Following in the tradition we started last year and inspired by our friend Agatha’s Oscar party, Katie threw another fete inspired by the films, actors, actresses, writers, and directors being honored by the Academy last night. Though the show itself was a bit of a snooze, the themed costumes and food were far from it, so we all enjoyed ourselves.

Some pictures from last night’s offerings. Not pictured—Theory of Everything Pretzel Chips. They were mathematically determined to be eaten far too quickly to have their photo taken.

Cards by Katie.

Photos + menu from last year’s party are up on the journal too.

Click through to larger views on any image.

I’ll admit it—with a few notable exceptions, I am, sadly, your average, cliché guy when it comes to most any personal care products.

Out of shampoo? No problem, I can use a bar of soap; they’re basically interchangeable, right?

Shaving? Same thing—lather up some soap, maybe throw on whatever lotion’s laying around once I’m done.

Out of bar soap and need to get clean? Dishwashing detergent gets oil spills off baby ducks, man—it’s gotta be good enough to get a day or so’s worth of dirt off me.

So safe to say that, usually, I don’t splurge on skin care products for myself. Which is why they make such a great gift for me, as my generous partner Katie knows full well. She put this knowledge to use for my most recent birthday this past month, buying me what’s turned out to be a pretty stellar skin care set from Vermont-based natural skin care company Ursa Major.

I’ve long been a fan of the company’s logo—simple, striking, iconography with a nice accent color and, most importantly, an awesome-looking bear—but had never really tested their products out. Now, after almost a month of using them though, I can say that I’ve fallen pretty hard for everything I’ve tried.

I honestly did, most times, shave with just soap and water unless I was using a straight razor. So to suddenly shift to using a shaving cream that someone’s taken the time to formulate painstakingly to give that little bit of frothing has been a sea change for my face. And, whereas I’ve never used anything like face tonic before, I have to say, it is a nice thing to splash on after shaving.

Moreover though, the concept behind the company’s very appealing. Thankfully these days, environmentally conscious businesses are a dime a dozen, but, as Ursa Major puts it: “Even products that claim to be ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ often only contain token amounts of natural or organic content. Research now shows these toxins (parabens, pthalates, sulfates, etc) penetrate the skin (or are unwittingly ingested) and accumulate in the body’s organs, potentially causing serious health issues over time (cancer, neurological complications, infertility, etc).”

Unless prolonged exposure to bar soap causes any chronic health issues, I should be good, but, now that I’m older and living in a place that has roughly no cloudy days ever, I am taking this kind of thing a little more seriously. So why not support a company that makes the health of its consumer a priority.

What’s more, the products are really nice to use. Most of their featured ingredients read like very intense salads—Aloe, Birth, and Sunflower; Cedar, Spearmint, and Lime; Aloe, Bamboo, and Lemon. But what appeals to me most—in addition to them working well—is the unique, earthy scents of their products, each using a wood-based ingredient to give everything that comfortingly wild, sylvan aspect. Like I’m at a forested fairyland day spa.

And, according to Carmenat Ursa Major, “all of our products are in fact vegan and cruelty-free”.

So consider me pro-Ursa Major, both in terms of their superb branding and their superb product.

For the record, I’m pro-fairyland day spa too if those exist.

Below, Ursa Major’s Stellar Shave Cream, 4-in-1 Essential Face Tonic, Fortifying Face Balm, and Fantastic Face Wash; branded packaging; and a great canvas gift bag for the set.

Let’s take this sign—found while walking around the StubHub Center in Carson, CA during halftime at the USA vs Panama friendly inter nation soccer match a few weeks back—as a lesson in design + perceived meaning to your audience.

Is it telling you, as a stadium attendee, “Hey, there’s a public water foundation over here if you’re thirsty, friend”? Or is it saying, maybe depending on exactly how many $15 beers you’ve had, “Hey, buddy, come throw up in this trashcan; it’s totally cool, man”?

