After our recent trip to Las Vegas with friends, we have only two pieces of advice for you:

1. Learn to play Craps (you’ll thank us later), and

2. Call and make an appointment to see artist James Turrell‘s Akoob in the top floor of—oddly enough—Louis Vuitton‘s Vegas store.

We can’t show you pictures of our visit—no, not because what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but because they don’t allow photos. But we can show you the card they gave us on exit and the lovely follow-up note they mailed us the following week. If you’d like to know more about the piece, you can read the LA Times article on it from a few years back, but we’d advise knowing as little as possible going in, as our friend Adam did.

Just know that any art you have to sign a legal waiver to experience must be worth it.

Just a heads up for both vegans and ice cream-lovers…and vegan ice cream-lovers, BK-to-LA ice creamery Van Leeuwen—who, as they did in Brooklyn, have a shop walking distance from our studio—currently offers a pretty jaw-dropping special: The vegan mocha-donut scoop, which is just as good as it sounds, full of mocha flavor and chunks of vegan donuts.

You might remember we interview co-founder, co-owner, and new Los Angeles transplant Pete Van Leeuwin last December about their west coast move and origins of the company. You can catch up if you missed it. But mainly, get to the shop—they offer multiple vegan scoops, vegan cones, vegan cookies for sandwiching (photo in the previously mentioned interview), and even full on vegan sundaes. And they make what we consider the best vegan ice cream around. Give it a go.

We came across this vintage print ad for the Peace Corps yesterday at the Long Beach Antique Market. It was in a 1968 issue of Life magazine—seven years after the creation of the program—and I found it impressive and intriguing, both from the perspective of someone in the advertising business and as an returning Peace Corps Volunteer myself.

From a marketing perspective, it’s got the simple, elegant visual hook of the text and glass, playing with the magnified perspective the rounded glass provides and its tone compels the audience with an emotional hook. It says “Hey, this isn’t for everyone, but if this positive messaging appeals to you, maybe it is for you,” without quite stepping over the line of condescension.

And coming at it as a former volunteer, it’s just nice—in an admittedly romanticized way—to see the positivity that I honestly do feel remains at the root of the program to this day worn on the agency’s sleeve and touted so loudly early on.

Plus how awesome that the call to action was to write a letter…to street address-free government agency.

You have to love old school social media.

Paired TV spot below. The campaign was done in partnership with the Ad Council. If anyone knows anything else about it, please do contact us; we’d love to know more.

One huge omission from our SXSW list, we only just realized—Los Angeles’ own Anderson .Paak. And no, we don’t know what the deal is with the odd period before ‘Paak’.

KCRW’s been great about playing his insanely groovy, catchy track “Am I Wrong” over the past couple months and we didn’t realize until yesterday that Anderson had trekked down to Austin for the fest. We’d really loved the song from first listen, but our real turn-on to Anderson was when we got in a Lyft last month driven by none other than Anderson’s keyboard player, who couldn’t stop singing the praises of Paak and his newly released album, Malibu, which the driver had helped him record. After listening through the whole thing, we can see why he was so psyched. We have no doubt Paak is wowing the audiences at SXSW as we write and predict huge things for him.

Listen to “Am I Wrong” below, one of the many excellent tracks from Malibu, which you can stream in full on Anderson’s soundcloud page and buy via iTunes and all the other usual suspects.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

Flipping through an old notebook in the studio, I came across this concept sketch for a logo we created for Brooklyn-based interior design, furnishings, and construction company Ted K Design and was surprised at how closely it came to the final mark. Sometimes it takes a wealth of different concepts and endless rounds of edits, sometimes…it doesn’t.

It’s that time of year again, when almost literally ever band ever makes their annual pilgrimage to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. What started as a tiny local music festival in 1987 has ballooned to massive proportions, as we all know—I mean, the President just spoke at South by and I hear the First Lady just did a keynote with Missy Elliot and Queen Latifah, both awesome things, but not exactly…indie?

Lament as you might about the days when the festival wasn’t full of douchey brahs, selfie-takers, and worldwide-recognized bands, the music festival is still a tastemaker and, if you can cut through the massive noise of a festival that features this many bands, it can do a lot for your music.

