Let’s take it across the pond this week. Dan Black is British and what’s cooler is that you hear it when he sings. I recently started listening to this dude. The first track that I heard from him was “Symphonies” with Kid Cudi. I really like that song. But I like this one even more. It’s called “Yours.” Escute.

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I felt like it was time to swing back over to the hip-hop side of things. If you are an Adele fan then you are probably just coming down off of the “21″ release. I have a lot of respect for the girl. I really liked her first album, and thought she was amazing on SNL. A couple of weeks ago, Gilbere Forte’s manager flowed me this track that GF did together with Adele.  I had the opportunity to shoot with Gilbere in the winter for and Edwin editorial. He is a super chill guy and I have a lot of respect for what he is doing. So, needless to say, I was pretty excited to see Adele and Gilbere collaborating on this track. It’s called “Set Fire to the Rain.” Give it a listen.

[photo:  artwork from the cover of the featured track]

Yesterday evening, J Crew held their Fall 11 preview in the MPD. It was awesome late afternoon sun, and one side of the showroom was letting a lot of it in. Even though there isn’t much J Crew product visible in the shot above, I couldn’t help but snap it, because of the light and the awesome flares it was making in the lens. Here is the color version.

I really liked the hair color/sweater color combo in the shot above.

And this guy came too:

And the big winner of giveaway No. 4 is…. Actually let me preface this by saying, thank you-thank you for all of the comments. I love reading about what people are listening to.  I really did like them all. I could tell that each person had put some thought into what they were sharing. So, I had to resort to good old random.org. Even though it doesn’t seem very random,  random.org chose the number 1. So– congratulations, Foodie!

I’m pretty sure that Reagan has your address. But if you wouldn’t mind forwarding it in an email, the buds are yours.

“Reloaded” because this is the second time that The Pixies are gracing the pages of LMC. The previous occurrence can be seen here. For some reason, I have had the “Surfer Rosa” album on heavy rotation for about the past month. There are a couple of tracks on there that I will mostly likely never grow tired of. I am sharing one of such tracks today. The title is “Gigantic” I love Kim Deal’s voice on this one. She doesn’t do anything fancy with her vocals. But the way that she makes the song come together is infectious, to me. Anyway, here it is:  listen up.

Noooooo, not those walkmen (although, they are awesome). Today we are talking about these Walkmen–

The Walkmen, to me sound a lot like surf rock meets Bob Dylan. But they are from Philly, so I don’t really know how it’s possible. I guess it is the old tube amps with lots of reverb, and extended tom rolls. The Dylan aspect only comes into play with the lead vocalist. He tends to have a lot of Dylan-esque inflections when he sings (not so much in the track I’m sharing, btw). The combo works for me. I don’t love all of their songs. But I really like enough of them to keep me interested. I particularly like this track called “Woe is Me.” This track is super appropriate for waxing up surfboards and/or scoping bettys. Give it a listen.

Completely unrelated. Since I slacked on choosing/announcing the winner of giveaway #2 on Sunday. Here is the announcement. Susan, you win. Hit me up with you email, and I’ll forward the shirt. Congrats!

[Photo 1: Collage from G-images]

[Photo 2: also from G-images, but not a collage]

Happy 311 Day. Friday’s by virtue, are generally pretty good days. But, for me it has been an exceptionally good Friday (so far). I went online to pay bills and saw that our car insurance premium had mysteriously increased for the second time recently. I was a bit perturbed, so I called in and asked for an explanation. I was told that it is just a general increase for all of the policy holders in my area. I asked her if there was anything that she could do for me, since I had been with them for 8 years. “Sorry but no,” I was told. So, out of a mixture of curiosity and spite, I went to a competing company’s website and jumped through all of the hoops to request a quote. The final number was less than a quarter of what we are currently paying. I thought for sure that I must have done something wrong. So, I followed up with a phone call to the prospective new insurer’s customer service. As it turns out, the online quote was accurate, and I had indeed been screwed over by my current provider. So, in two weeks when my current policy expires, we will have an extra $350 per month to allocate in less painful ways.

After this, I was feeling kind of lucky. So, I decided to go for broke and call my credit card, to see if they would lower my interest rate. They did. Whaaaaaa? When I hung up with the credit card people, I was half tempted to call my landlord and see if he would lower our rent, hahahahah. On top of everything else, the rain has given way to sunshine and warmish temps.

Ok, so obviously everyone else’s Friday is not going nearly this well. I’m referring to the entire Pacific basin, specifically Japan. I feel super sad for those guys right now. Despite having watched “The Cove.” I strongly feel that Japanese people, generally are way to cute/nice/smart for something this crappy to happen to. I’m sure that the smart factor did play a huge role in mitigating damage, though. I remember learning about their super advanced earthquake proofing that was part of the building code over there. Things like foundations with springs in them, and furniture strapped to the wall.  Amazing people. Despite how saddening all of the news has been, I can’t help but be awed by the incredible images that have come across the net. Here are a few links:

• Boston Globe Big Picture (consistently one of my favs)
• Here are a couple of links to videos that Boingboing posted video 1 and video 2
• This one kind of sums it up, from Anota Bien.

