A mural we pass relatively constantly on Fountain by Panhandle Slim.

As Wikipedia puts it, on their entry for the 2005 album by UK band, The Wedding Present, named Take Fountain:

“In Los Angeles, Fountain Avenue is a minor east-west street, between and parallel to Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard, two very congested arteries. Therefore, when Johnny Carson asked Bette Davis for advice on ‘the best way an aspiring starlet could get into Hollywood,’ Ms. Davis replied without hesitation, ‘Take Fountain!'”

This ain’t that clip—it’s one from 1988, the year before Ms. Davis died—but it’s a classic nonetheless, especially all the shade-throwing at Faye Dunaway.

We hereby present you with this month’s collection of new sounds from largely new artists—the May 2015 raven + crow mixtape, an accumulation of songs that get us going in the studio.

This one features some superb new tracks from Scotland’s Mercury Prize-winning Young Fathers (whose highly anticipated sophomore full-length White Men Are Black Men Too came out last month), NYC’s French glitch-punk Annabelle Cazes (AKA Glockabelle),  and a new collaboration between Emily Green + longtime favorite Madi Diaz, who first told us about her new band, Riothorse Royale, in an interview we did with the talented singer-songwriter last spring.

Give it all a listen below or over at our SoundCloud page. And be sure to scroll through and float over the tracks—a few, like the two from those latter artists mentioned above, offer free downloads of their MP3s currently.

Happy May!

We came across this on our trip to Ojai last week at the excellent mostly outdoor bookstore Bart’s Books—Drawings by Sylvia Plath, a collection of pen-and-ink illustrations created during her transformative Cambridge University period, when Plath met and secretly married poet Ted Hughes.

The book jacket alone is inspiring.

One of our Record Store Day finds this year was an RSD exclusive 7″ with artwork Shepard Fairey from NYC’s Interpol, a band that survived the indie commercial success of the early aughts followed quickly by the decimation of the industry by the Web.

I was mediocrely into the band when they first hit the scene but I really dig their subtly reinvented sound on this most recent ‘comeback’ album, El Pintor—a Latin-sounding anagram of the band’s name and their first full-length in four years.

The single features a stand-out from the album—”Everything is Wrong”—and a great unreleased B-side—”What is What”.

Here’s Shepard Fairey on the artwork for the 7″:
“The lyrics to ‘Everything Is Wrong’ are open to interpretation, but whether the song is about hard living, relationship failures, wear and tear on the environment, or an empire mentality, regret for poor decisions seems to be the theme. I decided to explore the idea of being complicit in a personal relationship or a relationship with a system that one realizes is unhealthy.”

You can see a shot of the sticker included in the 7″, a shot of the record, and the mural Fairey did around the corner from Acqua Santa in Williamsburg below. Watch the video for “Everything is Wrong” (directed by Paul Banks and Carlos Puga) below too. It’s either a commentary on our collective views of “old” and “new” residents of NYC…or just Interpol hanging out and doing stuff. Or both.

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.

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).

We couldn’t pass up pulling a color palette from this bouquet of spring green stalk we picked up from the farmers’ market recently.

Still unsure as to what we’ll use it for, but, at the very least, it’s a striking, invigorating palette that unmistakably speaks to lively spring days to come before we settle into summer.

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!

RIP, Rosie.

Art by Norman Rockwell.

Obviously.

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.