The Thousands

So something happened and today is now Thursday all of sudden. That would be fine if today was indeed Thursday but, as it turns out, today is Wednesday and tomorrow is the weekend. Go figure. This is a total mess but everything will be fine as long as we have an exhibition at FELTspace, a festival like Lost City featuring the likes of Prince Rama, bubble teas and the perfect exit strategy if shit gets too real.

Cover photo by Jeremy Ryder. Throw us a photo! Send yours to daniel@rightanglestudio.com.au.

Bad news, team: people die. Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears told me so. In the book, horology conservator Catherine Gehrig is beat up about this death thing - her boss/lover kicked el cubo and it’s driven her to Stolly, rack and kleptomania. She starts restoring a mechanical bird while poring over the notebooks of Henry Blanding, the chap who commissioned the machine in 1854. He’s an Englishman adrift in Germany, mourning the death of his first child and worrying about his sickly second child. He hopes the mechanical bird will invigorate the ill kid. We get to hear from both Catherine and Henry in an Inception of grief.

Sound stodgy? It isn’t. This is a book by Peter Carey and Peter Carey is an Australian legend. A stamp told me so. In his hands, Catherine’s restoration of the automaton becomes a saga of personal growth and Henry’s trials turn into a mystery filled with ambiguity and shady Germans. While reading the book, take regular breaks to reflect on our relationship with machines, our attitude towards the unknowable and the ties between grief, madness and obsession. Five minutes every hour.

I hope you don’t mind the book’s slipperiness, I really do. There’s a lot going on and Carey is happy to let it all float about, so don’t expect resolution in neat little bows. Life’s a mystery and so on. You need to be more patient. Your mum told me so.

Trust Now, sort of a lot to ask, actually. The kind of serious and timely demand that elicits a 'you first.' Thankfully in this case the move has been made and what is demanded is merely a reflection, participation. An open heart (something these girls have in spades) is a sizeable reflecting surface, and there’s nothing more prominent here than the joys of conduit-ship.

And so, Prince Rama give themselves to us first in six tracks with conviction and clearly-voiced wisdom that I can only envy, embracing fully the possibilities that giving-of-self lays like a victor’s laurel at the feet of those willing to sacrifice themselves on stage, acetate, or wax. Trust Now reflects these impulses with a really fortunate clarity. The tracks are trimmed to just the essential movements; each note ennobled because of its direct contribution to the trembling forward or staggering backward of the moment. These contributions are wrapped in the vernacular of Alice Coltrane ashram-cassettes, dollar-bin Ethiopian tones, and prismatic vocals that create a magical outsider-insider dynamic. The ultimate insiders, pleading the soul to trust its innermost impulses with tones formed and forged far outside: forged from necessity for utility. The resulting arrangements are filled with all sorts of interesting corners but exhibit a full-throated eagerness to move that inside outside, and (thanks to Nimai’s constantly stellar drumming) the medium is the massage.

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Webster’s dictionary defines ‘conflict of interest’ as "a conflict between the private interests and the official responsibilities of a person in a position of trust". I’m not sure about using all of the words of a phrase in its own definition, but that’s the Webster people for you. Anyways, as your person of trust in this instance I must declare that this article is about a store to which I have contributed a design.

This doesn’t stop the store from being awesome, though. Red Tomato Design’s tee shirt store is the store in question, and their range of screen printed shirts are here just as summer is at its back-sweating hottest. The online shop is a project by Adelaide designer Tom Pascale, who recently entered the screen-printing world, making a big splash with his I Have a Theme exhibition at Magazine Gallery.

There’s already an impressive range of shirts on the site by local and national artists, and a new batch of designs will arrive every couple of months hence. Making up these tees really is a labour of love (much back-sweat involved), and the care and attention that Tom concentrates into each one is obvious (may contain traces of back-sweat). Added to this is the fact that they’re all limited run designs, so you can walk around feeling as unique as the other twelve people wearing your shirt. Oh yeah, and Tom’s been a friend of mine for about 15 years. So there’s another conflict of interest for you. This article is a mess.

