WE'RE SUPPORTING

Legend has it that Ta55o’s career started with some scrawlings on his grandmother’s kitchen table. Every year he would sign and date the underside of the table and over the years would watch as the style and flow changed. Read more

WE'RE TRAVELLING TO

Monet and The Impressionists is on display at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales until January 26, 2009. Alive with bold brushstrokes and dappled colours, the exhibit features 58 masterpieces by Cezanne, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro and Monet himself, among many others that have never been shown in Australia. It was amazing to view some of the finest quality works that revolutionised modern painting and the way natural light is portrayed on canvas. Go Monetise yourself and see Rough Weather, and all those serial haystack paintings.

WE'RE WEARING

Threads or Dead is a new Australian-based online clothing store, based in Perth, and selling streetwear and contemporary fashion for both guys and girls. Says site founder Justin Greenwood: ‘As well as stocking some of the more well known brands, we also import a lot of labels exclusively from America, and produce a small range of our own clothing. We want to sell clothing that is unique and often has a story behind it. We don’t want to sell clothing that is available in your average High Street store’. Read more

WE'RE THINKING

If anyone ever asks you to define the word “schadenfreude,” show him or her these pictures of a poor skier hanging from a ski lift with his junk exposed to the alpine chill. If the person viewing the pictures laughs, he or she now understands the particularly useful German term.

WE'RE READING

We invited Greg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, who aside from being the DJ of the moment is also the remix whiz behind tracks from Beck, Tokyo Police Club, and Grizzly Bear, to give us a rundown on the songs he’s wearing out right now for our sister site, My Secret Playlist. He started off by propping Beyonce’s anthemic single, Single Ladies [listen below]. Go figure! ‘This is one of my favorite Beyonce tracks ever. It has so much energy, and the chorus gets dark in a great way. The clapping never stops. The video is a flawless execution of a performance style clip. It’s perfect’. Read the rest of Girl Talk’s Secret Playlist.

Back in the day, when I was a skinny teenager on the great pedestal of life, I had a real obsession for the understated, low-fi, deliciously melodic and somewhat blurry sounds of the New Zealand Flying Nun bands. I would pool my meagre savings and canvas the local record shops, scouring the racks for the latest cassettes from The Bats, The Chills, The Clean, and, later, The Straitjacket Fits. Read more

WE'RE LISTENING TO

There’s a world-weariness about Two Gallants frontman Adam Stephens. It reveals itself in the Tom Waits-like raspiness that permeates his gin house drawl and in the talkin’ blues narratives that he weaves around his simple acoustic fingerpicking. They are the new superstars of the West Coast scene, majestic showmen in homespun rags.

Listen to the Two Gallants track, The hand that held you down.