Alright, we promise to write about something that’s not music soon, but we are seriously seriously seriously obsessed with the band TEEN (all caps, seemingly) from NYC (and Halifax, seemingly?).

They truly reflect everything we love and nothing we hate about this whole indie psych revival and throw it up against the wall to reinvent it in a beautifully creative way, bringing in less buried, more vibrant vocals, great use of melodic electronics and vocal harmonies, and excellent lyrical content with provocative themes. They somehow remind us of an awesomer Warpaint that somehow melded with Braids and Dirty Projectors. Not that we like creative comparisons.

Just listen. Start at the beginning.

And—as I’ve already told multiple friends in NYC—go see them when they come to town. New York, they play Brooklyn’s Saint Vitus this Saturday with the also excellent Ava Luna. Go. Full tour dates via their Facebook page.

Album art by Rob Carmichael, SEEN.

The Way And Color by TEEN

We came across NASA’s massive archive of space photography a few months back doing some research (as we mentioned here).

Earlier today, NASA reposted this shot via their Instagram account (yes, they have an Instagram account), shared earlier via the White House’s Instagram account (yes, they have an Instagram too).

As NASA explains in the photo write-up:

This composite of data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope gives astronomers a new look for NGC 6543, better known as the Cat’s Eye nebula. This planetary nebula represents a phase of stellar evolution that our sun may well experience several billion years from now.

When a star like the sun begins to run out of fuel, it becomes a red giant. In this phase, a star sheds some of its outer layers, eventually leaving behind a hot core that collapses to form a dense white dwarf star. A fast wind emanating from the hot core rams into the ejected atmosphere, pushes it outward, and creates the graceful filamentary structures seen with optical telescopes.

In the case of the Cat’s Eye, material shed by the star is flying away at a speed of about 4 million miles per hour. The star itself is expected to collapse to become a white dwarf star in a few million years.

Coooooooooool. Again, we highly recommend both NASA’s image archives and image of the day series. Science fans and art fans alike will doubtless appreciate these images.

Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/STScI

We just picked up the doubt full-length from British band Boxed In and it is quickly burning up the motor on our turntable.

KCRW’s championed the band since early this year and we even included their track “Foot of the Hill” on our April Mixtape, but this our first start-to-finish listen of the entirety of the record and it truly is superb.

The band started as a solo project of songwriter Oli Bayston, who stated in an interview that he’d wanted to write an electronic record played out by largely analog musicians. The end result are songs with beautifully stark structures and meticulously stacked  layers of melodies and rhythm, playing off of rhythmic, hyper piano, coldly frantic drum lines, and insanely catchy bass lines.

One track we’d had yet to hear that’s stood out amongst an album full of standouts is “False Alarm”. You can watch the video for it below, hear more on the band’s SoundCloud page, and buy the album through iTunes + at your choice record stores.

Cross-post sharing a piece from our sister Web journal, Forgotten Favorite (which we announced here at the beginning of 2015).

Brooklyn-based contributor, Lovett Hines, writes about his introduction to hip hop and how it shaped his identity as a black kid in America, focusing specifically on Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”. As he writes, “It expressed our mistrust of a system we believed to be corrupt and a spirit of purposeful defiance. This song was the father of N.W.A.‘s ‘Fuck tha Police!‘”

Read more and listen along over at Forgotten Favorite. And remember—if you ever want to contribute, simply send your piece via the mail icon on the upper right.

From the raven + crow photo archive, an old Polaroid from this 420, taken in Kauai, circa 2002.

Twenty years ago this week, the world’s view on vegetarianism + veganism was changed with a single, hilarious, 30-minute-long episode of The Simpsons.

When it first aired, I myself had transitioned from vegetarian to vegan mere weeks before, so it definitely struck a chord with me on a personal level. More than that, it humanized and—oddly enough for a comedic cartoon—grounded the issue in a pretty honest reality, with both Lisa as she begins to identify with animals and with those around her, as they deal with the changes that come about in her personality.

All of this was beautifully rendered yesterday in a Slate article by Washington DC-based writer, Alan Siegel, commemorating the twentieth anniversary The Simpsons episode that Siegel writes “marked one of the first times on television that vegetarians saw an honest depiction of themselves—and of the viscerally defensive reaction that meat-eaters often have to vegetarianism.”

