One of our newest and most favourite things here at Third Drawer Down is Emma Magenta’s new animated series, The Gradual Demise of Phillipa Finch. Narrated by Toni Collette, and doled out in 17-2 minute segments, it gives us yet another reason to keep our sets tuned to ABC television.
Phillipa Finch is the pin up girl for the emotionally twarted. Each episode tumbles back through her past relationships, and follows her journey from the numb, torpid and stupified to the land of the emotionally fulfilled.
Produced by ABC films and in association with Screen Australia and Screen NSW, it has an eerily beautiful and wholely interactive website, where you can create your very own Emma Magenta inspired “heartworks” based on your current emotional state. Here you can also see every episode as it is revealed.
They’ve also created a super addictive iphone game, which is impossible to put down.
Third Drawer Down has created the licensed products for all the ABC stores and franchises, which include Phillipa’s favourite soap bar, tea towel, magnets and mug. We will be distributing these products, and they will be available shortly online and instore (as well as ABC stores).
The 6-part IFC Original short-based comedy series PORTLANDIA, created, written by and starring Fred Armisen (SNL) and Carrie Brownstein (vocalist/guitarist, WILD FLAG, Sleater-Kinney), premieres on IFC Friday, January 21, 2011 at 10:30 PM ET/PT. Each episode’s character-based shorts draw viewers into “Portlandia,” the creators' dreamy and absurd rendering of Portland, Oregon.
“I love Portlandia. It really represents so much of what I love culturally, musically and in so many other ways,” said Fred Armisen. “This started as just a fun summer activity for Carrie and me. We’d be hanging out in Portland and shooting whatever made us laugh, and that evolved into Portlandia.”
PORTLANDIA’s inhabitants include but are not limited to: the owners of a feminist book store; a militant bike messenger; an artsy couple who attach cut-outs of birds to everything (“put a bird on it!”); an organic farmer who turns out to be a cult leader; an adult hide and seek league; and a punk rock couple negotiating a “safe word” to help govern their love life. The first episode depicts Armisen and Brownstein meeting with the Mayor of Portland (Kyle MacLachlan) who solicits the duo to write a new theme song for the city. This segment features a cameo from the real mayor of Portland (Sam Adams) playing the assistant to MacLachlan’s “mayor.” Much of the series' original music is written and performed by Armisen and Brownstein.
An assortment of guest stars inhabit PORTLANDIA, including Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks, Sex & The City), Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation), Selma Blair (Legally Blonde, Hellboy), Heather Graham (The Hangover), Edie McClurg (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), Kumail Nanjiani (Michael & Michael Have Issues), Jason Sudeikis (SNL, The Cleveland Show), and Gus Van Sant (Milk). Singer/songwriter Aimee Mann also guest stars, alongside James Mercer (The Shins), and local Portland musicians Jenny Conlee and Colin Meloy (The Decemberists) and Corin Tucker (Sleater-Kinney).
Brownstein and Armisen spent years observing the joyous eccentricities of Portland, Oregon (when Fred was on hiatus from SNL), which spawned their “Thunderant” project, a compilation of online videos that combined their unique music styles and comedic sensibilities. Their artistic collaboration garnered an online cult following, as their “Thunderant” characters resonated with a young audience celebrating individuality, free spirit and weirdness.
I’m always amazed at how the holidays just sneak up on all of us. We are just going along our everyday things, la-de-da, one day you hear someone humming a little Christmas tune on the tram… soon after, a sign or two about sales, in the shop, you hear people talking about stocking stuffers, and buying multiples of little gadgets or playthings. You think nothing of it until one day, Blam!
I came home a few days ago to see my stay at home writer husband Josh, sitting at his desk in his boxers wearing a dollar shop elf hat, felted red and green, with giant pointy elf ears poking out the sides.
Oh my god, The Holidays are here! I mention the boxer shorts, as this is pretty much his daily uniform in house during summer. And the hat? He found it stuck under the junk drawer in the kitchen while searching for pencil leads. It was a treasure from our first holiday in Australia, before I knew how hot summers could be, and I tried to stuff him into a reindeer sweater on Christmas morning.
So, begrudgingly it is time to hike up those boxers, get like an elf, and get ready for the holiday season. This newsletter is filled with all new goodies, from the stocking to the stuffers.
For those of you Nearby, we will be part of the MARKit @ Fed Square in a few weeks. Here we’ll be toting special deals on our best items, as well as the coveted mystery bags for 20 bucks!
We will share the Atrium with over 30 other designers and shops, so if you want to get things done quick, come and see all of Melbournes greatest design shops under one roof!
MARKit @ Fed Square
The Atrium – Federation Square
Corner of Swanston and Flinders Street Melbourne
Sunday November 28th
10 AM – 5 PM
WOW.
Oh, the internet. It’s pretty darn magical, with its ability to let you peep into the rest of the world from the comfort of your couch and slippers. Even the most housebound folk can Wikipedia themselves across the globe, picking up obscure facts to use in showy dinner conversation. Like did you know that there are tourism groups to Mexico from the US based completely around cheap dentistry work, and dentists there use styrofoam teaching tools in early days of Mexican dental school? Well, what better way to convince your friends and family about your worldliness than to have these obscure, special and oh-so unique items just laying around your house?
Want some breakfast? Peel up some potatoes with a luxurious Famos Potato Peeler, straight from Germany. After that, have some juice straight from the orange with a Citra Sipper created at the 1933 World’s Fair in Florida, then grate some cheese with a great Italian invention and do your washing up with a true horsehair dish brush, handmade in Denmark.
KIOSK can provide these things, with fantastic back stories which beat the crap out of Wikipedia. And now, in Australia, you can bring these bits back without changing out of your jammies.
Oh, and you can also get that Styrofoam Mouth Teaching tool here too.