In order to not end this post on a depressing note, here are links to some much more light-hearted items that I have liked during the week:

• Motorized off road skateboard by Fiik on Uncrate. Includes wireless hand held throttle.
• iPhone case made from stacked and cross-cut old Skate Decks, by Grove.
• Nat Geo built the house from Pixar’s “Up” and flew it using helium balloons.
• Speaking of Awesome Japanese stuff, a short beautifully shot documentary on Japan’s Keirin Racing Academy.
• A bunch of art that I shot at Scope, broken down by Nick Schonberger on Complex.
• And finally– why didn’t they have this when I was in Law School?

Apologies for the redundancy for anyone who subscribes to my G-reader shared items, or is my FB Friend. Don’t forget to try your luck, by participating in giveaway #2.

[Photo: Greta, By: Me]

I’m having a tough time staying on top of things this week. Here we are a day late with LMC (and several other things). Better late than never? It’s debatable, but here goes anyway. Sam introduced me to this hip hop duo, while he was in town. We ended up listening to a lot of Chiddy Bang radio on Pandora, while we were hanging out. It is pretty good stuff. You might recognize the music behind this track as one of the most overplayed MGMT songs in existence. I have to say that I like this rendition better. Check out “The opposite of adults (KIDS).”

[photo:  garnered from G-images]

Now that I’m looking at these images all in the same post, I’m getting a kind of morbid vibe. That wasn’t my initial intention. It is just some more stuff that I shot last week, and wanted to share. All three of these works were featured in galleries exhibiting at Pulse. The painting on the top was done by Cindy Wright. I have really been enjoying the photo-realistic stuff that I have seen lately.

Below, is a mixed medium piece by Matthew Cox. It is an Xray partially stitched over with cross stitching thread. Super cool concept.

Finally, these skulls are made from pieced together glass gathered from Mexican beer bottles. The artist is Andres Basurto.

It is Tuesday, which means that Sam is headed home today. Bummer. New LMC dropping later tonight.

The first art show that we hit yesterday was The Armory. It was massive. Almost too huge. I was exhausted by the time that we left. The shot above is overlooking half of one of the two piers that contained the show. Again– massive. Anyway, a few of my favorite shots from the armory include the one directly below, and the one with the hanging dollar bills.

I wasn’t really paying attention to the names of the artists for these two shots. I wasn’t even particularly fond of the pieces, but I thought that the setup of the display lent themselves to an interesting shot. Especially the one above, the way that those two gallerists happened to be standing right there conversing.

After The Armory show, we headed a bit further downtown to hit Scope. Below are some of my favorite paintings from the show.

Andy Denzler is the artist who painted the work above. The artist who did the one below is quickly becoming one of my favorite painters. Her name is Anna Borowy. I first saw some of her work a few months ago on a press release from a gallery show that she was doing in Berlin. It was very, very cool to finally see some of it in person.

And finally, I really enjoyed this piece by Victor Rodriguez called “Two Masks.” I love the concept and work. Two more shows today.

Sam B. rolls into town tomorrow. Good times will undoubtedly ensue. Incidentally, there are also grips of art shows going on this week. I will be covering nearly all of them for Curated/HS.  So, sorry if you hate visual art. Because, hey, there are going to be some photos of art shows on here for the next few days.

On an entirely different note. I just wanted to say how much I love the readers of JNB. Yeah, all 12 a of ya’ll (did I spell “ya’ll” right, Kelvis?). Even the crazy ones (you know who you are). To show a little bit of that love, I’m going to start doing some giveaways. Basically just whenever I feel like it. I might make up some fake reason or milestone to try to justify it. But in reality it is just that I’m trying to unload some (debatably) cool swag (of which I have amassed shload of in my fake-line of work)(I’ll try to cut down on the parentheticals in the rest of this post, I promise). Winning it might entail some sort of lame contest that I invent.

As a matter of fact, I have already come up with a contest, as I was typing the stuff above.  I guess that I should announce the goods up for grabs, first. The item that will first be given away via Jake’s New Blog is none other than a Flud Turntable watch. Peep the images below of the actual watch that will be given away:

from a slightly different angle–

These images are just to whet the appetites of those possible 4 of the 12 JNB  readers who might be interested. The contest won’t actually start until probably sometime next week. The awesome thing about blogging for free is that there are no rules…. ever. But here is some insider information on what the contest will entail. I recently did a video for Curated and PF Flyers in which we featured various pieces of street art around the city. The contest will be something like “who will be the first person to name 5 artists whose works appear in the vid.” So– if you are perving on that turntable watch for your aspiring rapper boyfriend/husband (because let’s be honest mostly girls read this page), or even possibly for yourself, study up on your art. At least two of the artists have been heavily featured on JNB. Spoiler alert, one of them is not Banksy.

So, yeah. There is all of that. This might get embarrassing when I actually start the contest. But until then, happy hump day.

[top img: Curated, Juxtapoz, Highsnobiety]