Reinventing Astro Turf
Where plastic roses everywhere remain a testament to the gifts of spring or the virtue of 80s romantic cliches, Astro Turf offers one of Kitsch’s more useful incarnations. It’s a grass is greener artificial nature strip that brings to mind Alice in Wonderland putting on a ’50s Miami golf course while making friends with the pink flamingos. Like flocking, Astro Turf can be used to cover all manner of surfaces: concrete verandahs, carports, handbags, kitchen cupboards, even the car dashboard (whence daisies and mushrooms spring). And considering the poor state of many inner-city gardens (resulting from neglect and water shortages), a piece of fake greenery adorning your balcony or living room gives a welcome respite from modern life. The best thing is it will remain a Soylent shade of green while the summer sun parches the surrounding landscape until it’s as thirsty and wilted as a party without beer.
Also by ANNA SUTTON
I get a lot of junk sent to me by email, but every once in a while I get a real beauty, something that makes me laugh out loud at how funny and absurd life can be. The phenomenon of creative canine grooming shows has its home in, you guessed it, the USA. Poodle owners dye, shave, clip and accessorise their pets so they resemble chickens, fairies, underwater sea themes, even American football players. As photographer Ren Netherland has discovered, the extremities of canine grooming have attained cult-like status. Read more
All you photographers out there, a word up on one of the most prodigious emerging photographers in Australia. And if you’re nursing an inadequacy complex, seeing Nirrimi Hakanson’s folio might propel you to briefly flee your aspirations and think about getting a job at the local supermarket. Hopefully, it will inspire you. The self-taught sixteen-year-old Hakanson has been taking photos on a digital SLR since the age of thirteen, after starting out on a disposable camera. Her distinctive style is ethereal and reminiscent of photo albums filled with enchanted childhood memories. Read more
Piet Parra at Milan’s Galleria Patricia Armocida
Piet Parra’s vividly coloured and voluptuous lemming-people get down to Italo Disco in the Amsterdam-based artist’s latest exhibition in Milan. Parra’s new works feature sensual and surreal figures busting raunchy poses to soundscapes from the electronic dance music movement that began in Italy and Europe in the late 1970s. Read more
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Aled Lewis has a wicked sense of humour. He creates cheeky scenes from plastic toys, imbuing his sedentary subjects with lively quips. It’s all for his ongoing project, Make Something 365, in which he is attempting to create something new every day of the year. Read more
A collective of mind numbing new surrealists from around the globe, this one stop visual shop is the quickest way to get current on the movement.
Micah P. Hinson is like every rustic, broken down, and pieced back together country great that’s ever been. Only hipper and slightly less sombre. This track, Diggin’ A Grave, is a button-up hoe down with a classic pop chorus and a jangly banjo accompaniment. Yup, some folk have all the fun.
On the roof of Bangkok’s Banyan Tree Hotel is a dining experience like no other. The Vertigo Bar sits sixty one floors up, and serves delicious gourmet meals and cocktails. These are expensive by Thai standards, but cheap enough for shoestring travellers to indulge in now and then (a cocktail costs around AUD$12). I’ve spent hour after hour in the bar, drinking and smoking and taking in the amazing view. Most nights at Vertigo end the same, with fast-moving storm clouds rolling in without fail at about eleven pm. While wait staff scurry to move tables, and drunken diners navigate the steep stairs down to the safety of the hotel, the more hardy can sit and watch the clouds race closer and closer towards the building, soaking in both the atmosphere and the rainwater until the lightning gets too close for comfort.
Pomocracy is a lifestyle statement Tumblr recently created in Berlin by PoMo, a nurse and designer. It’s an inspirational blog full of weird stuff.
Caught The Dust Dive the other night at Glasslands. They’re a bunch of hippies, but even I have to admit, they’re atmospheric live show – consisting of violin, gently strummed guitar, a few piano and sampler twinkles here and there, and sound samples from the found footage projected behind the band – is really powerful, like the warm rush of fond memories that hits you an instant before the mushroom cloud annihilates everything. Frontman Bryan Zimmerman even plays the musical saw, and you really can’t argue with that.
Listen to their track, Claws of Light.
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Australian t shirt label Das Monk create the coolest tees this side of Sydney. Or Melbourne. Or New York, for that matter. Made from super soft, one hundred per cent cotton, they’re comfy and unique, and quite possibly Australia’s best fashion secret. Wait! No, they are. Grab one now from the Lost At E Minor store for just US$45.
WE'RE POSTING / SOME OF THE BEST
Cookie Boy’s creative cookie designs
I don’t eat cookies, so good thing Cookie Boy’s cookies are little pieces of art too pretty and cute to eat. Read more
Baltimore Mural by Josh Van Horne
My friend Josh Van Horne, a local Baltimore artist, did this amazing mural in our neighborhood that depicts the history of this warehouse-laden area.
A little infectious lollipop rock anyone? Feel free to embarrass yourself singing along at the stoplight. If the other drivers give you that look, roll down the windows and spread the love.
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Here are a couple awesome pieces by Matt Leines that were recently on display in the Doubting Thomases exhibit at Nudashank gallery in Baltimore. Gives me ideas for Halloween. Read more
Mathematics? Leave me out. Fashematics? Now you’re talking! This gem of a site is a runway equation that adds up to a whole lot of wonderful.
In the Little Companions Rebelling Against the Magician t-shirt, label The Balletcats capture everything that we love about the holiday season: rebellion, flames, and striped pants. Nothing short of a classic family gathering! While everything that The Balletcats do is genius, this shirt has an extra bit of zip: it’s an exclusive for Lost At E Minor, and available to buy at our online store.
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