girls

Have you listened to this band before? I've had this song sitting around for ages, but I think they only just released their album, according to Pitchfork. This is the video clip for my favourite one, Lust for Life. How good are the lyrics...

take it outside

so fantastic

The Making of Fantastic Mr. Fox
Designed by Angus Hyland, Pentagram London
Rizzoli New York

Inspired by the coffee table book Truffaut by Truffaut, Wes Anderson and designer Angus Hyland of Pentagram London have put together the official companion to his latest film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. The book contains sketches, photos, interviews, and plenty of corduroy swatches sure to please fans of Wes Anderson and the whimsical world he creates.

via Pentagram

big girls don't cry

don't tell me the truth about love

I stumbled across the work of Dan Rhodes the other day. I quite like it. His book Anthropology and a Hundred Other Stories consists of snippets like these. His website is full of gems too.

film buff

What films have you been watching lately? These are on my 'To Watch' list - what should I add?

//paper heart
//where the wild things are
//fantastic mr fox
//christiane f
//valerie and her week of wonders
//lying

nice outfit

so naive

This is so cute! Doesn't it remind of you the books that taught you to read? Tom and Susan and their adventures...

don't you want me baby

we love sensitive boyfriend and sensitive boyfriend loves...

Sensitive Boyfriend. When it kept popping up on Facebook, my interest was piqued. I mean, who doesn't want one? We asked the mastermind behind the so named popup store, Drus Dryden, for his ten favourite things...

one. montage scenes
Say it with images & an 80s soundtrack!





two. By:AMT diamond rings
I gave my ex-fiancée a lot of these, but she kept falling off her bike and breaking them. Then another one got stuck on her finger (she had enlarged knuckles from all that basketball) and I had to delicately remove it with a hammer. Damn you symbolism! Other than that the rings are great.



three. American Apparel socks
Colourful socks turns an outfit’s frown upsides down.



four. lips sofa
I’ve loved the lips sofa since I saw it on the set of 80’s sitcom, My Two Dads.




five. Fantastic Man magazine
Fantastic Man is a fantastic magazine from Amsterdam, available from Mag Nation in Auckland.
Check here for daily recommendations.

six. missed connections
When someone has a moment with a lusty stranger in San Francisco, they write about it here. I am the author of the world’s longest missed connection, which started as a missed connection to a missed connection (they didn’t write back when I emailed them.)

seven. cider
It’s my new Rosé.

eight. Fly By Night
An Aladdin’s cave of a vintage emporium in Kingsland. The store’s deck chairs, picture frames, suitcases, “I support eh rugby tour” badge and logo are all from here. Matt (who runs it with Lili) can often be found sanding down furniture out the front. Parking outside the store switches to a clearway at 4pm, and he warns people like me that they’re about to get towed. And you don’t get service like that every where. . .

500 New North Road, Kingsland
www.flybynight.co.nz



nine. Trigger Happy
A great new Americana shop in Grey Lynn. You can’t buy any more cowboy button covers because I have cornered the market. . . like a cowboy herding his cattle into the corral. The proprietor, Tom, built the shop himself in Adobe style, and that’s his Cadillac parked out front. Look for his dad’s Torpedo pen, it’s below the stuffed baby alligator in the “not really for sale, but too cool to hide away” section.

44 Hakanoa St, Grey Lynn
wwwtriggerhappystore.com



ten. parachute dresses

Dresses made out of vintage silk parachutes. Even floating through the air was more romantic then.

sensitive boyfriend is a fashion & design pop-up store open until the 27th of November, in the High Seas opp the Supper Club at the top of Pitt Street, near K Road in Auckland. Your insensitive boyfriend will be cooking you breakfast & writing you poetry before he can say ‘you’re the best thing that ever happened to me.’

the lovely dress

Our friend Juliette Hogan made this special one-off dress for actress Rose McIver to wear to the premiere of The Lovely Bones in London today (she plays Lindsey Salmon in the film). Isn't it, er, lovely?

if wishes were kisses

Wish I had time to just laze about in something pretty for a bit. Who else is looking forward to the Christmas holidays? It's summer here in New Zealand, and I can't wait.

le petit prince

My absolute, all time favourite children's book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince. I have it in French, I have it in English, I have a spare copy for lending. It's a beautiful tale, with beautiful illustrations and if you haven't read it you really have to do so immediately.

