Erin Elizabeth Bardwell

WE'RE SUPPORTING

Laurie Hogin takes a classical approach to painting mutant critters that snarl and menace through their cute, day-glo fur. If Victorian artists got in a time machine to the ’80s, watched Gremlins, bought some Hypercolor jam shorts, and went back to their home era, they might have generated images like these. Read more

WE'RE LISTENING TO

Casio Keyboard Brooklyn trio Au Revoir Simone are about to release a collection of remixes and covers their musical friends have recorded of songs found on their second album, The Bird Of Music. Titled Reverse Migration, the record features re-workings by Best Fwends, Teenagers, Darkel, and more. We caught up with them recently. Why and when did you decide to release a remix album? Annie: ‘Our friends were making so many wonderful versions of our songs we wanted to share them with the world’. How did you select the artists? Annie: ‘Mostly they were friends who told us they wanted to do remixes! Very fun and easy’. Reverse Migration is out November 11 through the band’s own label, Our Secret Record Company. Listen to Ruff & Jam by Au Revoir Simone.

WE'RE THINKING

Ze Frank’s iconic videoblog may be long dead, but he’s been plugging away, filling his little corner of the interweb with awesome stuff. His latest invention is a little voice-based face drawing toy that creates lines that differenciate according to the volume of the user’s voice.

WE'RE READING

DJ Spooky — That Subliminal Kid — is just about the deepest crate digger around, trawling the barrels of long-lost record stores for choice vinyl to spin in his wickedly dubby sets. He gave us the inside word last week on his eight favourite songs right now via our sister website, My Secret Playlist. This is what he had to say about Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s Panic in Babylon: ‘If there’s anything that the twenty-first century has told us, it’s that dub is the real original hip-hop. Lee Scratch even had to make it clear in 1965 by adding “Scratch” to his middle name. Take that, Grandmaster Flash!’ Read the rest of DJ Spooky’s Secret Playlist.

Seldom has black humour been done so well. On the surface, this film about the everyday lives of some unusually mundane characters, sounds extraordinarily boring. But it is instead a cutting comment on the absurdity and drudgery of everyday life. The characters try to break out or change their lives without success, and the results are bleak and hilarious. Read more

WE'RE TRAVELLING TO

We have reported on Danish firm, JDS Architects, before. And here their memorable work continues. This glorious design for the Holmenkollen Ski Jump in Oslo is the result of an international competition and is to be completed in time for the 2011 World Championships. Read more

WE'RE WEARING

While I feel I am not alone in breathing a sigh of relief over this season’s purging of fluoro, in retrospect there was a lot to be learned from the experience: don’t wear all fluoro, or don’t wear fluoro at all. And we slowly trudged back to black, which, despite what other colors may think, will always be the new black. Read more