Mutiny bikes was smart (or dumb) enough to fasten a 7D to a remote control helicopter and shoot footage at the new Austin skatepark. The result is unique and really cool.

As the last few days of the surf season are being crossed off the calendar, I’m finding myself holding tightly to what I might possibly classify as one of my top 5 most adventurous and pure summers ever. I’ve hung out with a lot of great people, I’ve visited a lot of incredible places, and I’ve spent a lot of time relaxing on the beach or on a longboard and discovering great music to keep me company through it all.

So I know I’ve already released a summer mixtape at the beginning of the season, but I realized that it was based mainly on music from last summer, and didn’t adequately represent any of the new memories I made this year. I also realized that all the music I found this year didn’t fit into just one category of summer music, there was music for hot days on the road to the beach, and music for chill nights by the pool. So I’ve compiled two companion playlists; one for Summer Days where you’re driving down the ocean road looking for a place to park your car so that you can jump out and hit the surf, and one for Summer Nights where you’re winding down by the pool with only your closest friends after a long adventurous day, talking about music, girls, life, and love. Once I divided the mixtape into two specific categories, the inspiration flowed and they both ended up developing into two really solid jam lists.
I’m about to head to Raleigh this weekend to see Bon Iver, and then Folly Beach for what is possibly my last big beach trip of the year, and I’m looking forward to setting the mood with these two sets of memory-inducing songs. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do, and I hope they provide the soundtrack to what’s left of your summer. Get out there and make the most of it.

Summer Days [Download]
Floating Vibes — Surfer Blood
Today is the Day — Yo La Tengo
Dannyboy — Youngblood Hawke
Young Blood — The Naked and Famous
Pumped Up Kicks — Foster the People
Either Way — The Generationals
Go Outside — Cults
Out of the Blue — Julian Casablancas
Big Wave — Jenny and Johnny
Cold War — The Morning Benders
Cheekbone Hollows — The Child Ballads
Everyday — Vetiver

Summer Nights [Download]
In the Summertime — The Rural Alberta Advantage
Wash Away [Reprise] — Joe Purdy
The Drying of the Lawns — The Tallest Man on Earth
And If My Heart Should Somehow Stop — James Vincent McMorrow
Santa Monica Dream — Angus & Julia Stone
Song for You — Alexi Murdoch
In the Stream — S. Carey
The Great Escape — Patrick Watson
Pacifists Anthem — Sunparlour Players
Accidental Babies — Damien Rice
Cliffs Along the Sea — Bryan John Appleby
Holocene — Bon Iver

Saturdays Surf NYC is a brand I’ve been wearing all summer, and I wanted to share the love so that you have a chance to get in before the last days of summer are gone. Saturdays has a store in SoHo that sells everything from surfboards and wax to apparel, to books and music, fine art, coffee, and other quality lifestyle accessories. The coffee is brewed at the front of the store by some of the best baristas in the city, and out back there’s a patio hang-out, like a beach oasis in the middle of a crowded city. The apparel has a classy surf style that is a perfect blend of old school california and new school prep, and right now they’re doing a partnership with J.Crew “In Good Company” so you can buy a few pieces from J. Crew, or you can find a much more exhaustive selection on the Saturdays Surf online store.
It’s the perfect style to wear to the beach, or even just to do some longboarding on the boardwalk. Go check out their website to read more about the brand and their shop for tons more quality products.

This video is actually a gorgeous lookbook for fashion designer Stephen Alan’s spring/summer collection from 2010. We’re a little late on getting to this one, but it’s such a beautiful piece of cinematography that time doesn’t really matter. Shot in the waning days of summer, the film features DJ/Actor/Film-Maker Matt Creed and the up and coming Canadian actress Liane Balaban as a young couple who finds that it is harder to “escape” in the country then they had thought. I wish more fashion labels would put this much love and life into their lookbooks.

There’s still a little bit of summer left and if you’re looking for some good literature to close out your beach season, I’ve got a couple of recommendations of books that I read this year.

Love is a Mixtape by Rob Sheffield
Rob Sheffield writes about music the way poets write about romance. He dissects every melody line and lyric and examines each emotion evoked in order to fully understand the impact of a musician’s work on our souls. Love is a Mixtape is a story about a relationship with a woman named Reneé as told through music and mixtapes. Each chapter starts out with a list of tracks that defined a period in their relationship, and how each lyric or each artist’s work spoke to a specific time in his and Reneé’s life. Sheffield talks about how Nevermind was such a complete revolution for mainstream rock, and how a relationship is about taking your time and hurring up, and why Hey Jude can take a sad day and made it better, better, better. When his wife Reneé dies suddenly and without warning, Leonard Cohen, Frank Sinatra, and Pavement kept him company on those late nights spent smoking in the backyard and processing life. Rob explains that music is what helped him understand Reneé, and music is what helps him understand losing Reneé.
Sheffield sees music in an incredibly intimate and personal way, his writing is clever, witty, and every line is packed with a strategic thoughtfulness that makes this book stand above all other commentaries on music. It’s heart-wrenching and hilarious at the same time, and you’ll find yourself seeing Stephen Malkmus in a completely different light.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
When a young Oskar Schell suddenly loses his father in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, he finds himself tossed immediately into a world of turmoil and emotion as he tries to understand life without his father. He unexpectedly finds a key in his father’s closet labeled “Black” and he vows to find the lock that the key opens because whatever is behind that lock will help him to understand even just a little bit more of who his father was.
Foer’s writing is an insightful glimpse into the mind of a young child who has just lost a parent, and it is mesmerizing to see the Oskar try to put together the scattered clues of a puzzle with too many pieces. Foer paints the picture of a picture of a young boy who, even in his confusion, sees things much more clearly than many adults do, and despite his inability to cope with his father’s death, is able to express himself and his feelings truthfully, the way we wish we could.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a portrait of a boy becoming a man overnight and Foer’s intelligent writing puts flesh and bone onto an intricate character in such a way that you can’t help but laugh with him, cry with him, wonder with him, and dream with him.

