James Benjamin Franklin

WE'RE SUPPORTING

Adam Bartlett’s illustrations take me back to a time when Saturday mornings were all Coco Pops and soft drinks, a soft, lazy pillow and a well-worn position in front of the TV. When the funny faces, sounds, and storylines of the bright-eyed cartoons somehow seemed more real than the scattered world around me. On this cold, windswept Brooklyn morning, it’s a wonderfully sharp burst of mid-80s nostalgia. Read more

WE'RE TRAVELLING TO

With the streets of New York already covered in a thin layer of ice after a heavy snowstorm yesterday, it’s interesting to see how other cold winter cities deal with this ubiquitous companion. At the annual Ice and Snow Festival, in Haban, China, they get kinda creative with it: building an entire city out of ice and then lighting it up like an extra frosty, colourful Christmas tree. Read more

WE'RE WEARING

Free bird boots are handmade customized military boots, applying recycling to fashion in a new way. Created by young New York-based designer, Stacey Howard, the boots were originally collected from military bases in the South. As Howard says: ‘It felt most natural to my aesthetic to use vintage native American garments and paint to refabricate the boots. Using a soldier’s boot and an Indian’s blanket, I wanted to merge two opposite and patriotic styles and use them in the most organic way’. Free bird boots are currently sold through Steve Madden’s Steven stores on Ludlow and Bleecker in New York. 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

As someone who thinks more about traveling than actually gets to do it [damn, it should really be the other way around], it was good to come across the latest batch of Wallpaper* city guides the other day. Living vicariously through the pages of the Berlin edition at least made my next choice of holiday destination that much easier. 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.

The sound New Zealand band The Brunettes make is Hallmark card pop — naïve sincerity mixed with low-fi, casual kitsch. Says chief songwriter, Jonathan Bree: ‘You’ll find us somewhere between US punk and just before classic 60s romps’. And so we will.