Posted by Sacha Vukic on December 8, 2009
‘Blog’ is such an ugly word. It’s almost too daggy to be associated with the stylistically elite likes of Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist fame, a dapper American chap who makes the whole computer geek-esque act of creating an online diary, fastidiously updated daily, look very cool and in fashion.
That’s because Scott Schuman is intuitively fashionable. His astute sense of fashion and style, classic, edgy or otherwise veers him towards attractive and superbly dressed strangers on the street, who allow him to take glossy mag-quality pictures of them for his blog.
Schuman is up there with Lily Allen and Chk Chk Boom girl when it comes to internet sensations. Now reaping the rewards sewn in humble Blogspot (and a myriad of other fashion side projects) he is amongst Time magazine’s top 100 design influencers, has a monthly column in GQ magazine, and has turned his blog into a book.
Scott Schuman is in Australia, assessing antipodean style and will be signing his book in Sydney and Melbourne this week. Meet the man behind the blog and maybe get your photo taken.
Sydney
Tuesday December 8
6-9pm
Sass & Bide, 132 Oxford St, Paddington
Melbourne
Thursday 10 December
6-9pm
Sass & Bide, GPO, Bourke St
the sartorialist, scott schuman, sass & bide
Posted by Kristen D on December 2, 2009
Christmas shopping sucks. But it doesn't have to.
You don't need to mall trall with all the screaming snotty kids and nannas. This year, we are going to the very gorgeous Finder Keepers Spring/Summer markets at Carriageworks in Sydney. There we shall browse from a huge range of stalls featuring unique and special homewares, clothing and gifts from some of Australia's most promising designers. Not only will we be basking in the praise from our deeply grateful loved ones, who will be entranced by their truly spectacualr Chrissy gifts, but it's also a chance to support emerging artists and designers. And it really sticks one to Westfield...Ha!
The markets are on Friday evening the 4th of December, and Saturday the 5th of Decemer all day, with live music, great food and, sigh...a bar...CarriageWorks - 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh NSW 2015.
christmas, deals, finders keepers, carriageworks, art markets, crafts
Posted by Miss Kat Jade on October 28, 2009
Sydney's Duke Magazine, known for its independent, bi-annual publication and mad social events, is having a Halloween ho down aka the Mutant Dance Off. Yes, a dance off. The All Hallows Eve eve event combines prizes, booze and the aforementioned monster mash with the ultimate challenge: the quest to crown two revelers king and queen of the dance floor. Solo fliers and couples welcome.
With international dance sensation The House Of Bad Kids rocking out to DJ’s Mike Tyson, National treasure and Sex Azza Weapon, the Oxford Arts factory will turn into a ghoulish monster mash nightmare. Fighting, cheating, lying and scary outfits all encouraged in the quest for dance-floor supremeacy. Get down and Boogie with Duke Magazine on Friday the 30th for a jive, krumping-filled Friday. It’s only $12, fool.
dance, oxford arts factory, duke magazine, the house of bad kids, halloween.
Posted by kluster on October 20, 2009
Bill Cotter’s novel Fever Chart (McSweeney’s), and
Annie La Ganga’s memoir, Stoners and Self-Appointed Saints (Red Hen Press).
Most of the venues at which Annie and I read and signed our books while on our authors’ tour of the States were utterly independent---not links in a chain of bookstores, not attached to a university or house of worship, not N.A. clubhouses, not fronts for illicit hold’em games. Some were so indie they weren’t even bookshops: In Rapid City, South Dakota, we read and signed at a coffee shop to a welcoming, attentive, and enthusiastic group of persons positively boiled in caffeine. Another venue, the KGB Bar in NYC, which trades on the quaint delusion that communism worked (and by that virtue will not sell brands of beer it deems capitalist), was also hospitable and seemed excited we were there. (Two other writers, Ernie Hilbert of Philadelphia, and Greg Sanders of New York, both in the Red Hen Press stable, also read that night, adding another storey of warmth to the evening.) And in Chicago, we read at the Green Mill, a saloon and the birth-hospital of Slam Poetry.
The Green Mill was one of the few events not populated in the majority by friends and shills; more than half were strangers! On hand to listen to people read their writing! Though also generously welcoming, my Green Mill reading did not go well. I write fiction, a genre not often read in places where poetry is expected, so the audience—at first merely disoriented by narrative prose with characters behaving in linear time---began to shift and yawn and politely exasperate. When I hadn’t stopped after five minutes, I became aware of budding menace and hostility. Since I was pretty tired after the 15-hour drive from Rapid City (q.v. above), and thus in no shape to tussle or dodge chucked bottles or endure reputedly gnarly Chicagoan rebuke, I raced through to the end of the planned bit and leapt from the stage to the safety of my booth. The emcee came on and gave me a little shit, and several people afterwards came up to me and said things like “Don’t worry man, it’s okay, happens to everybody,” and “Hey, you weren’t as bad as it seemed,” and “Glad I’m not you.”
Annie, not incidentally, blew the fucking place away. Go buy her book, you.
Bill Cotter
Austin, Texas
bill cotter, annie la ganga, book tour
Posted by kluster on September 30, 2009
Bill Cotter’s novel Fever Chart (McSweeney’s), and
Annie La Ganga’s memoir, Stoners and Self Appointed Saints (Red Hen Press).
Of the many places Annie and I stayed while on our severely budgeted national book-signing-and-reading tour, I noted that only a few of them were not occupied by at least one cat. One of those places was a motel, a form of shelter from which cats and other domestics have been, by tradition and without prejudice, wholly banned. So it doesn’t count. And another place, a couch-surf stop in Salt Lake City, Utah, served merely as a snack bar for a neighbor’s cat. We never so much as glimpsed this animal, whose only witness was a half-noshed bowl of dry vittles on the front porch. So that doesn’t count either.
A moment of simple calculation reveals a startling figure: 82%. That is the percentage of households we visited with at least one cat. Why does this startle? Because the national percentage of becatted households is <34%,* that’s why. More than double.
Wherefore this wildly off-key statistic?Continue...
bill cotter, annie la ganga, book tour
Posted by kluster on September 24, 2009
Bill Cotter’s novel Fever Chart (McSweeney’s), and
Annie La Ganga’s memoir, Stoners and Self Appointed Saints (Red Hen Press).
I have not kept my promise, issued on this blog three weeks ago, to supply Kluster with regular updates on the progress of my 8000-mile book tour of the States with the poet Annie La Ganga, and, even though it is generally agreed among the semi-civilized and the sporadically ethical that spouting excuses for the breaking of oaths merely makes one look like a self-serving tenderhead, I’m going to do it anyway. (In fact, I am a self-serving tenderhead.)
Possibly the single largest obstacle was the surprising countrywide paucity of telecommunications technology. Even though Annie and I have an iPhone (given to us by my sisters specifically for sending distress signals while on tour), and even a dashboard-lighter-socket inverter for on-the-go recharging, it was largely useless because our itinerary took us through those swaths of the United States least concerned with communicating with the outside world: West Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota. Hundreds of thousands of square miles undotted with cell towers, wi-fi zones, or internet cafés. (Lots of cafés, though---my favorite was the Chat ‘n’ Chew, in (I think) Nevada. Didn’t go in---it looked like the sort of place where the chatting is about how to kill and eat, or enslave and auction, city slickers who happen upon the premises.) From such arrant geographies few communiqués ever escape, [except maybe via “mail” (like, with stamps) or smoke signals. (With the latter, punctuation gets all fucked up.)]Continue...
bill cotter