I’ve always thought it strange that Sydney’s grungily trendy and alcohol soaked Newtown has fewer than it’s fair share of cool little bars. There’s Madame Fling Flong’s, if you can find it, and Kuleto’s, if you make it in time for two-for-one cocktail hour. But just the other day I realised that there, smack back in the middle of the action, was a new small bar called Corridor.

Cool yet unpretentious, Corridor’s comfortable setting in a refurbished yet suitably rustic terrace house makes it very Newtown, and very inviting. Reasonably priced drinks and the tastiest plate of vegie nachos ever (with complimentary tequila shot) means this is a place I will go back to again and again. And it is blissfully free of the pokie machines and framed football jerseys that seem to haunt most of Newtown’s drinking establishments. More, please! [photo via SideStreetSydney]

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Picture a future in which climate change and exhausted coal supplies have left humans in need of inventive ways of living in an inhospitable landscape. Then combine it with two inch high yellow plastic people and a bunch of interlocking plastic bricks and you have Dave DeGobbi’s Lego Crawler Town, a fantastically detailed, miniaturized solution to life in a post-apocalyptic world.

Crawler towns, DeGobbi explains, roam ‘the barren wastes of a post-punk steam world’. They travel ‘in search of minerals and aquifers [and] the mobility of the city keeps it away from the vicious sand storms of the wastes’. It looks like a great idea, and could save future generations from perishing from nuclear fallout and radiation dust storms. If only they could fit inside the building.

The brainchild of Harvard University engineering students Jessica Lin, Jessica Matthews, Julia Silverman, and Hemali Thakkar, sOccket is an ingenious creation that harnesses the kinetic potential of play. A soccer ball which uses inductive coil technology to capture and store energy for later use, sOccket has been provided as a solution to the day-to-day energy problems of people living in third world countries.

Tested in soccer-loving South Africa, sOccket worked effectively — allowing children to play during the day then take the ball home to light their houses, even if there was no electricity available. sOccket provides three hours of energy for around every ten minutes of play, and is an easy-to-use, low cost, eco-friendly solution to kerosene lamps, which are expensive to run and create many health problems.

In a city like Tokyo, where high-density living has reduced green spaces to mere pockets, and Japanese food self-sufficiency has dropped below 40%, it makes sense to look to alternative forms of agriculture to feed the growing population. Enter Pasona 02, a square kilometre of underground farm located in an abandoned bank vault that prepares jobless youth for work in the agricultural industry.

A study conducted by The Tokyo Foundation in 2008 showed that agriculture is on the decline Japan, mainly due to structural reforms and advances in technology. But this decline isn’t helped by the aging of the farming workforce, which primarily consists of the elderly. This means that if Japan is to improve its self-sufficiency, it will be up to young people and places like Pasona 02 to rebuild the industry.

Illustrator Molly Crabapple is inspired by Victorian culture and the sexy, bawdy world of burlesque. Her illustrations are colourful and erotic, her voluptuous female subjects bursting out of their corsets while eying off the viewer with undisguised lewdness. Having worked on numerous commercial projects, organised her own shows and illustrated several graphic novels, Crabapple also created Dr Sketchy’s Anti-Art School in New York City in 2005.

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The twenty minute walk from my house to Newtown takes me down cramped backstreets and past run-down buildings decorated with some of the best stencil art I’ve ever see. One of its creators is Sydney’s Syke, a member of a group known as the Original Art Club, who ‘busk’ their art on the streets of the inner-city suburb.

Syke sells small stencilled and graffiti works by donation to fund her studies at art college, and pedestrians on Newtown’s King Street can’t help but be drawn in by her delicate, evocative work. Finalist in the 2009 Australian Stencil Art Prize, and a member of the Oh Really! art collective, Syke works on the basis that producing a lot of pieces that sell cheaply is great exposure. ‘[Art busking] is a great way for us to produce a lot of work and advance our skills as well as make money and get our art out into the public arena’, she says.

New Delhi-based digital artist Archan Nair (aka archanN) has worked for notable clients, including CNBC, Hugo Boss, Apple and Tiger Beer. But although his corporate works stand out in their glorious, hyper-real colour, his more intricate and personal works are my favourites.

His brilliant rainbow-saturated pieces, The Peacock Dance, and Botanical Dimensions, decorate my office cubicle, taking me out of the day-to-day banality of work with the promise of fantasy lands beyond the earthly realm. The inspirations behind his work are the various phases of his life, and, at a young 26 years of age, it will be interesting to see how future life experiences will influence archanN in his creation of more amazing works.

The Miss Rockaway Armada is a group of about thirty artists, musicians and performers who hail from across the United States. In the summers of 2006 and 2007, the group floated down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans on a flotilla of handmade rafts. Crafted mainly from junk and recycled materials, the rafts ran on wind and solar power, were fuelled by bio-diesel, and their crew subsisted on rainwater and dumpstered meals for the entire journey. 

Stopping off at numerous ports along the way, the Armada performed vaudeville shows, played gigs and organised art workshops in towns along the river, hoping to inspire their inhabitants and encourage cultural change. Though the rafts have since been abandoned, the Armada collective continues to put on shows both across America and in Europe. Best known for their involvement in musical outfits such as The Amateurs and The Toyshop Collective, the group is currently working on other ‘big, insane projects’, the details of which are so far unknown.

Eve and Eryn, two amazing Free Spirit Sphere tree houses, are located in Vancouver, Canada, high up in the canopy of the West Coast rainforest. They are, as their creators describe, ‘suspended like pendants from a web of rope’ from the trees. This is a unique way of creating unobtrusive means of living amongst nature. Insulated and set up for one or two people to stay in, these spheres allow people to experience the ‘energy shift’ that occurs ‘once one breaks contact with the ground’.

Staying in either Eve or Eryn is an ephemeral experience, with each sphere staying in the trees for only a matter of days. At the end of a stay, the whole thing, including stairs and suspension bridges for access, it is removed, ‘without a trace’. Free Spirit Spheres also sells tree houses made from either wood or fibreglass allowing people, if they wish, to take the experience home to their own backyard.

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When I was a kid, I loved balloon animals and was always sad when the colourful, inflatable creatures I bought home from shows and circuses slowly deflated. I think Jason Hackenwerth may have had a similar passion, which he has transformed into a peculiar form of art-making: balloon sculpture. Drawing inspiration from nature, Hackenwerth brings strange animals and bizarre landscapes to life through the twisting and turning of hundreds and thousands of balloons. Reminiscent of millipedes, of crustaceans, of deep sea fishes and waterborne plants, his giant works make the microscopic macroscopic. Rendered larger-than-life but yet unnaturally airborne they are brilliantly surreal, capturing the transcendentalism of both air and of nature itself.

Sardinian born Carolina Melis is an illustrator based in the UK. She’s obviously multi-talented, her bio listing her not only as an artist but as an animator, dancer and choreographer. Her illustrations are apparently ‘informed by her background in choreography’ and explore ‘ideas of delicacy, organic development, life-cycles and living relationships’.
She demonstrates skills in a variety of media, her lovely linear images cleverly using negative space to leave room for the viewer’s imagination, while her multimedia collage pieces are intimate and warm. I particularly like her colourful design pieces, especially her use of cute bird motifs. Animals seem to play an important role in her works, with butterflies, horses and deer recurring alongside the birds. This makes the organic nature of her work all the more apparent.

A survey of two thousand Britons has revealed the country’s perfect pet. Max is a bizarre hybrid that is part cat, part dog, part rabbit and part horse. Insurance firm More Than, which conducted the research, suggests that Max ‘has high energy levels, loves daily walks and sleeps for an average of nine hours 27 minutes a day’.

I’m not quite sure how an insurance firm plans to benefit from the study, but it is certainly an interesting insight into what the British public values in their companion animals. However, some people are not so convinced that Max is particularly interesting after all, with one commentator suggesting that ‘this may just be the most pointless research ever completed’.

Cremations Solutions, ‘[y]our complete source for scattering urns and accessories’, offers personal urns which are created from the image of the deceased. The large containers, which feature lifelike features, but no hair, can hold an entire loved one’s ashes, and cost only US$2,600.

Personally, I think the Personal Urn is the stuff of nightmares. Since discovering this site, I would now quite specifically like a clause written into my will prohibiting the storage of my ashes in one of these freaky things, not only for the sake of my departed soul, but for my family members and friends, who should not have to suffer the dead stare of my hairless, lifeless, decapitated head.

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I’ve just returned from an amazing trip to Vanuatu, a small cluster of islands north east of Australia. There my friend and I spent time exploring the coral reefs of the Nguna-Pele Marine Protected Area, home to hundreds of thousands of brilliantly colored fish, sea turtles, reef sharks, sting rays and other fascinating underwater critters. We also spent time hiking through the lush jungle, its volcanic soils so rich that even fallen branches and fence posts were alive with greenery. The small islands of Nguna and Moso, where we stayed, are blissfully remote. Housed in bungalows fashioned from branches, bark and bamboo and fed on traditional island food we learnt the true meaning of relaxation. Without electricity, privy to the rise and fall of the sun and moon time became meaningless. Only the immediacy of our surroundings and the glory of nature mattered.

May’s is an outdoor gallery in Sydney’s St Peters that is devoted to promoting a legal space in which street artists can exhibit their work. The brainchild of Tuli Balog, who runs his own graphic art business behind the colourful façade, he set up the gallery to encourage and document the evolution of graffiti and stencil art in Sydney. Based on several removable and replaceable wall panels, May’s allows artists to work on an entire wall, and to keep the parts of their works on the panels before the next artist’s work takes up residency. While this system challenges the usually temporary nature of street art, it also provides an avenue for street artworks to be protected from removal or cover-up by the local council. For this reason, it is a unique space, protected from the rampant clean-up and gentrification which is sanitising so many areas of the city.

Rob and Christian Clayton hail from Pasadena, California, where, together, they create fascinating and somewhat nightmarish images portraying the ‘unique people, animals, and places that occupy the outskirts of the American psyche’. The sad-faced, tired-eyed characters that inhabit their bright, almost suffocatingly busy pieces seem bemused by, yet unarguably a part of, their hectic surroundings, while the rough honesty of their work reminds me of artists such as Frieda Kahlo and comic artist Lynda Barry. The Clayton Brothers have an exhibition called Jumbo Fruit coming up on July 18 and running until August 29, which will be held at the East and West Galleries in Santa Monica, California. If you’re in the area, I’d highly recommend dropping by and immersing yourself momentarily in their colourful chaos.

Andrew Zuckerman’s beautiful photographs make me imagine how it would feel to be in close proximity to a menagerie of amazing creatures — orangutans, mountain lions, chameleons, and zebras. With a careful eye for what makes these animals unique, Zuckerman has, in his wonderful book Creature, shown the intimate side of animals that are usually considered ‘wild’. Up close and personal, these animals reveal what might be termed an innate humanness, or, perhaps, as I prefer, a pure and primal sense of emotion, a capacity that is too often denied to them by humans. Captured in this way, we see that it is not animals that are human-like, but humans that are animal-like: each of us share the same glimmer in our eyes, the same need for safety, food, companionship and belonging.

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I really like the work of Craig Phillips, an Australian illustrator whose notable achievements include creating the cover art for the new EP from Sydney band Lions At Your Door and being named as one of the 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide (Leurzers Archive).

His work often graces the pages of Rolling Stone, and he is also a favourite cover illustrator of publishing house, Simon & Schuster. Phillips’ illustrations blend bold lines and colours with an ethereal feel. Some of his works, such as The High Priestess, are reminiscent of the style of Art Nouveau artists such as Aubrey Beardsley. Others, such as his fantasy-themed work, remind me of paintings done by science-pulp fiction artists of the fifties, such as Ron Turner.

I’ve been keen on Mandy Ord’s work since we were both involved in the Australian underground comic scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s. She shared my love of the dark and the bizarre, and her cool little self-published comic, Wilnot, inspired me greatly in my own work. While I drifted away from the scene a few years ago, Ord continues to draw her darkly witty, autobiographical comics and has just had her first full-length graphic novel published by Finlay Lloyd. It’s entitled Rooftops, and it tells the tale of a night spent out and about in Melbourne with friends, discussing, amongst other topics, the existential nature of coincidences.

Rooftops is a timely follow up to Ord’s previously published works which graced the pages of the Weekend Australian’s Orbit section for years. Now she has moved onto bigger and bolder territory, and her foray into the graphic novel genre has been well received by reviewers around the country, proving that even underground artists can make it big in the fickle world of publishing.

Several years ago I spent five weeks hanging out with friends who lived in the friendly environment of Copenhagen’s Freetown, Christiania. A former military base, Christiania is a self-governing borough set on 85 acres of mainly lush forested grounds, surrounding a lake. It is a beautiful and idyllic location where 850 residents have built their own idiosyncratic constructions in which to live and play. While I was there, I watched local bands play in the coffee-house, helped paint a psychedelic mural on the wall of one of the military bunkers, smoked some legal marijuana bought from street sellers, and jumped off a homemade tree-swing into the freezing cold lake. Sadly, in recent years the Danish government has cracked down on the pot sellers and attempted to ‘normalise’ the legal status of the community. I hope they leave the place as it was. Staying in Christiania for that brief amount of time was such an amazing experience, and it would be a shame if the unique nature of the Freetown was lost.