Paul Youdell (Cannonball Bob)

The saxophone-playing busker in The Rocks
At Circular Quay near the MCA, there is this awesome bald, black sax player with gold headphones and backing tape. I got misty eyed when he played Careless Whisper on Wednesday. To date his crowning glory, hands down, has been his stirring rendition of Love, Thy Will Be Done. Yo.

Microcastle, Deerhunter
New Deerhunter album got leaked on the internet. It's actually out in September. It's "OK Computer good" and the best thing I have heard since My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. If you don't agree, we can't be friends. I like MBV a lot. See you in New York!

Tuff Turf
As in, the 80s film with James Spader and the drumstick-spinning Robert Downey Jr. Unintentionally hilarious is the standout scene: Spader and Co. crash a poncy preppy country club for a free lunch. What better way to seduce the rival gang leader's GF? Serenade her with some piano magic. He gets the girl. She had waist-long crimped hair. Entirely Justified. Word.

Goldfish
Just bought two. Their names change daily for my personal amusement. I enjoy changing their water and feeding them in a Betty Ford 12-step plan kinda way. They are my children. They are my friends. Currently titled Hall & Oates. Previous names have included Smith & Wesson/Riggs & Murtaugh.

Shane Skillz
He swears. He swears a lot. He's a rapper from Broadmeadows. I don't know if it's "for real" but it sure is funny. Remember when you'd go to the type of birthday parties where you'd watch Police Academy and laugh so hard Fanta would come out your nose? Shane Skillz is that good.

Paul Youdell (aka Cannonball Bob) plays groundshaking and window-rattling bass in Sydney trio Skullsquadron. If your feet aren't fuzzed out from floorboard pins-and-needles at their concerts, then he's not playing loud enough. They have an album coming out "sometime late 2008".

Mark Drew

Cafe Ish
Excellent coffee and menu, excellent people. Plus I have two paintings hanging in there right now.
Shop 2, 102 Albion Street, Surry Hills NSW (02) 9281 1688.

Japan
36° north of the equator. Love it. Miss the convenience.

Print Gocco: Toy screenprinting kit
Analogue technology and painless process makes me the happiest. Perfect addition to any zine workshop.

Old 'Peanuts' books
Man's inhumanity to man - Charlie Brown tells it like it is.

Twin Peaks
I wasn't interested in the TV show the first time round, but just
getting stuck into the DVDs. Finally I get Homer Simpson's reference!

Mark Drew is a zine magnate, whose stapled projects include Long Story Short (with Beccy Joe Stuart), My Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades (with Tristan Serps) and several miniature zines of screen shots from 80s films that slug you with a huge bout of nostalgia. He also runs China Heights gallery, which got so popular it had to move to a new address: 257 Crown Street, Darlinghurst NSW.

Natasha Ley

Adriano Zumbo Patissier
I was a bit slow in discovering this place, it opened last November, but since I have I can’t stay away. I was in there on the weekend buying little pistachio macaroons to take to a dinner party and a girl walked in with a group of friends just to food perv. Each delicious morsel in there is a little work of art!
296 Darling St, Balmain NSW (02) 9810 7318,
adrianozumbo.com

City Walks: Paris, 50 Adventures on Foot by Christina Henry de Tessan
I’m planning a trip to France and a friend gave me this cute little set of 50 cards, with detailed maps of Paris on one side and a list of restaurants, shops and sites to visit on the other. Much more chic than trying to look at a big folded map and looking like a tourist… Etes-vous d'accord?

Ben Quilty
I absolutely love Ben Quilty’s textured artworks. There is an amazing fashion shoot photographed in his art studio in the current issue of Vogue. I think his artworks (in the background behind the models), steal the show (sorry Vogue!) It’s a beautiful shoot and reminded me of how much I love Ben’s paintings. Apparently he has an exhibition coming up at the Grant Pirrie Gallery in Redfern on the 6th August.

Basement Books
Last week I bought Neil Perry’s The Food I Love for $36.95 rather than RRP$85. This book shop has lots of bargains.
Shop 1, Henry Deane Plaza, 2 Lee Street, Haymarket NSW (02) 9211 7726, www.basementbooks.com.au

Neil Perry’s Cinnamon-Scented Middle Eastern Lamb (see above)
Delicious. For me this winter, it’s all about Middle Eastern food.

Burt’s Bees 'Almond Milk Beeswax' Hand Creme
This creme is beautiful, thick and smells amazing.

Natasha Ley is Deputy Art Director of Sunday magazine and previously worked on Inside Out and Australian Gourmet Traveller. She is a generous foodie who has the combined knowledge of every volume on your cookbook shelf and is able to convey it without Gordon Ramsay's swear record (in fact, her delivery is much warmer and gentler). She once swam out to sea - under a sky of pounding rain - to rescue some antique buoys that had blown away in the wind and had to returned after a very wet and gale-like photo shoot.

Matthew Levinson

I've been in a bit of a USA bubble the past month or so. So you'll have to take my apologies in advance for a very States-centric list. I love the idea of lists by the way. I grew up with music magazine Top 10s, Nick Hornby; god, even The Commitments. And I was just reading about Amazon's Listmania, which is weirdly terrific.

Grace Paley
I'm a short story fanatic. I guess I love how Raymond Carver, Chekhov and the rest pack so much into so few pages. Fire your imagination, leave you guessing. Grace Paley is much more personal than those guys. Less bleak, still very real. She described herself as a "cooperative anarchist", which I like. Art was too long, and life was too short, she said. She wrote only four slim books in 50 years.

