Designed by guilty people and crafted by Norman Porter the Urban Camper Bag is a minimal bag with style. It’s made out of high quality leather and water / puncture resistant fabric that ages like denim. There is 3 front pockets, the large pocket can fit you average book or moleskin® and 2 smaller ones that are made to fit you cellphone, wallet, pack of smokes or even (mac) laptop power supply. Also on the outside of the bag along the bottom is a camper strap that is perfect for a yoga/camper mat or even an umbrella and sweatshirt.

Once you venture to the inside of the bag you are greeted with a soft red flannel lining that not only looks good but also adds another level of protection for your items inside. For those of us caring laptops and tablets there is a special sheathe in the back to hold your expensive toy in place.

Great things happen when creative minds come together. We are lucky to have had a chance to come together on this project with Norman Porter. If you ever venture into Philadelphia and are looking for the best made pair of jeans or some well made leather goods be sure to stop by Norman Porter‘s studio. If you’re not in the area or are to lazy to stand up be sure to check out normanporter.com. There responsive site is pretty amazing (maybe cuz we made it).

For those of you into what the kids are calling “stoner rock” then you’ve herd of Kyuss. When the band broke up in 95′ the lead guitarist and main song writer Josh Homme went onto make a little band called Queens of the Stone Age. The singer John Garcia went onto make a band called Slo Burn for a short period of time between 96′ and 97′. It was no Kyuss but it was heavy, fast and rad.

There was an EP called Amusing the Amazing released on Delicious Vinyl which is where the song Pilot the Dune came from. There was however, a 5 song demo tape that was never formally released. This is that lost demo.

This past year John Garcia and some of the other remaining members of Kyuss started touring under the name Kyuss lives! without Josh Homme. After an almost sold out tour, Josh along with another former member Scott Reeder filed a federal lawsuit against Kyuss Lives! alleging “trademark infringement and consumer fraud”. We’re not going to choose a side on this one but on November 29, 2012 there was a message on the Kyuss lives! site that said the band had changed it’s name to Vista Chino. We’re just glad there is still music being made by those dudes.

First up is a project from Japan called Turntable Rider by Cogoo. Put simply, your bike becomes the mixing interface through multiple attachments to the bike that change the music based on how you use the bike; better tricks – cooler mix. Translated to dj gear the wheels act as the jog wheels, brakes as beat pads and the gyroscope sensor doubles as a fader pad. On their website Cogoo has said they will mass produce the Turntable Rider if they get 5,900 more “Likes” on that Facebook thing so go here and like it.

If you’re not the xgames type and more the play with blocks type then Reactable is just for you. This thing is from the future and probably was given to us by aliens. Reactable’s goal is to give the player a more tangible music creation process. Blocks designated with different loops or sound modifiers are placed on a electronic plain and produce sounds reflective of their potion in relation to the pulse point and other sound modifiers around it. Put plainly you move these magic blocks on a magic glowing table and make crazy electronic music.

The next step is too lose the “instrument” altogether which is what the V Motion Project is all about. Using a Kinect a group of musicians, dancers, programmers, designers and animators were able to achieve a fully motion sensitive music manipulator. The performer is tracked in real time and his movements actually manipulate the track – so other then looking really awesome it is a fully functional set up. This merger of dance and music in a performance has set the bar quite a bit higher and could revolutionize musical entertainment.

While stumbling through Old City Philadelphia, freshly filled up on cheese steaks we came across what from the distant looked & sounded like a full band rocking on the sidewalk. Living in cities will get you use to see street performers but when we got close what we saw was a guy with a crazy electrified mask playing guitar, killing it on drums with his hands, while singing. There was 2 mini amps with no indication of where they were getting electricity from and his mask had a wire running out of the top that seemed to be for a microphone. He was like an alien creature. It was mesmerizing and as we stood there the crowed got larger and larger.

He later revealed that his name was Nate and the project was called GULL. Nate has been a street musician for over 6 years, popping up throughout the US. Mexico, Africa and in 2013 Europe. When he was in Africa he was part of The Street Muse Project, which is a documentary on street musicians across the globe. Check out the kick starter here.

Kristof Kintera is an award winning Czech artist that makes beautifully useless and provocative things. Kristof doesn’t like to explain the message behind his pieces so that they can affect a viewer in whatever way they can but his creative titles matched with intriguing movement and sounds makes his art easy to digest while remaining mysterious. In his view art is not so much about making pretty things to sell or even calling attention to political enemies but rather as a communication tool for an idea or statement about the intangible.

