The Thousands

Things that are not cheesy: obviously, Dennis Cooper; standing directly under the Milky Way; boss resortwear; boccadillos (choosing is a serious business).

Things that are delightfully cheesy: She's All That; NASDAQ.

Things that are literally cheesy: mozzarella.

Cover photo by Sui Zhen! Get your inidivual brilliance up there by sending potential cover shots to alex@rightanglestudio.com.au.

If you’ve read complex academic writing and thought, “This wouldn’t bore me to tears if instead of abstract theoretical concepts it was densely packed with emo boys, all-male incest, French pop culture, high art, cannibalism, and Manga,” you’ve basically envisioned The Marbled Swarm.

Dennis Cooper has obsessed over a number of these topics in the past; to me, it feels like Swarm picks up where the final in his George Miles cycle – Period – left off, exploring similar themes but with the opposite approach to that book’s stark minimalism.

The titular ‘Swarm’ is what our narrator calls his prose, an elaborate mix of double-negatives, innuendo, and abutting analogies that jumps back and forth chronologically. It’s super confusing, and some will say incomprehensible, but that’s part of the point. How we process reality, construct a fantasy, and develop our sexual preferences or (ahem) personal taste (cannibalism!), is all in our heads – and often equally complicated.

Like recommending Mysterious Skin, Happiness, or Gummo, there’s a handful of traumatic scenes, but I reckon they’re worth weathering for this excellent read. Set in Cooper’s adopted home of France, Swarm weaves through magic tricks, secret passages, doppelgangers, and elaborate make-believe with the creeping horror of Luna Park, the narrative subjectivity of The Usual Suspects, and a gripping sensationalism that’s quintessentially Cooper.

ASE, NASDAQ, NYSE, Deutsche Borche, Flying Nun. Stocks, fortunes, and people’s sanity are dealt, traded, and swapped within these entities; Flying Nun would have to be the only worthwhile ‘enterprise’ from the cocaine-fuelled lot. For 30 years the venerable New Zealand label has been investing in the best music from the land of the long white cloud, and The Bats would have to be the blue chip band in the stable's portfolio.

Financial pidgin aside, I can safely say that their new album Free All the Monsters is a high quality LP. Much like The Go Betweens, The Bats are experts at chugging, romantically melancholic ballads. Album opener ‘Long Halls’ is a lilting song with an undulating wah-wah guitar, soaring strings, and Robert Scott's forcefully soft vocals. ‘Spacejunk’ is a faster, jangly number with several differing guitar solos that comes as a delightful audio-phonic surprise to the ears.

With lines like "How I would love to throw it in/Make them pay for all their sins" on the beautiful ‘On the Bank’, it’s clear that that Scott is excising some career demons. However it’s also crystal clear that Free All The Monsters is a testament to The Bats' lithe, influential footprint upon pop music. May they keep flying through the long white cloud.

Both preposterously serious and blackly playful, Pedro Almodóvar’s melodrama explores how trauma and perversion are literally inscribed on the body. Stylistically, it’s an enjoyable blend of Hitchcock and Argento, but above all Almodóvar evokes Georges Franju’s horror classic Eyes Without a Face, in which a mad doctor and his female assistant abduct young women to a country estate to graft new faces onto his hideously disfigured daughter.

Almodóvar suggests suave plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is driven by grief, guilt and desire when he invents a transgenic super-skin in memory of his wife, who died after being horribly burnt in a car crash. He recklessly tests it on Vera (Elena Anaya), whom he keeps locked in a room in his mansion outside Toledo, and who, as his loyal housekeeper Marilia (Marisa Paredes) reminds him, looks suspiciously like Robert’s dead wife. But in an audacious twist, Almodóvar reveals another impulse gripping Robert – revenge!

Banderas plays Robert as intensely controlled rather than a gurning Frankenstein figure; only night sweats and eye twitches betray the depravity beneath his skin. Almodóvar has always gloried in the silkiness of flesh; his glossy cinematography and production design offer a luscious echo of Robert’s fascination.

