The Latest
What memories are etched in your mind from childhood?
New York artist Scott Hunt draws stuff good. Real good, like. What is this I don’t even.
Hunt’s subjects take on many different forms, from transvestite ballet dancers to deluded children brandishing decapitated heads. He plays vaguely with theme, drawing out stories through the order that his work is presented. The image of a nun with the police carrying a limp man would not be as powerful and as intriguing had the image preceding it been an eerie shot of a man being baptised. It felt just a little too Jeff Buckley.
Check them out here.
Did you have a big night last night?
Sometimes you wake up in the morning feeling a little groggy. As you prise your crusty eyed noggin from the pillow, all dizzy with hangover, you stumble over the cat and towards the bathroom. You look into the mirror, and the site before you has you rushing to the toilet. That can’t be your face, can it? It’s all puffy with alcohol, with deeply embedded creases from the pillow lining your cheeks like shonky train tracks. Your eyelids are swollen, and the whites of your eyes are tomato red. One doesn’t even really open properly.
Simon English’s paintings are a little like the reflections that you see those mornings in the vanity mirror. But unfortunately, these paintings don’t have Berocca and a sauna to set them right.
See your Sunday morning reflection here.
Are they geisha or ghetto?
Black is the new black – you only have to look at the pasty Anglo boys that hang around outside Subway trying to dress like they’re Jay-Z to see that.
Merging Japanese geishas with Harlem harems, Iona Rozeal Brown takes the piss out of the obsession to be something that you’re not. They paint their faces black instead of white, corn-row each others’ hair, and wear kanji-patterned hoodies.
Keep reading and see the mashups here.
Is Numskull Australia’s answer to Ron English?
I interviewed Sydney’s graf-God Numskull the other day. You know the deal. If you want to read the interview, you’re going to have to read it on Lifelounge. If I post it in full here, they will pelt me with comically sized inflatable donkies and relinquish my microwave privileges.
He has a show opening later this month at the newly launched Lo-Fi Gallery in Sydney’s Darlo. It’s a great space with radical curation. Thou shalt tap that shit.
What do transexuals do during their days off in Barcelona?
The most shocking part of Paola de Grenet’s photographic series? They’re normal. Really, beer-in-front-of-the-TV normal. They live with their grandparents, they cook Christmas roasts, they hang pictures of their parents on the walls… Are you disappointed? There are no rollerskating midgets, no naked slumber parties, and no walk-in wardrobe of candy thongs. Although, one of the girls has a serious bling collection that could rival Flava Flav.
Do you actually want to see/read more? Sure you do. Right here.
Where can I read more frankie fodder?
frankie blogs are now coming in thick-n-fast (like a Matt Preston endorsed paper towel advertisement), so I’m going to start only post a few a week here. If you want to read them all, just keep checking back to frankie.com.au. There’s normally about one every day or so going up there!
I also assisted on my first frankie editorial shoot today. Super top secret, unfortunately, but issue #38 will be on newstands or in your letterbox this time next month. You can have a peek then.
And also have a flick through my first feature too…
All I can tell you about next issue’s shoot is that we had demolished a packet of iced vo-vos by morning tea. So we had no choice but to move onto the Homebrand ‘Tiny Bears’ to dunk in our cuppas.*
Life is good.
*Note: like Tiny Teddies, but with less intact limbs.
Who wears Levi’s?
So… I wrote the feature advertorial for Levi’s’ last Australian campaign! Selling my soul for selvedge, but I loved it. Even though the apostrophes drove me ga-ga. Here’s the start, then click through to keep reading:
Just as Kleenex is synonymous for tissues, Levi’s® is now interchangeable for jeans. They were the original manufacturer of our favourite pants all the way back in 1873, a time when horse power referred to bovines and not bogans, and 3D TV was but a blip on the non existent radar. Think of them as your great great grandfather - the cool type that let you try their chewing tobacco and taught you how to cuss.
As the granddaddy of denim, they are the ones that you should be taking your advice from. Matt McGivern, the Senior Product Manager for Australian menswear, should know: he’s been working with Levi’s® for over a decade, following the brand everywhere from Belgium to San Francisco. He has worked with the “bling” of Italy and Spain and the “clean-cut classics” of Scandinavia, and is now finding Australia’s own prevailing trends.
“I’d say that globally, people are reverting back to classic brands, and there’s this whole ‘nostalgia purchasing’ going on,” says Matt. “It’s going a little bit retro: Ray-Bans are coming back, Converse, brogue shoes…” What once was old is new again. Wouldn’t you prefer to be driving a Chevrolet over your beaten up Ford?
Keep reading? Want to see what the skinny on skinnies is? Clicky clicky through to levis.com.au
What do you look like mid-cuss?
‘Fuck Off, I Love You’ photographic exhibition:
“We tended to shoot in the evenings so people would come over after work,” Monfaradi said. “We’d give them a few beers to loosen them up and they’d unleash down the lens and get a lot of shit off their chests. There were some quieter more unassuming friends of ours that suddenly became angry, raving lunatics. We’re considering moving into a line of alternative anger management/therapy.”
While we normally associate swearing with anger, violence, and Mel Gibson, many of the portraits in the exhibition have a certain serene quality to them. It’s a release. It’s catharsis. It’s fucking magic.
Read the rest and see the gallery here.
Do you want to read my Ou Est Le Swimming Pool EXCLUSIVE album review and win a free album?
There is nothing revelatory in The Golden Year. However, it really does create a portrait of the world that the late Charles Haddon would have inhabited in his mind. It makes you feel alive, but empty. You will find yourself unconsciously tapping to the driving beats, moved by some internal metronome. However, you don’t so much actively consume it than let it consume you. It’s like drowning peacefully in a haze of synthesisers.
Of course there are going to be the skeptics: the ones that say that Universal Music is cashing in on a tragedy, and the ones that say we will only listen to the album because of Haddon’s death. But the album may now be imbued with the ghost of Haddon, but that doesn’t change the musicality – it only changes our perception.
Read the review and enter the competition at lifelounge.com
Don’t like paper cuts?
Then don’t keep reading. Before you ask, yes. Yes, Seiko Kato cuts out all of these tiny little bits and bobs to create into collages metres tall. Yes, she probably has twenty gazillion paper-cuts. Yes, she is Japanese but she’s now biding her time in San Francisco. And yes, that is an entire gallery full of 1920s men with lumps of raw steak for faces in the second page of this gallery.
Keep reading and see what I’m talkin’ BOUT here.
