Today saw the release of the newest album from Brooklyn based band The National, titled Trouble Will Find Me. I haven’t heard the album yet (they didn’t option it to Rdio, I guess) but I am enjoying the song I’ve posted above called “Don’t Swallow the Cap”. As you may have gleaned from the title the song, I believe, is about struggling with addiction. What I find funny is that every National song I hear seems so “pretty” and melodic, so you’ve got this song about a pretty serious subject that’s done so beautifully. That’s the joy of The National though and why they’re one of the best bands out there right now.

It’s summer blockbuster movie season, but for those of us interested in eschewing loud spectacles in favor of the smaller cinematic wonders, I’d like to recommend A Band Called Death for the top of your must-see list. In theaters on June 28, but available via iTunes VOD on May 24, the documentary tells the story of three teenage brothers—Bobby, David, and Dannis Hackney—from Detroit, Michigan, making punk rock before there was definable punk in the USA. Not only was this trio of misfits making killer original music at a time when disco and Motown were each having their respective moments, they were blasting the typical labels placed on artists at that time. And even though they disbanded before finishing their first album, going so far as to lock up their master tapes in an attic, they have since gone on to acquire the most unique semi-posthumous fame.

Though the band pressed a single and played local gigs, they had trouble garnering the attention of record labels as many found a trio of black punks—and their band name—too intimidating to sign. But when a 1974 demo tape found it’s way out of obscurity and began influencing a younger genration of musicians and fans, the band suddenly experienced a resurrection. I’m thrilled to find out more about the band and their first album, …For the Whole World to See, which has some fantastic cover artwork. Check out the trailer with a cameo by Henry Rollins below.

This weekend, I kind of stumbled into a rabbit hole of Japanese architecture. Or maybe it’s more like an ant farm? It started when I wanted to see what Jun Aoki was up to, and ended when I found these incredible models by Ikimono Architects. Honestly, I’m not even sure how I arrived at the firm’s website; between Jun Aoki and Ikimono Architects, it’s all a blur of white spaces and asymmetrical windows.

I didn’t realize I had seen the firm’s work before on ArchDaily and designboom because the speculative models are so distinct from the firm’s built work. And while the firm has realized some lovely built projects (I’m particularly fond of the Atelier Tinjinyama) the imagination of these unbuilt projects is outstanding. The project above is the “Eats ground project” which features a labyrinth of spaces burrowing into the site. The displaced dirt from the excavated spaces fills the volume within the project’s walls, pushing the ground inside higher and higher. Other projects are imagined as boxy volumes intermeshed with trees, as an undulating ground on top of a glass square, or even as an inhabitable bottle in the middle of the ocean. The ideas are as absurd as they are thought-provoking.

Lately I’ve been loving the work of Emmanuelle Walker’s. I discovered her while flicking through the recent Nobrow 8 (more details here) and was instantly taken with her style of illustration. Originally from Montreal, Emmanuelle currently lives in London where she works as an animation director and illustrator.

In truth I could have picked any one of her projects to share with you here but I thought that you might really like her ‘Dogs and Cars’ illustration. It features six cars, all of which are in motion, and all of which have dogs riding as passengers. It’s a fun image and Emmanuelle does a great job at capturing each dog’s enthusiasm for being in the passenger seat. The image really comes alive thanks to her great illustrative style and I think it feels like the perfect combination of Sylvain Chomet and cartoon modern. You can see more of her work online here.

I’m a sucker for a good pattern, and Liberty of London, who’s teamed up with Levi’s, has killed it with this new pattern design for their collaboration collection. The pattern was inspired by a piece by Liberty from the 70′s, recreated with watercolor pencils and set into a repeat pattern that adorns some of Levi’s classic silhouettes.

I was able to see the collection in person at the Levi’s showroom here in Los Angeles, and when I Instagrammed a photo of one of the bags, I received so much good feedback that I wanted to feature it here. As you can see in the images below they’ve found ways of working the pattern into every piece, sometimes overt and sometimes extremely subtle.

My personal favorite is the anorak, which is featured in the middle below. The combination of chambrays paired with the floral pattern is a stunner. It’s the combination of boy-ish proportions mixed with the gentle but brightly colored floral pattern is too good to pass up. If you’re interested in seeing the rest of the collaboration you should click here.

I’ve got to hand it to Simon C. Page, the man knows how to make some phenomenal, mind-bending patterns. If you’re unfamiliar with his name I can assure you that you’ve probably seen his work before. He creates these fantastic pieces which seem math-like in their nature, filled with intricate line work and mind-bending optical illusions. His most recent print, Optical Ripple, may be his most intriguing piece yet.