With more than 1000 works in this show, Jim Cooper is evidently blessed with a pretty extensive (concept of) family. His ceramic Family Portraits recreate TV characters, pineapples, ducks and Jesus (just to name a few), in a slightly wonky grinning style. Super-bright coloured glazes drool into one another in a vaguely psychedelic way, over totemically proportioned figures and objects invested with a sense of vegetable sentience. All jumbled in together, the works are installed like offerings at a monument, but really are commemmorating their co-existence. Seeing so much all at once is testament both to Cooper's mastery of the medium and to its often overlooked possibilities.

Maybe it's the useful domestic object heritage of ceramics? Or the vibe of it being the self-exploratory craft of middle-aged ladies who wear too many scarves and have spiritual feelings? But if Fine Arts were a high school movie then ceramics would probably sit on its own at lunchtime - until eventually it took off its glasses and looked bangin' at prom. Just like Rachel Leigh Cook was actually totally a babe even before getting a makeover from a teeny-tiny super-sassy Anna Pacquin (seriously check out the cast list for She's All That; it's nuts), ceramics as instanced here does not need your "dork outreach program."

Focusing its lens on the incomparably fa-ine Dutch model Kim Noorda at a stunning Parisian chateau somewhere, the E L L E R Y Resort 2011 collection might hurt your soul a little. It’s a vision of aching peach print-work, sculpted bodices, delicately beaded belly-grazers and tan head-scarves that whisper of afternoons spent sipping soda pop in the countryside.

We said she was one to watch back in '07, and Perth-born designer Kym Ellery certainly hasn’t let our crystal ball down. Rated in a Vogue Australia ‘Talent Time’ line-up, courted by Madge’s stylist, stepped into by the myriad Talulahs, Julia Nobises, and Bambis of the fashion world, E L L E R Y is the tall poppy we can’t help but begrudgingly like.

Setting up shop in the Strand Arcade for a slice of the summer months, the E L L E R Y pop-up will stock a range of current season threads, hopefully with minimal injury inflicted to our poor lil souls.

Eat a panini and you could be anywhere. Chatswood, Tempe, Rushcutter's Bay, anywhere at all (in Sydney). As a city, we took the panini and we ran with it. We're currently in the middle of a similar frenzy with tacos. But eat a bocadillo, and you could be in a curving crooked labyrinth of an alleyway in Barcelona's Barri Gotic. Or, more likely, at the new Encasa Deli on Bathurst Street.

Peer past the impressive salamis swinging in your face to the bocadillo menu. You will find it hard to choose between the Canario - thick slabs of roast pork with queso fresco and roast capsicum mojo; Argentino - South American sausage with chimichurri; Calamares - fried squid and aioli; or the Boquerones - white anchovies, confit piquillo peppers and roast garlic aioli. Seriously, it's like choosing your favourite child. If you were some kind of sick cannibal who then ate their favourite child for lunch. Like that.

Being a deli, you can also purchase goods to consume at home. The shelves are stocked with hot sauces, paella rice, quince and guava pastes; the refrigerated deli counter is piled with jamons and manchegos. But it all comes down to this: move over panini, there's a new sanga in town.

Alex is a man and he wears shirts. So he was pretty much the perfect fit for a test-run of the new Vanishing Elephant x Stussy capsule collaboration. All the questions have totally been signed off by a qualified market researcher, swearsies.

Can you draw the Stussy S?
Yep it's like \|\ but rotated. We used to draw it in year three when we were practicing our tags. Mine was 'FRESH'.

What are the most important things about a good shirt, and how many boxes does this guy tick?
1) don't make me look wider around the middle; 2) don't make my arms look like flag poles with your big sleeves; 3) have a tops print. It ticks all of them.

Would you wear this on a sexy times date, to a basketball game or to a bar mitzvah?
The first and the third because girls have liked the print and it also definitely says "sure, but who else is ready to party?"

Do you now want the shorts to match?
Yes of course absolutely. Combining them would be resortwear meets trapwear.

And how do you feel about the Oxfords? Does this shirt need some brothers down below?
Everyone needs brothers down below and the tumblr menswear lords would be horrified if I busted out thongs or whatever.

Does it feel more Stussy or more VE?
The look is more VE but the vibe is irie.

Thank you, Alex. Please help yourself to the mini-strudels on the way out.

