The Thousands

Yes it is, and we'll help you define things in the negative:

• Proudly declare your lack of currency and spouse.
• The Golf Wang book sadly doesn't concern a sporting erection.
• "Unheimlich" isn't a stance on the anti-choking measure.
• Newtown beach doesn't just refer to Gordon's Bay anymore.
• It won't cost thousands to attend this school.

Also there is this tiny secret in Darlington, and that CAN sound is always refreshing.

Cover snap by Emma Anna! Get your pics up here: send them to alex@rightanglestudio.com.au.

The Beatles bought glamour, pomp, and rock n’ roll chivalry to the musical landscape. No later than a year after Paul McCartney and co split their ways CAN introduced severe paranoia, rhythmic meditation, and intricately reassembled studio outtakes via their landmark record Tago Mago.

If you do the math this makes the album 40 years old, which usually means that it would have been thrown out to wolves lurking in the cultural wastelands long ago. In the instance of Tago Mago it’s turned 40 years young - in the form of a deluxe reissue.

Recorded at Schloss Nörvenich, a castle near Cologne, Tago Mago represents the throbbing core of CAN’s sound: stretched out soundscapes littered with vocalist Kenji Suzuki’s howls, the trademark rhythm of drummer Jaki Leibizeit, Holger Cuzukay’s ‘mong’ tape edits, and the crunchy, bluesy guitar of Michael Karoli.

Karl Stockhausen had undoubtedly left his mark on Holger Czukay (who was also the principal audio engineer) with heavy tape echo abounding throughout Tago Mago, particularly on the schizoid ‘Peking O’, which meanders from spoken word to really strange mechanized bossa nova. Other highlights include the cushy, hallucinogenic ‘Bring Me Coffee or Tea’ and the dark overtones of ‘Mushroom’.

I’ll get on my knees and beg: if there’s one album you should listen to this year (if you haven’t already) CAN’s Tago Mago is it. During ‘the decade that style forgot’, CAN produced a musical proposition that is as influential and spritely as ever.

At a coffee shop in my hometown I ran into my friend Jon, who I skated with when we were teenagers. While his toe-headed son Mylo played we talked about old times; Jon recalled, "We were dicks! We'd crash parties, walk into bars like we owned the place. I was never an instigator. I'd just sit back and watch, like, 'what's gonna happen tonight?'"

What's rad about Odd Future and probably what's got "old" white dudes like me interested is they broadcast that vibe worldwide; the fun of being a young skate punk, being kind of a dick and not caring. We get to watch without instigating.

This book is mainly photos, sandwiched between a bit of Tyler's Always Amusing Soundbite-Based Prose. It's not amazing or anything; it'll make the haters fume, but the diehards will swoon. It's got pizza shots, Sharpie tees, homemade tats, posing for pictures, cute skate outfits, girl action, skate photos, and lots of bird flipping, showing the crew can be as creative, silly, funny and offensive in real life as they are on recordings.

My favorite photo is the crew sitting on their boards, on the curb, eating take out. Skaters are the best at hanging out, and hanging out is the best thing in the world. So why is anyone surprised we all love Wolf Gang?

It's been two years since China Heights co-founder and curator, Mark Drew, bailed Sydney for Japan. And in that time he's noticed a few things: neon play structures, octopus enclosures, grand entrances, Rafael Rozendaal, The Boss, purple snow, single gloves (everywhere), true verts and of course, sadly, a tsunami inundation zone.

He also noticed that Japan's Tower Records slogan 'No Music, No Life' has been re-appropriated over and over again, by smaller companies ('No Ramen, No Life' etc), so much that he started rendering his own version 'No Money, No Wife' internally. When New Era approached him with a collab project, the message was automatic.

He attacked the classic 950 snap-back silhouette (because his head is too small for anything without a snap-back), and put a reverse Raiders colourway in place (symptomatic of his life-long NWA obsession) and a clean black and gold colourway for the primary release - limited to a run of 200. The result is a simple design that mirrors his bold and immaculate graphic art work. What's next for New Era Australia's collab project? They've hooked Steve Duck and Mark Gale from Saint Side. Fah-resh.

I feel strongly that Lars von Trier is fucked in the head and that we should condemn his films’ glorying in women’s psychological (and sometimes physical) suffering. But Melancholia surprised me with its romanticism… albeit the sublime kind tinged with suffocating dread. It’s an intimately powerful film that imagines the end of the world with tenderness rather than bombast.

Its disquieting, slo-mo prologue of apocalyptic imagery feels like video art. Like a nihilistic companion piece to Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, it’s set to the prelude from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. This music recurs almost obsessively, coming to represent the florid inertia of sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg).

