America’s King of Macabre Would Have Made a Killer Fashion Designer

Who else writes an alphabet book where “E is for Ernest who choked on a peach?” or where “B is for Basil assaulted by bears?” Master of the macabre, Edwardian enthusiast, unlikely style icon, cat lover – there’s no box the late illustrator and author Edward Gorey doesn’t tick for us. He wasn’t trying to…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CCCXLIII)

1. A Great White Shark preserved in formaldehyde in an abandoned wildlife park “Curiously, the shark—alongside the rest of the park’s non-living attractions—were left behind. Apparently interest from the curators at the Melbourne Museum also cooled, as the shark had began to badly age in its forgotten tank. So then, for the next seven years,…

Search for the 235 Anonymous Souls of Studio “Foto Americain”

Ernst Lalleman doesn’t make friends like the rest of us. “I was mesmerized by the quality, as if I could hear the voices of these people talking to me from the past,” he told us about the collection of 235 portrait negatives he found so many years ago, and have been his silent companions ever…

The Revolutionary ’70s Girl Group That Swept Bowie off His Feet

“They were one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time,” David Bowie told Rolling Stone magazine in 1999. They were called “Fanny,” and they were a breath of fresh air in an industry where few women, let alone all-girl groups, were given the space to rock out. Fanny saw that space, and claimed…

Taking Cash Out (and Proud) at the World’s Gayest Bank

There’s a certain anatomy to a makeover scene, but it always promises a drab to glam transformation – which is why the initiative of one Australian bank is going down as one of the most fabulous in history. “The things that matter to [us] are the same things that matter to our customers and our…

She Was a Bag Lady to Most, until She Became the City’s Most Collected Artist

“I’m much better than Cezanne,” she would say if you had the opportunity to cross paths with Lee Godie selling her canvases on the steps of the Chicago Art Institute. She was a homeless self-taught artist who floated about town for many years; her arms full with artworks, wearing a patched-up fur coat, hair wild but…

The Women Who Walked on Wings

Gladys Roy, pictured above on the far wing, is probably the only woman in the world who could say she’s played tennis on an airplane– at least in our circle of friends. As it turns out, a lot of women did some pretty crazy stuff on airplanes in the 1920s… Take Gladys Ingle, for example…

Take a Brain Break with Errol Le Cain’s Fantasy Illustrations

Errol Le Cain is the perfect example of the magic that happens when cultures collide. Growing up in Singapore, India, and London, the British illustrator started inventing his fantasy worlds as early as early as age 11, weaving in elements of Moorish symmetry, Indonesian shadow puppets, and Baroque fantasy. Above all, he took the art…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CCCXLII)

1. Potemkin Villages: Fake towns and villages designed for police or military training The concept of the “Potemkin Village” can be traced back to Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin, a Russian field marshal and favorite of Empress Catherine the Great. Anxious to spare the grim face of the recently annexed Crimea when she was visiting in 1787,…

It’s about Time we Reinvented the Autochrome

Show me an Instagram filter that can do this and I’ll personally take you out to dinner so that we can become lifelong friends. Autochrome is a dead art – a secret recipe – if you will, that has been long lost to the modern world, left uncharted by 21st century technology and yet to be…