Journal of the Movement of the World

We ♥ NY

We're super-proud of New York for passing the Marriage Equality Act. Being design nerds, we show that with...design. Der. 

Congrats to New York—we all got a bit more free this weekend, gay or straight. And congrats to all of our gay friends. NOW GET GOIN'! We want some super-awesome weddings to go to, stat!!!

Music Monday

Björk • Crystaline

Holy shit, Reader. We're kinda reeling of late, recovering from our minds continually being blown and then reassembled in new and exciting ways, over the weekend by a ton of DIY BA conference awesomeness—more on that later—and now by the queen of the weirdly beautiful, Björk.  Sit back and enjoy this amazing, so-far-from-disapointing new track from her forthcoming studio album/Web art project, Biophilia (due this September). Our tip: Stick around for the break-beatingly superb ending of the song. Call us overly optimistic and good-mooded today, but we'd say it's mind-blowing. MIND-BLOWING. Also mind-blowing, her spaced out, crazily designed site. Beautiful and understandably innovative work from m/m paris and Toronto's Jam3, who are evidently alien robots form the future.

Pin-Up Pandas

Pin-Up Pandas wanted to wait for summer-proppa to arrive before saying hello this month. Mmmm. Burrito. 

Journal of the Movement of the World

Via this TRIPPED out tumblr.

Music Monday

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs • Trouble

Reader, we need to be entirely up-front with you—we're dragging today. We're not 100% why— we got a decent amount of sleep this weekend, we ate all our veggies, and we even got out of town for a quick jaunt upstate a bit, but we are not your usual happy-go-lucky, we've-got-the-world-in-the-palm-of-our-hands selves. 

Our only hypothesis is that we somehow ended up a super-creepy british party like our artist of the week did int he video below. Orlando Higginbottom AKA Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs seems to have some issues if you go by what's happening here—super-skeezy bearded dudes in really tight 70s pants eyeing you from across the room; multiple bizarre sets of headgear; the apparent total lack of emotion.... Dude's in need of some serious couch time. 

And yet, he can write a damn fine song. The dead-pan singing, glitchy dancy music, and super-Britishness will draw immediate comparisons to Hot Chip, but I was personally rather disappointed with their last endeavor, so I welcome this strange, strange fella's throwing of the gigantic metal pronged hat into the electro-Brit-pop ring. Bizarre it up, sir! Bizarre it up, indeed.

Journal of the Movement of the World

From the Nest

Check it, reader! We designed a salad! Again! 

We did this once last summer and now we're doing it again. 

Then, as now, drew inspiration from Lauren Willhite of Color Collective + Design Sponge, who creates palettes as resources for designers, pulling from photographs of various fashion designers and artists. We're doing the same sort of thing....with our lunch.

This salad's honestly pretty par for course as far as ingredients go—fresh spinach, vine-ripened tomatoes, Fakin' Bacon, and cucumbers from our Carroll Gardens green market—but the colors struck us as photo-worthy. And color-palette-worthy.

And just WAIT 'til we start our CSA next week....

Music Monday

BOBBY • Sore Spores

Reader, though we gave you fair warning with our last post that we'd be taking a little time away from the blog to attend to things like demanding work schedules and even more demanding party planning schedules (HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KATIE!!!), we nonetheless have been plagued by persistent pangs of guilt for shunning our committed, silent, potentially fictional audience. 

So we give you a better-late-than-never Music Monday post featuring a band we saw open up for the phenomenal Thao + Mirah last week—the enigmatic, hippy-trippy, search-engine-defeating BOBBY. Yes, their name is unfortunate, we must admit, but they seem to have fully embraced it, talking about the band as an ethereal entity in and of itself—
"When Tom (primary songwriter) finally did meet him face to face in the Spring of 2010, Bobby became nervous and got sick all over his little brown tap shoes and turned into a mist. He was naught but vapor for a whole month, but soon after that, they fell in together; Tom making tunes to accompany Bobby’s sad dances."

I know. Trippy stuff. But you've got to hand it to them—they have fully embraced this odd, hallucinogenic-like  persona for the band, which is pretty evident in their live show, which features Woodstock-era wavy arm dancing and some pretty kaleidoscopic bizarro visuals. Taking any of this alone, it's easy to immediately dislike the band. Especially when they name their songs things like "Ginger (Water Birth)," "Shimmychick," and "Tomb Bloom." But taken as a whole, and especially in long form—either at one of their live shows or in listening to their album start-to-finish—they start to win you over with their seemingly sincere blend of chaotic tranquility, accented by catchy, unique instrumentation and a good balance of rhythm-centric and melody-centric singing.

This week's Song of the Week—"Sore Spores"—(worst title yet), gives evidence to this with an eerily catchy keyboard/theremin line and nice call-and-response from Tom and singer, Molly Sarle. Check 'em out. Their live show really is nice—like very chilled out stumble through a psychedelic forest—and we highly suggest catching them with Thao + Mirah if you can. Excellent show overall. You can find tour dates here (looks like they're hitting up NYC again in July). And you can pre-order their album, out next week. But give it a listen first—NPR's got the whole thing up as one of their First Listen features.