We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Partners & Spade is a store-cum-gallery-cum-studio-cum-performance space in Lower Manhattan established by Andy Spade and Anthony Sperduti. How to describe the storefront? It’s a bit like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse for creative adults— a place where you can look at art, browse and buy neat things, and generally soak up the conceptual shenanigans of the two founders.

Along with hosting art shows, the two are fond of hosting one-shot events in the vein of ping-pong tournaments, avant-garde preschool classes and, for two memorable weekends, a fanciful French bakery with treats baked in-house by artist Will Cotton. The macarons were impeccable.

It’s to our great delight that Spade and Sperduti have recently launched a website worthy of their space. If you’re not in the neighborhood, an online tour makes a fitting substitute for the store experience. Be sure to check out the custom fixed gear bike, the backdated confidence trophies, and the Stacy Wall skate deck!

Tools are personal. Whether it’s a paintbrush, chisel, camera or sewing machine, a long-used tool becomes like a third arm. You learn its quirks and deficits. You figure out, over time, how to coax the best performance from it.

Best Made appreciates this fact and produces its axes–yes, axes–accordingly. Their axes are made to order, hand-painted and tempered by “one of America’s oldest axe-makers.” The handles are made of hickory from Tennessee and each axe arrives with its own leather blade guard, ready for the kindling pile. Best of all? The axes have names like “Moss Thumper”, “Big Sur” and “Zepyhr”.

Appropriate for chopping wood or just mounting on the wall, the axes come with a lifetime guarantee. As the creators put it–and this applies to every tool, no matter what size– “Axes, like all tools, are at your disposal to make your life, and the world around you a better place, and above all they require your sound judgment and precaution. An axe can bite you if you don’t respect it…always respect your Axe!”

At the intersection of youth, scavenging, fine art, and elegy is the Kid Chair Poster, a visual assemblage of children’s furniture found on the streets of New York. Part narrative experiment and part aesthetic delight, the posters are the brainchild of ARTFORUM-touted provocateurs Trenton Duerksen and Daniele Frazier.

Best part? The $30 poster inaugurates a series of affordable pieces that the artists will release in teensy editions. At last count there were just 84 posters left– order online at the official website or in real life at Partners & Spade, Andy Spade’s nifty retail experiment in SoHo, then display in the office, studio, bedroom, or, if you’re of a certain age, in a fort constructed from blankets and pillows.