Victor Safonkin

WE'RE SUPPORTING

For the longest time I was an enormous admirer of the loopy, distinct line drawings of Brooklyn-illustrator Matt Hollister. Having seemingly lost track of his work for a couple of years (who knows how that manages to happen), I was shocked to stumble across his work yet again recently while perusing the New York Times. I had to check out his website immediately, and from there I wandered into his blog. The best part was that you could almost watch a new style emerge chronologically, beginning with the old drawings and then a small experiment, a mono print and then, more and more, mono prints and experiments, less and less loopy drawings. Even the subject matter seems to have changed and become much quirkier to accommodate the new style. I’m certainly feeling that staying abreast of Hollister’s work should now prove pretty inescapable.

WE'RE LISTENING TO

Give me a minor key song anytime. Yup, I’ll take the heartfelt purity of an introspective trawl over any warm and fuzzy major key shimmy. I once asked UK band The Editors why there aren’t more cheerful songs in the world: ‘Three words’, vocalist Tom Smith replied. ‘Shiny Happy People’. He smirked. I grimaced. Enough said.

Listen to Casiotone for the Painfully Alone’s, Don’t They Have Payphones Wherever You Were Last Night.

WE'RE THINKING

If you’re all a Twitter and Tweeting is your thing, then you might like to follow the new Lost At E Minor feed, which is an extension of the things we post about here. We get access to a lot of tips and information that we don’t always post about. But we will Twitter it. Yup, Tweets are fun and brevity is our friend. So if you have a Twitter account and you want to follow us, we’d love to have you on-board.

WE'RE READING

TIME magazine’s annual Person of the Year issue is coming out this week. I illustrated one of the runner-ups, but of course, I have to keep my mouth completely shut. I don’t know who is the winner though. On TIME’s website, you can see all the past covers of this most talked about issue of each year. It’s a good time to look back history and learn from it anyway, don’t you think?

Oh man, my eyeballs feel like they’re dropping out of my head. This clip is pyschedelic in a way that platform shoes and polyester shoes could never be. The Faint are the shizz, and that’s the truth.

WE'RE TRAVELLING TO

Having lived in New York for over two years now, transplanted from the sunny beachside landscape of Sydney, Australia, I appreciate the gritty realism, yet positiveness and vibrancy in the photographic series on Manhattan locals by British writer and photographer, Ian Woolverton. In addition to his talents with the lense, Woolverton also has two humanitarian awards: one for the Australian Red Cross Service Medal for his achievements in the Bali bomb response and the other, Australian Government’s Humanitarian Overseas Service Medal, for covering the tsunami in Aceh. Read more

WE'RE WEARING

Ben Lee upped the label a while back, but Band of Outsiders is still probably the best label you’ve never heard of. Read more