Presenting: Eccentrification Tour

There's something contagious about this family of do-it-yourselfers and fun-loving kooks. The Zenga family has decided to take their antics on the road for the first ever Eccentrification Tour, advocating "active living, creative expression and homemade entertainment." Imagine designing a website for that? Tom Froese tackled such a creative task:

When a 22-person, tall-bike-riding fam­ily going on a road trip called The Eccentrification Tour asks you to cre­ate their web site, you know it’s going to be a dif­fer­ent kind of job. The chal­lenge: how to tell the story of this family’s upcom­ing adven­ture and hon­our their own cre­ative vision whilst res­onat­ing with a diverse audi­ence. Borrowing from the lan­guage of cir­cus and sideshow posters of old, this web site is an inter­ac­tive poster that promises spec­tac­u­lar spec­ta­cles at every stop on their tour.

These are the clients I dream of...

Via DesignWorkLife.

On sailing: 'Pigeon' by Tennis

This adorable husband-and-wife duo, Tennis, debuted their first EP after sailing for eight months around the East Coast. After saving extensively to buy their 30-foot "Cape Dory", they left Denver with no serious boating experience to pursue Patrick's (the hubby) dream of sailing. Since they sold all their material goods (for the most part) to fund the trip, slowly, the couple reacquired instruments on their voyage with nothing but time to evolve into the sound you hear today. Alaina Moore (the lady part) said, "One day we were in a bar in the Florida Keys and 'Baby It's You' by the Shirelles came on. We'd never heard it before, but we loved the wall-of-sound thing, and decided right then that we'd try to create that when we got back."

Pretty successful if you ask me. I don't think their concept album screams "sailing," but it sure gives me hope that if I could be a little miserly, I could find out firsthand what they're talking about. If you're interested at all, they (b)logged the whole trip: White Satin Gloves.

Via The New York Times Magazine.

What We Do On Sunday

After finding an unattended crabapple tree, we have successfully made jelly (which reminds me a lot of this stuff). Our Wii is officially softmodded and I am now playing every Zelda game known to man—which has been enlightening because every new installment borrows so much from previous games. We had some friends come in town, and when they left they gifted us an awesome Chicago Dog print (in a very fine frame made by the gift-giver, Raun, himself). Molly decided she was bored and went to town on our rocker base (on the tip hiding under the curtain), so we're in the market for another one of those now... And as punishment, she is learning a new trick rooted in patience, called "Listen, You Lil Brat".

As far as this music bit, I was introduced to the glam rock side of Marc Bolan of T. Rex, initially. And then Sean comes home with a vinyl of what I'd consider the preface to psycho-folk; Devendra Banhart's early work is definitely influenced by this stuff, and I hear a lot of Animal Collective in this particular track. Good music for the best day of the week.

Reggie Watts

Probably one of my new favorite people—he's funny, talented and intelligent. You can find handful of really great performances on Conan including, but not limited to, Brown-ness and Big Ass Purse and Some Kinda Love. I made-up all these titles, because none of the videos or his lyrics make clear WTF he's really saying (other than maybe "Purse...").

Photos belong to Megan Kathleen McIsaac.

Respublica Bookstore, posters gifs

Work by Pavel Paratov.

Life In A Day

"What happens when you send a request out to the world to chronicle, via video, a single day on Earth? You get 80,000 submissions and 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries. Producer Ridley Scott and Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald took this raw material—all shot on July 24, 2010—and created Life in a Day, a groundbreaking, feature-length documentary that portrays this kaleidoscope of images we call life." Utterly amazing, brings me to tears.

Via doinwork.tumblr.com.

"There's a name for you ladies..."

Me oh my, The Women is the real original Mean Girls—where marriage and money replace power and popularity. There are no men cast in the film which is ever-so clever, because though the movie concerns the love and loss of many women, it makes apparent how little men have to do with these relationships. Bottom-line: women are crazy, nasty creatures, and "[pride is] a luxury a woman in love can't afford."

So this movie is two hours long, but it moves so goddamn fast. The women are catty, they all talk a mile/minute, and I couldn't keep up with any gossip. Everyone is obsessed with fashion and fitness ('39 had bizarre aerobics and beauty regimens), and it's all very cutthroat but fabulous. There's a cat fight, some mental breakdowns and a ten-minute fashion parade in Technicolor!

