The Thousands

Seeya! We’re going to live like Pork Chops for a couple weeks, but don't worry, we still want you to be Happy Little Dumplings while we're gone. Everything you need to keep you Kontemporary is right here. A summer mixtape! An Occupy Christmas shopping list! A new pair of shades! And more! Okay. Gtg. Bye!

This week's covershot comes courtesy of Aëla Labbé. Be a total beach babe like Aëla by sending us your covershots and funny jokes.

Between 1973 and 1981 Tony Edwards worked for Australian surfing magazine Tracks (here's what it looked like back then). According to reports, what he did there was "embrace the worst excesses" of the era, give everyone doobs before they went on the radio - and drew a comic about a foul-mouthed yobbo surfing pig called Captain Goodvibes. Now the surfers at Flying Pineapple Media (who you might remember as the publishers of Peter Troy's journals, To The Four Corners of the World) have gathered together every Captain Goodvibes strip published over those nine years and turned them into a book - with historical anecodotes from Tony, original Tracks cover art and correspondence (including a complaint letter from Barry Humphries).

This is a massive document - 400 pages - printed on rough comic paper that you just want to smell, then colour in, then rip out and frame. But you wouldn't do any of these things because Captain Goodvibes is a legend who should be respected and feared. He's also loveable, though, as former Tracks editor Phil Jarratt observes: "Over time [Tony] gave Captain Goodvibes a gentler, more whimsical, even caring side." It seems crass to compare this cult Australian creation to an American project, but fellow fans of Dave Carnie-era Big Brother Magazine and how little it gave a shit will understand how excited I am when I say Captain Goodvibes has the same thing going on. But Tony did it first!

I commend the Captain to any of you who want to experience a time capsule of Australian, Whitlam-era surf culture - and what it's like to be friends with an overweight top banana swine.

It's time to cast off the shackles of civility. Summer's when you run wild and free and come up with soundtracks that will get you sentimental in years to come. A few of us sat down and, with a little contention, came up with a list of songs that will likely soundtrack our summer.

There's Weeknd's of 'Dreamin' by the riverside, following some trails, giving people 'the look', and appearing as Cameo's in their dreams. Their dreams will also feature Polish girls, Lost Animals, brightly lit blue skies and high seas. Our Real Estate will consist of Slow Clubs, Shabazz Palaces, the Sun and loads more!

Track listing -
1. Boomgates - Cameo
2. The Rising Storm - Bright Lit Blue Skies
3. Real Estate - Younger Than Yesterday
4. Twerps - Dreamin'
5. Lost Animal - Lose The Baby
6. Metronomy - The Look
7. Neon Indian - Polish Girl
8. The Kinks - Sitting By The Riverside
9. Blank Realm - Falling Down The Stairs
10. These Trails - These Trails
11. Happy New Year - High Sea
12. The Weeknd - The Morning
13. Total Control - Pyre Island
14. Slow Club - Two Cousins
15. CANT - Too Late Too Far
16. Timmy Thomas - People Are Changin'
17. Shabazz Palaces - Are You Can You Were You
18. Sun Araw - Crown Shell

We all know that fashion and art have a long history of sordid love affairs, which makes for both interesting art and interesting fashion. Living in a globalised world, huh.

Ksubi have collaborated with artists from the very beginning. Their first collection was launched installation style in an abandoned tube station almost ten years ago and they've frequently collaborated with DJs, musicians, photographers and other arty types. One of their projects included an Amelie-esque relocating of a sculpture (a hand doing the peace sign with it's fingers chopped off) and taking it's photo.

It may be strange and slightly self-deprecatory to choose Robin Hungerford as the first artist in the IMA's new satellite space in Ksubi's first Queensland store, the Kontemporary or Modern Art (or KoMA for those who hate speaking), but self deprecation always makes the best comedy.

Robin Hungerford makes videos which explore a sordid hilarity, stabbing his own papier-mâchéd head, this visual joke sits nicely alongside Ksubi's latest collection, Lucifer In The Sky With Diamonds. This one's for the good timers who love a good chortle.

A Colony girl is said to be a jet-setting gypsy. A concoction of words like 'disheveled', 'creative' and 'natural'. She's more the girl you'd rather be yourself than befriend. By night you could be your sweet yet awkward self but by day, with the help of a bitchin pair of Colony frames, you could be some unpredictable cat-eyed vamp. Like a sunglasses wearing super hero, in reverse.

