Summer in New York is a beast. I designed these little handkerchiefs a few months back because I knew that by the time June rolled around I’d desperately need of some kind of vessel to sop up the sweat from my face. Your clothes may be soaked through on those dense 90 degree days but the LEAST you can do is wipe your face of before you say hello.

So here it is, the 100% Silk Summer Sweat Rag.

Click here to buy them!

When the thick air of Summer envelopes the city, would you even consider allowing an inferior cloth the privilege of kissing your cheek? Don’t stand for a misty brow! Your 100% Silk Summer Sweat Rag will be standing by to sponge the city filth from every pore.

Measures 12” x 12”
Easily stows away in a pocket.

For six whole years I’ve enjoyed interacting with my friends and family on Facebook. It’s pretty amazing actually, for nearly my entire adult life, Facebook has been the closest thing to a journal and photo album I’ve ever kept. Facebook is a big part of day to day conversations with clients and friends alike, but as a Facebook user, the service has become nothing more than an impersonal and passive distraction. So, I have permanently shut down my personal account. Not only, to rid myself of an unnecessary diversion, but also to keep nonconsensual sponsored solicitations like “Dylan Likes New Balance. Like the page?” out of my follower’s News Feeds.

I’m not vanishing, but converting my personal account to a business page. This way I’m able to continue to use the service for work, admin other business pages, and maintain a searchable static presence on the site. It makes sense for me. Facebook has chosen a distinct path away from user connectivity and continues to evolve toward a profit-driven, sponsored content experience. Consuming content on Facebook is much like flipping channels on a television.

For me, Facebook is no longer the vibrant and exciting interconnected space it once was. The social web has changed a lot since 2006, and in regard to Facebook, instead of creating, contributing and engaging with meaningful content, I consistently find myself in submission to a bombardment of sponsored content, passively consuming content spanning from contextless headlines to friend-of-a-friend’s baby photos. It’s not a space I want to dwell, but I always tend to loiter.

Facebook has a great mission, “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” The problem is that I don’t trust they are pursuing their mission. In fact, I’d like to re-write their mission statement to read, “providing unmatched targeted advertising access to the largest and most detailed database of passive information consumers accross the globe.” The most prized possession for a brand to own is a consumer’s unwavering trust. Facebook sort of lost mine over time. For one, Mark Zuckerburg doesn’t have the cleanest track record in the area of trust and privacy. Beyond that, I feel put off (to say the least) when I read my News Feed and instead of seeing engaging relevant content, I see manufactured product/content endorsements from my peers.

I’m a fan of smart advertising, and we are only seeing the beginning of how advertising will evolve in this fairly immature stage of the social web. Brands already know more about us than ever before and I am truly excited for the future of how brands will cater to individual and group data. Facebook, however, is pursuing their goals to monetize in a way that sorely lacks creativity and frankly, makes me increasingly uncomfortable.

That all being said, the content that I created, the story that I’ve been telling for the past 6 years, is important to me. I created a ~500pg, black and white printed archive of my posts and photos between Dec. 2006 and Nov. 2012. I think that was a fitting way to terminate.

Here’s to a year of creating, contributing and engaging with meaningful content.

On to Beale St!

Like I said, I had been a little grumpy. Not at anything in particular, I was probably getting a little tired of hanging out with my dad. So we sort of took an unspoken break from each other and parted ways. I took a walk up and down the historic business district, talked to some friendly strangers and drank a few beers outside of an Irish pub.

It looked like madness in there and I really had no desire to be inside any more bars. (Conveniently, the Irish pub had a little to-go window right on the sidewalk, so I could order a beer and make faces at the sweaty people jammed up against the bar!)

These girls told me they drive 4 hours from their homes in Arkansas to party in Memphis on the weekends. Interesting! Their bulky-Razorback-football-star-boyfriends were just out-of-frame. I told them I was from San Diego and we bonded because some of their military friends are stationed there. I think I said, “Well it sure is a beautiful place to prepare for War.”

This bar was interesting.

Above: Sweet views from our $99 Econolodge room.

The next morning we did a little exploring. For some reason, the Mississippi River that borders Tennessee and Arkansas seems much more official than the Mississippi River that we [half-drunkenly] threw rocks into in New Orleans. So of course we went down to the shore to make it count.

On our way out we stopped at Graceland. Apparently that is Elvis Presley’s wall. Elvis Presley was a famous musician and performer who died 11 years before I was born.

A few hours later we stopped in Nashville for some Honkytonk and barbecue. We got out of there at just about sundown inorder to continue our drive across the state. Late that night we checked into a Super8 in Knoxville to rest up before the next leg to Washington DC.

Click here for more photos from Tennessee.