Here's a fun fact: glowworms aren't even worms, they're insects. Flies, usually, but otherwise they're beetles. They glow through bioluminescence which means the making and releasing of light by a living organism. It's cold light, though, so don't think you're about to enter a thermal cave here.

It'll be a little bit chilly, and wet. You need to be wearing gumboots because the further in you go, the deeper in muck you get. But a little muck around the knees is a small price to pay for a completely cosmic experience. Standing underneath these glowing beings is extraterrestrial - like standing directly beneath the Milky Way. Mostly they glow green or yellow, but if you see one with a red head, that's a railroad worm. Mad!

It's important to remember not to let your star-plucking fantasies get the better of you, you shouldn't touch these little guys. Through the 80s most of the tunnels were occupied by mushroom cultivators, and although no significant research has been done, it seems like a chemical that they used has made the tunnels uninhabitable for glowworms ever since. So tread lightly, these beaming larvae don't exist in many of the other disused rail tunnels in the whole south coast area, and they won't for sometime. Or ever.

This won't consist of great lengths of silence interspersed with random questions asked seemingly into the void. OR WILL IT? Sir Tom is the Mick Jagger of playwrights, but there's no Cambridge Companion to Mick Jagger, and Harold Bloom wrote an entire book about this guy. A conversation about his life and work might include such topics as escaping death in Czechoslovakia, becoming an Englishman, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, supporting political dissidents, Shakespeare in Love, and of course, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Heads, you attend.

Hanni from Los Angeles says, "These songs were written for anyone who's ever been shot or hit by a train"... which is maybe why he's not on your iPod. He's also dubbed it "knife fight music", which is more inclusive, since we've all had that awkward moment around the cheese platter. It's not all Eddie Current/The Clash style tantrums - sometimes it's just slouching past the milkbar and seeing your girl share a milkshake with some other guy. But the live show will mostly be tantrums - just Hanni and his friend on drums.

Internet sensation music weblog Polaroids of Androids has nothing wrong with its arse. This is just the annual Xmas party, and, true to form, features some of the best new music around: Ernest Ellis & The Panamas, The Fighting League, Unity Floors, and Sean Lockheart (Marcus Collarbones).

The HOOPS ladeez - babing multi-taskers Bad Ezzy, Anna Lunoe and Nina Las Vegas - team up with Santa (and Mariah Carey) to bring you some kind of hip hop, dancehall, tropical house, club banger Christmas monster mash that lasts all night long. Were you at the last one? All night is not an exaggeration.

WOOF. Tim Sweeney at Marrickville Bowlo! THAT is a Friday night. HAHA brings the humble Beats in Space / DFA overachiever out for the third time running. His sets have never not been The Best.

The Paper Mill haven't specified a theme for their closing party, but they'd probably be pretty impressed if you turned up sporting something made entirely from paper. They've provided a space for artists, zine makers, audiences and workshops over the past year-and-a-half, so it only seems right to get into the spirit. Just be careful of handing out paper cuts when you're dancing to DJ sets from Jai Pyne, Dara Gill, Del Lumanata and Hossein and Dom.

Until now there have been only two kinds of wine racks: The oak wood kind your dad bought after watching Sideways. And the novelty kind, where the wine bottle morphs into a phallus (cue Italian waiter statue trying to carry his larger-than-life Pinot). No one had even considered the plight of cyclists. Cyclists who are trying to fulfill their dinner guest duties, riding down Bourke Street like a Vin Diesel wannabe with one hand steering the bike, the other carrying a bottle of vino. It took so long to remedy this OH&S nightmare, but finally the solution is here: The Bicycle Wine Rack.

This new wine rack genus is hand made in Montreal by Oopsmark and, if you value living, it's the only way you can safely transport wine while cycling. It attaches to any 1" bike frame, securely clamps closed with an antique brass fastener and can adjust to fit various 3" bottles. You'd expect such a creation to look similar to the head gear contraption you wore in year seven, but instead it's made of olive oil-treated vegetable-tanned leather. The same ingredients Jerry Hall lathered onto her pregnant stomach in the '80s - so you know, it will age beautifully.

And guess what you peddlers? Our favourite Australian online bike accessories shop CycleStyle is their newest stockist. Order one here! Or try your luck as follows. Thanks to CycleStyle we have one bicycle wine rack to give away. To enter, just answer the following question.