In any case Brisbane designer Jessica Shipard is the Charlie to your angel. The Colony girl's champion matriarch. Jessica dreamed up her girl and label Colony during her years at the Queensland Collage of Art and unveiled the jet-setting femme during her design graduate exhibition. And just like a speeding bullet, stockists came knocking.

With a love for quiet luxury and good, nay great design, Colony's first collection is made up of boldly beautiful sunglasses and scarves. Cat eyed in shape and offering 100% UV protection, the acetate frames are hand crafted in an Adelaide studio. Such craftsmanship can be seen in the geometric cut outs which cleverly reveal the glasses frame work.

For when more protection and disguise is necessary, a girl can turn to the labels' hyper coloured scarves. Sold under the collection Dawn of the Giants, the styles feature painterly digital prints on silk satin or silk wool. Perfect for when a girl needs to shield herself from the sun, bad hair days or the occasional villan.

What better traditional holiday entertainment than a rollicking English pantomime? This political fairytale is seasonably hilarious, and ultra-conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, despite Meryl Streep’s uncanny verisimilitude, is as farcical as any cross-dressing panto dame. In 2008, the aged, demented ex-PM potters about, lost in her memories. She’s daring the audience to shout, “Your heyday is BEHIND YOU!!”

The dialogue is a scream. As Thatcher teaches her teenage daughter Carol (Olivia Colman) to drive, Carol struggles to overtake a cyclist and Thatcher bellows, “Move to the right! TO THE RIGHT!” Later, after Thatcher berates loyal deputy Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Head) for daring to spell ‘poverty’ with only one T, she overhears a disgusted fellow Tory saying, “I wouldn’t speak to my gamekeeper that way.” Periodically, her now-deceased husband Denis (Jim Broadbent) pops up as a puckish, increasingly wacky hallucination.

Are such picaresque antics what director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan intended? Hopefully, because as a feminist underdog fable, it’s deplorably tasteless. Thatcher’s notorious career is glossed, casually spiced with archival footage of alarmingly savage police brutality, while Thatcher pontificates that she’s “done battle every single day of my life”. Retorts a brutalised Britain: oh no you haven’t!

Whether you're the kind of person who picks apart film adaptations of graphic novels/comics and bangs on about the lack of depth/truth of the protagonist, or the kind who's wiling to just watch Spiderman and enjoy it for the babefest, GoMA's Drawn To Screen film program have the film for you.

Drawn To Screen features films from genres spanning almost a century's worth of film adaptions. From conventional Marvel-ish genres and everyone's favourite superheros (Batman, Spiderman etc), to autobiographical comic-cum-animation Persepolis which explores Marjane Satrapi's experience of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

They've got the golden oldies like Blondie and Footrot Flats. They're showing Australian content like The Kid Stakes - an Australian silent from from 1921 Sydney Nicholls' comic which deals with the foibles of a kid and his pet goat. They've got Daniel Clowes, Kevin Smith and Harvey Pekar. The Studio Ghibli's, Japanese cult horror, biopics like Gainsbourg and the just plain strange (cue Barbarella). And if you want to know more about the life of the comic book artist, they're even showing documentaries on legends like Robert Crumb, Alan Moore and (not the bad seed) Warren Ellis. Whatever you're genre, it's hard to pick apart this comprehensive retrospective. See you in the cool dark cinema, geeks.

Occupy Christmas is less about protest signs and dreadlocks and more about buying your gifts from local businesses. Local boutiques often get forgotten at this time of year, so before you flee for the air-conditioned comforts of shopping malls, here's a run down of just some of the stores that make our city great.

At the Outpost you'll definitely find some boy-toy gadgets like a Z-Flex skateboard to impress the unimpressed man. If you're game enough to give the gift of fashion, some understated threads from Apartment will do just fine, or a safe bet is a great read from Title. Vintage fans will love you long time if you wrap them up some retro treats from Sunday Social or Box Vintage. Or, for a fail proof present, a film camera from Violent Green will always win the day.

For your old man, channel his hey day with some vinyl from Rocking Horse, Egg Records, or The Record Exchange (if you can handle the grumpy old men). For mum, anything from Miss Mouse's collection of warm and homely items will earn you some serious brownie points.

When it comes to the fashion forward female in your life, accessories or leather goods from Blonde Venus or The Loft will get you far. If you're not game to guess their size or style, just go for a skull candle from Fallow. It's humanly impossible not to love one of them bad boys. Occupy Christmas! It's an important and easy revolution to take part in.

Just when it looked like we might get through the year without mentioning more dumplings, another contender enters the battle to be Brisbane’s best. No queues to be found on this discrete Bulimba side street though.