This post took me longer to write than I thought it would…

I shot five more rolls of film during our stop in Louisiana. I’d really like to go back there, there is some ancient culture in New Orleans that I can’t describe but that I haven’t experienced any where else. Some mixture of french-voodoo-pirate-bayou that seeps up from the cracks and makes the food and the music better. It’s apparent that the dominant white/western culture has slowly been paving away the unique characteristics of this place, but the authenticity of the culture is tenacious (and has been for hundreds of years). Yada-yada-yada

Anyways, right when we crossed the TX/LA border we dipped down south to check out the Gulf Coast. We followed highway 82 into a sparsely populated chain of beach-rental communities that had been pretty ravaged by hurricanes.  Some photos from Little Florida Beach, LA, below.

Once we left the Gulf, we headed straight to Lake Charles, LA to have our first taste of Creole since entering Louisiana. One of my dad’s friends recommended Steam Boat Bill’s so we stopped in and had a seriously delicious gumbo, poboy lunch. There was a cool bridge as you enter Lake Charles so I snapped a few photos down there too.

Lots more photos below

By the time we made to New Orleans and checked into our hotel we were pretty exhausted. Of course, that didn’t stop us from checking out Bourbon Street. After all, our hotel was 4 blocks away and we’d only be in NOLA for 2 nights right? I immediately got hustled for $5 by a friendly vagrant who pulled the ol’ “I bet you five bucks I can guess where you got your shoes” trick. After that, we both bought a $12 Budweiser which we were unaware was on special: buy one get three. So here we are, on a balcony in New Orleans with six unintentional beers. Everyone is on the take, you order 1, they sell you 2. After walking around, breathing in the omnipresent smell of vomit and horse shit accompanied by “…Jeeeeenny I got your numbah..” blaring out of one of the bars hosting some awful cover band, Dad buys us a shot (of course it ended up being 2 shots out of some god awful glass liquor vile). Before long it was 3AM, I had accomplished my pre-requisite “photo with strippers” and we were out of cash sitting on a cardboard box eating falafel. Time to sleep.

Side note, really stoked on how my flash worked out! Frankly kind of amazed that these photos even developed!

Day 2. Woke up late, Dad wanted to get cleaned up and figure out our plans for the day, hinting at a swamp tour – I think he was hurting more than I was. I decided to skip the shower and take a long walk around the French quarter during the less-sleazy-hours in the mid day sun. It was really rewarding, that 1 hour walk gave me a really good feel for the dynamic of the city.

The guy above was rad, he was trying to talk me into a restaurant and we just started talking about other things… any ways it worked and I bought a sandwich to-go to split with Dad. I was a little late for our 1PM departure for the swamp tour so I jogged back to the hotel where the valet had our van waiting out front. I hopped in and we split the sandwich on the drive out to the swamp.

We made it back to New Orleans just before sundown and decided to have a go at a slightly less rambunctious evening. I wanted to check out Frenchman Street pretty badly, maybe see some non-coverband play and catch a bit of the Charger game. We ended up at D.B.A and did exactly that.

The band was incredibly fun, I did some research and figured out the band was “Mike Dillon’s Go-Go Jungle.” It was a weird combo of rock, jazz, funk, rap. All the players were unbelievably talented, pure musicianship. We ended up by the Mississippi River waterfront so we walked down to the banks and skipped some rocks for good measure. At some point, security guards in agolf cart told us we couldn’t be down there.

Of course since we had to walk through Bourbon St. to get back to our hotel we inevitably stopped for pizza and one more daiquiri. YIKES. The little slushie shop, ironically, was playing horrifically graphic natured television, I took some photos.

Memphis is up next! You can take a look at all the photos from our trip on Flickr. I’ll post photos from Memphis soon.

Texas is big. El Paso, Ft. Stockton, and Austin were our stops along I-10. I shot five rolls during the course of our three night stay in Texas — one night in El Paso and two nights in Austin. A few of my favorite photos from the batch are posted below but you can view the all of the photos (there are a lot) on Flickr.

El Paso was a trip – we basically spent the night, got some coffee in the morning, and got out of there as quickly as we could.

We had plans to take the trip down to Marfa, Tx to see what all the hype is about but we literally missed the turn off and didn’t realize until 100 miles later. Instead we stopped briefly in Ft. Stockton for some Tex-Mex and got right back on the road. That actually worked out because it put us on course to meet my pal Travis Trevisan just in time to catch the Youth Lagoon show at Emo’s in Austin.

We arrived in Austin about an hour after the sun had gone down so I gave Travis a call.

He rode his bike over and I spotted him as I was walking back from the Liquor store. The three of us drank a few beers at the La Quinta Inn where we were staying, located right next to the Texas Capitol building, and we made our way out on foot to the show.

Youth Lagoon played an awesome show, but we wanted to get up semi-early the next day and tour the town so we headed back to our room…but not before some late-night pizza followed by shenanigans around the Capitol building.