Russell sits at work with a blistering hangover, repeatedly revising a text to a guy he picked up the night before: "I feel like shit." Should I add a smiley face? Oh no wait - how about an exclamation point?

Weekend does an excellent job portraying the many modern day complexities of meeting someone you like, letting (or not letting) them know, and starting (or not starting) a relationship. The intimate details of this male/male coupling make the film particularly insightful and funny for homosexuals, especially if you've always felt like outsiders to 'gay culture'. But the pair's predicament will resonate with anyone who has felt their heart flutter or break in the last decade.

Though it's a small film, Weekend grabs at a lot of big ideas that will needle you long after it ends. Writer/director Andrew Haigh crafts characters that are refreshingly imperfect, and so three-dimensional you actually hear them speak (rather than their screenwriter). I hate to harp on the gay thing (and to call this a 'gay film' is reductive) but in comparison to the bulk of gay narratives, where all onscreen action is intended to provoke one of three physical responses (laughs, boners, or tears) having a film that appeals to your head and heart is extremely rare.

Beautifully shot, Haigh's Weekend artfully unpacks the issues surrounding the roles we play in relationships and in life. And, thankfully, it doesn't provide any easy answers.

At the opening night of Patrick Rees' 2011 show with Ben Leslie META, I overheard someone good-naturedly accuse him of having an embarrassing amount of phallic shapes and spoodge-like substances in his work. And that person was right, there was a lotta sticky dick stuff. There is something sweet about the clawing attempts at transgression in Patrick Rees' lumpy, gloopy messes. Brown fur with silver holographic paper, whole slabs of plasticine set in thick bubbly resin, lumps of paint smeared across everything. Rees explains the work as an attempt to make something that doesn't make sense, because nothing really makes sense, which makes sense to me. Cue up the Keanu stoner meme.

So yeah, Patrick Rees is in the front room of FELTspace, and in the back room they've got Malia Wearn with Will Happiness Find Me. Like her previous work, it trades on the personal and the confessional. So y'know, secrets; admissions of sexual affairs, heavy feelings and trivial habits. People like to dismiss this kinda art as 'too girly', which is a strange criticism to have directed at you when you actually are a girl. Wearn will be doing all sorts of 'girly' shit like sewing secrets in glow-in-the-dark thread, and Rees will be covering everything in messy liquids, so wear your gender-neutral hat to the party and order a cider at the bar.

I got this really good feeling the first time I looked at Maripossa jewellery because straight away I knew exactly what it reminded me of. That's Waterworld, post-apocalypse jewellery. People washing up on shores, seaweed tangled around their bodies. And then I read an email from the lady behind Maripossa, Lauren Besser, explaining her new range: "El Homenaje is a personal collection, paying tribute to past experiences and encounters with the unpredictability of nature's elements." SHUT. UP.

This instant recognition of a fashion or jewellery collection doesn't come along all too often for me. Or, at least, when it does I'm just totally misconstruing the artist/designer's intentions. But Lauren somehow communicates "nature's destructive forces" via metal - and I think that's very impressive. Maybe it's because when she was a teenager she was caught smack bang in an earthquake, true story.

Though she's competing on an international stage (Maripossa won Young Designer Award for Accessories at Berlin's Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week last year), Lauren remains in her Melbourne studio painstakingly weaving and knitting fabric-like metals by hand. Her meshes are then adorned with a feature: cast sterling silver, natural earthen crystals, or some hand-painting and dip-dyeing for colour.

This summer I started getting pretty heavily into bubble tea. Then I sprained my ankle and any romantic notion I held about actually 'doing stuff' slowly melted away. Very soon Genuine Taiwan Pearl Milk Bubble Tea on Moonta Street became my beach. My urban beach. My urban beach that sold lychee/double lychee/peach/taro (whatever that is)/(anything I can pronounce)/triple pearl bubble milk teas.

Bubble teas are almost perfect. The two main ingredients are milk and sugar. You add even more sugary things at the end called 'pearls', which is such a beautiful word. They come with pastel coloured ultra straws with little transitional knife ends that break the sealed lid and at the back of the shop there is a professional cup seal sealing machine. Super innovative.