From afar Optical Ripple looks like reality is beginning to stretch apart at it’s very seams. Take a closer look and you can start to see the complex details that make the piece possible. Not to sound demeaning, but almost starts looking like the most complex crossword puzzle ever envisioned. But you step back, look at the piece with some distance between you and it, reality yet again begins to tear apart, leaving a chaotic mess that’s hard to truly stare into.

You can buy this print for yourself by clicking here.

I don’t often post “real versions of cartoon characters” on the site, but when I saw Dan LuVisi’s interpretation of Buzz Lightyear I knew I had to. This illustration is a part of a series Dan is working on called Popped Culture where he skews popular characters, making them a bit more intense in the process. I think Dan’s take on Buzz is super cool looking, like if he fought alongside the characters from Gears of War. Could you imagine that crossover!?

Fashionable pink cats, mini helicopters shooting out of a giant golden retriever’s eyeballs, and a trio of famous chefs straddling motorcycles that run on pork broth—this is the wonderfully wacky world of illustrator/comic book artist/podcast extraordinaire Lisa Hanawalt. Though we’re already big fans of  her work (remember that hilarious Visions of Thanksgiving drawing?), her new book, My Dirty Dumb Eyes, is particularly exciting, and not just because it’s endorsed by a bevy of comedian types like Patton Oswalt; she’s doing an expansive U.S. book tour, too.

Beyond Hanawalt’s deep artistic talents lies a playful deftness at illuminating pop culture subject matter in the wryest of ways. She sees “Jurassic Jeff” Goldblum as a sly-tongued dinosaur, for instance, and reinterprets Back to the Future as a bunch of lizards lounging on a Delorean. Her illustrations and comics have appeared in everything from Vice and McSweeney’s to The New York Times and Vanity Fair. I loved a recent series of chef drawings she made for Lucky Peach magazine, one of which depicted NYC chefs Anthony Bourdain, David Chang, and April Bloomfield astride motorcycles powered by their favorite ingredients.

My Dirty Dumb Eyes will be released on May 28, and you can check out Lisa Hanawalt’s book tour schedule below.

Jun Aoki is probably best known (at least in the States) for his designs of Louis Vuitton retail spaces. For over a decade he’s been working on retail projects for the brand in prestigious locations like 5th Avenue, where he wrapped the flagship retail space in a kinetic moiré pattern. Like many of his projects the predominate color of the space and it’s ghostly skin is white. So I was surprised that when I went to the firm’s website and looked at projects “In Progress” and I was greeted by diagrams as colorful as a candy shelf.

The diagrams above are for a Town Hall in Miyoshi and a Gymnasium in Omiyamae. The firm links each diagram to a blog about the project’s conception and development, which you can see here and here, but the descriptions that accompany the pictures are all in Japanese and I’m a little hesitant to draw too many conclusions from the baffling translations provided by Google. What’s a bit more clear is the firm’s own Facebook page. There, the firm recently posted the two pictures below of a hair salon, the Shima Ginaza Annex. The project hasn’t made it into their website’s projects yet, only five projects have in the past three years, and from what I can tell, the project was finished in early March. It’s a sophisticated space with a luminous ceiling, marble floor, and no traces of the colors that likely dominated earlier diagrams of the project.

The contrast between diagrams of proposed projects and the reality of built projects is kind of fascinating. Color really animates the diagrams, and the compositions are livened up by the wide range of hues. They look like art. But the built spaces do not suffer, or seem any less lively, because all of the colors disappeared in the construction process. These spaces are animated by people, and I suspect that going wild and crazy with cans of paint in the spaces would only make them look terrible. Maybe as even as bad as the haircut I endured last week.

My impression is that architecture firms have been a little slow to adopt social media, but it is one of the best ways to keep up with them. I’ll follow almost any firm on Facebook, not only to find out about their latest work, but also because it can transform your newsfeed from pictures of babies and food into pictures of architecture, babies and food. Everyone’s proud of what they’ve made.

It’s rare for me to get too excited over a brand redesign but when I saw Studio Small’s imagined Meccano rethink over on Collate I couldn’t help but be a little impressed. The redesign was created for Icon Magazine as part of their ongoing ‘Rethink’ feature, which asks a new designer each month to rethink an existing brand of their choice and look at ways to improve it.