Bonus Pro Tip: If you’re looking for something a little more classic, I suggest you pick up The Old Man and the Sea again. Hemingway is my favorite prose author, and I just finished re-reading this old favorite the other night. It’s a great story about perseverance and willpower that is always a good reminder that “a man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

Alone in the Wilderness is a compelling story about a man named Dick Proenekke who, at the age of 51, went into the mountains of Twin Lakes, Alaska and built a cabin where he lived for several years. He used only hand tools he either brought with him or made himself and constructed a home measuring 11′ by 14′ with a dutch door, a waterproof moss roof, a gravel floor, and a fireplace. He built everything from the ground up with his own hands, including the furniture.

His friend Babe Alsworth was a bush pilot who brought him food and supplies, but Dick eventually purchased a J-3 Piper Cub with which he used to explore the area around his cabin. He crashed one day at Sheep Mountain, and injured his back, but was able to make it to the Alaskan Highway where someone took him to the hospital. He never flew again.

He lived at his cabin on Twin Lakes for 30 years until he became to old to continue maintaing it, at which point he moved in with his brother in California, and then died in 2003.

Alone in the Wilderness is a edited together using footage that Proenekke shot himself using a tripod as he built his cabin and lived life in the Alaskan wild. It is narrated and edited by Bob Swerer, who guides you through the story with interesting practical detail, but also great philosophical eloquence.

I love building things with my hands, and I often fantasize about dropping off the grid and building my own log cabin with only an axe and hand tools, so it is an absolute dream for me to watch and see someone else who actually did it, and in Alaska, no less. I heard about this film from a recommendation by the good folks over at Best Made Co. and I highly recommend it. I’ve already loaned it to many of my friends and they all enjoyed it thoroughly.

I’ve also just ordered Part II of Alone in the Wilderness which was just released. It includes never before seen footage shot by Dick Proenekke, so I’m glad I have a bit more material to fuel my wanderlust. You can order your own copy of Part I and II from this website.

I don’t know if I’ve posted about Dana Tanamachi and her chalk lettering before, but she’s recently updated her portfolio with a few new pieces, and her work is so incredible that I wanted to give everyone a chance to look at it at the risk of being redundant. She does such a precise job with her typography, and she continually keeps it fresh by using many different complementing fonts. Go check out the rest of her work on her website.

Jasmine Van den Bogaerde, or Birdy, is a 15 year old artist from England who won Open Mic UK in 2008 at the age of 12, and has been writing music since she was 7. She’s been on the radar ever since she released her cover of Skinny Love by Bon Iver early this  year at the age of 14, and she’s recently released a cover of Shelter by The xx.

When I first heard her cover of Skinny Love, I didn’t know she was so young, so the fact that I loved it had nothing to do with her age… but once I found out she was 14 when she recorded it, it was that much more impressive. What I love is that she doesn’t try to do a note-for-note remake of the song, but instead switches the accompaniment to piano and makes the melody lines her own. You can listen to the song below:

Download audio file (Birdy-Skinny-Love.mp3)
Skinny Love (cover) — Birdy

No word yet on when a full length album is due, but she was quickly picked up by Good Soldier Songs Ltd. after her success at Open Mic UK, so an album is most likely not too far away. File this under “Artists to Keep an Eye On.”

As it turns out, Phoenix is in the studio working on their follow-up to their breakout fourth LP, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Fashion designer/photographer Hedi Slimane caught up with Mars and gang in a New York recording studio and took a whole bunch of candid pictures of the band as they worked. Bassist Deck D’arcy has mentioned that they’re working with an orchestra for the new release that is somehow inspired by the TGV train. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I know Phoenix won’t disappoint, and neither do these photos.

There’s a whole set of really great photography here, and if you’re not familiar with Hedi Slimane’s work, visit his website and look around. What I love about him is that he seems to capture the true emotion of the people he’s shooting, it’s not the standard staged posing that usually goes on an album cover, but it really gives you an insight into what the musicians, actors, and models are really like.

Stuxnet is a highly complex computer virus that was discovered in July 2010 designed to target industrial software and equipment. It was found on computers at an Iranian nuclear test facility and was programmed to remain dormant until it made its way to the computers that control centrifuges that spin nuclear material. It had the ability to operate the centrifuges at will, all the while telling computers and workers that everything was fine. It has been called the first open source weapon completely made of code. It weighs only 1MB in binary, and required a specialized team of hackers at Microsoft to disarm.

This is a gorgeous video produced by Patrick Clair for Australian TV program HungryBeast on Australia’s ABC1. The information is highly interesting, but what makes this video incredible is the fact that the graphics are really beautiful, but not distracting or superfluous. They perfectly support the content and make it even more engaging.