The Thousands

We see your bluff summer and we call it. You're not going to prevent us from eating ice cream burgers and dressing like we should be. Kurt Vile and Big Freedia are here despite you. You'll be back to your inimitable ways soon and we'll be out and about. Bank on it.

Cover shot by Nat Nikitovic. Get yours up here! Send potential cover snaps to alex@rightanglestudio.com.au.

What this is, is a pack of 'Pacs drawn by kids all over the world whose utter idolisation of Tupac trumps their ability to represent it. But the intention is not mockery. Mark Drew, whose artwork revolves heavily around music, and the conscious or subconscious impact it has on us, saw this Makaveli fan-art phenomenon as a way to highlight his cause. Tupac died before some of these kids were even born but still, 15 years on, they want to draw his face, tattoos and middle finger.

Beginning as a homemade zine, after its first issue in 2007 TUHG LIFE is now big enough to be a 48-page, bound, hand-numbered (1st edition of 100) book printed by Smalltime Books. The title of the book comes from one fan's typo, which happened when he was penciling in Pac's legendary stomach tat.

What's great is that most of the images are inspired by the same press shot or album cover, so genius and flair are interestingly comparable. Some others are pure sci-fi fantasy. Like the one of 'Pac with a samurai sword punching a robot, who's wearing two hats, in the teeth - which could be a prediction for when Tupac finally comes out of hiding.

Among the host of things the world can thank Cash Money for (Birdman’s squawk, Weez’s tatts, ‘Project Bitch’) is bringing bounce further into the rap mainstream. The uniquely Nawlins sound has influenced southern rap widely, but the city itself maintains the core bounce scene. One of its major proponents is Big Freedia - the undisputed Queen DIva of bounce.

Freedia’s a sissy bounce artist – cross dressing party rap. Emphasis on party. The NY Times last year put out a solid profile of the scene. With GoodGod, we’re presenting Booty-booty-booty, XmASS Everywhere, featuring Big Freedia and The Divas, withJuiceboxxx, supported by DJ Sweta and Love Kings!

To get errybody amped to shake so much ass they feel it back in Louisiana, Big Freedia put together a mini mix for us. Tracklist below:

1. Big Freedia - 'Na Who Mad'
2. Katey Red - 'Where Da Melph At?'
3. Lil' Wayne feat. Drake - 'She Will'
4. Young Jeezy - 'Hoodstar'
5. Beyonce - 'Best Thing I Never Had'

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To understand why Riot Grrrl mattered, you need to know that '80s punk and hardcore shows were a major sausage fest. Mostly male bands played to mosh pits full of middle class white dudes with shaved heads. Girls stuck to the sidelines, and for an 'alternative' scene, it was distressingly misogynistic, homophobic, and even racist.

Kerri Koch's documentary Don't Need You shows how Riot Grrrls disrupted the patriarchy of punk, forming their own bands, starting their own record labels, running live music venues, and making zines, all with a pro-girl attitude and a variety of female perspectives. Their antics made audiences think about gender, from telling guys to move to the back of the audience so the girls could be up front for once, to charging entry fees of "$3 for boys, $2 for girls or boys who come wearing a bra".

The effect they had is still palpable in Ian Mackaye's inability to describe just how awesome it was the first time he saw Kathleen Hanna's Bikini Kill. Ian and Kathleen feature prominently alongside Allison Wolfe (Bratmobile), Corin Tucker (Heavens To Betsy / Sleater-Kinney), and many more.

It's disheartening to watch how the mainstream media portrayed the movement as a group of trendy, grudge-toting man haters. And it's a bummer to think now about how rampant misogyny still is in other creative arenas (read Tina Fey's Bossypants or the New Yorker's Anna Faris article, 'Funny Like a Guy'). Recommended viewing for both girls and boys.

Wang Jun-Jieh, Project Rrose: Love and Death, 2011 (still)

Billionaire art collectors, right? Can't live with 'em (they usually have pretty good security); can't read ARTFORUM's hilariously depressing Scene & Herd diaries without 'em. Charles Saatchi is self-awarely hating on them and this guy with his fakes of work he really owns up on his walls coming to light is kinda, "Um..." But! White Rabbit founders the Neilson family are a Sydney instance of billionaire art collectors doing pretty good. Sure, the latest gallery newsletter did admit attendance at the super-crass (p)art(y)-fair Art Basel Miami Beach, but as is reflected in the current exhibition Beyond the Frame, their collection is anything but unreflective AND it gets a bunch of work not otherwise represented on our shores into the reach of the viewing public.

