Let’s talk about anyway, any way, and anyways. Because there is, in fact, a difference.

Anyway is an adverb that means “regardless” or “nevertheless.”

Though Skooch apologized for being late with the coffee, Aaron beat him anyway.

It can also signify that a story is being resumed.

Anyway, I think Shirlee has been partaking in the Devil’s lettuce on her lunch breaks.

Any way, on the other hand, is a phrase that refers to method or means.

Courtney suddenly realized that the key to her success was to emulate Aaron any way she could.

Note that, in the above example, in any manner could replace any way.

As for anyways, well…it’s best to drop the s. Though it may have its roots in Middle English (a corruption of anywise), these days it’s generally considered dialectal, and therefore not appropriate in formal writing.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

Today’s miscellany is all about music. So if you don’t dig on tunes, you can go ahead and stop reading right now. But then, if you don’t dig on tunes, we can’t possibly be friends, which means you wouldn’t be reading this blog anyway.

“I played Carnegie Hall twice before I was 13,” says Saul Chandler. “If I could forget about music I would.”

Speaking of Carnegie Hall performances: “At one point, an older woman approached the stage, took off a shoe, and banged it on the stage, imploring the ensemble…to stop.”

And speaking of disastrous openings, there’s a new recording of Brian Ferneyhough’s La Terre Est Un Homme. You can listen to a live performance from 2011 here. (You’re gonna want to turn up the volume.)

And speaking of revolutionary radicals, want to take a stab at guessing who “the most perfectly original composer of the past 200 years” might be? Would you believe…Debussy? Me neither.

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

During annual report season, we’d always look for a good location to photograph the company’s top executives. We’d get permission to roam around the headquarters—or an off-site location—with the client and the photographer (in this case, J. Craig Sweat) to take a few test portraits.

This 35mm film strip and enlarged test photo were taken in early 1990 for The Washington Water Power Company (now Avista). That’s me (left) with the client’s project manager, Pat Lynch. We’re doing our best imitation of both the chairman of the board/CEO and the president/COO. The actual executive photo is above Pat and me, in a spread from the the company’s 1989 annual report. Remarkably, even the hand positions are similar.

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

A trip to the print shop to check and sign off on paper stock, colors, and registration still happens, but less so with the advent of digital printing. Offset printing—now reserved for larger-quantity projects—still requires us to ensure that the quality of printing meets our satisfaction. Having a good loupe to check the four-color process and spot color ink alignments is critical. When I was making press checks, I never left the office without my Betaview 10X.

And while the pressmen always gave me grief about my homemade pretty pink shoestring lanyard, I never misplaced my loupe. It’s kind of funny how once you start looking at printing that closely—right down to a gnat’s ass—nobody pokes fun of you anymore.

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

The Norks have nukes, there’s an Oompa Loompa in the White House, and Hot & Spicy Cinnamon Oreos are a thing. It’s enough to cause even the most stoical among us to despair.

But hey, we here at helveticka are a creative bunch. When a client comes to us with a seemingly intractable problem, we put our heads together and solve it. So I asked the best and the brightest around the office for help with the following:

“The world would be a much better place if…”

Based on the responses, I’d say we nailed it:

Linda “…fields of cotton were actually made up of tiny balls of cotton candy.”

Courtney “…every single person did at least one kind thing for another each day, giving us a daily reminder to be more selfless.”

Steven “…we lived in a virtual reality world where everything we thought instantly materialized, like the Construct in The Matrix.”

Michelle “…we could all just get along, if there was more sunshine, if we lived for today, if there were more happy endings, if we drank more wine, and if we were all as awesome as Aaron except on the days when he asks me to do stupid crap like this.”

Aaron “…more people listened to the Grateful Dead.”

(And yes, we can deduce from this that Linda is a fantasist, Courtney an idealist, Steven a solipsist, and Michelle a monologuist. As for me, well…I’m the only one offering a practicable solution. So call me a realist.)

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

Lionel Shriver bravely tackles the “cultural appropriation” mob over at Prospect magazine. “Given that the better part of the human race is crazy, stupid, or both,” she writes, “there’s nary a thought in the world whose airing won’t offend somebody.”

She’s right, of course. The problem, though, is that those in thrall to this sort of nonsense aren’t inclined to listen to reason. In fact, they’re probably taking to social media right now to denounce her.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

“Contrary to popular opinion,” writes Ian Bogost in the Atlantic, “malls are great, and they always were.”

Did you know that more than a thousand words—e.g. mule deer, prairie dog, snowberry—appeared for the first time in Lewis and Clark’s journals? Neither did I.

Postcards and propaganda.

Ah, the five-paragraph essay: “a form that is chillingly familiar to anyone who has attended high school in the US.” It’s “dysfunctional – to say nothing of off-putting, infantilising and intellectually arid.”

Speaking of essays, Marilynne Robinson has some thoughts on freedom of conscience.

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

So we’re midway through Black History Month, which can be pretty intimidating for white folk like me in an era in which a word like “racism” has lost all meaning – and when the concept of “privilege” has become completely unmoored from reality.

How do we celebrate? Should we? Dare we, lest we offend someone?

This isn’t the place to get into all that, I reckon. So let me offer up a recommendation: Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers, an epic four-and-a-half-hour composition that took Smith more than 30 years to complete. It’s hard to describe, but the entry on the Pulitzer website does a pretty good job: “An expansive jazz work that memorializes 10 key moments in the history of civil rights in America, fusing composed and improvised passages into powerful, eloquent music.”

“More than anything,” writes Josh Langhoff at PopMatters, “Freedom is about sound: the tangible, physically beautiful sounds of Smith’s imperative trumpet and of different instruments in combination, testing their own limits.”

BBC Music’s Daniel Spicer wrote that Freedom “is a spiritual call to action, a powerful argument not just for civil rights but for universal human rights; a vision not just of a better America, but a better humanity; a plea for compassion and, yes, love.”

“It’s a major work for Mr. Smith,” sums up Ben Ratliff at the New York Times, “and for the ambitious and experimental end of post-Coltrane jazz he represents, the kind of music in which intuitive and collective improvising meets strict notation.”

As for me, well…I find Freedom utterly mesmerizing. I have a few of Smith’s recordings; this, I think, is his most personal. His trumpet playing is at once plaintive and elegiac, clean and pure, soulful and beautiful – punctuated, at times, by appropriately righteous anger. And though the scope of the work itself is massive, I tend to think of the individual pieces themselves as meditations; intimate reflections on a time in our history that can best be described through Huxley’s dictum that, “after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

It’s a truly remarkable achievement.

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