I’m afraid the latter perception may have started to prevail the nearer the end of the game we got.

USA!

A few weeks back, we got an oddly minimal email from electronic duo The Blow that started with:

TWO WAYS TO SPREAD THE ELECTRIC WOMEN:

1. ON THE INTERNET
WE MADE A WEBSITE IT’S CALLED WOMANPRODUCER.COM
www.womanproducer.com OR @womanproducer

The second way was just to go see the old school electro pop band live, but the site caught my eye as intriguing.

Essentially, it seems to serve as an homage to women in music production and the more arcane, complicated world of early electronic music, when you needed something akin to the code-breaking computer in The Imitation Game to play a single note.

The Blow’s site is equally minimalist as it is deep, focusing on a specific artist for each post and then featuring a series of usually awesome photos of them in their studios, followed by a long list of Web links for continued self-education on the genre and artist.

Below, a few of our favorite images. See the rest at WomanProducer.com.

The beauty of color gradients in nature, in this case exhibited by a blood orange from the Hollywood Farmers’ Market. I’d say roughly Pantone 1665 -> Pantone 1805 -> Pantone 506 (at the deepest red on the left).

Which reminds me—the Hollywood Orchard is holding it’s first pick of 2015 this Saturday. I’ll be in attendance along with Katie, who’s now on the board of the organization, and we’ll all be gleaning fruit from participating members in the Beachwood area, donating the majority of the fruit to needy agencies in Los Angeles and making fun things from the rest.

We’ve written about the Orchard in past pages, but you can also find out plenty more about the group on their/our Web site. The pick starts at 845AM Saturday though, details here. They’re a ton of fun and totally worth the relatively early weekend morning.

File Under: This Looks Awesome.

Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, DC (1980-90) is a documentary film that examines the early DIY punk scene in the Nation’s Capital, a scene that can easily be called one of the most influential in recent times. Like the related riot grrrl scene, it highlighted to so many of us that music and politics and social change can and should all influence each other and gave voice to a generation who wanted to change the world.

As the film-makers put it:
“This was a particularly important time in the evolution of punk and independent music, with DC based bands like Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Black Market Baby, the Faith, the Slickee Boys, Void, Government Issue, Marginal Man, Dag Nasty, 9353, Gray Matter, Beefeater, Scream, Rites of Spring, Fugazi, Shudder to Think, Nation of Ulysses, Jawbox and others defining the DC aesthetic. Local record labels like Dischord, Fountain of Youth, Teen Beat, and Simple Machines would become standard-bearers for the DIY revolution.”

Created by Writer/Director, Scott Crawford—old school DC scenester + creator of the fanzine, Metrozine—and Director of Photography, Jim Saah—who basically taught himself photography by documenting the punk scene in DC—the film comes with built in cred. It adds to that with interviews from the very people who created this seminal scene and those it impacted, like Dave Grohl.

We lived in DC ages ago, in the wake of this musical, cultural, socio-political scene, and, even to this day, so many waves of gentrification and change for the better and/or worse later, it still very much feeds into the city and its people in a very unique, beautiful, independent way. So I can’t wait to check the film out.

You can see a trailer for it below; scroll down further for screening dates as they’ve been announced.

Salad Days Official Trailer from Scott Crawford on Vimeo.