Severely depressed Justine fails to keep her shit together at her wedding to gormless Michael (Alexander Skarsgard) at the country estate of Claire and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). Some months later, almost catatonic, Claire returns to the house as an undiscovered planet named Melancholia collides catastrophically with Earth.

The sisters’ terrifying mum (Charlotte Rampling) abhors the sentimental rituals Claire cherishes. But Justine’s more atavistic rituals – baths; nude moonbathing as the planet encroaches; constructing a ‘magic cave’ with her small nephew – provide solace at the last.

When The King of the White People, Dave Eggers, inaugurated Wholphin, the DVD anthology of moving picture ephemera, it was with the intention of releasing short fiction films and documentaries from the bondage of the snooty film festival circuit. All those haughty aesthetes with their top hats and monocles. No. Thanks.

What turns all this into some kind of zen koan is the thought that perhaps the comfort of your living room and plasmo hi-demolition screen is a ghetto all its own. Isn't film best enjoyed with others? Preferably with people just as good-looking and intelligent as yourself and the ready availability of beer, whiskey and more beer? Yes it is. Which is why Speakeasy Cinema is screening issue 14 of Wholphin in its entirety at the FBi Social.

Here's the exclamation-mark-riddled nineteenth-century-carnival-hawker pitch:

Polyamorous perversity! The secret life of the inside of your mouth! A gazelle in Palestine! Cats and mice living together! The fabulous Zellner Brothers! A journey into the dark heart of nuclear disaster! Will Oldham tells you a bedtime story (with spooky results)! And so much more, folks.

Plus I hear the DJ playing before and during the interval is FBi's Kate Jinx. And she's great!

How Typical of Metal is Queenslander Ray Cook, and the 4.5 Billion Store is his showroom. Internet rumour has it that the name 'How Typical' came about when a friend muttered the phrase after hearing about the label.

Not knowing Cook (aka ‘Metal’), we’re not sure how characteristic or not his stoneware jewellery pieces and leather-hewn bowties are. Certainly they are unusual, as is his newly opened boutique on Lawson Street, a sparse mix of threads, accessories, and eventually, 1950s-era British and local bicycles fully restored onsite. Simple cotton shifts in Crayola brights from Brisbane designer Alice Nightingale and collared shirts from Gold Coasters House of Humility flesh out the racks.

It really does feel like you’ve stepped into an artisan’s workshop: blank canvas white walls, light fittings ringed with loops of wire, a wall-sized ‘4.5’ in rusty finish, and even Cook himself, crafting his shit right there on the floor.

Roll call! Paper2, Somedays, Tokyo Bike, Spence & Lyda, Cake Wines, Object Gallery, Follow, Shelf/Life, Surry Hills Library,  Brett Whiteley Studio, Wall Candy, Orson & Blake, Published Art, Living Edge, Interior Arc, La Rara, Project 82, Justus Magazine, (strong inhale), Sark Studio, Style Trader, Little Birdies Tea Party, Fashion eBoutique, Curator, Quadrangle, Lucette, Herringbone, Anu, Hub Furniture, Tribe Studio, Oscar & Friends Booksellers, Minty Meets Munt, Office2010, Artemide, Hardwick & Cesko, Planet, Ann Snell Gallery, Friends of Leon Gallery, Workshopped, (weak exhale).

Everyone: This is Surry Hills High, you've met online but now it's time for IRL. It wont be awkward, it'll be great. Just like those big factory outlet bus tours, except definitely not shit (e.g. 5-seasons-old Table Eight and other misc. corporate fashions), but instead really great (local creative industry and independent ideas)!

It's the first of many promised open days which includes one-off sales, exhibitions, picnics, markets, launches, artist talks, open studios and anything else these free-thinkers come up with. All collected online for you, like your own clever shopping guide. Pay attention, this is Christmas shopping and supporting your local heros made easy as 1-2-3.

Hitesh Natalwala is a complicated guy. His art is intricate, with detailed textures painted, drawn and collaged onto the surfaces of the works. His appropriations and abstractions play around with history, and personal and cultural identity. He's also a fan of the highly unpackable title. There are vintagey-print, collaged, unheimlich-vibed party-tableaux, with the potential to kind of make you uncomfortable given a narrative power up by their being named after predatory animals. Natalwala's unsettling weirdness can be fairly literal, too, with a series of human-animal-nature-machine morphic drawings entitled 'Changers' also being part of this body of work, alongside pictures of flowers called by their real names but painted to look like cross-stitch samplers on a surface of old newspaper.

Other pieces on show here, like 'Heads shoulders knees and toe' and 'The segmented view', are coterminous visual and titular puns of the kind that make you say "Huh?" and then "Ha!" - and then think about how many ways there are to look at objects for a while (cough cough Picasso exhibition go see it cough). There's also some of the most luscious scrap/confetti looking compositions pretty much ever, and these are also called by true but consideration-demanding names, ingenuous ones like 'big blue thing' and 'green thing well hung'.

