The Thousands

Get your mind out of the gutter that's not what we meant. Not with those things. We were actually referring to the way things aren't always as they seem: getting nailed in a hairdressers for one; sitting in an old bar that's-- new?; going grocery shopping and realising you're in a store for giants. Y'know - the usual stuff.

Cover image by Chris Barton. Be enormous like Chris - send your cover snaps to alex@rightanglestudio.com.au and prepare to become the next Helmut Newton.

The new edition of The Death-Ray by Daniel Clowes is an unexpanded version of Eightball 23, published in 2004. The only changes are the new hardcover and a dozen pages for endpapers, title page, publishing imprint, etc. There’s a substantial price hike too. This is causing some hand-wringing in the world of alternative comics, cries of greed, sell-out, and bullshit are echoing around. There’s another argument though (which has some eloquent supporters) – that this is due recognition for The Death-Ray, Clowes’s masterpiece.

What’s so compelling about The Death-Ray is that in 42 pages it manages to cover much of the ground that Jonathan Lethem’s 500-page Fortress of Solitude did – by doing things that only comics can do. The denseness of the experience, the mastery of different modes of storytelling and the switches between them are what make The Death-Ray not only a great story but also an object lesson in how to write and draw comics.

The story echoes the classic superhero narrative – outsider kid discovers he has superpowers and/or a super object (yep, death ray) – but explores the idea with a reality and nuance that belies the slim page count. Rather than ending up in Kick-Ass gritty-pseudo-reality, though, The Death-Ray shows us the more likely outcome of a horny, depressed, awkward 17-year-old kid receiving super strength and a lethal weapon.

Earlier in the year, we described Royal Headache as "hones." Doesn't make sense? It would if you saw them. We've long been on about their live shows and how amazeballs they are, both for the tunes and the gloriously awkward dancing they inspire. That’s why they’re playing Maggot Fest II at Red Rattler this Saturday November 5, alongside some of Australia’s finest punk/snot/rock and roll bands including headliners The Sailors, and dudes like Chrome Dome and Per Purpose, as well as a swag of others.

After the success of last year’s Melbourne show, Maggot Fest has gone national, having played Brisbane earlier this month, here this weekend, before it all trucks to Melbourne. Here's an intervi-- no wait, not really. Here's Royal Headache all choosing songs you should hear because: they're awesome.

MIXTAPE TRACKLIST (WITH LINER NOTES)

Shogun:

'Displaced' - Cousin Brian
We played with these guys in Philadelphia on our recent US tour and they ruled. Smart-ass young kids who didn't seem to care about stylistic influences, being cool or any of the other things that make music boring.

'Gore Story' - Septic Death
I don't know  I just like listening to this song when I'm hungover because it mirrors how I feel but in a way I can laugh at.

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In a show at Locksmith Project Space White made keys out of clay. In a body of work entitled Study that was shown in last year's Primavera she replicated office supplies. There's a lot going on with the idea of realness in her work, a whole metaphysical kind of a deal.  This show, of forms White has created and composed in painterly tableaux and photographed and rephotographed and reorganised, is a departure from her previous means of engaging with materiality, but still about that at heart. Her practice is still addressing a lot of the same questions: How is a thing a thing? What is a thing for? Is 'looking like' the same as 'being like'? Do you have a headache yet? She addresses these questions far more eloquently than I've managed to here, both in her description of the works and in the pieces themselves.

Once upon a time my undergrad-art-history-self totally signed up to do the tute presentation for the Baudrillard week, and then realised that it was not just a funny coincidence that my lecturer had the same name as the dude who translated and edited the book from whence the reading was excerpted. I'm feeling pretty much the same amount of super-excitement about concepts and fear of sounding dumb in front of the ideas, only this is an Emma White thing and only tangentially a Baudrillard thing, which is good news because these pretty, pretty photographs of things that kind of look like lollies are way funner than that oft-misunderstood Frenchman.

Person 1: “Blather nonsense jargon Chanel nonsense blather pun colour whistle.”
Person 2: “Squeal nonsense obscure-reference Beyonce shiny nonsense blather.”

So goes a conversation between me and someone else about nails. Except the 'someone else' is myself, because no one actually wants to talk about nails and nail polish with me. I am too obsessed with colour, too annoyingly anal about coverage, too likely to yelp like an old lady if I chip a coat. We could be in the middle of a fascinating discussion about Manichean philosophy circa 300BC or the myriad benefits of goopy cheese and KASLAM! I am riffing about the new Muppets collection and holding my claws against other people’s pants to see how well the colour matches. Sorry, guys. I am sorry.

