Daniel: Nirrimi, thanks for your time. I’m a big fan of photography and was stunned by your portfolio, and by how young you are! You are “newly 18″ right? I must ask, although you are young and new to the industry – has fashion photography changed since you first joined it?

Nirrimi: Luckily I see the industry and fashion photography embracing more of what is real. I hope it keeps steering toward the natural, and I hope I have a positive effect on that.

Daniel: Tell us about yourself, where are you from where did all of this begin for you?

Nirrimi: I’m from a little town close to the sun where I grew up with my mother and siblings. I’ve been creating my whole life, and just got consumed by photography when I was 13. I was crazy with all the beauty around me and just wanted a way to record it. I moved out a few years later and began traveling the world.

Daniel:When did you discover photography?

Nirrimi: I know I took many photos as a child, but it wasn’t until I became a teenager that it became this obsession.

Daniel: Do you like fashion or photography best?

Nirrimi: I do fashion photography because it gives me so much creative freedom and takes me all over the world. I’ve never really understood fashion though. My head is too caught up in other things.

Daniel: What has been your most rewarding achievement as an artist?

Nirrimi: Awards always make me feel special, but it’s little things that are really rewarding for me. Like overhearing a stranger talking passionately about my photographs or turning down a big job just because it would mean being disloyal to my style.

Daniel: What is your biggest dream? And have you accomplished that?

Nirrimi: I’d love to make films, to live near the sea, to have a child and give them an inspired life and to have my own exhibitions often. So many of my dreams have come true in the last few years and I feel so grateful for it all.

Daniel: Who’s your favorite photographer and who do you draw your inspirations from?

Nirrimi: I’ve always had a soft spot for Sally Mann. I draw inspiration from books, films, strangers and the world.

Daniel: What has been your favorite shoot so far?

Nirrimi: I am going on a big road trip through Europe to shoot a campaign in a few weeks and I have a feeling that will be incredible.

Daniel: What are the tools that a photographer cannot live without?

Nirrimi: A camera, an open mind and motivation.

Daniel: I’ve noticed a collaboration between you and DIESEL. How did this collaboration form?

Nirrimi: They were fans of my imagery. They flew me over to New York to shoot their winter campaign, it was the first time I’d been to America. It was crazy.

Daniel: What’s next for Nirrimi?

Nirrimi: Flying to New Zealand to shoot an album cover in a few days, Europe road trip for Billabong a week later, an exhibition in New York, shooting in L.A., holiday in Lake Tahoe and a trip around Asia for my birthday in August. I also just did a tee shirt line through Milk & Honey and my lover shot a film for them. There is so much good to come.

Daniel: Where do you see yourself in 5, 10, 15 years?

Nirrimi: I’ll never shake this wanderlust. I’ll have a little child or two, take them everywhere with me on wild adventures. We’ll be this artist gypsy family who follows the summer. I will shoot enough campaigns to get by happily. I will own a home near water with acres of untamed backyard. Everything will always be okay.

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Prepare for your virtual life (read: entire life) to be turned upside down. At midnight, Facebook launched their new and supposedly improved profile. Among the new changes, your profile will now immediately display the following information about you:

Joe Blow
Works at “Cooler Job Than Yours.” Lives in “Cool City.” From “Not A Cool City.” Born on “Oh shit. He is young and fabulous!”

And because we love scoping people’s photos, there’ll also be the most recently tagged photos of you looking fresh, fun and popular on your profile. You won’t even have to click “View Photos” anymore. It will already be on their main page for you to judge, laugh at or feel envious of.

The creepiest new feature would have to be “Featured Friends” in which you can list the friendships that are most important to you and reveal their history. It’s like a popularity contest masquerading as a sentimental journey through time. Those of you who were on Myspace will be familiar with the perils of promoting special friendships. Top 8, anyone?

All in all, the new design isn’t particularly bothersome. However, I’m not sure why Facebook feels the need to constantly change its layout. It mostly just pisses people off and makes them feel disoriented and scared. I thought about switching to the new profile but in the end, I couldn’t do it. What if I didn’t like it and couldn’t go back? What if it negatively affects my experience on Facebook? That’s a risk I’m just not willing to take. Are you able to?