Studio Small chose Meccano and I’m really glad that they did. As a kid I quite enjoyed the model construction set, yet it never felt quite as cool as other toys (chiefly LEGO, and to some extent Playmobil). Now that I’m older I know that a certain amount of this had to do with its packaging and how its information was presented. The sets lacked creativity and didn’t have quite the same sense of fun that Studio Small’s rethink has.

“When we looked at the nuts and bolts of the problem” Studio Small’s Guy told Collate (excusing his pun), “we found the current product hinged around single models not a set of components for building your own creations”.

His rethink involved creating Meccano+, a more immersive experience where kids can create their own iconic sets to their own specifications. For Guy, this rethink creates a toy that fosters a relationship between Meccano and the end user, a place where “the augmented reality is built into the box and component silhouette so if you want more inspiration you can receive it straight to your smart phone.”

It’s a smart idea and I just how the finished project looks. It’s fun, playful and has an energy which the current brand lacks. Meccano, if you’re reading this, go and send Studio Small an email!

Yahoo, your mom’s favorite default home page, decided to acquire Tumblr in a $1.1 billion deal yesterday, perhaps proving that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer can in fact revive the struggling search portal. But what, if anything, does this mean for the chaotic, meme filled blogging platform?

Probably a lot of nothing, for now at least. The fairest comparison, and the one I keep seeing thrown around, is Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram. So far the social giant hasn’t Facebook-ified much of Instagram on the surface, letting the people who built continue to do what they do. As a part of the Yahoo acquisition Tumblr CEO David Karp will stay at Yahoo for at least four years, continuing to evolve and grow the product. Where we may start seeing changes is in Tumblr’s ad based strategy, which up until the last year or so hasn’t been much of anything. If you’re a Tumblr user you’re already seeing sponsored posts in your stream, which potentially may increase with Yahoo’s involvement.

What I wonder is if Mayer has a strategy to somehow tie all of these products together eventually, or will she leave Tumblr as a siloed experience, allowing it to continue to bloom as is? Tumblr certainly has a lot of valuable data (GIFs and memes ARE valuable in 2013) that Yahoo could use, perhaps in their search product or to supplement their news platform. Either way I think it would take a really savvy strategist to piece that puzzle together.

As for those already crying that “Yahoo is going to ruin Tumblr!!” I think that John Januzzi summed it up best, saying, “if yahoo buying tumblr ruined your life, it was already ruined.” Indeed.

Update: I was thinking about this move from a design standpoint and how it would be interesting if this was done partially as a talent acquisition. Peter Vidani and his team are constantly iterating on Tumblr, refining and polishing the experience. What if that team was utilized to improve Yahoo’s homepage? Or even consulted on strengthening the design of Flickr? Having a unified design front fur all of Yahoo’s products could definitely be powerful.

Building Design: An Interview With Frances Anderton Of KCRW
Frances Anderton is Los Angeles biggest supporter of architecture and design. We thought we were but, boy, she takes the cake. She’s a radio personality and writer who is super passionate about her work: we are proud to share this LA architecture and design champion’s story.

A Stay At The Parker
We went to Palm Springs last weekend because we love Palm Springs. It’s a dream place to visit. Anyway, we had the rare opportunity to stay at fancy pants place The Parker in the desert and it was heaven. You guys need to go there if you visit. (Moreover, the place is super gay and we toured a lot of their gay bars: read about that here.)

Spotaste
EunJin Park is a Los Angeles designer who came up with an ingenious idea: what if didn’t describe how things tasted but instead visualized how things tasted. She made a conceptual app called Spotaste that lets you make little spots to illustrate the taste of something. Genius! It’s also super good looking. We wish we could try it out…

Questions With A Visitor: Charli XCX
In case you didn’t know, we do a little series of interviews with visiting artists called Questions With A Visitor where we learn about why they are in LA and what they think of the city. We usually feature musicians as they tour and talk to them by email but, somehow, we got to do a little interview with indie pop starlet Charli XCX in person. She was here to kick off the Levi’s X Liberty of London collaboration and she was the sweetest. Spoiler alert: she loves LA.

This J,P;A House
We’ve been on a bit obsessed with finding and sharing houses in Los Angeles that we wish we lived in. What is the most recent house? J,P;A’s house they built for the Sessa family. It’s basically a beautiful box on the side of a hill and it is so simple and so in touch with the outdoors. We would die if we could live here.

Oh! Two other posts we wanted to share that didn’t make the cut: the illustrations of Eszter Chen are fabulously varied and so Yayoi Kusama and James Elliot Bailey are wonderful, calming, and well composed. Check those out!