Scheduled Salad Day Screenings:
February 14 at Top Hat in Missoula, MT (Big Sky Film Festival)
February 15 at Midtown Cinema in Harrisburg, PA
February 21 at Roxie Theatre in San Francisco, CA (West Coast Premiere)
February 25 at SPACE Gallery in Portland, ME
February 27 at Kiggins Theatre in Vancouver, WA
February 27 at The Regent in Los Angeles, CA
February 27 at Grand Illusion Cinema in Seattle, WA
March 1 at Stage II Cinema in Amesbury, MA
March 2 at Prytania Theatre in New Orleans, LA
March 6 at Circle Cinema in Tulsa, OK
March 6 at UCSD in San Diego, CA
March 8 at Underground Arts in Philadelphia, PA
March 13 at XOXO B Modern Events Venue in Las Vegas, NV
March 15 at Byrd Theater in Richmond, VA
March 19 at Metro Gallery in Baltimore, MD
March 20 at Greenwich Odeum in East Greenwich, RI
March 20 at Ojata Records in Grand Forks, ND
March 22 at Alamo Drafthouse in Houston, TX
March 22 at Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, TX
March 23 at Alamo Drafthouse in Dallas, TX
March 27 at Hollywood Theater in Portland, OR
March 30 at High Noon Saloon in Madison, WI
April 10 at AS220 in Providence, RI
April 16 at The Local 662 in Tampa, FL
April 17 at Gateway Film Center in Columbus, OH
April 17 at Headliners Music Hall in Louisville, KY
April 17 at FilmBar in Phoenix, AZ
April 17 at IFC in New York, NY
April 18 at BSP Kingston in Kingston, NY
April 18 at The Hollywood Theater Dormont in Pittsburgh, PA
April 23 at Bryant Lake Bowl & Theater in Minneapolis, MN
April 24 at The North Door in Austin, TX
April 24 at Studio C in Lansing, MI
April 25 at The Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, MI

Photo of Guy Picciotto of Fugazi by Jim Sahh.

Some bands blend serious, weighty, emotive music with equally serious, weighty, emotive lyrics, which sometimes works, sometimes can be a bit of a downer. Other bands blend much less deep but high-energy, happy music with subject matter that matches that music, which sometimes is great, sometimes smacks of saccharine sweetness that leaves you with an emotional belly ache.

In my experience, the best songs, the ones that stick with you long term, marry some healthy balance of sweetness in the music with a depth and thoughtfulness in their lyrics. San Francisco-based Geographer is like a  factory for such songs, churning out music that can both get your feet tapping and leave you thinking about life, love, and everything in between.

We featured their sweepingly beautiful single, “I’m Ready”, on our February mixtape and recently got a chance to catch up with Mike Deni leading up to the release of his third album as Geographer—Ghost Modern—to talk about what inspires his writing, the changing scene in San Francisco, the ocean, and nihilism.

raven + crow: Alright, Mike, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. First question—myth or fact?—You started writing music when you found a synth on the street.

Mike Deni: A little of both. I’ve been writing music since I was 12. My Dad got me a four-track cassette recorder, and I spent an enormous chunk of my childhood down there layering acoustic guitars, saxophone, and an clay drum my sister made for me with stretched goat skin. That sounds like a lie, but it’s true! I soon graduated to really really slow computer software (it was cutting edge at the time) and then the songs got really over-blown. We’re talking 16 vocal tracks at times. I still have to rein myself in sometimes even now. But the fact portion is that I did find a synthesizer on the street when I first moved here while I was out for a jog, and I wrote “Can’t You Wait” on it, and a number of other songs that went on to be the first songs I wrote as Geographer.

Man. I gotta start jogging in better, more synth-heavy locales. What would you say drives the writing behind the new album thematically?

Being tired of feeling like an outsider, being ready to plug into life, to stop distancing myself from existence on intellectual grounds. Basically exploring what happens after you realize there’s no reason for you to be here, and you’ll never get a satisfying answer. But the best art comes without satisfying answers, so why should we want more from life?

Fair. I saw a quote from you talking about the album that “life has no discernable meaning or purpose, and your life is a dream.” Is that something you believe powers your writing…and living, for that matter, in a positive way, freeing up inhibitions or more of a Nihilist view?

