Not sure if I've ever seen Alice in a cowboy hat before, but if I did, would it be black or white?
Whatever Alice decides to try, that corner of the world gets one of the best it'll ever see. She could front a hardcore, thrash metal band out of the Bay and feel just as at home on a porch, playing an acoustic Scandanavian folk song, her voice so soft, alighting birds would mistake her for someone else. Except currently, it's garage rock.
Punk. Not just an aesthetic or a playlist or a scene. It's more like the way she moves without auditing herself for anyone's approval, comfortable in contradiction, taking up exactly as much space as she wants and never a careful inch more. There's that softness in her too, unhurried and settled, that sits right alongside all of it without apologizing for either side. Outlaws and punks share the same root, and Alice moves through both without asking permission. Which is maybe why the hat question was never really about the hat…
Some people need a deliberate ON switch before a camera can find them, that conscious decision to straighten up and perform their best self into the lens. Alice has that switch and uses it beautifully, but from where I stand it never turns off in a great way. Even when she feels off, it doesn't show. Whether she's giving me a full lit up smile or holding something back behind a cool stare, she's smoldering in a way that has nothing to do with effort and everything to do with presence.
Every emotion reads transparently across an editing filmstrip, and there's always one frame that stops me mid-scroll, too real and unresolved to skim past.
This all played out in the cold last week. Genuinely frigid, neither of us planned to shoot for long. Shivering, standing shots first, but then…she sat down. On the concrete, she tightly curled herself inwards, guarding something close, looked up and said she wasn't sure why she sat that way. I knew. Just a decision on her own terms that blossomed into the best frames of the night with no one's direction at hand. She was on.
Ok, so black or white?