We won’t be in attendance this year, but, were we, these are the 25 bands we would make extreme efforts to catch live, some of whom we even saw just last week—they’re that fucking good. List presented in alphabetical order for maximum fairness along with pithy snippets that fall vastly shortly of fully describing each band and images that click through to the bands’ SXSW page with showtimes or the bands’ site/Facebook page. Check bands’ site or FB pages for additional showcases in Austin though—most will play many sets in the next week or so, not all official South by showcases that’ll be listed on those pages.

Bavarian weird-pop band that you should really check out—they barely ever make it stateside. We also did a 2014 interview with the band—seem like nice guys.

Beautifully crafted pop; solo project of Vampire Weekend’s Chris Baio, featured on last month’s mixtape.

Los Angeles’ own king of catchy, lush pop; we hear he puts on a greta show too.

Chad Valley, AKA Hugo Manuel, AKA the main dude from Oxford’s Jonquil, a great, guitar-melody-driven indie band; this is his electronic solo persona, equally awesome.

I’ll be the one person ever to not mention how young this guy is and just say he writes jangly indie-pop and sounds kinda like a 12-year-old British James Mercer.

Go see her. Saw her again last week and she only gets better; simple, driven pop music built smartly around Sumner’s husky distinct voice; some validity in comparing her music to early stuff from her dad’s band, The Police…that’s a good thing.

Rightly much-buzzed about, vocally driven electronic music; featured on last September’s mixtape.

Frank, folk-infused indie pop some might call cute…for which I hope they’d get kicked; featured on this month’s mixtape.

Straight up catchy indie pop out of the Bay Area. We did an interview with primary Geographer, Mike Deni, last year.

Fun, crazy noise. Live shows said to also be fun, crazy.

Jack Garratt this month’s mixtape; slightly glitchy, R+B-y, smooth-vocal-forward electronic out of England.

Ex-xx (maybe current?); not exactly indie or small any more, but worth catching.

Solo bedroom pop project from Little Big League front woman Michelle Zauner outta Philly/Brooklyn; featured on this month’s mixtape.

We got this most adorable painted geometric wooden block airplant planter from what might be the most adorable shop in the world—Ojai‘s Summer Camp (pictured below).

Summer Camp’s one of those home goods, vintage, and lifestyle stores that’s really tough not to walk into and buy a million things…especially if you’re Katie. They also do custom picture framing. The store is housed in an mid-century filling station—upping the adorable factor to near incomprehensible levels—and was started by couple that left the LS hustle and bustle for the starry-nighted, dreamcatcher-filled Ojai life, a move that sounds pretty appealing most days. Except for those deep summer ones where it gets into the upper 200°F’s or so in Ojai.

Check Summer Camp Instagram feed for more shots of the planters and other home goods and order via their web site if you can’t make it out any time soon.

Work given to us years back by NYC artist and musician Allison Hawkins.

A new month—and one with spring in the air, no less—means a new mixtape, and this one’s chockablock with some awesome tracks from awesome artists.

That’s right, chockablock.

Minneapolis-based Lizzo starts us off with the perfect springtime, bedroom dancing track, “Let Em Say”, a song that celebrates women, features Caroline Smith (also outta M-town), and was included in the intro of a recent Broad City (AKA, the best show ever), so win-win-win. Then we’ve got a great song from British singer-songwriter Jack Garrat; something from a band we’ve been loving of late, Los Angeles’ own Tuft (FKA Hi Ho Silver Oh), who’s new album is pretty great start-to-finish; beautiful glitch from Blackbird Blackbird (who’s playing the Echoplex next month with the excellent Chad Valley—see you there!); a new one from NYC’s TEEN, who we wrote up last fall; a really fucking cool song from Wicca Phase Springs Eternal; a song from LNZNDRF, the new collaboration between the brotherly rhythm section of The National, Scott and Bryan Devendorf, and Beirut member and National/Sufjan collaborator Ben Lanz; a way-too-catchy mopey indie pop song from Brooklyn’s Porches (AKA, Aaron Maine), who, weirdly enough, Frankie Cosmos (AKA, Greta Simone Kline) used to play bass with…also weirdly enough, Cosmos/Kline is the daughter of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, the latter of whom once threw her coat on Katie during a show at the Bellhouse, some think on purpose. And a ton more great music, obviously.

Give it all a listen below. And, New York friends, do not despair—warmer weather and sunshine are just around the corner! Likewise, Los Angeles friends, don’t you despair either—we’ll get through that rain tomorrow if we all stick together and keep our heads about us!