Like many of you artists already know, making money as an artist is not easy, and Kristof is not immune to the starving artist stigma. This comes across in his art through his manipulation of everyday objects, almost like he used whatever he could get his hands on. This adds a more relatable element for those of us outside of the 99% and helps us to see the things we gloss over in our everyday life in a new way.

A lot of people say they can’t get into ‘modern art‘ because it’s sometimes so simply made that they get the ‘…i could do that’ voice stuck in there head so loud that it talks over the message the art is trying to convey. While some of his pieces fall into this vein of simply made, like Resurrection (shown left) he is also part of this exciting wave of pseudo-engineer artist that bring life to their objects with electric motors, lights, and other modern tech. This mechanical soul of his pieces sucks you in and puts you inside of the experience instead of just peering through the window. Pictures don’t do justice to the pieces, watch the videos to get the full experience.

Be sure to check out the rest of his work at kristofkintera.com and for more artist like Kristof Kintera check out Daniel Rozin and Niklas Roy.

The guys at Backyard Brains have just the right amount of mad scientist and cool to pull off some interesting experiments without getting wedgies. In fact they are the ones probably giving out the wedgies. At any rate one of their latest neuroscience experiments involved a squid, electrodes, and Cypress Hill. In the experiment a squid membrane containing ulta-sensative pigment cells called chromatophores was stimulated to the beat of Cypress Hill – Insane In The Brain (video below).

Electric pulses are constantly running through our body moving muscles and controlling our thoughts. What this experiment basically did was to replace the pulses usually sent out by the squids brain with the electrical pulses created by the Cypress Hill song. How the song is transformed into this electrical pulse is the same basic principle of how a microphone converts a singers’ voice into electricity.

You probably noticed the cockroach at the beginning of the video and if you go to the Backyard Brains website you’ll see even more cockroaches. This is from one of their first experiments in which they hooked a cockroach leg up to an iphone and bumped some beastie boys ( you gotta love their taste in music).

You can get in on the action too but of course use only already dead animals, and not already dead because you killed them dead. You can order all sorts of neuroscience gadgets including a SpikerBox, Manipulator, and yes, even a RoboRoach (that scene from fifth element is now real life) from their website backyardbrains.com. If you’re too poor too buy their toys they’ll even show you how to build them yourself and if you don’t want to experiment on animals you can always use your own face like artist Daito Manabe.

Seeing miserable kids waiting at bus stops got us thinking about when we were those miserable looking kids back in the 90s. The one thing your parents had to buy for you, if they really loved you, was the almighty Trapper Keeper.

A Trapper Keeper basically was a 3 ring binder with a velcro flap. That being said you still couldn’t deal with some knock off b*ll shit but a real deal Artist Series Trapper Keeper. You could always tell a legit trapper keeper by the psychedelic computer generated images of other dimensions and space-time printed on them. Other then hypnotizing you every chance it got, they also represented your sense of kewl to all your lame classmates. Of corse not everyone dug floating geometry wars – if you were a girl or were still waiting for your balls to drop you could have gotten the rainbow puke of colors with queer animals by Lisa Frank on your junior office supplies.

When we look back on all these computer generated designs some people say “wow these didn’t age well” But when you think about it they were not really meant to “age” with us. They were perfect for the time period, they mixed the latest technology with modern art styles resembling the Memphis Movement that was transforming interior design and fashion with bright colors and chaotic geometric structure in the late 80s and early 90s. Kids were exposed to art in a whole new way. They would look at art as something they can identify themselves with, even on this abstract level.

These designs stick with us because this was art that we saw every day, multiple times, for extended periods. Imagine if Picasso or Rembrandt made pieces that you carried around with you all day for at least a year. Even though these pieces would become apart of us we were never told who made the designs. Through all of our search so far, we still haven’t been able to track down the computer generating mastermind behind the “Designer Series” Trapper Keepers… But do we even really want to find out? Its one of those things where if it turns out the original designer is making ham and mayo sandwiches in a shit deli in the midwest, wearing slightly soiled khakis without washing his hands we’re ganna be a little let down – so we’re just going to think they ride motorcycles, shoot guns, and have one of those gold coin vaults that you can swim in.