The Art of Tattoos: From Peanuts to Keith Haring
Tattoos are so ubiquitous it’s hard to imagine how you can make yours stand out. Maybe lift something from the classics. Peanuts or Keith Haring, anyone?
Cardiometry
Darren, in a neat shirt and slacks, with an ID lanyard around his neck, a bright red chevron that signifies his membership of the cardiometrical brotherhood – they are still mostly men – Darren will pass a plastic-covered sensor over your upper left chest, where your heart is supposed, in the sense of thought, to…
Melbourne’s Nutella Donut Craze: A Sticky Revolution
Ground Zero for Melbourne’s Nutella donut boom was a quiet northern suburbs street that runs off Sydney Road opposite Fawkner Cemetery. Among the brick veneer and weatherboard bungalows built by migrants from Italy and Greece in the 1960s and 1970s is a row of shops, empty-looking except for the milk bar in the middle, Jimmy’s…
Boarding Pass
The people were queuing up to board, some through the front door, some through the rear, according to which line the flight attendant checking our boarding passes had assigned us: in theory the two queues would never meet, dissolving somewhere in the middle of the aircraft: “Row 19 – board through the rear door, please.…
The Life of Knives
The knife came in a special black cardboard box with the blade wrapped in newspaper and slipped into a protective vinyl scabbard. The steel was clean and bright, stippled along the spine as if it had been beaten with a small hammer, and engraved with Japanese calligraphy. The cutting edge bore a watery swirl, like…
The Sketchbook Project Draws the Line …
Jo Buckland can’t remember what she drew in the 36-page sketchbook back in 2010. When a friend told the then 20-year-old Victorian College of the Arts student about a crowd-sourced art project based at the Brooklyn Art Library in New York, she sent away for one of the $US25 A5 sketchbooks on offer. When she…
The Dead Ball Men
“Do you see how beautiful the stadium is,” the father said. “The flawless emerald rectangle where the players assemble, the crowd hushed, the giant screens replaying the game in hallucinatory slow-motion, like our dreams projected on the night sky…” On Friday evenings they were swept along in the crowd hurrying towards the glow of the…
The Hallowe’en Party
It was better to arrive at the Lawton’s Hallowe’en party late, but you wouldn’t know that if you hadn’t been a regular guest over the years. The first hour or so of the party was always dedicated to taking the children around the streets to ask for trick or treat, and as the younger children…
a metaphor for something
When Martin woke he thought, Fuck – should I go in today? He took the dog for a walk along the creek. She whined and jumped against the glass of the back door when she saw him with the lead and wriggled under his hand while while he tried to fix it to her collar.…
Six crazy coffee gadgets … and one great April Fool’s Day joke
Coffee and bright ideas? They go together like a horse and carriage … 1. Fixed-gear no-brainer “I have been riding fixed wheel and drinking double espresso religiously for ten years,” co-inventor of the fixie grinder Dave Buonaguidi told the Daily Coffee News website. The grinder has a 20-gram capacity and takes 100 revolutions of the wheel to…
Rattling the pans
It’s better to be called a cunt than be ignored.¹ You step on a lot of toes in a restaurant kitchen on your way to a Michelin star. You throw a lot of pans at a lot of young, stupid heads. You kick a lot of ignorant customers out of your restaurant, serve hand-cut chips that…
Matt Holden 