Let’s do launch! This week we’re serving up an intergalactic adventure from 1968 care of the hotel chain Howard Johnson, which gives a child friendly look at the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. John Sisson, on his blog Dreams of Space, recently scanned in a menu and comic book which was released by HoJo as a promotional tie-in, featuring iconic moments from the film.

Why they were aiming this promotional effort at children is beyond me, but good for Howard Johnson for thinking outside the box! You can see the entirety of the comic book over on John’s blog by clicking here.

Everyone can be an astronaut! Or at least a space stewardess…

I am really fond of this menu-if only the hotels still produced materials such as this. There are so many sci-fi and space comics of the 1960s that pushed the belief that kids should reach for the stars. There are still some wonderful experiences in this post-Shuttle era as well, such as Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and his serenade to earth from the International Space Station.

Yesterday, I was walking around Weltenbuerger, a cutting edge fashion shop here in Los Angles filled with all kinds of amazing clothing and designers. They carry a lot of up-and-coming designers, most I had never heard of, but there was one designer though who really stood out for me, and that was Julian Zigerli.

Julian is a Swiss designer who studied the University of Art Berlin, aims to make clothes out of innovative Swiss textiles. The results are both vibrant and exciting, as you can see above and below. The pieces here are from his Spring/Summer 2013 collection which is titled “My Daddy Was A Military Pilot”. The collection features some summery styles like shorts and button-ups made out of some of the most outrageous fabric I’ve ever seen. I’m going to take a guess and say that the fabric was all digitally printed, and if that’s true, it’s pretty spectacular to see how far the technology has come.

Would I personally wear these? Probably not. But I’m happy to know that someone is out there making audacious clothes like these. Men’s fashion can be so pedestrian, and I think Julian strives to make it so much more fun. In fact, this snippet from his bio sums up his work so well.

Julian Zigerli’s men’s collection stands for useful, smart and technical high- class pieces with a sporty touch. There is always a lot of love, color, humour and positivity involved in his designs.

Earlier this week, Dezeen ran a story about a clean and modern house; a house where the living spaces cantilevered off of stacked bedrooms like a grown-up, contemporary treehouse. The views from the so-called Tower House are incredible and the architects responsible for the projects are the ones at Gluck+. I poked around the firm’s website a bit and found that the Tower House has a sort of cousin built in the New York: the Vertical Library. Although one house is rural and the other urban, both are organized around something simple and humble: a staircase. More than just circulation, the stairs become exciting and dynamic places in these projects. In the city, the stair climbs a four-story bookshelf, and in the trees, the stair is painted bright yellow.

Another project by the firm, Grounded, has a video on the site where someone travels from the city to a wonderfully pastoral site to relax and stay… well… grounded. That project, a vacation house, has a giant green roof that makes most of the project seem underground at first, but the project has all kinds of stairs all over. In most shots of the house, there’s a staircase (or two) in the background with someone happily zipping up or down them. These stairs are nicely detailed and prominent… or is it possible that I’ve just never noticed stairs before? I’m probably just imagining things, but all three projects are quite nice and worth looking at, anyway. So who’s fetishizing the stairs here, is it the folks at Gluck+ or is it me?

For as long as I’ve known Cody Hoyt, I’ve known him for his incredibly detailed paintings which absolutely blow my mind. Sometimes though, you gotta branch out, and that’s exactly what Cody is doing with this new series of sculptural planters he’s begun making.

When it comes to ceramic pots I’d guesstimate that roughly 99.7% are round, so I love that Cody has brought in these lovely geometric angles to shake things up. They’re almost like art pieces meet functional objects, it’s hard to tell where one beings and ends.

The other element that really makes these special are the fantastic patterns that he’s kneaded into the clay itself, and the incredible glazes he’s applied to the vessels. I think the zebra striping in the clay is so awesome looking, giving each piece such texture and drama. I wonder how long it took him to figure out the correct way of layering the pieces of clay together to achieve that effect?

Cody sent me an email describing some of his inspirations, so I thought I’d share it for a bit of context.

I’ve been bringing elements of my drawings into the 3D realm with ceramics. It allows me to further examine the role that process plays in my work. It’s also is a great medium to play out the dynamic between intention Vs incident. The idea of making a piece with a certain result in mind, but acknowledging that control has to be partly surrendered and dealing with the results. I’ve been inspired by Ken Price and John Mason’s sculptural work, Japanese Nerikomi pottery, the Memphis catalog, etc…

You can see many more examples of his ceramic planters by clicking here.