He explains further:

“Vegetarians previously had been portrayed in pop culture, but rarely as anything but one-dimensional hippies. ‘Lisa the Vegetarian,’ which aired on Oct. 15, 1995, was something different: a conversion story, told from the point of view of the person becoming a vegetarian. Lisa, the moral center of The Simpsons, spends the episode wrestling with what it means to eat meat. Her agonizing journey mirrors the one experienced by many in real life.”

We highly recommend reading Siegel’s full article, which details how The Simpsons show runner at the time gave up meat and came up with the idea for the episode and how Paul and Linda McCartney got involved, which resulted in their one and only stipulation—that Lisa remain a vegetarian through the rest of the series. Twenty years later, that never-aging little girl stays as committed to animals as ever.

We re-watched the episode last night so many years later and it really does hold up, both in terms of hilarity and earnestness. If you have cable, you can watch every episode of every season (all 27) of the venerable show via SimpsonsWorld.com or through FXNow via Apple TV or the like. There’s even a random episode button that will doubtless result in many glorious lost hours at our home.

Below, a clip from the show when Lisa’s school becomes concerned with her turn and shows the class an education film titled “Meat and You: Partners in Freedom—Number 3F03 in the ‘Resistance is Useless’ Series”

Some pretty cool art and an interesting teaser accompanied an announcement by Brooklyn band Chairlift today that they’d be premiering some new music Wednesday.

You can see the very brief teaser on their Facebook page; video of them performing the new song “Ch-Ching” at the film festival Tropfest New York this past June below.

Just created this to help promote tomorrow’s vegan bake sale at MooShoes Los Angeles benefiting Burrito Project LA.

The day’ll feature a ton of vegan baked goods, raffles, some early Halloween fun, and vegan franks from the spookiest vegan in town, Frankenstand. We’ll be bringing some baked goods ourself. Keep it on the DL, but we’re thinking special vegan hand pies.

Here’s another batty burrito too.

Not sure what the Burrito Project is? Check out this interview with one of the group’s local organizers, Kathleen. And totally volunteer with them.

Hope to see you tomorrow! Details + RSVP.

We just added a branding project to our portfolio that we completed this past spring/summer for a local greenway and neighborhood environmental group, Westwood Greenway.

The group found us—oddly enough—through tacos.

As Greenway Steering Committee member Jonathan Weiss wrote us at the time:

“About a week ago, I went to a bike clothing sale where 100 Tacos was serving up veggie tacos.  I took a picture so I could find him later.  Searching for him, I found you.  And boy, was I blown away.  I may have come across you at just the right time…or not. We’re a group of volunteers who have been working to create a park—instead of a parking lot—next to a train station.  The park will clean water, restore a native ecosystem, and teach sustainability, among other things.”

Well, it did turn out to be just the right time. We scheduled calls with the members of the steering committee to learn more about the direction they’d hoped to take the Greenway, finding out along the way that they shared an impressively aggressive timeline with the City of Los Angeles as the city government pushed to open the new Westwood/Rancho Park Station of the expanded Metro Line.

After much discussion and focused feedback from the members, and some design exploration, we all decided to keep intact two key elements from the group’s original logo (below)—incorporation of railway imagery/concept to show “accessibility and environmentally responsible transportation” and the imagery/concept of the native Sycamore, which plays strongly into the architectural design of the Greenway itself.

In the end, we arrived at an elegant solution that gave the group more functionality and flexibility in their branding…and we met our event-centric deadlines. High fives all around!

You can watch Westwood Greenway’s video below—which incorporates our new logo—and visit their site to learn more.

We couldn’t resist these new collaborative tea towels from local lifestyle store and purveyors of design-driven wares, Poketo + Los Angeles-based illustrator Mel Kadel.

Kadel—who’s originally from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—works largely in pen, pencil, ink, and blades on a signature, Goonies map-esque treated paper. Her work is beautifully playful and subtly colorful, often depicting stoically powerful looking female figures dressed in vibrant patterns and busy at various odd tasks like holding up ducking, shooting rays of bubbles from their hands, and/or diving from walls of colored ribbons.

Kadel’s work has appeared in publications including Juxtapoz, The New Yorker, and LA Times Magazine and she’s currently in the midst of a solo exhibition—“Sky’s Eyes”—at Highland Park’s Slow Culture gallery. The show runs through October.

Tea towels available from Poketo in-store or online; Mel also sells hand-painted prints, postcards, and totes through her own site.