that his gaze, focused on his hands, never deviates. He won’t look up until his thought is completed, and my bikini’s refastened, and our interview marches on.

First, the work: Simmons make large-scale digital photo collages, constructed on Photoshop and consisting of thousands of images of Paris Hilton, of the Statue of Liberty, of porn stars and rappers and white tigers, each taken from the Internet and then painstakingly arranged into compositions that are frequently described as Boschelian, a reference to Hieronymus Bosch, the 15th-century Dutch depicter of extremely detailed versions of heaven and hell. Each piece—and so far, four in a planned series of ten are finished—takes about two months to complete, or 150 hours. I ask Simmons at what point his head screams at him for some recreational time. “It screams at me all the time,” he says. “It says, ‘Case, where’s your girlfriend?’ I spent so much time in front of a computer that I became a hermit, but I don’t think that’s such a bad thing—I think in life you go back and forth between needing a lot of people, and needing yourself.”

These pieces clearly demand the latter, and whatever effort they demand from the artist, they feel like a vision of an end-of-history moment for their subjects±Hilton, Nicole Richie, and the other Us Weekly staples assembled into a superstructure that resembles nothing so much as a temple. Despite the pop-culture elements, there’s something subtly apocalyptic about Simmons’ prints—as if all this cultural refuse we inhale, from Entertainment Tonight to Perez Hilton to ex-Survivor Rudy Boesch’s book of aphorisms, which Simmons has on his bookshelf, must combine to form something else, something distinctly otherworldly. “I try to stand outside the art world a little bit, and look at popular media—I watch MTV all the time, and it makes me think about why people are so fascinated about all of this,” he says. “So I take it and recombine it with other imagery to make this world you can get lost in, and also maybe make sense of it. When I get them up on a wall, I feel like I’m finally giving some sort of justice to the amount of intake that I’m getting.”

Simmons is based in San Francisco but grew up in small-town Iowa, and though it’s painful to indulge in region-based stereotypes, there’s something distinctly Midwestern about him, something solid and assured—qualities not generally associated with a 23-year-old artist on the cusp on a major career. “In a way, you feel like you have more to prove, because you’re this little runt from Iowa,” Simmons says. “If you went anywhere, it was like, ‘Oh, you’re from Iowa? What do you grow, potatoes?’ And you’re like, ‘No, it’s corn.’ But Iowa was good to me.” However good it was, he left it young, at 16, to study at the North Carolina School of the Arts; a year later, he followed a girlfriend to Arkansas, where he stayed with her through a major illness. “As a kid, that was mind-blowing—I wasn’t going to be a 17-year-old anymore,” Simmons says. That seriousness accompanied him to art school in San Francisco, and he seems to be taking some refuge in it now, a few days after an Oakland gallery showed some of his newest pieces. “I love that people are reacting to the work, but I want to be removed enough from it, too?any attention I’ve been getting from the show has made me really anxious,” Simmons says. “I feel like I’m down to earth. I feel like I try to stay humble. I’m not going to forget I’m from Iowa.”

Simmons’ next home will be not Iowa but New York: “I want it to rain, I want it to snow,” he says. “San Francisco’s sunny, and it’s comfortable here, but I want to be rubbed the wrong way; I think I need a little big more struggle.” I want to tell him that Manhattan has a habit for devouring its young, and to be careful. As I leave, he hands me two pieces of paper, each filled with details he didn’t want to forget to discuss in our interview: the support from his family and his roommate Calvin (“that kid really has made it possible for me to live here”), a distillation of his philosophies (“finding beauty in opposites, not being skeptical or afraid of being stupid & profound”), even mention of the grandmother he loved. If it didn’t clearly mean so much to him, it’d register as adorable, but it does, and so it becomes something more solid and sizable: a bulwark, against becoming a different person, maybe. I want to tell him, again, to be careful in New York, but I manage to keep my mouth shut: He’ll be just fine on his own.

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