The Motel Life

WE'RE SUPPORTING

Matt Duffin’s sparse illustrations of symbolically loaded objects, anthropomorphic donkeys, and children’s toys, are full of dark and blank spaces that make their subjects seem isolated and alone to the point of dread. Extreme sources of light up the drama of Duffin’s images, and despite the storybook-ish quality of his wax drawings, they convey a sense of impending doom. Read more

WE'RE TRAVELLING TO

A project that has been a pioneer of the revitalization of downtown Kansas City, this building’s goal was to promote the Central Library as well as represent the city itself. Read more

WE'RE WEARING

With the recession still biting, it may be time to whip out the glue and the cardboard and make your next pair of cool kicks. Don’t know how they’d manage in the rain though? Read more

WE'RE THINKING

Forget battery powered vehicles. Cars made from ice are the future of transportation: no pollution, no honking horns, no painful rap music blasting out of souped up stereos. And if they melt, they melt. You just swim the rest of the way down the slipstream.

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.

If animated wall drawings of severed heads and insect men ejecting their brains from their craniums is what people produce when they have too much time on their hands, then we should do their laundry for them and cook them dinner so they’ll have even more time on their hands.

WE'RE LISTENING TO

Athens, Georgia art rockers Circulatory System have delivered an extraordinary 46-minute album sculpted from five years worth of accumulated sonic experimentation. Signal Morning ricochets across every raw nerve from the poppiest of impulses to the edge of ostensible sanity, without revealing a single cut corner or uninspired change.