Because the exhibitions here are defined by personal taste, each rehang is kind of like a hangout, finding out what the White Rabbit Collection is up to and where it's at. "What big, cramazing thing do you have up on the fourth floor this time, White Rabbit?" you might ask it, or "How freaked out exactly am I going to be by what is on in your screening room?" read more

While the man upstairs forgot to bring summer this year, Somedays didn't. Popping up in a casual, breezy space on Crown St with the usual essentials and fine-tuned Scandinavian summer stock, it's a tidy oasis amongst a mile of vintage.

Expect everything you need from Dr Denim, Resterods, Gram shoes and more. Checked shirts, denim button-ups and basic tees for the dudes; summer dresses, printed button-ups and denim shorts for the ladies; and staple Dr Denim chinos for both. All of it is on sale, too.

Go inside. It'll at least keep you dry, if not keep you a la mode.

It’s because, according to the Louis Vuitton CEO Yves Carcelle, Sydney deserves, “a Fifth Avenue of New York” that the corner of George and King Streets is now home to the thirteenth Maison for the brand – a three-storey behemoth oozing new-car smell and bag-laden tourists.

As you step through the gold-gilded swinging doors, resist the urge to feel like Pretty Woman. Even if you are a dude, resist this urge. No-one is looking at you, no-one is mentally calculating the dollar-value of your outfit, or the pavement-to-pimped-out ratio of your stride. At least, I hope not.

Level one is dedicated to bags, displayed in a honeycomb fashion up the soaring walls. The carpets are plush and the staff members bountiful. Price tags are suspiciously absent. Dotted about are quite amazing animals constructed out of LV leathergoods: a deer, and something resembling an armadillo. In the display window there is a life-size kangaroo.

Levels two and three are men’s and women’s fashion and footwear. Couches punctuate the rooms, in case you are weary from fingering pure silk, or slipping your stockinged foot into a hand-stitched loafer. One unique element the Sydney Maison boasts (along with Milan) is Haute Maroquinerie (design your own bags) and Made to Order Shoes, which is a VIP personalisation service. This suggests there are living, breathing leather artisans hiding somewhere … perhaps in the basement.

This is a maison of pure, shiny spectacle. Sydney, are you ready for it?

Amongst the great quotes of your Wildes and Twains and Anons in the canon, there are few more worthy than "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream". A new chance to scream comes courtesy of Gelato Messina's left-side project, The Lab. In the shop next door they've taken their regular (magical) flavours and concentrated them in to something even more luxe.

Essentially they're ice cream cakes. But they're a big fat edition of Larousse away from something a Barbie doll would wear as a skirt. Words like "feuilletine" and "croccantino" are bandied around.

Taking the cake up a notch, there's an ice cream burger: a Royale w' Cheese of chocolate crackle gelato, financier bun, white choc gelato & apricot gele'e, compressed cucumber and white chocolate slice - it's a pretty happy meal. The Samurai is a more familiar form - an ice cream on a stick. If said ice cream was served on a white plinth in a museum of modern art; a bold work of yuzu sorbet and salted caramel swirl encased in orange scented chocolate.

Many of these delicates dance around the $10 mark, so it's no replacement for your dirty little mid-week Viennetta habit. But as far as picking up a sweet to impress, if not screams, oohs and aahs will be guaranteed.

Stars! No, wait. Artists! They're just like us! Since the recognition of the Documented Instance of Public Eating (let's call it DIPE) amongst celebrities as a 'thing', the floodgates opened for all kinds of evidence of the essential 'person-dom' of those both notable and eminent. Diana Smith - herself an artist - presents some evidence in the form of House Work, a Witnessed Evidence of Living Somewhere (WELS) as part of the WALK season at Performance Space.

The 'Somewhere' in question is both the Redfern/Waterloo area in general, and homes within it at a more specific level. Smith has managed to get twelve artists to open their doors for the afternoon and allow visitors in to see a once-off performance or installation the artists will have undertaken inside their home, for the purpose of this event. These are people you've probably heard of, such as Dara Gill, Alice Gage, Ben Corbett.