It’s something I struggle with. I don’t feel quite set free by it. I envy people who don’t feel that way. But the way my mind works, I have a hard time taking things at face value. In the writing of this album, the lyrics, particularly, at the advice of a good friend, I tried to push beyond disbelief, beyond disillusionment. They don’t have to get the last word. Sure if a tree falls and no one’s there to hear it, you could argue that it’s not there, that you’re not here, that there is no here. But there’s certainly something…somewhere, and I guess I started to feel tired of thinking that other way. Before I started writing the album, I think I reached the borders of post modern thought, and pushed into something more dangerous, more lonely, which I call Ghost Modernism. Because I felt I had examined things so intently, deconstructed them so fully, that not only they, but I, had lost all meaning. It was as if everything just faded away. It’s very human to deconstruct, but the endpoint of deconstruction is, well, nothing. And I want to have something. I want to feel a part of things, full of life, not overwhelmed by it. So that’s the journey of the album.

Wow. I like that you’re putting that journey into the music rather than keeping it to yourself. I can only imagine that’s somewhat cathartic. I also read that you wrote much of it while sitting in the Presidio, looking out at the water. Was that something that fed your creative process?

Definitely. The ocean factors strongly in the album, and infected my thoughts ever since I saw The Master for the first time. In that film the ocean is this roiling, churning symbol of the obscured self, the raging animal under the placid surface, the unknowable forces of the world and our lives. And then there I was staring at the ocean, writing these songs. One of the songs I wrote on a deck of a house in Mendocino right on the edge of a cliff, just staring at the ocean all day long with my keyboard on the banister, working the lines over and over again. That one doesn’t have anything explicitly about the ocean, but it was just a powerful image looming in front of me as I tried to simplify this song.

I know what you mean. When I first started getting into photography, I spent a whole moonless night just photographing the ocean—I was obsessed with the ocean at night. It’s a powerful thing.

So ,what brought you out to San Francisco in the first place?

Two friends from college. They moved there right after we graduated, and I went to Boston, and then back home. I was telling them about my life back in NJ and they basically staged an intervention and said, “You’re moving to San Francisco, and we’re driving out with you when we come home this summer.” So we packed up the car and drove across in 3 days, and I lived on their floor for a month. That’s when I found the synthesizer, and started writing a bunch of the first songs.

Good friends. There’s been a lot of talk of late of the city changing a lot, mostly in terms of the cost of living sky-rocketing. Have you seen a lot of change in those terms lately?

Yeah, I mean, it’s real. I’m not really qualified to talk about that in an intelligent way though. I’m an emotions guy.

Hah. How’s the music there these days though?

A lot of my friends have moved away, so a lot of our “local” artists either have no home, are on tour all the time, or they call home somewhere else. But I’ll always think of them as locals.

Man. Kinda sounds like New York of late. Any SF bands you’re liking a lot?

I’m just a big fan of Waters. I feel so invigorated by that music. Songs. That’s what gets me going, not doodads, as much as I love those. I need songs, and Waters provides them.

Yeah, we’re fans. Now, I saw Geographer described as “romantic indie pop” somewhere. I don’t think I’ve seen that particular sub-genre up until now. Can you break that down for me? Is it just dudes in a band who like The Notebook a lot?

That’s it. If you look up “Romantic Indie Pop” that’s exactly what it says. We can make up a genre right now. It’s fun. “Garage Folk”. There’s one.

I don’t want to want to hear what garage folk sounds like…but I do want to, despite myself. In the studio, is Geographer essentially a solo project at this point?

