sunday

shhhhhhhhhhhhh.

did you hear that?

silence.

a fire just lit. 

the darkness of the wind.

a hungary baby, crying.

the weight of tomorrow.

a flicker of light.

a road.

a wrenching heart and an end to these weary shutters, flapping like concrete in a cool empty night.

the beginning.

a beginning of noise.

of radiant ignorance.

an informal awakening.

mass fulfillment awaits.

the long path to enlightenment.

a vastness only she can comprehend.

Courtney Brims

Courtney is a self taught artist is nestled in Brisbane, whom likes anything a little unusual being inspired by fairytales.

Mr & Mrs Drinkwater

It's wonderful life, isn't it? And what makes life so brilliant is the people you have in it. About 4 years ago I moved into my fresh new abode in St Kilda with an armful of friends. I was moving into Lottie's old room. And that's where we first became aquainted. Since this very day we have seen this beautiful flower flourish into what she is today. A success. A real gem. A beauty. And last year her and her equally beautiful hubby, became wed. James and Lottie lead a life many would kill for. An old shed/warehouse in Yarraville, filled with collectables, easels, lace table cloths, books and painting and pictures scaling every wall. Clutter and butter, stairs to the kitchen and bedroom and a big roller door that opens up onto the street. It's heaven. James has dabbled in much creation now proving to be a very successful painter and there's plenty of room to move in the warehouse. Trust me. Lottie also runs a very interesting business of her own making jewelry from recycled metals. Her work is simply stunning. Staying true to her ilk, Lottie is a walking breath of fresh air tapping into vintage/corporal polished/war like romances with artish intelligence. She makes all of her pieces by hand as well as all of her own packaging. 

Next month James and Lottie are moving to Italy to live in a beautiful old house in the country. A garage sale and barbeque a few weeks ago, saw all of the beautiful stuff from their place sold and into the possession of friends and family to live on forever. There's a poky sadness having this special space change but the excitement of the alternate is a leisure. I can't wait to see inspirations drawn from Europe in James' future work, and what Lottie has in store for her next! Here's a few pictures from Mr and Mrs Drinkwater's nest in Yarraville and a few examples of their work. 

God bless beguiling people and how they decorate your life! It's an inspiration to us all to follow what we believe in, stay true to yourself and march ahead. 

Find Lottie @

http://www.blackelephant.com.au/

Find James @

http://www.jamesdrinkwater.com/

State of Design Festival

I'm very excited to announce my excitement for the annual State of Design Festival.

Held over two weeks and exhibitions continuing, people can indulge in design events, dinners, talks, workshops and exhibitions. This years topic 'Sampling the Future'. I have friends involved this year and I'm working at the festival to get an sneak peak into the wonerdul world of design and these events behind the scenes.

So stay tuned.

15 - 25 July

http://www.stateofdesign.com.au/

anything but tame

Tame Impala is the movement in Orion's nebula and the slime from a snail journeying across a footpath. To humans however, Tame Impala is more of a 'music ensemble', but its various other forms should not be disregarded (colour that humans can see is only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the rest is just as important to other things!)Tame Impala make psychedelic hypno-groove melodic rock music. It's intended for moving one's body to, and it's intended for keeping still and observing other forms of movement. It's bombastic but it's swirling, think of the shoulder bones of a giant striding feline creature through some kind of tunnel. If Tame Impala's music reminds you of what you'd want to put on when you next visit your mind's engine room then they're happy. If not, whatever, it's just music. Put it on when the sun next shines. Basically it's all about the feeling

Tame Impala are Kevin Parker, Dom Simper and Jay Watson. Kevin and Dom have been musical companions for a good 9 years, having met at music class in high school at age 13, sometime after Kevin had began honing his primitive self recording skills as a way of putting tune to his newly learned drum beats. They found Jay sometime last year in rural Western Australia and admired his groovebrain and corresponding wrist movement. By stroke of luck he was moving to Perth with another band and this allowed them to jam.

The Tame Impala sound is one equally informed by The Beatles as it is beat poetry, by Turkish prog as it is by Turkish delight, and by English folk as much as homeless folk, and it's a breathe of fresh air that reeks of all of these at times and none at others.Anyway, the band still enjoy recording music at home and getting up on the roof when weather permits. With the songs-vat (the apparatus used for storing songs) showing weakness and beginning to split at the seams, it's lucky they have secured a recording deal. An EP of home recordings is due out sometime soon.The EP is 5 tracks of untamed enthusiasm and unexpected delight. Beginning with Desire Be, Desire Go's endlessly looping, loose groove verses, to Slide Through My Fingers rollicking desert trip of a journey, Half Full Glass Of Wine's half-speed double-awesome riffing, 41 Mosquitoes Flying In Formation's unstoppable shake and Skeleton Tiger's marching band drums and haunting lead guitar, the Tame Impala EP is a beautiful snapshot into what lies within this beast. - (website)

Sundown Syndrome reveals a brazen tenderness from my soul and all I can think of is shorts and long grass in the scrub as a child. Give them a hoy and stay tuned for more beautiful free gigs to move to or to get moved by - (hopefully)

Kate Gibb

Kate Gibb originally studied textiles at Middlesex University in London, but after her graduation she decided to focus on the development of the silkscreen process on paper, rather than fabric.

