Ponytail

by Josh Teixeira

Baltimore artrock heroes Ponytail have been blowing up basements from MICA to Pratt for a while now. We included them on our Memorial Day Muxtape (R.I.P.) back in May, but we wanted more. In this video, we spend a sweaty summer weekend with Ponytail at shows in Baltimore and Brooklyn and talk shop over homemade omelets at their house and practice space. We’re hoping to make this a series of cooking with bands, and we’re excited to kick it off with Ponytail.

Mexican Summer Record Club

by Evan Orensten

By Gabriel Bell

Mexican Summer, a new boutique music label offers the latest titles by contemporary, cutting-edge artists in big, beautiful vinyl wrapped in big, beautiful album jackets. Pressed in limited runs of 500 to 1,000 copies each, Mexican Summer offers albums from acts such as Dungen, Nachtmystium, Bobby BeauSoleil & The Orkustra and others.

For those of you who just can't put your iPhones away, the service backs up every vinyl purchase with a downloadable digital version of the music so you can take it to go. With three albums released every other month, you'd best stock up on those old milk crates—your collection is about to explode. A range of subscriptions are offered, starting at $80 for four months (five albums plus exclusives). Read more...

Double Dutch at London Design Festival

by Leonora Oppenheim

The Double Dutch show was surely the most sensual and evocative display of design talent seen at the London Design Festival last week. A small unused gallery in the Brompton Design District was overtaken by a banquet of flora and fauna, the stunning beauty of which stopped passers by in their tracks. This surprising and seductive guerilla exhibition was curated by Jane Withers and sponsored by the Flower Council of Holland. Two floral design duos were invited to create a show of "Appetites and Emotions".

The floral feast was created by gardener Lisa White and stylist Graham Hollick. They filled two ornate tables at the front of the space with exotic carnivorous plants, roses, orchids and fruit until it was almost overflowing with abundance. Props of golden cutlery and brightly coloured plates added to the general sense of insatiable opulence.

Dutch designers Niels van Eijk and Miriam van der Lubbe created five "Bouquets of Emotions" exhibited on plinths like sculptural artworks. Each bouquet cleverly evoked human feeling such as anger (pictured above), which used prickly thistles, spiky rose stems with their flowers cut off and aggressive looking warped branches. Who knew flowers could be so furious?

Nick Veasey: X-Ray Photographer

by Brian Fichtner

Nick Veasey calls himself the original x-ray nerd. Having spent over a decade obsessively chronicling thousands of objects through x-ray photography, it's an appropriate label. While our society is taught to concern itself with the alluring surface of things, Veasey uses industrial x-ray machines to peel back those upper layers, often revealing a far more beautiful, and complex, underside. Having produced the largest x-ray photograph ever—a Boeing 777 that required over 500 separate x-rays of individual elements—one would think Veasey had reached his summit. As the slideshow and interview below reveals, he's only just getting started.

Cool Hunting: You were formerly an advertising photographer. Advertising is all about creating desire, most often through seductive imagery. How did you make the transition from looking at the surface of objects, to looking beneath?

Nick Veasey: I never really did classical ‘glossy’ advertising type photography. I don’t really like the synthetic look that over manipulated images have. In particular I hate the advertising aimed at men and the worst example of this is Gillette. It is so contrived and cheesy. I dabbled with ‘conventional’ photography by using a camera and film, but I never made conventional imagery. That part of my career was all about experimentation and abstraction.

Moving from abstraction to x-ray was difficult as x-ray is very much a technical process. You have to understand the physics and chemistry of it all. I’m no Einstein so this part was hard. But like most things, the best way to learn is by practical involvement. The more I do it, the better I get. Conceptually speaking, the looking beneath the surface analogy has many avenues to explore. I’ve only just started...

CH: Once you embarked upon this new artistic trajectory, did you—and do you continue to—find yourself looking at the world differently?

NV: You bet. I find myself considering most things in x-ray vision. I can make educated guesses as to what things look like in x-ray. Often I’m wrong – which is good and keeps my feet on the ground. The difficult issue for me is to keep focused on a particular project. So many things that I come across tempt me to pick them up and x-ray them that I get distracted from any particular themed project I may be working on. I’m 46 and my mind is still very active and open to influence. I do find that, in this age of information overload, I’ve had to develop this filtering process. If an idea keeps nagging at me, then I’ll do it. But as I have so many ideas I have to let most fall into the ether and only commit to the ideas that won’t go away, they keep nagging me. So I do them. As I get older my main objective is to do better work, but more slowly, making my results more beautiful and more challenging.

Most of the images that bombard us all are ‘aspirational’. I want to be sexy, cool, thin, younger... My work is real. X-Ray is an honest process. It shows things for what they are, what they are made of. I love that. It balances all that glossy, superficial bollocks. I’m real and straightforward. And so is my work.

Click through for the full interview.

Cleopatra Chair

by Tim Yu

Last week I had the chance to try out the Cleopatra Chair as part of a visit to a spa. Made from a single cut of high-density Italian limestone, it was surprisingly comfortable — for a rock.

Even better, the Cleopatra Chair is heated using silicone-based equipment that bleeds warmth throughout the whole body. And believe it or not, limestone is a soft rock that actually has a bit of give to it. The deluxe chaise lounge is ergonomically designed to follow the body's contours while the firm support aligns the spine. Developed in Germany, some versions even come with a hydraulic lift to elevate the chair.

Place a special order to purchase the Cleopatra chair for $17,000. If you can't shell out that sort of money visit The Resort and Spa at Singer Island. They have a few in their spa.