You can imagine the sounds that came out of me when I heard about People's Get Nailed bar. They were all of the above but on crack and via an imaginary megaphone. Longtimes have I loved USLU Airlines Nail Polish, especially their collaborations with the likes of Bernhard Willhelm, BBB and various DJs (yeah!). If you’re die-hard about nail colours, this range is impossible – you will want them all. Until now there was nowhere in the world to exclusively have USLU applied by a specialist at a bar: Get Nailed does it… with booze!

Get Nailed is in the process of becoming a proper ‘retail experience’, with makeup and the works - but for me, my nails, and for anyone who has to listen to me talk ever, it’s already perfect.

Moneyball has all the sports-movie ingredients: an underdog team; a manager haunted by past failures; talented but overlooked players; an amazing true-story comeback. Yet despite all this, Moneyball is not conventionally triumphalist. It’s a rather melancholy clash between human convictions and cold computer analysis.

Yes, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and his economics-grad assistant, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill as the real-life Paul DePodesta, who objected to being portrayed as a nerd and requested his name not be used) found success with an unlikely 2002 team drafted using in-game statistics. But what have they really ushered in? Richer teams using the Athletics’ methods against them? Even more ruthless ways to trade players and managers as commodities?

Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian’s deft screenplay eschews game-day spectacle to emphasise baseball’s human interactions. Torrents of unspoken meaning roar beneath Beane’s amiable patter with players, rival managers and colleagues (including a sullen, under-used Philip Seymour Hoffman as the A’s field manager). Pitt’s subtle, internally focused performance suggests some people’s actions can’t ever really be quantified. Meanwhile, Hill brings his usual diffident sweetness to Brand’s own discovery that his numbers-driven world is more idealistic than the baseball industry’s zero-sum game.

Most of my 'how cool would it be if...' thoughts end up as ever-lasting pepperoni pizza or Internet in the shower, but Bianca Riggio and Ryan Hanrahan of Sydney-based design duo Page Thirty Three have much brighter ideas.

A quick click through their webstore suggests instant coolness: a wooden milk crate that interlocks and stacks just like a stolen Dairy Farmers. A jigsaw serving board and ceramic jigsaw plate, which can cleverly connect. Cinematic light boxes, with lettering. And a curly straw that spells out 'Life Sucks' while you sip.

If you look closer you'll see that, unless it's impossible, the objects are all made in Australia - including the lavender oil and beeswax candle that accompany the scientific essential oil burner, and the lavendar bath milk (with goats milk and cacao butter) inside the giant bath tonic tea bags. And that makes Page Thirty Three more than just a tellin'-it-like-it-is drinking straw and a good-lookin' crate.

After causing nothing but grief for The Man and nothing but convenience for the rest of us, The Beer Baron's loophole was sadly closed. No sweat for him really: since the Blind Pig tried to steal his mojo it was getting kind of old anyway. So baron Jed's gone and opened up a bar instead!

The Dock is bang in the middle of the 'fern, across the road from iconic Railz and that questionable sculpture. The location is pretty innocuous, as is the look: a chalked-on sign, chipped paint, solid woods, a bit of forlorn majesty in the leadlights and recovered furniture. The drinks list is similarly unpretentious: five bucks for a Carter or house wine, a tenner for house cocktails. And while it might not be to everyone's taste, The Dock's Skittle Brow (beer and Skittles) is peculiar enough to contend with Shady Pines' fresh juice and the Flinders' pickle backs to become a signature drink. At the moment, the menu is limited: popcorn. It comes with your drinks. But there's plans to have food delivered from a local cafe.

If there's any extravagance at all to identify, the bathrooms are the size of a small terrace, making it impossible not to think "eight people could definitely not do coke in here", and the whole flush/basin set up is from the future.

The combination of all this results in a place hinted at earlier - a bar. No prefixes or descriptors: it's a bar. A commendable little local bar. And it could have been there for ages.

Citizens of a sharehouse hold two truths to be self-evident:

1) Someone is using my toothbrush. Who is it and why.

2) We are out of everything, every day.

Mornings spent fruitlessly getting your hand sticky trying to scrape the last of the jam from the curvy bit at the base of the jar? Those mornings can be relegated to ancient sharehouse legend, because a store exists whose goods are of such epic proportions that surely you will have moved out before the honey is finished.

