Lost AT E Minor

WE'RE THINKING

Dan Hiller mixes a gothic sensibility with a tribal roughness in his haunting watercolors and ink drawings of skulls and tree-headed figures. His mash-up of old Victorian engravings are simple but eerie, and have an almost logographic quality about them — they’re great tattoo ideas.

WE'RE LISTENING TO

His name echoes those of colonels and soldiers who fought in the American civil war. But far from that, William Fitzsimmons is actually an obscure songwriter from Jackson, Illinois. Read more

Australian group Pivot have recently signed with the mighty Warp label and — even better (well, for us anyway) — have written a fun Secret Playlist for us. You can see where the many disparate influences have seeped into their latest recording, the beautiful and colourful, O Soundtrack My Heart.

WE'RE READING

We have a bunch of new playlists up on our sister site, My Secret Playlist, a music discovery website and weekly email publication in which we invite our favourite bands and musicians to give us the rundown on their eight favourite songs right now. Over the past few weeks, acts such as The B52s, Team Genius, Pivot, Jukebox the Ghost, Moby, Katy Perry, and the Dandy Warhols, among many others, have written about the music that inspires them. To sign-up to receive the weekly My Secret Playlist publication, just enter your email address into the website’s subscription box.

WE'RE SUPPORTING

In my Personal Vision class at the International Center of Photography, one of our first assignments was to photograph a classmate naked. I was paired up with a guy who wasn’t keen on the assignment (he ended up backing out due to moral issues), and the opportunity to photograph a stranger in the nude is yet to come up again. Yet! With that in mind, we interviewed New York-based, Chinese photographer Shen Wei about his series Almost Naked and how he gets through those awkward moments. Read more

WE'RE TRAVELLING TO

Mozzarella is the new sushi in New York since the opening of Obikà (pronounced Oh-bee-KA), Manhattan’s first mozzarella bar, at 590 Madison Avenue. It’s like a sushi bar that uses buffalo mozzarella instead of fish, and has been a hit in Rome since 2004. Obikà, from the word obiccà, means ‘Here it is’, in Neapolitan. Its innovative concept focuses its offerings on the Mozzarella di Bufala Campana DOP, a premium cheese, along with recipes and artisanal products from Italy. The minimalist and modern style of the Obikà kiosks also throughout Rome, Milano, London, Turin, and very soon, in Kuwait City.

WE'RE WEARING

The Virtual Shoe Museum was initiated by Liza Snook in 2004. Once the idea was born, a long search began for designers, photographers and publishers connected to shoes. New friendships developed and their mailbox filled with loads of material on fantastic shoes, art and design on shoes. The Shoe featured above is the Electric Light Shoe by Strawberry Frog.