It may also be worth nothing that Kamikaze Wasabi is not this guy's first condiment reference in the title of a show: he called a 2009 solo in Mumbai The lack of marmalade was my only real grievance. We are onto you, Hitesh Natalwala! But it's okay because you yourself are really onto something good.

Shakespeare, who was something of a wordsmith in his day, made use of oxymorons in his little-known gem Romeo and Juliet, "O heavy lightness!...Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!". Meanwhile here in present-day real-life, Beach Burrito Company have employed a similar device by opening a new faction of their sea-shore eating house in the landlocked suburb of Newtown.

The BBC have rinsed off their sandy Havaianas and ventured over to sell their wares on the dusty plains of the Inner West. And they've brought not just burritos, but tacos, quesedillas and chimichangas! The whole swag of substantial hand-held meals. Many burritos are freshened with shredded cabbage, while tempura fish swims with a cool splash of a salsa blanco of yoghurt, lime, jalapeno, cucumber and mint. All washed down with frozen margaritas or a bucket of Coronas.

The good vibrations here are less beach shack than the original, more Dia de los Muertos skull duggery meets SoCal street art. It can feel a little heavy handed, but tradition dictates that down under we serve our Mexican with extra cheese.

Fittingly, if Newtown were a beach suburb, this spot next to The Hub Theatre feels like it would probably house the surf club. And yet, no business has ever really seemed to boom in this 'hub'. Perhaps 'til now.

Melbourne-born, London-based, highly-influential HTRK are heading our way (we chatted with them last week). Emerging out the other side of tragedy after the suicide of founding member and bass player Sean Stewart in 2010, A Girl Called Jonny (Jonnine Standish) and Nigel Yang will bring their slow synthesized melodies that are like wading through an industrial vat of treacle. With support from Lost Animal and Kirin J Callinan.

Gaylordin' exists in absolute quantities - for every person who newly gaylords, one less person gaylords somewhere else in the world. For one night only the global epicentre is shifting from Gaylordsville, Connecticut to Red Rattler, Marrickville. West Connecticut is taking this opportunity to finish some crosswords. Their Saturday will not involve T Bag's Summer Sesh or Betty Grumble's perpetual tantrum, but maybe yours will. One would be well advised to wear one's favourite outfit.

The man behind the spangly face paint and arresting gaze has flown back from playing shows in the US (including CMJ), and boy are his arms tired. Kidding! Guineafowl is a flightless bird. Since returning the band have jumped straight in to a tour of the Australian east coast to promote single 'The Lie Is', which is an urgent and euphoric number in an Arcade Fire kind of way. Supporting this leg will be Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire! and Glass Towers.

Set in the curious (and slimy) community of Kings Cross, local filmmaker Jon Hewitt's most recent thriller X, tells the story of a tired call girl and a new-to-the-scene hooker dangerously battling their way through a criminal's paradise. While the film is doing brilliantly offshore, it's time for us to see it - in a charity premier for the Wayside Chapel.

If Siberia wanted to convince the world it was a fun summer holiday destination, it might enlist Future Classic. Sunhaze on Sundays, FBi on Saturdays, Adult Disco - if it wasn't already sunny in Sydney (er, except this week) they'd have easily had us duped. Meet the faces of Future Classic at this exhibition - e.g. Pantha du Prince, Sebastien Tellier, Mount Kimbie, Little Dragon, Classixx, Bon Chat, Bon Rat  - as photographed by Daniel Shipp. They are quite photogenic and the opening has free Grolsch.

Remember that episode of Seinfeld where George was a hand model? For a moment you had impure thoughts about him with his perfect cuticles, pearly white phalanges and liver spot free hand. You looked down at your own clappers and cringed.

Listen up flipper hands, you need Salus Body, the creation of Jason Cook (former co-owner and general manager of Aurora Spa Retreat), offering Melbourne-made body, hand and therapeutic products including bath salts, herbal pillows, heat packs and soy candles.

Their new "best of spa" range contains botanics that reduce premature aging, increase hydration and restore your sense of wellbeing. They're also free from harsh chemicals, mineral oils and synthetic fragrances.

Salus Body's Hand Rescue Kit is neatly packaged in a drawstring bag, containing their Lavender and Mandarin Hand and Cuticle Cream and Grapefruit and Jasmine Body Cleanser, which promise to reinvent your handshake with chamomile, aloe leaf, jojoba, plant extracts and vitamin E. Kits are available online at their website.

But listen to this. Thanks to Salus Body, we have a Hand Rescue Kit (valued at $69.90!) to give away. To enter, answer the following question.