This store is eponymously named Epic. It is like a Coles, but for Titans, and this works really well for the sharehouse market. When you buy in such large quantities there is also approximately ten hundred* times less packaging, which makes it eight times** more okay that I never put the recycling out.

My housemate Daniel says, "My ironic favourite thing about them is the 40L mayonnaise tubs, but my bona fide favourite things are the 1kg [frozen] blueberries for $8ish, the 1.5L maple syrup at $40 and the 10kg cous cous and the weird trolleys with the clipboard holder. And the fact that high-viz is the dress code." Firstly, he is talking about maple syrup, not maple-flavoured syrup. Secondly, yes - as there are quiet forklifts peaceably roaming the aisles, Epic provides the visitor with fluoro vests.

You can buy regular things, like 2.5kg of Monbulk jam/marmalade $9.98, 2.5kg of Vegemite, 10kg of rock salt $5.90, or 25kg of rolled oats $41. On the other end of the grocery spectrum, 1kg of cardamom pods is $65.60, 1kg of macadamias $27, 1kg of Star Anise $10.50, 1kg cinnamon quills $36. Owning one kilogram of cinnamon quills? Priceless***.

* not based on maths.
** ibid.
*** ibid.

Some of the best songs have some pretty basic lyrics. But like how in space no one can hear you scream, in a foreign language no one can hear you cliche! The bulk of Beijing rockers Carsick Cars' songs are in English, but the few sung in Mandarin are The Best. Listen to 'Zhong Nan Hai' and try not to bop around like you're on a pogo stick. If you're the type that needs credentials, the trio have toured and collaborated with Sonic Youth, and were rising stars of SXSW 2010. They're touring in Aus for the first time to promote their second studio release, You Can Listen, You Can Talk (produced by the legendary Wharton Tiers), with support from Mere Women and Rites Wild.

Just like a Beckham child, New Navy's EP, Uluwatu is named after the place where it was conceived. Located in the southern-most point of Bali, it's an oasis away from everyday life with long sunsets, beach parties and thieving monkeys. The result sounds a bit like The Whitest Boy Alive on a tropical holiday. Take an aural trip to Uluwatu and then go home and book your own holiday.

This mixed bag film fest opens feature-length doors and windows, momentarily defogging the mystery around Mexico. Ranging from the mundane to the extraordinary, from the light-hearted to the super-serious, through the ever-present narco wars and the poverty, these films are bleak, funny, heart-warming, drug-addled and dangerous. A winner is Acorazado a comedy where protagonist, Silverio, makes it to Florida by DIY taxi-raft to find freedom. El Inferno (translation: 'hell') looks out from the inside of the crim-life of money, women, violence and fun. With a varied palate and a huge soundtrack, the films concern an over-arching theme of humanity and the eternal chase for the American "dream".

Theatre Kantanka and music collective Ensemble Offspring have taken the $2 shop as inspiration for their melding of performance, live music, kinetic sculptures and multimedia installation in a representation of the disposable orgy that is mass consumerism. If that doesn't enlighten you as to what to expect, here's a video of synchronised Barbies. Something to mull over before Christmas shopping?

Usually it's a bad sign when an exhibition is called something that sounds like the title of a journal article (make a tenuous pun then chuck in a colon and a factual subtitle) but this one is a LOL. Booze and cities and art shows and so on; unpack the pun at your leisure but that second bit tells you what it is. It's also the last BIG opening before The Paper Mill shuts its doors at Angel Place, and you'll be sad when they're gone.

A good pair of undies should be clung to, both hand and butt. They are a rare beast and an important one, and Cheap Monday have just started making some. Bad undies bunch up, fall down or are just plain ugly. That's why most bad undies end up hidden - on purpose - at the base of a clothes horse. But Cheap Monday undies are undies you can take all the way to the top of the clothes horse. Where. The. Towels. Go.

Ladies, for you, Cheap Monday undies come in micro fibre (hello), mesh (helloooo) or lace (heyyyy) and are available in all kinds of cuts and all kinds of colours. In much the same fashion, the boys undies come in plenty of cuts (including long johns!) and colours. The boys stretch material undies have skulls on the waistband, making it possible for anyone to have skeletons in their closet. For a more subtle undie however, we think you should go for the plain ribbed ones.

To find these undies in the flesh, visit Somedays, Local Store Newtown, General Pants; not in the flesh, they're online here. Or you can try and score a women's or men's undies pack by entering this here competition. Women, your pack has a lace racer back and lace mini hipster (worth $53). Men, your pack comes with three pairs of stretch trunks in white, black and real teal (worth $54).

To enter, answer the following question.