I'd have to say my favorite character is the Countess, Miriam, who is the only woman who has any faith in love (save for the main character at the very end). This is particularly fantastic to me, because—through getting screwed at the end—we understand that the Countess can afford to have faith (and therefore lack pride) because she's the only one who doesn't need men for any other reason but love. She's also hilarious with her constant shouting of "L'amour!" Last line from Joan Crawford completes the movie for me, and should sum up any questions about what this movie is about: "And by the way, there's a name for you ladies, but it isn't used in high society—outside of a kennel."

Motorparade, GRRLS

For Sean's birthday a few years back, I really wanted to get him something that'd last—something he'd really want and would keep. I couldn't afford to get anything big, so I solicited the help of our friends to create a birthday fund for the big day, where we presented him with a check—to buy a motorcycle. He'd always wanted one since selling his last bike... to my dad. My dad never rides it; It just sits in his garage, taunting Sean quietly.

Sean had his eye on a BSA A65T he'd found on Craigslist, and with his birthday stash he bought it. It needed more work than he could imagine, and thus began our long ordeal with "the bike." Owning a motorcycle is nothing to scoff at, especially if you're an enthusiast of the vintage kind; There are blogs and forums and videos and sites galore concerning this interest. And as Sean does, he's attempting to consume it all before he dies.

Today I came home to him browsing Motorparade. The blog's label "GRRLS" is pretty interesting to me, because the world of cycles is heavily man-centric, so seeing some females dominate a motorcycle is pretty nice. Careful... Some of the images are NSFW, because—as you can imagine—a lot of women posed with these bikes are as objectified as the machines themselves. Trust me; It was a real feat to find the few images I did of women actually riding them (hardly any in attire appropriate for the "slide"). My favorite is the following for Ducati, mimicking something like a high-fashion ad: "Isn't that where they invented taste?" Hysterical. Enjoy in whatever vain you will.

William Eggleston, Dust Bells

It's summer, it's hot, and there's something really romantic about these images of William Eggleston's that give me a strong urge to crack open family photo albums and move back to the city, pronto. I'm a sucker for photojournalism and his work is anything but fabricated or blown-out. I know I'm really late to the party for finding his work and falling head over heels, but if you at all care you'll read this article about the"softly spoken gentleman from the Deep South, with a taste for bourbon and antique guns and a reputation as a 'hellraiser'."

On Youth: Boards of Canada

This cover possesses such a pleasant, pleasant listening quality. I'd grown interested in Boards of Canada after watching—and then later purchasing and repeating too often as a strange teenage girl—Morvern Callar (one of Samantha Morton's early films). It's different and a bit of an art film; So if you haven't seen it, it's whatever. Nuttshell: "Have Walkman, dead boyfriend and unpublished novel; Will travel." I don't know where I read that, but it's quick and fitting.

Since I can't ever put into words my feelings about music, I like to post reviews. This one's from Pitchfork, when Music Has the Right to Children dropped. Please ignore the fact that the song I posted is a cover, and I'm writing about the album from where the original came. If the cover won't inspire you to give it a try, then maybe this review will:

Boards of Canada's sound was not wholly original… Boards used drum machines, samplers, and an unfathomable collection of analog and digital synths, like others in their sphere. Their chords were typically gauzy ambient, their beats head-nodding downtempo.

Properly speaking, they invented nothing. "And yet, the parts had never come together quite like this. The first thing to note is that Music Has the Right revealed Boards of Canada to be geniuses with texture, where god is in the details. The slow fade-in on 'An Eagle in Your Mind' is the lonesome sound of a gentle wind brushing the surface of Mars moments after the last rocket back to Earth has lifted off. The long history of the electric piano was nothing but a lead-in to the tone Boards used on 'Turquoise Hexagon Sun', the perfect evocation of a happy walk through the woods in an altered state….

What's it all about, then? 'Childhood' is the usual answer, but that's not as easy a connection as it seems on the surface. Music Has the Right to Children avoids the twinkling music box melodies that Múm has been coasting on for a while now. It's childhood, not as it's lived, but as we grown-ups remember it… The shades of darkness and undercurrents of tension accurately reflect the confusion of a time that cannot be neatly summed up with any one feeling or emotion.

If Boards aren't your thing, check out the cover's composer Keith Kenniff (or Goldmund) at unseen-music.com.

Black and WTF

A "Miss Figure" beauty contest where models' faces are strictly prohibited, a possibly-taken-mid-sneeze portrait, and the infamous chicken that lived 18 months after his head was chopped off. Not sure what to give that special someone this coming holiday or birthday? They have photo calendars! Via Black and WTF.