A practical demonstration of how domesticity and artistic practice feed into and influence each other, House Work is the shaded-in part of a work/life Venn diagram. Wait, diagrams are homework, aren't they? Luckily there is an actual artist to talk you through it on the day.

Boxing and music haven't locked horns with such force since Bob Dylan penned a ditty about a hurricane. On Friday, Woolloomooloo PCYC becomes the unlikely home of performances beating up on the theme of 'Machismo'. Musecology: Round One is the first in a series of four seasonal events put on by Siberia Records and Jack Jeweller with City of Sydney, popping up in unconventional spaces. Graduating from the school of hard knocks will be Kirin J. Callinan, Justice Yeldham, BAADDD and FORCES. The event will kick off (er, wrong sporting cliche) with a screening of Ken Burn's doco, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. And it will also be the launch of a joint 'postcard vinyl' (a kooky relic from Communist Poland) by FORCES & Kirin J. Callinan.

Among the host of things the world can thank Cash Money for (Birdman’s squawk, Weez’s tatts, ‘Project Bitch’) is bringing bounce further into the rap mainstream. The uniquely Nawlins sound has influenced southern rap widely, but the city itself maintains the core bounce scene. One of its major proponents is Big Freedia – the undisputed Queen Diva of bounce. Immediately watch this video. Freedia’s a sissy bounce artist – cross dressing party rap. Emphasis on party. It’ll be Juiceboxxx’s first time down under: this dude GOES IN.

Oscar + Martin are celebrating the release of their new single 'What I Know', so why shouldn't you? You've had a while to get familiar with Oscar + Martin's 'wonky pop', but if you've just surfaced and are about to approach Uncle Google, stop. You'll come across articles describing them with high-falutin' phrases like 'strange micro-incursions on sounds', and 'compartmentalising sounds', and 'kitchen sink percussion'. What? All you need to know is: Oscar + Martin's music is playful, it draws on hip hop, R'n'B and experimental pop, and makes you want to dance.

If you didn't max out your card last weekend, you've got a second chance. The Big Fashion Sale has landed The Eleventh Hour, Carly Hunter, Rittenhouse, Elke Kramer, Seventh Wonderland, Story By Tang, My Pet Square, Miss Unkon, Friend Of Mine, Fernando Frisoni, Friedrich Gray, and heaps more for its Christmas sale. You can do a little preparation window-shopping on their Facey now. We've already called dibs on this.

A diamond in the rough (that is Regent Street) is new fav Freda's. With your only indication of arrival being hand-drawn chalk signs, for the un-schooled it's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it. However on Sundays during summer be guided by sounds of the globe and smells of a Sunday roast. This relaxed vibe will be a sonic tour, guided only by the best, snaking through some far-out musical destinations (Japanese reggae anyone?). With the odd bit of live-music in coming weeks, your first-up host is Smokey LaBeef and your first-up $10 cocktail special is Mint Julip.

Having been crooned to sleep as little ones by the Bob Marley himself, the Marley family know good sound. In an effort to carry on the still-relevant, ever-simplistic mantra of 'One Love' they're keeping the spirit of their old man alive, creating a "movement" in the way of headphones and speakers.

All the products at The House Of Marley have been crafted using the sounds of reggae as a starting point. In short, the bass on these things is out-of-control, without a trace of even the slightest distortion. They've worked on the high pitches, too, for clean sound on either end of the sonic spectrum. Aesthetically they're about as far away from the heinous futuristic get-up you might see chumps sporting on the bus. These are very simple black and brown leather, recyclable, with a tangle-free cord and plenty of other techno-jargon-filled features you can smile-and-nod about too.

Backing up the earthy aesthetics, the Marley family use only reusable or renewable materials to make and package their products. It's times like these the glass feels half full.

You can buy Marley Headphones from these stockists or if you're lucky you can win the pair of Exodus Headphones we are giving away! Over-the-ear design, 20Hz-20+kHz frequency response for clear sound reproduction, a 40-millimeter dynamic moving coil speaker drive for sound reinforcement and integrated three-button Apple controls compatible with iPod and iPhone - RRP $149.95. To enter, just answer the following question. (Warning: We've rigged it so that this kid can win.)