GPMBT is tucked inside the lo-fi womb of the Hong Kong Grocer, and is basically the Empire Records of Chinatown. Take a boy there, get your bubble teas, and drink and sit on the Hong Kong Grocer window seal. Elevate your ankle. Put down your cups and hold hands, whatever.

Just when you thought you were actually about to lose it, Lost City appeared. You've been looking for those mystery subterranean tunnels, looking for an undiscovered corner of the city, looking to the past, looking to the future, looking for your keys, looking for something new to spark your interest. Well, it's here.

The beautiful, historic Queen's Theatre is an immersive, transformative space just waiting for a similarly transcendental experience to blossom within its walls. For Lost City, two stages featuring a swarm of imported bands (nine including Prince Rama, Love of Diagrams and Galapagoose) plus complementary locals (Doe, Sparkspitter, Oisima and no less than ten of our favourite others) make for a swirling, extrasensory, line up of noise, electronica, post-rock, composition and psychedelica over two days.

The carefully curated festival generously uncovers the best in avant garde and experimentation. My Disco side project! Next Wave sound artists! Brisbane Festival-presented musicians! Projections courtesy of Jayson Haebich, BIG DOS and Hal Bird! Augmented reality installations by Dr Christian Sandor! Market stalls and support from local craft breweries only add to the impressive juggernaut of the festival. Frankly, we don't quite know where to begin.

Forget about searching for anything more than this. We've found the door. Enter, friends. Be lost no longer.

People who know how to make a guitar sing, or pull together a piano concerto, or whip up some crazy, driving floor tom beats are amazing. But people who understand midi controllers, various software that obviously only works on a Mac, how to rework someone else's music and how to use pedal-y things with lots of buttons and knobs are fast becoming the new breed of 'amazing'. (If that description is anything to go by, I am clearly not one of them). If you like your tunes glitchy and sampled, you cannot go past Travis Cook (Collarbones), Presidio and Slamagotchi; together, this gig will be a tour de force.

You all know Colin, right? Well maybe no one knows Colin but he's around so much that it sometimes seems like it. Kinda like an Uncle who lives in your granny flat and comes inside for Vegemite on toast and to mutter something inaudible. Despite knowing barely a thing about him, that Uncle is a pretty cool guy (when he has his pants on) and this is how we all feel about Colin. What am I talking about? Colin is a nice guy and he usually has his pants on, he's been around taking photos of the music scene in this city for about 200 years. It's his birthday this weekend and to prove just how much the people love Colin, some wise guy is throwing him a party at The Metro with some bands you haven't seen in a very, very long time.

Technically this is a 'gig' of 'music', but when you put that guy Matt Banham in a room with a crowd it becomes something more like an Adam Sandler film crossed with the performance of a Shakespearean tragedy. It will sound a lot like this. There will be a lot of grown-man crying. There will be attempts at humour. It will be tragic. It will be kinda funny. You will leave wondering if you were laughing at the jokes or just Matt himself. And then, sometimes, Matt gets all serious as he is wont to do. Plus there's Matt Hayward who would really like it if you requested some Chris Isaak from him, especially when he is playing his brand new original material. Enjoy!

Odd Future get bagged on for being misogynistic or just obnoxious, but, y'know, hip-hop. That's not new. We love them because underneath those artistic flourishes are a bunch of creative, funny, super colourful and original kids blowing up basic hip-hop (it's been sorely in need of a shake up for probably a decade). We also love them because they agreed to do an interview with us. Via fax. Thanks guys!

In between rapping about fucking dolphins and eating cockroaches, OFWGKTA manage to release a million singles and mixtapes, release books, Tweet nonstop, run a solid tumblr and make this here clothing line.

This is all important because Odd Future are now in our city for the Big Day Out. Get your tickets here. In Sydney they did a pop-up shop for Odd Future clothes, which they will sadly not do anywhere else. But do not eat a roach because BDO have given us an orange t-shirt with a cat on it and some long white Golf Wang tube socks to give away. To enter, you better answer this very important question.