Eduardo Sarabia
I saw Sarabia's work at Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement, a show at the Hammer museum in LA. I'd never seen his paintings before. 'Painted Memories', 'Tainted Memories', and 'Tetris King and Queen of the Monarch Butterflies' - the paintings I saw - are beautifully rendered landscapes or portraits that he's daubed with big smudges, splashes of colour that obscure or completely deface the subjects. You'd expect that to be a kind of Sex Pistols-esque nullification, but instead it charges the canvas with life. Truly fantastic.

The New Yorker magazine
I'm in love with NYC. There, I said it. And being able to get The New Yorker from the newstand for a decent price, the week it's published, and peruse its listings with the possibility of getting to the gigs, book readings, performances - so great. I like The Monthly - Australia's answer to The New Yorker - and I've especially been enjoying Alice Pung's sketches, but it's not quite the same. Maybe because Robert Manne's pieces get on my nerves.

Kings Lane Sandwiches
Best chicken sandwiches in Sydney. Not much else to say. Kings Lane Sandwiches, 28 Kings Lane, Darlinghurst NSW (02) 9360 8007.

City of Sound
Dan Hill blogs on his two fascinations: music and urban design, though it's weighted to the latter. He was design boss at Monocle, and before that the BBC; he's now with urban developers/consultants Arup. For someone with that kind of CV, he devotes a lot of time to blogging. His posts are well-researched, informative and extremely informed, packed with ideas, and fascinating to read. Recent favourites include long pieces on 'seamfulness' in train ticketing, music scenes unlocking the dynamics of broader creative shifts and the Sydney record shop Title.

Matt Levinson is a blogger, writer, radio presenter, DJ, perfect dinner guest and all-round thoughtful person. He hosts Canvas on FBI 94.5FM in Sydney and has a very funny story about scaling mountains in Japan.

Alana Adye

1. Failure baking.
You know when everything just seems to be a bit wrong? And then you can't sleep and that makes things that little bit worse? Baking challenging new things at odd hours - 'failure baking' - has curative properties for me.

2. Eating apples.
They're in season and, really, could there ever be anything better than a crisp apple at some inappropriate hour of the morning when you've had a beverage or two, but are still far from bed? Carry an apple in your bag and you're sorted.

3. Downloading MoMA audio
New York is far away, but MoMA hosts great guest speakers. The lovely internet brings some of this arty excitement to my waiting ears at the click of a mouse.

4. Browsing Craigslist (New York)
I've been told that it's one of the better ways to find a place to live in NYC, but really I just love reading the often hilarious descriptions ("I have ten cats. Don't bother if you don't like cats. Seriously." etc) that accompany the vacancy posts.

5. Listening to Shag's playlists
My friend works in radio and has cultivated the wonderful habit of compiling playlists of songs he's currently enamoured with. Listening 'Shag's picks' never fails to have a positive effect on my emotional wellbeing (thanks Shag!).

Alana Adye can bake her way out of a bad situation and has enough cinema-savvy to shame the most screen-glued critic. In fact, she's off to New York later this year to buff up her film knowledge even more. (Another smartie lost from Sydney, sadly.)

Beccy Joe Stuart

1. Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
The best book I have read in recent memory. Written in the first person about a country girl's experience in a posh boarding school, her awkwardness and self-consciousness from that age I can completely relate to. The realness of it kills me.

2. John Henry - the van I live in
It's a 1984 Chevy camper van in various tones of brown. Featuring stove, fridge, sink and seats that convert to bed. Cramped but comfortable. Very loveable. Only fits what you need. Takes you anywhere you wanna go. Here's to mobile homes and life on the road.

3. Kentucky - the state
I love Kentucky for the bluegrass music and the horses and the friendly southern hospitality. And the fireflies at night. And the Appalachian mountains. It's dreamy.

4. BJ, my husband.
Can I say that? Sigh. I love him so much!
He's so good at directions and so easy to get along with. I'm so happy to be married to him.

ALTERNATIVELY

4. American micro-brew beers
All over the U.S. and Canada, you can get locally made "micro-brew" beers. They're local and cheap and seem to transcend the ugly beer culture created by big corporate beer brands etc. I was never a beer drinker until I discovered these. They have all kinds of flavours, my favourite so far is a Honey Lager from St Louis. I find them very drinkable and they often have beautiful labels.

5. The Dry Branch Fire Squad
This is the band we saw at the bluegrass festival we went to on the weekend. The lead guy sings beautifully and tells long rambling funny stories between songs about growing up poor and the horses he's loved. They've been around for over 30 years... We've been listening to the CD in the car.

Beccy Joe Stuart is currently in Kentucky, driving around in a van that shares a name with an American folk hero. She owns seven versions of the traditional folk song, In The Pines, and recently put out a zine called Note To Husband. She even has a blog, currently only available in one version (although lots of singers might release their own cover of it one day).

James Gulliver Hancock

No One Belongs Here More Than You: stories by Miranda July
Miranda July is so great, I think I'm in love with her. I saw her at an opening in LA and almost died with shock. And these little stories of hers change your life - incredible!

Bottino NYC
Amazingly relaxed and relatively inexpensive, Bottino does everything just how I would, but better. Great for after the gallery openings in Chelsea.

It's Nice That blog
This blog has a great collection of stuff all the time, I was featured on here too!

Charles and Ray Eames
Famous for their chairs, Charles and Ray Eames are a creative duo who made everything from films to houses to mobiles. They had an awesomely varied career.

The recent New Yorker letter written by Haruki Murakami
This article was about how the Japanese author got into writing, changing from running a small jazz club in Japan. He describes his personality and its growth so well.

James Gulliver Hancock has created countless images that will blitz your visual cortex - from the beautifully whimsical cover for Darren Hanlon's last album to publications for Herman Miller to eye-stunning animation clips for Josh Pyke. An Australian artist currently based in LA, his latest work can be seen here.