July 2011
21 posts
Music is a time machine
I get back to the bus stop around 8:30; a two-hour bus ride from New York has been my commute home everyday this summer. I got off the bus and was driving home, the windows were down and that cool late-summer-day breeze poured over me as I twist and turn down these country roads.
The iPhone was softly playing music when an old song started and I suddenly found myself reminiscing. Music does that to us. It invades our experiences and becomes forever locked in certain moments. When we hear that song again, all those emotions, experiences, and memories come flooding back. Like how that one band takes me back to my senior year of high school or that song that reminds me of Philadelphia or those songs that remind me of Kutztown and how that one album will always make me think of Nashville. A song doesn’t make us just remember another time, it makes us feel like we are there again. Music is multi-sensory like that, we don’t just hear the melody and the words, we feel them and they take us somewhere. My iTunes is a scrapbook, a roadmap of where I’ve been. If I ever want to remember and look back, I know how to get there.
The song finishes and a new one begins. I’m somewhere else. Music is a time machine.
“My favorite thing about Facebook is seeing how people choose to present themselves. It’s especially interesting when my friends change profile pictures: I like imagining them looking through their pictures and finding the right one that they feel perfectly sums up how they want to be seen and then cropping it. The narrative and process behind the selection of a profile picture is really endearing.”
—
—Moby, from The Atlantic’s What I Read feature
Reminds me of this quote from Shane Hipps
On the designer-client relationship →
brainpickings.org
One of my all-time favorite Steve Jobs stories is his retelling of working with the designer Paul Rand:
I asked him if he would come up with a few options. And he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you, and you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution — if you want options, go talk to other people. But I’ll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not, that’s up to you — you’re the client — but you pay me.’
I find myself referring to this story often and I like it just as much for what it says about Paul Rand as it does Steve Jobs. You don’t often hear Rand’s side of the story, though:
Steve Jobs of NeXT is a very tough client. If he does not like something, you hand it to him and he says, “that stinks.” There is no discussion. On the other hand, I was lucky enough, I suppose, when I did the logo for him. After he saw the presentation of it, he got up - we were all at his house, sitting on the floor, you know, Hollywood style, with the fireplace going, hot as hell outside. He got up and looked at me and said, “Can I hug you.” Now that is overcoming a conflict between the client and the designer.
“I think I continue to be engaged with design because it’s so tied to the rest of my world. Design is informed by music, culture, politics, and everything else that’s happening around us. Being involved and aware of these other things only makes our work better. It’s a good excuse for me to go out and live an engaging life outside of design.”
—Dan Cassaro from this interview with ComputerLove
“What else but baseball connects us to America of, say, 1891? What else has burned so long in our consciousness? The American population in 1891 was less than one quarter of what it is now. That was before movies, before television, before radio, before Hershey bars, before Wrigley gum, before even Brett Favre. America the Beautiful had not been written. Dracula did not exist, no Roosevelt had yet been president. Football, under different rules, was played only at a few colleges, there was no golf U.S. Open and until the end of that year basketball was a game bouncing around in the fertile mind of a YMCA instructor named James Naismith. The Olympics, more than 1,500 years since their last staging, would not resume for another five years.”
—What Keeps the Grand Game Great?
“It’s odd that she has come to represent, for some, a kind of soulless hipster cool, because in July’s work, nobody is cool. There’s no irony to it, no insider wink. Her characters are ordinary people whose lives don’t normally invite investigation. So her project is the opposite of hipster exclusion: her work is desperate to bring people together, forcing them into a kind of fellow feeling. She’s unrelentingly sincere, and maybe that sincerity makes her difficult to bear. It also might make her culturally essential.”
—
Miranda July is Totally Not Kidding
This is exactly why I love July’s work so much. I can’t wait to see The Future
(Also, here’s a great interview with July’s husband, Mike Mills, the graphic designer-turned-filmmaker on his latest film Beginners)
Art and Family
The always interesting blog of Austin Kleon points me towards this quote from cartoonist Gene Colan on the perpetual conflict between art and family:
To be successful in art, you have to really love it and be totally devoted to it. Unfortunately, a family life is missed. It’s a sad thing. You’re not really with your family that much. You’re married to your art. I have some regrets about that. My art seemed to come ahead of everything. Maybe that’s what makes for the artist. Artists are very self-centered people. They love what they do to the exclusion of just about everything else. They kinda live in a bubble.
The term “work-life balance” gets thrown around a lot these days. I hate that phrase. I wonder if a balance like that is even possible? What if “work” and “life” can’t even be separated but are merely parts of the other? What if it’s all just one stream we delicately navigate down?
Yet, I think about this struggle Colan talks about often. I think the creative fields are more prone to obsession than others. I don’t know any accountants who crunch numbers in their free-time. But us artists? We get home from work—where we are creating—and create more! I spend my days pushing pixels, designing interfaces, and drawing icons only to come home and illustrate, draw, paint, photograph. For many of us our work is more than that. Even if a work-life balance is possible, I can never achieve it because my work is more than work. It’s part of my identity.