More photos below

Meeting up with Travis was honestly one of the highlights of the trip – He had just moved to Austin a few weeks prior and I think both of us were excited to see a familiar face. We’ve never been super close friends but I felt like we had a mutual respect for each other’s decision to leave San Diego and try something else for a while. I had a blast hanging out with him and I hope he didn’t mind being our tour guide for a couple days.

Before we had made the decision to go south, I had visions of a weird small town tour through the midwest, just because I had never seen that part of the country. I had decided early on I wanted to skip Austin, because I had a feeling it would be really similar to San Diego i.e: tight-knit music scene, some cool bars, fun little downtown, indie shops on the outskirts etc…all of which I am far too familiar with to find interesting (that sounds pretentious but you know what I mean). I felt like I didn’t need to see any more of that. For the most part I was right. Austin felt very similar to San Diego to me in many ways. However, it’s familiarity was endearing and I definitely felt right at home. I’d love to spend some more time there.

Oh yeah, and bats!

The next morning we packed up and headed toward the Gulf, passing Houston with New Orleans plotted as our next stop.

Continued next week…
Here’s the link to the whole collection on flickr as they become available.

On November 15th, 2011, I arrived in Brooklyn, New York and opened up the door to my new apartment for the first time. In a bittersweet 30 minutes, my dad and I unpacked my possessions from the van we had just driven for 10 days across the country. We left San Diego on November 3rd, made stops in Tucson, El Paso, Austin, New Orleans, Memphis, & DC and we had a blast everywhere in between. During the trip I took almost 30 rolls of film with my shitty Minolta XG7 and some cheap Fujifilm Superia X-TRA 400 color film. Finally, I got around to developing the film and I just uploaded all the photos to flickr. I still need to sort and title and tag them all so I’ll be posting only one or two rolls every week instead of publishing them all at once.

Click here, or take a look at the slideshow below, to view the first couple rolls from the trip taken between San Diego, CA and Tucson, AZ
Eventually each roll of film will be published in a collection on flickr.

My dad and I did a lot of mobile uploads to facebook and instagram and I checked in everywhere on 4square, so it was very refreshing to just snap some film photos and not fuss with uploading/deleting/saving/sharing etc. This trip was amazing and it was a seriously fun exercise to use my film camera.

Slideshow below

Today is the day I put all my things in a van and left San Diego for the East Coast – Brooklyn, New York. For a kid who was born and raised in the sunshine and cool vibes of Southern California, well, this is a big change… and the imminent winter may be telling of that.

I won’t tell you about how much I’ll miss everyone or about all the incredible experiences and people I’ve met over the past few years or any of that, all I want to say is that San Diego has been the perfect stomping grounds for trying new things and experimentation – to hone in and figure out what I love to do and what I want to pursue. Now I’m moving to New York to focus.

Today, I’m embarking on a 10 day roadtrip with my Dad and we are going to have a blast. I’ll keep everyone updated via twitter, instagram andfacebook. I plan to take a ton of film photos also, which I will upload to flickr at some point.

Around the 15th of November I’ll arrive in Bushwick and unload the van into my new apartment where I will be living with my girlfriend, Leah Goren. She is the most creative and ambitious person I know, we make a great team and I can’t begin to explain how excited I am for the things we will accomplish together. Our first task will be designing the apartment, building shelves etc. and making it feel like a home.

New York is a big place and I can’t wait to make it my own. I’m excited to start new routines, find a new coffeeshop, see new faces and most importantly, embed myself in a new community.

In pursuit.

If you missed Computer Club (Angella and I) DJ at Starlite, DON’T SWEAT. Here’s volume one of Computer Club’s new mixtape series. Party +1 UP! Download Here

Today is National Bow Tie Day – believe it. So, to celebrate I wanted to take this opportunity to show off my growing collection.

Currently I own a humble assortment of three bow ties. Three is a good number. On the left is a silk bowtie that Leah designed for me specifically to match her dress for a wedding. It’s super light weight, 100% silk with a fun pattern fit for summertime parties.

My very first bow tie, pictured in the center, is a classy blue chambray. It was an early birthday gift, purchased from the fantastic Brooklyn shop  In God We Trust. It’s a go-to choice – looks great camouflaged blue on blue with my favorite chambray shirt, that way it’s a subtle look. “Was that guy wearing a bow tie?” – Yes, in fact, I was.

Finally, the most recent addition on the right is the one I’m currently excited about. It’s of the light weight, 100% wool variety. Coffee brown, dark enough to pull off a formal look, but on the other hand, looks just fine with a work shirt and rolled up sleeves. It’s handmade in San Francisco by Smith Brand Bow Ties.

It’s great to see a brand take enough care in the packaging to add details throughout. I mean, a wax seal, really?… So rad. When it arrived in the mail I kind of obsessed on taking pictures of it. Check out the gallery below for more images.