Silkscreen printing is often used to create poster works or prints to put on t-shirts. It's a printing technique that uses woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink as a sharp-edged image into a substrate. A roller or squeegee is moved across the screen stencil, forcing or pumping ink past the threads of the woven mesh in the open areas. Very nice results come from this process, fragile and dreamy. Kate has worked with people such as The Chemical Brothers, The Magic Numbers, Penguin Books and Sonny J, just to name a few. Check her out!

ACNE PAPER

I must say. It's been a while since I have picked up a magazine and read every last word on every page, but this one has me drewling.  Thomas Persson if the mild-mannered editor-in-chief of ACNE PAPER, the magazine published by the Swedish label of the same name. But as it's covers make it perfectly clear, this is no dressed up catalog flogging skinnies and tees. Rather, mostly sold in museums, ACNE is a large-scale, finely crafted art biannual with a mission all its own. Unabbreviated, the title says it all: Ambition to Create Novel Expressions. And it does just that. Every dripping page lush with elegant layouts and romantic hues. Hypnotic and artful photography with each issue having a theme. The page layouts are just beautiful. I'm so impressed. I feel slightly lustful and special. My thoughts are killer right now!

Lee Carter from Hint caught up with Thomas in October last year whilst he was launching the new winter issue, this is how it went....

LC: Would I sound like a groupie if I told you I'm a fan of the new issue even before seeing it?
TP: No. Yes. Each issue does get better. I think because we have these themes, which makes the magazine stand apart.

What's the theme of winter?
Tradition.

What's your favorite thing about it?
There's one feature that's my darling. It's about two extraordinary tapestries from the late Middle Ages that went through a major renovation. They're enormous. They're from Belgium, now hanging in Genoa. It took this atelier five years to restore them, which they've been doing for hundreds of years. They tell the story of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king—who was gaaaay.

So the tapestries are gay porn?
No, they're quite sexy though. It's interested to see how sophisticated things were. We think about the Middle Ages as something dark and gloomy, but in fact it was quite a colorful, glorious and glamorous time. You can see that in the tapestries. The women are beautiful with high foreheads and heavy eyelids. The men are very masculine and they all have their own individual expressions. There could be hundreds of men in one fragment yet every inch is so full of detail.

Um, hundreds of men? What kind of scene is this?
A battle scene. One tapestry is about Alexander's youth and the other is how he conquers the world. Then we have a wonderful cover shoot by Daniel Jackson with Guinevere van Seenus, beautiful pictures inspired by old master paintings.

She's perfect for that. She can do Renaissance, alien, anything.
We also have an interview with Nan Goldin, which is quite brutal in its honesty. It's sort of painful to read because she talks about love, but without being cynical. She's realistic about love and sex and relationships. We also have an interview with the great Noam Chomsky about language, which is really fascinating. And we have a really funny story about wine. It's with Raoul Ruiz, a filmmaker from Chile but based in France. He talked about a certain wine having so much acid that if you spilled it on a tablecloth it would burn a hole right through it.

I must try this wine.
Yes, you should. It was fun to do something about wine that wasn't snobby.

I like how Acne Paper has complete freedom of scope and tone. It's able to touch on so many times and places, and really go beneath the surface. It's a little universe.
That's very nice of you to say. And you're absolutely right. That's what we wanted from the beginning. I like to say it's dinner conversation, as opposed to cocktail conversation. Today, with the web, you can get information in a flash. So in a way, magazines have lost their purpose. I wanted to offer something different. We're more inspired by books than magazines.

How do you come up with your stories?
It all starts with a kind of feeling, which always seems to come when we're already working on an issue. We get an appetite for something else, so each issue is a sort reaction to the previous.

What's your dream story?
An interview with Irving Penn, because he's so reluctant. I love what he writes in his books, there's no bullshit. He's about finding the essence, like in his photographs. He's a great inspiration. 

What's the mission of Acne Paper?
To be timeless, to mix the historical with the contemporary. A theme that was relevant 500 years ago can be relevant today. And it needs to have an aesthetic about it. I couldn't do a magazine about passion because what's the color palette of passion? For the color palette of tradition, I immediately think of wooden floors, rustic, old, textured. Then we just research for a while. We'll look at books, go on the Internet, talk to people and boil down the theme. And sometimes we do something just because we want to.

Are there stories you definitely don't want?
There's so much focus on celebrities and consumerism these days, which is fine. But I thought maybe we could not do that, not because we don't like it, but so many other people are doing it.

And clearly you're not funded by advertising.
No. Someone said to me once that we have to advertising. He said without advertising it's not a real magazine. But what is real?

He was saying the prestige of a magazine comes from its advertising, which makes no sense.
For me a real magazine has real content. If you look at most magazines, they're controlled by their advertisers, but we have freedom.

At the same time it's not just promotional material for Acne.
In the beginning, bookstores in Sweden would say, Oh, Acne is doing a magalog. But it's not about Acne. It's called Acne and it's part of the Acne collective, but one has to remember that it's published by all the Acne companies. People got that eventually. We're getting better distribution all the time, primarily through cultural institutions. We've been contacted by the Centre Pompidou and the Tate Modern. We're always sold out.

So in a way, it seems like Acne Paper has reached a kind of perfect form. Is there anything you still really want to try?
Of course, like anything, it can always be better. But if I wanted to try something radically different it would be to start a new magazine. Should we have another champagne?

Yeah, I'm easy.

http://acnepaper.com/