After nourishing festival and market goers for quite some time already, Candice and Mellita’s Happy Little Dumplings now have an outlet to satisfy your midweek cravings. Little more than a stand in a café, the understatement works just fine because the dumplings here pack so much flavour.

Fresh and soft is the status quo, but the dumplings here are particularly satisfying because the chef’s have Thai and Chinese backgrounds, meaning extra spice and zest is the norm here with a range of dumplings and dipping sauces to choose from.

Vegetarians can often be forgotten in the dumpling wars but not here, with tofu and ginger, and mushroom and Chinese vegetable dumplings on the cards. Try the prawn dumplings as well. If anything were worth renouncing your vegetarianism for, it would have to be these. Have a sneaky one. We won’t tell anyone.

Before you read any further, no, we haven't got any copies of the Anarchist Cookbook laying around and no, we're not talking about obliterating nature with a mixture of styrofoam and unnamed evil materials.  We're talking about shaking your grinch-like vibe and making strangers smile with silly decorations.

Tree bombing around Christmas time is particularly pertinent. It's easy! Just grab some tinsel, make your own decorations, or even fill some bon bons with weird surprises for passers by. We went to the cheap shop to stock up on decorations and made some some of our own by printing out hilarious pictures of people dressed in Santa outfits and gluing them to card then tying a string through the top - things like the guy from Twisted Sister, Destiny's Child, a cute bulldog, Tim Heidecker and Chevy Chase among others.

Whether you're a killjoy who likes to boycott Christmas or a lover of all things festive, tree bombing is sure to put a smile on someone's face, even if it is twisted, sister.

As fun as the crazed shopping centre crowds are this time of year, there may be a better shopping solution. Nine Lives End of Year Show is here to save you superhero-style from car park circling, cash register queues and Mariah Carey on the loudspeaker. Swan in, take a look at the pieces, including timber, paper, watercolour and ink, and enjoy the smugness that comes with giving art instead of socks as gifts.

Can you imagine spending Christmas / New Years in New Orleans? Not to get all personal on you, but this would be a dream - good food, music everywhere, down-and-outs living with abandon and real life Bleeding Gums Murphys. Bad airline food and long-hauls, forget you - Black Bear are doing it right here. Playing will be The Mayhem County Brothers, Barksdale Brass Band, circus performers and DJs. Like an episode of Treme in Brisbane. Space is limited so get in quick.

Everyone knows that when two artists from different collectives meet, it’s basically like the tensest moments before a gang fight. Brisbane’s brightest art collectives are putting aside their (imaginary) rivalry for a joint exhibition in celebration of the festive season. Opening night features artists from Diagram, Wandering Room, JSO Art Collective, Danger Daze and Vegas Spray, alongside music, drinks and probable dancing.

Don't be all down and acting Dum Dum Girls, it's The Holidays and shit's getting wild. Jonti’s going to flip out, move with Nina to Las Vegas and make Millions with his Oliver Tanks business. Ah these puns could go on forever so stop reading and get yourself a ticket for probably the new years party.

It's always easier sticking to resolutions when you're wearing a cape and a fake moustache. Woodland’s NYE party is providing a decent soundtrack and bands to accompany those moments in life when you have to ask why Bananaman is dancing with the Russian chick from Captain Planet and why Wolverine's claws are made of spoons.

Don’t colour this in. Your steady hand and your deluxe 72-pencil Derwent box set don’t mean jack when it comes to Dylan Martorell’s Possible Worlds 2 Poster Book. Put down the Kingfisher Blue and the Vandyke Brown and let’s just talk. Have you ever put a pencil to a sprawling non-Euclydian migraine or the remnants of an aquatic hallucination? Have your textas ever graced an Arabian bazaar where a sweater-wearing cat peddles fruit, beverages and electronic equipment? I didn’t think so. You’re out of your league.

There’s plenty to look at though (no touch!). The posters belong to a foreign place where animals do as they please, reality and perspective be damned. Bees unwind on swings, bunnies read books about magic and cats mount up and ride on the darndest things. It’s as cute and immaculate as a deftly wrought cupcake. Mind you, there’s something in this cupcake that's making me feel weird and woozy. Also, if you want these posters on your skin, you’re up for a riveting tattoo experience - the hairline details will cramp even the most experienced tattooist’s hand, while the staccato, Morse code patterns will tickle you to the point of chuckles and wee.

Lamington Drive Editions and Sunday Morning Designs have only printed one thousand copies so stick the posters on your wall and, yes, step away from the pencil sharpener. Buy it here now for $35! Or attempt to win one by answering the following question.