So, how cute was it to find this little compact by Japanese designer Tsumori Chisato for Shu Uemuera? I met Shu Uemuera's son earlier this year - he's the man who invented those infamous eyelash curlers. If only I'd known this was coming out at the time, I would have begged for one for my very own.

"That is the hardest thing of all. It is much harder to judge yourself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself, it's because you're truly a wise man."

"You risk tears if you let yourself be tamed"

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

bad girls to go hell

Smart girls go to this website.

so much to tell you

When Zoe and I changed the name of the site to its current incarnation, we didn't overtly think about the John Marsden book. But, the more I think about it, the more I remember the experience of reading it when I was in my early teens. It made me so, so sad and I could never comprehend the notion of such a sudden, seemingly unresolved ending. I really want to find a copy of it in a second-hand bookstore.

Marsden is, or was, a very prolific writer of teen fiction. He's Australian, and his series Tomorrow, When the War Began sent me spiralling into fear and fantasy when I read it. The general gist of the series is a group of teenagers who manage to escape the clutches of a mysterious, faceless invasion of Australia.

So Much To Tell You, however, is more personal, intimate. It's letters in a diary format, following the story of Marina.

Marina has a scarred face due to acid that was thrown by her father. She refused to talk to anyone when she was at hospital to recover, so she was sent to Warrington Boarding School for a chance to communicate again. But even then, her silence goes on. Her English teacher Mr. Lindell gives her class journals to write in. Despite the unwillingness to write in the journal, Marina still records some trivial daily events in her school down. She eventually starts to write beyond just trivia and the readers are able to see Marina's world, and how her friends, teachers and families influence her. Marina goes from not interacting at all, to opening up and socializing, as well as communicating. As the book goes on, Marina's uncertain feelings towards her father fade away. In the end of the book she goes to see him, and speaks the only words she says in the entire book: "Hello, Dad," and "I've got so much to tell you..."

What books defined your early teenage reading?

absence makes the heart grow fonder

'I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance,' Leo says at one point, 'that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.'

Siri Hustvedt - What I Loved

ASPEN

“Until now, every magazine was a bunch of pages stapled together. It arrived in your mailbox folded, mutilated spindled — usually with more ads than editorial. Last year, a group of us enjoying the sun, skiing and unique cultural climate of Aspen Colorado, asked ourselves, ‘Why?’

Why, for example, couldn’t a magazine come in a box? Why shouldn’t an article exploring jazz be accompanied by an LP record illustrating in sound our words in print? Why couldn’t each article be a separate booklet, in the shape, color and paper most appropriate to the subject?

We kept asking why for months. Aspen magazine is the answer.” - August 1966 advertisement for Aspen

I'm not sure how I have never come to know of Aspen before. But I'm glad I have now. It was only around for a few years, but the contributors numbered such luminaries as Andy Warhol, John Cale, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, Marcel Duchamp, Philip Glass, J.G. Ballard, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Richter, John Lennon, Merce Cunningham and Willem De Kooning.

Obviously, picking up a copy is terribly expensive, but this website provides scans of all of them in entirety. So wonderful, as is the magazine that I learnt about it from, Dossier.

good morning sunshine

oh pants

Here are three outfits that I'm digging right now. I never wear pants, but I think I need to start.
Photos: Lonely Hearts, The Cherry Blossom Girl and French Glamour

piano lessons

About ten years ago my mum painted her piano a futuristic shade of silver, which I always thought was pretty damn cool – but it can't compare to Lady GaGa's amazing pink butterfly grand piano, by Damien Hirst. I can't play the piano (well, except for an awkward rendition of Mary Had a Little Lamb), but I want this in my dream house.

wouldn't it be nice