Naked in the Mountains 100 Years Ago, She Invented the Advanced Selfie

Anne Brigman was turning up her selfie prowess about 100-years before the rest of us. For one, she was never the stoic, buttoned-up type, and felt more at home on a mountaintop than with a roof over her head. When Brigman stepped inside the lens of her camera, the result was a ‘selfie’ that looked…

Midnight Movie of the Month: A Forgotten “Rocky Horror” Sister Film

What’s your favourite midnight movie? That one totally weird film you tell your friends about at parties, a vintage masterpiece that slipped through the cracks of mainstream culture, because it was just too strange to find a traditional audience, and instead found an unlikely cult following elsewhere. We’ve discovered a midnight movie that’s slipped under…

Painting the Apocalypse

Wow, where is that? I thought leaning in closer to my screen, squinting at the ghostly concrete towers. It wasn’t until I actually saved the image to my computer and put it through Google reverse image search, that I actually realised, I wasn’t looking at a photograph. This is the work of Simon Stålenhag– and if you’ve…

Paris Has a Brutal(ist) Side

Love it or hate it, brutalist architecture has an unavoidable presence in every major metropolis– even Paris. In fact, the French capital is something of a haven for futurist concrete architecture. Brutalist boomed here during the 60s and 70s in response to Modernism’s utopian vision, and after Haussmann, came superstar architects like Le Corbusier and an…

Vintage Japanese Advertising Could Sell Us Anything

The foamiest men’s shampoo to make bath-time oodles more fun? The latest must-have make-up for your back? Whatever they were selling, we would’ve been buying. If you were in post-WWII Japan, your eyeballs had the luck of watching the advertising world grow brighter, hipper, and (especially in the ’80s) weirder. From the surreal visuals and zany…

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

1. A Time Capsule Airbnb Apartment in New York City In my arduous search to find accommodation for my upcoming stay in New York, I came across one of the city’s more unique and affordable options. You might have heard of the venerable Ear Inn, the grandfather of New York’s grand old saloons…. The upstairs apartment has…

The Vault

Trolling Nazis (and the world) with Forged Art

The accepted number of authenticated Vermeer paintings today is 34, but that number became mysteriously higher during World War II. Hermann Göring himself, a leader of the Nazi party and notorious art looter, traded 137 of his prized stolen paintings for a newly-discovered Vermeer, one of several 17th century works that had suddenly emerged in…

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The Music Your Plants Are Making in Secret

Think twice the next time you pluck a daisy from the sidewalk, because that flower may actually be ‘screaming’ in a language you don’t understand— or at least, not yet. Today, we’re cracking the code of the fascinating world of plant sentience, a.k.a., the secret way in which everything from your Ikea houseplant to a…

Here’s the American Dream looking pretty Hungover by the 1970s

I would have liked to see America during its in-between period– somewhere in the seventies when the whole “Stepford Wives” thing and censorship and social compliance was over with (more or less), but they hadn’t yet starting tearing down all those wonderful and whimsical buildings. Sure, they might have been looking a little sorry for…

What Happened to the Other Muses of Andy Warhol?

“One person in the ’60s fascinated me more than anybody I had ever known,” wrote Andy Warhol in his 1977 autobiography, From A to B and Back Again, “And the fascination I experienced was probably very close to a certain kind of love.” He never gets more explicit, preferring instead to steep in that infamous brand of Warholian…