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

Did y’all hear? Oakhurst Dairy settled an overtime dispute that “hinged entirely on the lack of an Oxford comma in state law.”

I’ve long held that there’s literally no reason whatsoever to omit the Oxford (or “serial”) comma. I mean, here I am back in 2010 making the case for its preservation.

The New York Times offers a couple of defenses for its anti-Oxford position, only one of which is believable: “[N]ews writing has traditionally omitted the serial comma—perhaps seeking a more rapid feeling in the prose, or perhaps to save time and effort in the old days of manual typesetting.”

Here’s the thing: Ambiguity, the chief result of omitting the Oxford comma (as the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled last week) doesn’t lend itself to “a more rapid feeling in the prose.” You know what does? Clarity. And that, my friends, is what the Oxford comma offers in spades.

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

“Every time I see a woman in public reading a book by a man (usually dead, usually white),” writes Danielle Lazarin, “I fantasize about offering her a book by a woman instead, replacing the male voices in her head with female ones one book at a time.”

That’s funny. Every time I see a woman in public reading a book by a man (usually dead, usually white), I think, Yay! Somebody’s reading! And then I imagine that, as a grownup, she’s probably capable of making her own decisions—since she probably knows better than some stranger with an axe to grind exactly what she likes to read, and most likely isn’t making that decision based on the author’s sex, race, or current state of existence.

But then, I’m a man. What the hell do I know about lady readers?

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

Twenty-four finalists (out of 450) have been selected in this year’s Book Illustration Competition run by The Folio Society and House of Illustration. The book, to be published later this year, is The Selected Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Entrants were required to read A Scandal in Bohemia, The Man With the Twisted Lip, and The Musgrave Ritual, then provide an illustration for each, as well as a design for the book binding. The Guardian put together a gallery here; you can view the longlisted entries—and cast your vote for the People’s Choice Award—here.

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

I don’t care what anyone says. Trigger Smith, owner of the Continental, a “divey mainstay of Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood since 1991,” is a hero. And it gets better, according to Grub Street: Smith also hates the phrase “my bad”—which makes him doubleplusgood in my book.

So how about it, Spokane? Any dive-bar owners willing to take a stand against the barbarians? Pour me an Old Fashioned—I’ll be right over.

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

Remember these? No, millennials, these are not drink coasters, but that’s about all they’re good for these days. 3.5″ floppy disks were commonplace in the late 1980s and early 90s. With a capacity up to 1.44 MB, it would take only 711 of them to equal a GB. New software would arrive on several numbered floppies. And up to four new fonts at a time on a single disk. Crazy, huh? And sharing our digital art files with printers on what we called a “transfer disk” was pretty amazing.

Ever heard of Bitstream? QuarkXPress? And imagine our excitement when we first downloaded Adobe Photoshop—version 2-POINT-O. Or when we took a digital tour of our brand-new Apple Macintosh SE/30 computer in 1990 (that’s the disk in the lower right). I guess it’s one of the reasons I’ve never gotten overly excited about buying new tech equipment or gadgets. It seems they’re almost as fleeting as the ephemera we design for our clients.

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

In 1989 we purchased our first computer, a Macintosh CXII. We borrowed the money from my business partner’s mom (thank you, Virginia!) to pay for the CPU, large monitor, and printer. Our second computer, an Apple SE/30, was used mostly to type letters and make lists—and served as our first poor-man’s laptop, as I recall taking it home on several occasions in its not-so-sleek carrying case.

We purchased our first mobile phones locally from Cellular One in 1991. They were expensive, but we bought them for half off their regular price ($450 instead of the usual $900) since they’d been used by firefighters during that year’s Fire Storm. Back then, they came with an eye-catching short- and long-form antenna.

We actually did business with these things.

Our firm’s first real laptop arrived in 1997. It was an Apple PowerBook G3: At 2.5″ thick and weighing a sturdy six pounds, it was much easier to transport than the SE/30. And back then, Freehand was our preferred design software.

Technology has, and will continue to have, the single greatest impact on our industry. Ironically, it has little to do with original ideas. One only has to review the great work produced prior to the mid-80s to see that creative thinking and its execution never relied on amazing tools.

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

“Poetry,” writes Christian Wiman in today’s New York Times, “is the deepest expression, and the best hope for survival, of a culture’s very soul.” We need art, he explains, not only “to explore the darkest recesses of our lives and minds,” but also “to tell us why this world is worth loving, and therefore saving.”

As with anything Wiman writes, it’s well worth your time to read the essay in its entirety.

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