December 2011
27 posts
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“He was a poet, and he exhibited me many of his poems. I remember many of them....”
– From Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
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The Table →
My friend Sarah Handelman publishes an interesting zine called Not French Cooking. In her words, Not French Cooking is:
[A] zine published by Sarah Handelman that explores relationships with and through food. Inspired by Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the series addresses ideas surrounding health, nourishment and culinary-based relationships. Each themed issue...
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Top 10 Albums of 2011
Is it just me or was 2011, a great year for music?
The Family Tree: The Roots - Radical Face
Bon Iver - Bon Iver
Barton Hollow - The Civil Wars
Young Love - Mat Kearney
On Fire - Peter Furler
Helplessness Blues - Fleet Foxes
Vice Verses - Switchfoot
El Camino - The Black Keys
Strange Mercy - St. Vincent
Civilian - Wye Oak
Honorable Mentions: Mylo Xyloto by Coldplay, King of Limbs by...
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Merry →
Seth Godin:
You can’t be merry by yourself.
Sure, you can be content, happy, possibly even delirious. But merriment requires a group, and that group is almost always a group you can see and touch, one that’s sharing the same molecules of air, face to face.
The digital revolution continues to get deeper, wider and more important. But it has made no progress at all at...
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Merry Christmas! [The Christmas Song - Owl City]
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“Good art is a kind of magic. It does magical things for both artist and...”
– David Foster Wallace (via)
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This Space In Between
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A man, a ball, a hoop, a bench (and an alleged... →
I absolutely devoured this profile of Teller (of Penn and Teller fame) from 2008 that John Gruber posted on Daring Fireball earlier this week. There is so much to glean about craftsmanship, the creative process, collaboration, and respecting your audience—just the things I think about most!
The profile centers around Teller’s exploration of a 100 year old trick called involving a simple...
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“In 2011 I learned that emotion is at the heart of every decision we make. From...”
– Aaron Walter, from A List Apart’s What I Learned About the Web in 2011
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What I Learned When I Started a Design Studio →
Khoi Vinh looks back at the design studio he co-founded ten years ago and the lessons he learned in the process. These are valuable insights for any designer looking to strike out on their own, but I especially enjoyed this last bit of wisdom:
Even then, what I had already learned running that business was that saying “no,” was incredibly important, that turning down bad clients and bad...
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Central Park North
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Lessons according to salt →
Terrific essay from Liz Danzico using salt as a metaphor to give some insight into work and life:
Today, I still think of salt as enormously instructive. Think about the classic white shaker on every restaurant table. Most of the time we look right past it or ignore the invisible flavor in the small packets stacked next to the pepper. But stop for a moment, and consider salt’s history and...
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WatchI absolutely loved this short talk from type designer Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler & Frere-Jones. One-half of arguably the most prolific type foundry of the current generation, Hoefler has spend the past two years preparing their entire collection to be used on the web. Taking a much more philosophical approach, Hoefler views typography as a design system that must be altered and refined...
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The Consumption Beast
And then there is, of course, always, and inevitably, this spume of poetry that’s just blowing out of the sulphurous flue-holes of the earth. Just masses of poetry. It’s unstoppable, it’s uncorkable. There’s no way to make it end.
If we could just—just stop. For one year. If everybody could stop publishing their poems. No more. Stop it. Just— everyone. Every poet. Just stop.
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“I almost believe there is no New York; there is only a set of projections, and...”
– Related to the last post, Milton Glaser talks about New York, his iconic I Heart NY logo, and what it means to be a New Yorker.
I love this bit he adds at the end:
The thing about New York is, it’s based on the idea of change. It is the most mutable of places; its strength comes out of...
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Manhattan
Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. Eh uh, no, make that he, he romanticized it all out of proportion. Better. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. Uh, no, let me start this over.
The forgoing of his traditional white-Windsor-set opening...
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I'll be Home for Christmas - A Christmas Mix
Since 2006, I’ve been making little Christmas mixes and sharing them on my blog. Continuing that tradition, this year’s mix is called I’ll be Home for Christmas and is now available for download. It’s a diverse mix of old and new songs from a variety of artists and is perfect to listen to while decorating the tree, sipping eggnog, and wrapping gifts.
Download...
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“We could accumulate hundreds of thousands of images throughout our lives but...”
– The Never Forgotten House by Joanne McNeil, on memory, nostalgia, and childhood.
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“An interview really should be a surprise, an excursion into unexpected terrain.”
– —Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris on the art of the interview. He goes on:
This is the thread that has animated and connected his documentaries, which have specialized in both upending received wisdom and finding the humanity behind it. And it’s the question that has connected Morris, the... 