“Every magazine, television network, or radio station with an archive is sitting on gold. Get that stuff out of the basement and put it online for free, where people can link to, remix, and use it. But don’t just dump it there. Take advantage of what the web can do. Structure the work so that people can improve on your collection.”
—What Big Media Can Learn from the New York Public Library
That door is locked
If while wandering around the inside of an art museum I come across a door that’s solidly locked shut, what do I do? Well, if I’m emotionally immature, I might wrestle with the door’s handle, or maybe fall to the floor and try to peer beneath it. I might throw a tantrum because I can’t get into that locked room. I might squat beside the door, fold my arms, and determinedly try to imagine everything inside the room. There are all times of ways I might waste my time outside that door.
But if mature, I will simply assume that those in charge of the museum know what they’re doing, and for whatever reason don’t want people going in that room. And that would be good enough for me. So I would turn away from the door, forget about the room, and go back out into the museum where all that wonderful art was waiting to enlighten and inspire me.
—John Shore (via)
Why worry about the future, what’s next, our five-year-plans and what’s behind all those locked doors when there is so much here, now, that is wanting to inspire and enlighten us? That door is locked and I’m learning to be okay with that.
Make Your Kid a Writer →
theatlantic.tumblr.com
M. Molly Backes on how to make your kid a writer:
Let her be bored. Let her have long afternoons with absolutely nothing to do. Limit her TV-watching time and her internet-playing time and take away her cell phone. Give her a whole summer of lazy mornings and dreamy afternoons. Make sure she has a library card and a comfy corner where she can curl up with a book.
Give her a notebook and five bucks so she can pick out a great pen. Insist she spend time with the family. It’s even better if this time is spent in another state, a cabin in the woods, a cottage on the lake, far from her friends and people her own age. Give her some tedious chores to do. Make her mow the lawn, do the dishes by hand, paint the garage. Make her go on long walks with you and tell her you just want to listen to the sounds of the neighborhood.
Let her be lonely. Let her believe that no one in the world truly understands her. Give her the freedom to fall in love with the wrong person, to lose her heart, to have it smashed and abused and broken. Occasionally be too busy to listen, be distracted by other things, have your nose in a great book, be gone with your own friends. Let her have secrets
Have you ever read something and felt: “Yes, that’s right. That’s the story of my life”? That was this. I think you could replace “writer” with “artist” or “designer” or any creative job and it still works. My parents raised me well.
(via Ta-Nehisi Coates)
Being Available in Response
I’m currently working my way through the terrific book Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Things One Sees, a biography and series of interview with the artist Robert Irwin by Lawrence Weschler. I’m finding myself marking it up all over and finding lot of passages resonate with me and my approach to design.
Talking Funny →
youtube.com
Talking Funny is an HBO special that features four of the top comedians working today, Jerry Seinfeld, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais talking about comedy. It originally aired a few months ago but the entire one-hour show has shown up on YouTube and it’s fantastic. It’s great to see these masters talk about their craft and some of the theory behind what they do. The link above is to part one, and here are parts two, three and four.
New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down
LCD Soundsystem
Song of the moment: New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down by LCD Soundsystem
More on gift-giving →
wearedesignbureau.com
There is a great interview over at Design Bureau with two of my favorite designers, Frank Chimero and Rob Giampietro, discussing one of my new favorite websites, The Mavenist, and the conversations drifts to one of my favorite topics, gift-giving. A great quote from Rob:
In terms of design, gift-giving is a useful structure. For one thing, gift economies create a different kind of value than pure monetary value. So when designers are asked about “monetizing” design, it’s good to invoke a gift metaphor to counter this. When you put good things out there, good things come back, and they may take both monetary and non-monetary form. Much of design is given away, either physically (like a business card) or digitally (like a website) or even experientially (like a slide talk). All of these are design and many are free, but all have great usefulness and value. Their value comes partly from their aesthetics, but aesthetics, as we know, can be highly subjective. Gift-giving gives us a criterion other than aesthetics to evaluate design. It shifts the emphasis in design discussions away from the production of forms by practitioners and toward the production of actions by recipients.
And then Frank adds:
The form of things matters only in so far as they have a good intent. I’m not convinced that design can rise above its content, because it’s so subservient to the message it’s communicating and the effect it has on its audience. The thing that merges design so eloquently to the process of gift-giving is the fact that one person is hiring another person to make something for a third person. The designer and the client are working together to create something for someone else.
The Attention Economy →
sethgodin.typepad.com
Seth Godin:
Attention is a bit like real estate, in that they’re not making any more of it. Unlike real estate, though, it keeps going up in value.
I think your attention is one of the best gifts you can give. Whether it’s to your family, to your friends, to your craft, to the companies you care about, your attention is a limited resource. Give it to things that are most important.