Imagine you’re marooned in some lazy beach town and are desperate for an icy beverage. You wander around nondescript storefronts, faded cars parked on vacant streets, and a feeling of zombie despair suddenly overwhelms you. In the distance you hear what sounds like be-bop but with driving guitars and a refrain—”why you lookin’ at me?”—and instead of running from it you’re drawn closer. There, through the squeaky doors of a blacked out bar, three guys and a beanie-topped girl are churning out pop-fueled, surf psych rock that forces you to tap your toes and nod your head into a frenzy. This is what it’s like to be sonically invaded by Hooded Fang.

Hailing from Toronto, with the new album Gravez due to arrive on May 28, I’m predicting Hooded Fang will feature prominently in your summer music rotation. They’re the perfect dose of sunshine cut with a smirk rather than a smile. Check out “Ode to Subterrania” and “Graves”, both new tracks from their forthcoming album.

Photos © Yao Li

A couple days ago Alex posted this great piece on the USJ campus de l’innovation et du sport, which to me looked like some kind of ancient apartment building that had been recently uncovered. The building had been getting a lot of flack for the way it looked, and in fact, our own readers took to our Facebook to point out that it looked like it had “been bombarded”. which kinda cracked me up.

I thought I’d continue with the theme of “bombardment” and present the CIPEA No. 4 House by AZL Architects, which is located in Nanjing, China, and looks like it’s been through quite a bit.

The first thing I thought when I looked at CIPEA No. 4 House is that it looks like someone took a shotgun and started shooting the sides of it. But the seeming scatter spray of shotgun pellets gives the surface a texture that breaks up the overwhelming whiteness. Then there’s the panelling that wraps the buildings surface, which reminds me of old paper, curling and distorting, or of a wall that’s begun to disintegrate. I suppose to some this might sound like a negative critique, but the way that AZL has executed this concept is stunning. It feels like a mindful deconstruction of a space, taking apart the very idea of what a traditional wall is.

I doubt that a building like this would be the right fit for most homeowners, but I think it’s one of the things that I love most about eastern architecture, that they choose to create uniquely shaped homes that defy western conventions. This to me is what innovation looks like.

It feels like spring/summer is creeping super quickly here in Los Angeles, so finding the right albums as the appropriate summer soundtrack is totally key. One I would highly suggest is the new release from Still Corners called Strange Pleasures. Still Corners is the musical collaboration between Greg Hughes and Tessa Murray, who together make some fuzzed out electronic joy.

I like they way the Sub Pop describes the new album, as “a leaner, more acute extrapolation of ’80s-suffused song and studio craft, navigating a sinuous trajectory between velveteen Angelo Badalamenti noir-pop torch song sophistication and ethereal Cocteau Twins beauty”, which is actually pretty on the mark. My favorite track off of the album has to be ‘Berlin Lovers’, which I’ve pasted above. Tessa’s velvety vocals are backed by heavy synths, a powerful combo that’s so pleasing to the ears.

Thoughtful filmmakers intent on making engaging experimental films in today’s cinematic climate are fearless. Only a handful of filmmakers, able to uncover the balance between formal abstraction and narrative fluff, succeed in making films that are a cut above the rest. Harmony Korine of course rules this utopia, as does David Lynch, Michel Gondry and to a certain extent Terrance Malick, with his rapturous depiction of regeneration. Hopefully, Shane Carruth, the writer, director and star, of his second film Upstream Color, will become the newest, most promising member of this crew.

In Upstream Color, Kris (Amy Seimetz) is the victim of a terrifying attack by an inconsequential assailant named “The Thief” who forces her to ingest a parasitic worm that keeps her under hypnosis. While he empties her banks accounts and drains her equity, Kris learns how to master the simple act of repetition, which becomes so engrained in her psyche, it sends her into a complex mental disorder post trauma. It is when she meets Jeff (Shane Carruth), that overall aura of the unknown in Upstream Color truly begins. And I haven’t even mentioned the cosmic bond with pigs or the reciting of Thoreau’s Walden while diving for mineral rocks.

The initial pull of the film plays with fear of disease and parasitic invasion, yet it’s softly lit scenes and contemporary art direction keep the thriller convention at bay. Navigating the rough terrain of experimentation, the raison d’etre of Upstream Color is to explore aspects of memory, reincarnation, and perceived reality.

It gets weird, but it’s beautiful. As much as it disturbs, it is equally packed with the lush of that which exists in life – love, sound, trust, nature and the beauty that wades in mortality.