Yeah, I mean, it’s always been like that. The idea of a solitary artist, though, at least in music, is a myth, for the most part. Even if it’s just your producer, or your manager, or the musicians around you, everyone’s interpreting your thoughts, even if you write them out on a page. That’s what’s so exciting about the studio. It’s like playing telephone. You have to pass your ideas through everybody else’s brain before it hits the tape. Or the hard drive, as the case may be. Sometimes I write every single note in a song, down to each drum fill, and the band members or studio musicians will just play it. Other times I’ll utilize their creativity, like wave my arms around and hum the kind of thing I want them to play, but I’ll want it to come from their own mind, you know, so I can stretch outside the limits of my own conceptions. Most of the people on the record, the horn players, the string players—there’s a harp on one song—the fans will never even meet, which is kind of strange. I like keeping the core of the band small, I like using the same people for touring and recording when I can, but sometimes people just don’t want to tour. That happened with Nate and Brian recently. I was lucky enough to have them with me for 6 years, but they reached a point where they were like, “I hate to say it, but I just don’t want to tour anymore.” So I got a new crew to take the songs on the road with me. I really went over this city with a fine-toothed comb, and I am overjoyed with what I came back with. I added another guitar, which I’ve wanted to do forever, just didn’t have the means. And we’re doing things on stage I’ve always wanted to, it really frees me up to concentrate on what I love about live performance and not be tied to making so many of the sounds myself. We played our first three shows together a few weeks ago, and it was the most fun I’ve had on stage in a long time.

That’s awesome. You seem to pull in a lot of traditional bowed string instruments in the music—is that keyboard-based or old-school?

You mean are they real? Yes, they’re real stringed instruments. I write the parts using midi on my computer, but with string sounds, you really need the real thing, at least for the sounds I’m going for. There’s nothing like a violin hitting those high notes. It’s the most delicate, almost death-defying feeling. It’s crazy how good these people are, the control and prowess they have with their instruments. It’s very humbling.

Agreed—I’ve always thought that’s one thing synths just can’t replicate that well, strings. It’s like finding an awesome vegan cheese. So, I saw that St. Vincent’s listed as an “associated act” on your Wikipedia page, but with no explanation whatsoever—is there a connection there or is that an Internet flub?

Well, it’s a stretch. Nate, the old touring cellist, was in Annie’s band when she was just Annie Clark, at Berkelee School of Music, in Boston. So it’s more of a 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon than an association.

I mean, I’ll take it. You toured last year with Tokyo Police Club, right? How was that?

I loved it. I’ve never made so many friends in one band, their tour manager and merch guy included! It was just a party. They’re just the sweetest, most fun guys. They’re giving Canada an even better name in my book.

Yeah, I don’t know those guys, but they seem fun. I didn’t see an LA date on your 2015 tour. Soon to come?

You just missed it, man! We blew the lid off the El Rey. It was such a fun show. But I’m sure we’ll be back real soon.

Damn my luck! We’ll keep an eye out then. And thanks again for talking, man.

My pleasure. It’s my second favorite thing to do. Thanks for the thoughtful questions.

You can pre-order Geographer’s new album, Ghost Modern (out March 24), through the band’s record label, Roll Call Records and through iTunes.

Profile shot of Mike by Victoria Smith; live photo from Geographer’s January show at the El Rey by Scott Sheff.

A quick reminder to continue to check in with Forgotten Favorite, the retrospective music journal we recently started up with Paul Singh of Pel.

Up today, a write-up I (Troy) did on the excellent 90s Brit-twee-punk band, Milky Wimpshake.

A shout-out to both the new waxed canvas Sinclair boot from LA shoe-maker Nicora Johns and the modeling prowess of the studio’s better half, Katie Frichtel.

We really love Nicora Johns because they’ve made it a priority to manufacture in America, which can really, really tough after so many years of outsourcing to oversea markets and (importantly) having American consumers get used to lower prices that result.

As founder Stephanie Johns puts it:
“Happy shoemakers and earth-friendly products are just as important as aesthetics! Since each pair of shoes is made of sometimes 25+ different parts and materials, it becomes very difficult to trace each part back to its origin and certify that it was produced sustainably and without harming any shoemakers. I decided to forego the giant question mark of purchasing or producing abroad, so all of NJ’s parts and materials are locally sourced from factories and the shoes are made 20 minutes away from my house.”

Pretty cool. And the shoes themselves are beautifully designed and made to last. I personally have to make a conscious decision to not wear my black faux leather Sinclairs daily, not to sound like a commercial for Nicora Johns.

But come by MooShoes Los Angeles, check ’em out for yourself, and say hey.