On August 4, 2018, helveticka celebrated its 30th anniversary. The occasion was marked by an exhibit titled CX30: Creative Experiences, Thirty Collaborators. It featured 30 collaborators who played an important role in helping us reach this milestone. In case you missed it, here’s a link to the site that features each of their individual stories. A year later, many of these creative partners are still lending their expertise to our projects.

photograph courtesy of Chad Ramsey

Above are 24 of the 30 exhibit subjects – mostly local, but some from Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle – who joined Linda and me during our anniversary celebration. Now that’s one serious talent pool.

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: the design life  |  make a comment

When I entered Eastern Washington University in the fall of 1985 as a freshman music major, I had no idea what I was getting into. I just remember that the possibilities seemed endless. I literally believed that I had a chance of playing in a major symphony orchestra.

It was a different time, of course. Professional orchestras were still economically viable, for one thing. And doesn’t every eighteen-year-old have more confidence than sense?

One of the things that sticks out from my first week of classes was the humorlessness of the professors. Theory, aural skills, music history: it was a dour bunch, with maybe two exceptions. The first was Richard Obregon, who, in a moment of weakness (and, in retrospect, somewhat irresponsibly), gave me his recipe for cactus coolers; the second was Travis Rivers.

Travis, who died last week at the age of 81, was every bit the nattily dressed walking encyclopedia that people remember. But he was also a kind, thoughtful, and extraordinarily funny man. As chairman of the department, he’d frequently roam the halls, hands behind his back and a twinkle in his eye as he’d chat up students, offer a wry observation, or crack a joke so dry it would sometimes take a day or two before you’d get it.

He was a hell of a writer, too.

Around 2001 – more than a decade after I’d left EWU – I began writing music criticism for The Local Planet, a short-lived alternative weekly that handled news more irreverently than the Spokesman and covered arts more seriously than the Inlander. It wasn’t the sort of publication you’d imagine Travis would read, and yet, a day or two after my first piece appeared, there it was: a congratulatory email from the man himself. I was surprised he’d remembered me at all, to be honest. But he knew I had a talent, he wrote – not so much for musicianship, as it happened, but for writing. And he’d always known I’d find a way to do it for a living.

Travis was one of those quiet people who made an outsized difference in a lot of lives. And I’ll be forever grateful for the time I knew him.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Kevin Drum’s helpful “Short Primer on Modern Nuclear Reactor Design” includes a mention of thermal breeders – a type of reactor that produces more fuel than it uses.

Sound too good to be true?

Not when you consider that, on December 20, 1951, Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1, near Arco, Idaho, became the first power plant in the world to produce electricity using atomic energy. That’s an impressive feat in and of itself. But there’s more: In 1953, testing confirmed that EBR-1 was, in fact, breeding fuel. The reactor operated safely for 12 years.

So when Drum says that breeder reactor technology represents one of many ideas that “deserve buckets of money for research to make them ever cheaper, more reliable, and easier to maintain,” keep in mind that we had a working one sixty-six years ago.

Generating electricity.

In Idaho.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Asteroid OD 2019, an Apollo-type NEO (Near Earth Object), is scheduled to do a fly-by tomorrow around 6:30 a.m.

Pretty sure this sort of thing happens all the time. I mean, look at this table.

Now, um…look a little closer. OD 2019 is estimated to be anywhere from 51 to 110 meters in diameter. It’s going to be traveling at a brisk 19.18 km a second (nearly 43,000 mph). And it’s going to be closer to us than our own moon.

So, you know, nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

“Creating a Gong,” according to Paiste, “is a dedication to the deeper meaning of the structured, focused vibrations which unfold into sound upon playing the Gong and thus have an effect on human beings.” It’s not just the sound, you see, it’s the vibrations; the feelings that “reach into the depths of your psyche.”

If that all sounds a bit, well…hippy-dippy, it’s because it is. But that certainly doesn’t mean it isn’t true. I mean, if gongmaster Sven Meier can’t reach into the depths of your psyche with his 80-inch symphonic gong, ain’t nobody can:

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

People of a certain age will no doubt remember this stunt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1CP1751wJA

That was forty years ago today. But because everything is terrible and problematic these days, some people are—of course!—”questioning the ideological underpinnings of Disco Demolition Night.” It wasn’t just a stupid promotion gone wrong, you see, it was “a homophobic and a racist event.”

Whatever.

Here’s the thing: There’s good disco…

…and there’s bad rock and roll.

But honestly, there’s a lot more bad disco, right? That’s got nothing to do with race or sexual preference. That’s just science.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

The trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting.

Richard Weaver (1910–63)
from Ideas Have Consequences

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

This short clip serves as a welcome reminder that (1) nobody works in isolation, and (2) we all need an editor.

And, of course, that Goodfellas is a singular achievement in American filmmaking.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment