A brief ode to stepping away and breathing in.

We took the day to get away from work and the studio and the facets of of our everyday life that, while most often wonderful, have the tendency to begin to appear flat, expected, and creatively sedative the more usual and familiar they become, despite their wonderfulness. Without fail, we always always always find it refreshing and wildly productive to step away from our industry of being daily creatives. It’s rare that it doesn’t result in a piling up of work on the back end, but it’s always worth it in the long run, it’s just a simple matter of making the time and remembering that it’s always worth it.

After a day’s worth of exploring, we ended up heading back to Los Angeles with an armful of eclectic literature—everything from biographies we’d been meaning to read to new world publishing high end magazines to area hiking guides to half-century-old cookbooks to treatises on creativity itself.

One publication Katie picked up—issue no. 8 of Darling: The Art of Being a Woman—is the epitome of this now not-so-new movement of beautifully produced new world magazines, boasting a masterfully crafted layout, subtly beautiful design, big, bold photography, and even an embossed logotype on the thick card stock of the cover. Some might call this a shift into the pretentious for the periodical publishing world, but I admire both the end product and the fact that so many have found a way to survive as a print publication in a digital world.

This particular issue of Darling kicks off with an inspiring and particularly fitting piece from author + WANT (Women Against Negative Talk) founder, Katie Joy Horwitch on creativity. In a sense, the one-pager a list of ways to keep faith in one’s self and continually refill that well of creativity within each of us. In another, more important way, it’s a reminder that we all need to constantly seek inspiration both inside and outside of ourselves. As Horwitch so beautifully puts it:

“Yes, this world is turning. Yes, this air is alive. Yes, to be static is an illusion, and, yes, to be creative is our calling. Everything is a little piece of artwork, from complex humanity to the grass and the clouds. Creative dry spells might make us feel as if we’re not imaginative enough, clever enough, or artistic enough—but with a little positive proactivity, we see that, just like in nature, every drought is followed by a fantastical rain.”

So, let it rain, world. We’ll do our best to stop what we’re doing and breathe it in.

Guys, I totally got tricked into liking a Christian band.

That’s not fair. Vancouver band We Are the City may or may not define themselves as a Christian band, but they certainly don’t shy away from the subject matter of god or faith in their songs, specifically in the context of the Christian upbringing of guitarist, David Menzel, and singer-keyboardist, Cayne McKenzie.

And they’re on Christian label, Tooth and Nail Records.

And they have songs with names like “King David”,  “Passing of the Peace“, and “Baptism“.

…so, yeah, they’re a Christian band.

But they’re a REALLY FUCKING GOOD Christian band. So good that I couldn’t stop listening to them when I discovered their new, jaw-droppingly amazing album, Violent, the other night and the beautiful video series they’ve created for it. As I told a friend and ex-bandmate over email, I feel like this is what good, progressive emo music of the late nineties and early aughts should have evolved into. Beutifully intricate, emotively introspective, thoughtfully crafted music that’s really hard not to love. Even once you realize it’s essentially Christian rock.

Dammit! It’s Dakota Motor Company all over again!

Check out We Are the City’s video for “Baptism” below.

In doing some research for a design project earlier, we came across NASA’s extensive + visually impressive archive of space photography, much of which is high resolution and free-to-use (providing credit is given).

One feature of the site is NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day—”Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.”

Today’s picture: Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

“What’s happening to Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko? As the 3-km wide comet moves closer to the Sun, heat causes the nucleus to expel gas and dust. The Rosetta spacecraft arrived at the comet’s craggily double nucleus last July and now is co-orbiting the Sun with the giant dark iceberg. Recent analysis of data beamed back to Earth from the robotic Rosetta spacecraft has shown that water being expelled by 67P has a significant difference with water on Earth, indicating that Earth’s water could not have originated from ancient collisions with comets like 67P. Additionally, neither Rosetta nor its Philae lander detected a magnetic field around the comet nucleus, indicating that magnetism might have been unimportant in the evolution of the early Solar System. Comet 67P, shown in a crescent phase in false color, should increase its evaporation rate as it nears its closest approach to the Sun in 2015 August, when it reaches a Sun distance just a bit further out than the Earth.”

Clearly this is a site I will now be visiting on a daily basis.

PS—Los Angeles residents especially should click on that giant dark iceberg link.

To the right, the Orion nebula as captured by NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes, an image I nearly used in a new project and really want to use going forward.

Comet image credit: ESA, Rosetta, NAVCAM; processing by Giuseppe Conzo; Orion image credit: NASA, ESA, T. Megeath (University of Toledo) and M. Robberto (STScI).

Today, April 27th, at raven + crow studio, we celebrate the little-known quasi-holiday of International Crow and Raven Appreciation Day—a day of recognition of our corvid friends seemingly relegated to the pages of Facebook and this Web journal.

Though not yet recognized as an official bank holiday in the States, we hold out hope here at the studio for national + international recognition and—with any luck—widespread, appropriately flamboyant parades full of over-the-top avian floats, marching bands, and (obviously) bizarre raven- and crow-themed costumes.

We’d obviously petition the high courts to have the nomenclature altered slightly before official recognition to have the proper name be International Raven and Crow Appreciation Day…though we get that the resulting acronym’s not quite as palatable as ICRAD.

Above, a detail of a piece we commissioned by friend + talented artists Deirdre McConnell years back; full scan below (click to open full-width in a new browser window).

And happy ICRAD, all! Give your favorite raven and/or crow a hug today!

Or don’t. That likely wouldn’t go well for either party involved.

Maybe just join the Facebook group and (if it’s not too late), do as they ask and celebrate by wearing black today!

What happens when you’re a successful commercial photographer and the digital photography revolution hits? For many, at worst, it meant an end to a long and prosperous career; to others, at the very least, it meant a sea change, with a massive devaluing of the industry as a whole and a dramatic decrease in income for many who relied on the industry as their financial bread + butter.

For Los Angeles-based photographer, Michael Faye, it meant turning his lens toward two of his passions—dogs + kombucha. In 2007, the longtime dog-lover sold his commercial studio with the intent of rebooting as a pet portraiture business. Then, as he eloquently put it:

“That’s when Lindsey Lohan changed my life. Stay with me.

I come from a family deeply rooted in holistic tradition. I was raised vegetarian. Father is a chiropractor and Mother made her own yogurt! Sugar was not on the menu. No soda. No chocolate cereal. To some that may seem like hell for a kid, but I stilI hold those core values. I started drinking kombucha around 2005. I was then, as I am now, a strong believer in the raw food movement, with a regular yoga practice. I felt healthy, in shape, even so I felt kombucha’s health effects from the start. The sense of well being that comes with drinking kombucha became part of my every day.

But just as my interest in kombucha was deepening, it disappeared. Literally. The story goes like this: Lindsey Lohan’s lawyers attempted to explain away a failed alcohol test by claiming it was a false positive brought about by a lot of kombucha drinking. The practical (and hysterical) result of which was that kombucha was summarily pulled from the shelves. Such is the power of the Lohan. After a few weeks without, it was time to take action. I started learning how to brew and found that friends and family were really liking my early efforts and requesting more… I also discovered I loved the art of brewing.”

Three years and a lot of work later, Faye turned his new passion for brewing into a business, tying his now commercially available kombucha to his love of dogs + photography by taking shots of currently homeless dogs in the Los Angeles area and putting them on the labels to help them find homes.

We’ve been fans of Kombucha Dog since we first came to LA. They make great kombucha and who could deny such an adorably awesome business model.

A little while back, Michael reached out to us to inquire about doing something together as our roles of running MooShoes Los Angeles. The result is this Saturday’s coming Dog Daze 2015, a celebration of local shopping, local music, local food + drink, and, of course, local four-legged friends (many of whom’ll be on-site and available for adoption).

Admission’s free and you can purchase beer, wine, and kombucha on-site along with some products from our store and the Los Angeles-based Made in America Project. Local vegan restaurant Sun Cafe‘ll also be on hand to cater a dinner for any interested (just RSVP for it on the Eventbrite page).

Details + RSVPing for both dinner and general attendance here—hope to see you there!

Below, more KD labels + dogs; the indoor event space at Kombucha Dog; Katie with the new pup at the brewery, Jax; the KD credo; large scale dog love on the brewery walls; and more kombucha.

Yesterday, I finished one of the weirdest trio of modern books I’ve ever read.

Bound up in this handsomely designed anthology, Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy compiles sci-fi writer Jeff VanderMeer‘s 2014 novels Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. As Joshua Rothman puts it in his review for The New Yorker:

“Broadly speaking, the novels, Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, are eco-sci-fi: they’re about researchers exploring a mysterious, deadly, and unaccountable wilderness called Area X. But they’re also experiments in psychedelic nature writing, in the tradition of Thoreau, and meditations on the theme of epistemic pessimism, in the tradition of Kafka.”

Rothman goes on to admire VanderMeer’s ability to keep the reader on his or her toes, avoiding the common pitfall of speculative fiction of, once arriving at the crux of the fictive/sci-fi element, becoming predictable and/or trite.

But through each of these three novels, as soon as you feel you’ve got something figured out, the author flips the story on its head, adding some other, larger element that encompasses what you thought you knew in a newly complex way, switching narrative perspective, and, in general, keeping the story-telling excitingly ahead of the imagination of the reader…in my case, at least.

At times, it left me wheeling and kind of clueless, but it never left me bored. And even if I had some problems with Area X as a literary series, the fact that Paramount Pictures has bought the rights to produce all three books (with Ex Machina + 28 Days Later writer Alex Garland set to direct the first film) has me excited about the story’s translation to the big screen. Done well, it’ll be sure to be a visually stunning thriller that, likewise, keeps its audience excitedly on its toes.

Plus neon Pantone printing, man. Best.

Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral + Tyler Comrie.

Finally, after deciding to pull up roots in New York City and move our lives to Los Angeles in late 2013, we embarked on a total of three drives cross-country with Allister + Owen very patiently and graciously set up in the back seat of our ’92 Vovlo 240.

We took route 40 and old 66 each time, setting aside a little time along the way to see some sites—like the Painted Desert (above)—staying with friends and in hotels, eating late night Thai food + legendary burritos with all of us in bed watching reality shows when we needed to decompress with mindless TV. Most days the drives were long and arduous, but it’s still, and I think, always will be, a time we look back on with heart-felt nostalgia, exploring America and stepping into a new life together.

Allister loved the house we moved into on Glen Green Street, with its skylights and patio and wildlife all around us. It may be the place where we sadly had to let him go in the end, but it’ll remain full of happy memories for us—him outstretched under the tree on our patio with Owen; laying pressed up against the window screen as we worked outside; curled up on our couch or on Katie’s pillow, above her head as she slept.

As long as we’re in that house, it’ll remain just as much his as it is ours, saturated with memories of him in every corner. And when we inevitably move on, we’ll happily pack those memories up with everything else we bring to our next home.

We’ll miss you, Allister.

In the fall of 2009, we moved to our favorite and final neighborhood in Brooklyn—Carroll Gardens, full of old-school Italians, beautiful brownstones, awesome bars + restaurants, and regular visitors in the forms of squirrels + birds (the latter of which Allister very much appreciated, window-side). On the very first day of that next year, we also added a kind, outgoing pup—Owen—to our family.

We met so many great, new friends in our four years in Carroll Gardens and will always hold this neighborhood near and dear to our hearts. It took the massive pull of southern California to even make us vaguely consider leaving that life behind, but, eventually, we did. Before we left though, Allister enjoyed many a sun-drenched day in our windows watching the world go by and making that weird, chirpy sound at birds outside.

Continuing on our homage to our dear cat, Allister, in 2008, we think our old Russian landlord died; we never got a clear answer. Regardless, we were forced to move out because he was out of the picture. The rumor went that his “partners” were the Orthodox Russian Jewish mob, which—god bless New York—is a thing that exists. Or did then at least.

So we left Park Slope and moved to an amazing apartment in a shitty neighborhood—Sunset Park. Not to throw shade at Sunset Park; the proper neighborhood’s cool with its awesome park and vibrant Asian American community. But we lived on the sex-shop-saturated northern border of Sunset Park. Not good, not cool. But our new landlords did a hell of a remodel on a spacious apart with a yard of all things, so how could we say no?

We weren’t there long—less than a year—but we had many lovely times in that apartment and Allister loved the back windows and yard for their feral-cat- and bird-watching.

Like we mentioned on these pages a few months back, our beloved cat of nearly 12 years (who was likely at least 17 years old himself), had not being doing well in 2015. He’d been slated for a surgery in January but the doctor discovered he had a massive, inoperable tumor in his head and gave him two weeks to live. Over three months later, Allister was still with us as of yesterday, but it’d become clear that he’d started down a road that would only end in pain and discomfort. So we made the awful, heart-wrenching decision to let him go before that happened and said goodbye to our dear boy yesterday.

Allister McVittes was more than a cat; he was a dynamic presence in our lives, one that can be felt all the more now that he’s left us. A friend put it well recently when she told us that, after so much time, animals have a way of becoming part of who we are, not just in a figurative sense, in a literal one too. They shape our behavior and habits which, over time, shape who we become. And when that part of us is suddenly pulled into the void, we’re left feeling appropriately emotionally dismembered.

Beyond all that though, he was just a really amazing animal and our best friend. That may sound shallow or trite, but it’s really not. If you knew him, you know what I mean.

I’d originally thought—after over a year of non-stop week-daily posting since last February—of going dark for the rest of this week. But Katie pointed out that a cat as rightfully ostentatious as Allister would want to be celebrated. So we’re instead going grey-and-white, posting an inordinate number of photos of this regal feline through to the weekend, today at our first New York apartment, on Sackett street in Park Slope, where we lived with him from 2003 to late 2008.

We’ll miss you more than you could ever understand, Sir Allister McVittes III. You’re unmatched in spirit, personality, and head-strong certitude in your stature here on this Earth. It’s a far worse place without you.