WE'RE SUPPORTING

Alex Passapera’s dizzying pen and ink drawings are cascades of images melting into one another, often looking like contorting, mutating creatures spewing blood-like ink splatters. Read more

WE'RE THINKING

Herb Lubalin’s typography looks clichéd and a bit played out if you are catching it right now, until you realize that most of the designers riffing on his letters were born after he died. Lubalin’s typography isn’t subtle. That isn’t to say it isn’t well balanced or poorly kerned (it is). It’s more that it is loud, fearless, and clever in ways type hasn’t been before or since. His particular cues are popping up more and more lately in “cutting-edge” graphic design. Avant-garde indeed.

Sparks’ album Kimono My House is a demented mix of hard rock, pop, glam, new wave, and baroque pop. Why this record never caught on in the States I’ll never know. The songs will get stuck in your head and prevent you from sleeping. Oh yeah, and the keyboard player has a nice mustache too, as evidenced by this track above — This Town Ain’t Big Enough.

WE'RE TRAVELLING TO

Who says the Swedes have got a monopoly on seasonal ice hotels? This one in Kemi, northern Finland, is the world’s largest snow castle, standing seventeen metres high and with walls that are 1,100 metres long. It has restaurants, an art gallery, a hotel and a chapel. In fact, since opening in the early 1990s, it’s been quite a hit for tourists to get married at the snow chapel. Hmmm, now that would be a frosty start to any marriage. Read more

WE'RE READING

When I did the Master Cleanse diet a few years ago — the one where you consume nothing but lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper for ten days — I sat at work looking at pictures of food as if they were porn. Scanwiches would have gotten me hot and bothered like nothing else.

WE'RE LISTENING TO

If Pharrell’s calling these guys ‘geniuses’, you’d better watch out! Chester French are Ivy League prep boys from Massachusetts who have mastered an interesting Beatlesque sound tinged with Motown influences. When, in May 2007, the duo — D.A. and Max — completed their recording and their degrees (in African American Studies and Social Anthropology respectively), they were snapped up by Pharrell Williams’ label Star Trak.

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WE'RE WEARING

Scott Sternberg created the great Los Angeles label, Band of Outsiders, and it’s one of the few labels that fit a little guy like me perfectly. I live in BOO shirts. They are my second skin.