Edit: J/K. I just did it. Look at the difference!

Then

Now

Wow. That was anti-climatic. Carry on.

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Chilly Gonzales takes the stage at the Pigalle Club, a Forties-style dinner and cabaret spot in London’s West End (circular tables, low ceilings, regular intervals of green velvet), and assumes his place at the piano. He is wearing a brown knee-length silk robe with matching trousers and a pair of generously cushioned slippers. His hands are encased in pristine white gloves. With shadowy deep-set eyes and slicked back hair, he is the very image of the brooding piano maestro.

He eases into a medley of slow, spare classical pieces. The music starts off somber and restrained, but his fingers move with such fluidity that they can’t resist adding little flourishes here and there. The embellishments begin to mount up. What opened with an air of great solemnity is now becoming increasingly comical. Now he’s playing a blues standard with one hand, a blur of white hammering away at the lower octaves.

He wraps it up and turns to confront his audience. “Hi, I’m Chilly Gonzales. If you don’t know me, I’m a Grammy-nominated producer.” This is true. He continues: “I hold the Guinness world record for longest continuous piano concert at 27 hours.” This is also true. “I’ve got a lot of famous friends.” He pauses for effect, then performs a modest raise of the shoulders. “In France, where I live, they call me un génie musicale.”

In 2004, Gonzales, who is neither French nor Hispanic but Canadian and whose real name is Jason Beck, released Solo Piano, an album of concise minimalist classical numbers in the vein of Erik Satie which gave substance to the génie musicale claim. Those who came to know Gonzales through that album – his best-selling by some margin – would have been shocked to learn that the author of those beautiful, delicate pieces had previously made, among other things, a gleefully profane lo-fi rap record called The Entertainist.

It’s not entirely surprising that a musician who rolls out his “unfuckwithable resume” at the beginning of a show, and makes unabashed reference to his musical genius at every opportunity, should dabble with rap. Rapping is, after all, the art of the inflated brag. The Sugarhill Gang were extolling their globally-endorsed sexual prowess and enviable motoring options as hip-hop drew its first breath, and given the amount of hot air that’s been blown over 4/4 beats since then, it’s no wonder the ice caps are melting.

Gonzales embraces the spirit of boastfulness on The Entertainist and its more lavishly produced follow-up, Presidential Suite, although in Gonzoworld the line between brag and self-skewering gag is always porous. Yes, he may be “the greatest entertainer of the year”, but he is also “the worst MC” who gets “more pussy than a priest”. He is “the prankster Frank Sinatra”, a “combination of Joe Stalin and Woody Allen”, whom you may address as “Fuckeye” or “the one-eyed Jew”. Or “Chilly Chaplin”. Or “Santa Klaus Kinski”, because he spent a few years living in Berlin.

“I am the worst MC” is at once a villainous sneer and an admission that Gonzales’ rapping abilities circa 2000 left something to be desired. In fact, as he demonstrates during tonight’s show, Gonzales is a pretty good rapper – stylistically derivative perhaps, but deft, playful and always entertaining. He spouts vast jets of nonsense in his rhymes but somehow manages to be more upfront than any other rapper you’d care to name.

Musicians rarely speak about, let alone lyricize, the shallow calculations that often underscore big career decisions, yet here is Gonzales on why he left Canada for Berlin: “I still remember when it first occurred to me./ Fuck it, I’m gonna move to Germany./ I don’t speak German, screw it/ But hey! I’m Jewish/ And I need a new press angle and that should do it.”

These kinds of outrageous proclamations make listening to Gonzales, or attending one of his shows, enormously fun. His almost pathological frankness presents an interesting challenge, however, when it comes to interviewing the guy. Any criticism you’d level at him has already been anticipated, and slyly underlined, in his music, or on other platforms. When he released Soft Power, his paean to Seventies soft-rock, in 2008, he posted a video online in which a Mercury label honcho begs him to take singing lessons to soften his harsh Montrealer tones. In the clip he circulated to promote his London dates, Gonzales tells a buffoonish interviewer, also played by Jason Beck, that although he “owns” France, he remains an underdog in England, adding: “I’m not a young man anymore. This could be my last chance.”

So why all the second-guessing?