Come to the KIOSK opening for the Launch of Third Drawer Down X Victorian Aids Council’s Free Condom Project.
Boxes of beautiful free condoms will be shipping out to stores across Victoria to help promote The Art of Being Smart.
Featuring works by David Shrigley, James Gallagher, Anne De Vries and Kill Pixie, each little box contains both condom and lubricant, and are oh-so collectable and fun. The Free Condom Project aims to positively change perceptions about condom use, helping to reduce the increasing rate of STIs by making condoms readily accessible to sexually active people in a fun and engaging way that encourages people to take ownership of their health and wellbeing.
Come to the Free Condom Projects opening launch and pick up some Free Condoms:
Retail Partners:
FAT
Third Drawer Down
Magnation
Metropolis
Polyester Records
Alice Euphemia
Little Salon
Galleon Cafe St Kilda
Kinki Gerlinki
That Store
Southern Cross Pharmacy
Chiodo
Bally Ho
Orlando and Ivy
Please email us if you have a retail store and would like to find out how to become a partner or you would like your own branded condom.
DATE: Thursday 4th November
TIME: 6-8pm
WHERE: Third Drawer Down / KIOSK
93 George St, Fitzroy 3065
So you know that feeling when you were a kid and your mom put you in a turtle-necked sweater? It was the most itchy and suffocating thing, and no matter how much you tried to stretch out that neck, it clenched right back down to its previous vice-like grip like magic.
That is a bit of how we are feeling at the moment in our studio and warehouse space. KIOSK is coming, which is just so damn fantastic, but since the expansion, our studio is packed to breaking point, and our little heads are just poking out from the boxes. That is why we’ve decided to have the most scrumptious and gargantuan Garage Sale all day Saturday!
It’s the most secret and fantastic projects we’ve done, plus everything else which is filling our shop and making us stuffy. Pillowcases, Sculptures, Tea Towels, Mugs, Books, Music Boxes, Chocolates, Soaps and much, much, much more. We can’t even tell you too much about it, we don’t want to ruin the excitement and surprises on the day!
It’s sure to be the most fantastic day, with Free Lemonade all afternoon, and prices being made up on the spot with Absolute Reckless Abandon.
And if you can’t make it to our Absolutely Huge Garage Sale this weekend, check on line after the weekend and see what we’ve cooked up for you out of state-ers.
Come, have some lemonade and help save our sanity.
Get ready Australians! The most super-utilitarian New York design store Kiosk will be making its debut with a permanent storefront at Third Drawer Down, Melbourne from November 4th.
KIOSK is a travel story depicted through objects, a collection of interesting things from around the world, simple everyday anonymous things that generally go unnoticed. It is a study of material culture, a shop, an effort to preserve unique and indigenous objects, an installation, and something different from the every day. Alisa Grifo and husband Marco Romeny create their collection of curiosities on bi-yearly trips, with their most recent collection heralding from Japan. Their travels result in an enticing collection of “traditional goods that have been developed over generations or anonymous design found in general stores, DIY’s and Kiosks: products designed not around one personality but the result of local aesthetic and needs.” KIOSK is an ever-changing exhibition celebrating beauty in the found object.
Clamber though the foam padded doorway at Third Drawer Down and you will find a collection of esoteric and chaotic objects from across the globe made by anonymous designers, ranging from handmade reindeer horn mushrooming knives from Sweden, Portuguese weather roosters to neon green plastic Citra Sippers from Florida. In essence, things so different and special you never knew you couldn’t live without them.
KIOSK currently has a selection of objects at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, Postalco in Tokyo, SCP in London and Project no.8 in New York.
Third Drawer Down have collaborated again with the Tate to develop an exciting range of products for the Paul Gauguin Maker of Myth exhibition. This new collection of includes a superb market bag with hand stitched leather handles and feet, cushion with bobble trimming, both featuring a detail of Gauguin’s 1898 Faa Iheihe painting, tea for one set, ceramic tiles, mug, wooden stamp set, embroidered tea towel, metal tray, book bag and pin cushion that utilizes the scrap fabric from all products within the textile range.
(text from Tate website) Gauguin is one of the world’s most famous and best-loved artists from the early 20th century. For the first time in the UK in over 50 years, Tate Modern presents an exhibition dedicated to this master French Post-Impressionist, featuring paintings and drawings from around the world. His sumptuous, colourful images of women in Tahiti and beautiful landscape images of Brittany in France are some of the most popular images in Modern art.
Gauguin was the ultimate global traveller, sailing the South Seas, and living in Peru, Martinique, and Paris among other places. This exhibition explores the role of the myths around the man – Gauguin as storyteller, painting himself as a Christ-like figure or even a demon in his own paintings, religious and mythical symbols in his work, and the manipulation of his own artistic identity. It features many of his iconic paintings, including those showing daily village life from the artist’s colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany, nude bathers and haystacks in the Breton landscape, and decorative works such as the carved wooden door panels around Gauguin’s hut in the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia.
Gauguin sought to escape European civilisation in the South Seas. Inspired by Tahiti’s tropical flora, fauna and island life, he immersed himself in its fast-disappearing local culture to invest his art with deeper meaning, ritual and myth.
Just in time for Spring Third Drawer Down and The Victorian Aids Council present The Free Condom Project. These little love boxes are the most collectable and useful things out there, with works by David Shrigley, Kill Pixie, James Galligar and Anne De Vries, they are the ultimate in date shiek.
The best part? they are absolutely, knee-spankingly FREE. Our Victorian-wide launch is a few weeks away, but are now available exclusively at our store in Melbourne. Ask us for a box when you order, and we will pop one in for free. Fall in love this spring, and let Third Drawer Down help.
Third Drawer Down have collaborated again with the 
