After a four day stretch of eating I decided I’d skip breakfast this morning and give my body a little breather. Though there was a lot to reflect on this past weekend, my mother and I still managed to cook and devour more food than both of us thought possible, so much so, that I still feel full three days later. But to be clear, that first day was not the culinary highlight and, to be honest, never is for my family. Thanksgiving dinner is good, don’t get me wrong, but the picture below shows the true event in our house… leftovers.

From left to right, top to bottom, and chaos in between: stuffing, mashed potatoes, Schofferhofer Grapefruit (look it up then live it, love it, die for it), part of our 11 lb turkey, more stuffing, gravy, my Granny’s sweet pickles, caramelized sweet potatoes, sweet rolls, BUTTER, and cranberry sauce… in all their Tupperware, Pyrex, and Ziplock glory.

posted by: Courtney Sowards  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

I’ll just come right out and admit it: When I bought Ever Since the World Ended, Mose Allison’s 1987 album for Blue Note, it was mostly for the three-saxophone lineup of Bob Malach, Arthur Blythe, and Bennie Wallace. That and the DownBeat review (five stars, by the way), which called the record “a perversely joyous affirmation of the possibility of not merely surviving but flourishing in an insane world by taking everything with a grain of salt, usually in an open wound, reminding yourself, as you grit your teeth, that there’s a joke in every episode of the human drama, no matter how sad it might seem.”

Turns out I should’ve bought the album because it was Mose Freakin’ Allison. But what did I know? I was just a college kid.

Ever Since the World Ended opened a, well…world of lyric possibilities that I, a self-serious student of jazz, hadn’t even considered. Here’s Allison poking fun at the music industry in “Top Forty”:

When I make my top forty
Big beat
Rock and roll record
Everything is gonna be just fine

When I make my top forty
Smash hit
Rock and roll disc
I’ll be the record company’s valentine

No more philosophic melancholia
Eight hundred pounds of electric genitalia

Then there’s “I Looked in the Mirror,” a meditation on aging:

I looked in the mirror this morning
And what did I see? Grey a-plenty
Could be the reason I’m not gettin’ any

And “Tai Chi Life”:

Give me that Tai Chi life
With the gently flowing motion
Every move the same devotion
Oriental magic potion

This guy wasn’t just a smart-ass, I realized. He was cool smart-ass. Like a subtler, hipper Weird Al Yankovic. And that was something to aspire to. (Like I said, I was young.)

Seriously, though, I think Mose Allison is as much to blame for my pitiful attempt at a writing career as anyone. I mean, I knew I’d never be as cool as he was. Or as good a musician. But maybe—just maybe—I could write like that: pithy yet artful, sardonic but not quite cynical. Look, I never said I’d actually get there. But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying.

Mose Allison died last night, just a couple of days after celebrating his 89th birthday. There’ll never be another quite like him.

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

In honor of Veterans Day—and mindful of Aldous Huxley’s maxim that “after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music”—take a moment to familiarize yourself with Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s Symphony no. 4, “The Inextinguishable.” Paul Serotsky explains: “Nielsen started giving the work serious thought in Summer 1914, just as the dogs of the Great War were being unleashed. By the time he’d set pen to paper, a full year later, Mankind’s most determined attempt to date at pressing the ‘self-destruct’ button was in full swing.”

If you’re a veteran, thank you.

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

Our Helveticahaus friend and cheerful supporter, Craig Sweat, recently helped us out on our fall apparel photoshoot. Along with his assistant Chris Thompson, they made the most of our beautiful Manito Park location (as did our two brave in-house models, Courtney and Steven).

Since the launch of Helveticahaus in February of 2015, J. Craig Sweat Photography has donated several hours’ worth of professional expertise to benefit our philanthropic cause. It’s that kind of support that enables us to dedicate 100 percent of the proceeds from the sale of our Helvetica-inspired products to fund area graphic design student scholarships, the very first of which was awarded just last month. Thank you, guys!

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

Just another autumn afternoon at Lincoln Park, a little oasis in the midst of South Hill suburbia. Of its 50-odd acres, fewer than five are developed—leaving quite a bit of space for frolicsome fun. You know, for your dog. Or whatever.

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

Grammar got you down? There’s a solution.

“We know that grammar lessons alone do not improve writing much, if at all,” writes Gregory L. Roper in The Writer’s Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing (ISI Books, 2007).

But why?

“The readers don’t need it,” he explains, “because they hear the good sentences and mimic them, and the non-readers never get good sentences in their heads through mere grammar study.”

The current “pedagogy of exhortation,” as Roper calls it, is meaningless; “long and deep reading is the only sure way to improve writing.”

I suppose my own experience bears this out. As a child, I spent most Saturdays in the basement of John Steinbeck Library. What I hadn’t read by dinnertime I’d check out—along with another half-dozen or so books to get me through the week. During junior high and throughout most of high school, my family didn’t have a TV set, so my time was pretty much equally divided between books and Dungeons & Dragons—and reading books about Dungeons & Dragons. (Girls clearly weren’t an option.) And I had a couple of amazing English teachers in high school, when, during summers as a truck driver, I managed to down a novel a day while waiting for the next load of wheat or barley.

Roper’s theory explains how writing has always come naturally to me, I guess. And why it is there are so many people with communications degrees who can’t, well…communicate. So go ahead. Pick up a book. You might actually learn something.

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

I recently wrote about visiting the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at NYC’s Cooper Union. But what I didn’t discuss in that post was the show in Cooper’s main gallery—Swiss Style Now—which, as it turns out, included not only contemporary Swiss designers, but also a few retrospective pieces related to our favorite typestyle, Helvetica.

We got to see the first pamphlet, designed in 1958, promoting Neue Haas Grotesk (as Helvetica was called prior to 1960), as well as an oversized business card for Alfred Hoffman, son of Helvetica father Eduard Hoffman. The younger Hoffman began working for the Haas Type Foundry in 1951, retiring in 1989.

Before we left, the curator pulled off the shelf a very rare piece: a Neue Haas Grotesk specimen book designed in 1960 by famed Swiss designer Josef Müller-Brockmann. Back in the day, when designers actually used math when working on page layouts, specimen books consisted of pages of dummy text organized according to different point sizes and leadings.

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: the design life  |  comments(2)

It’s Elmore Leonard’s birthday today. He would have been 91.

Fifteen years ago Leonard published “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle” in the New York Times—part of the newspaper’s “Writers on Writing” series. Here’s how he begins:

These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

The rules that follow that short introduction have been shared thousands of time over the years, and for good reason: They’re no less applicable to marketing communications or business writing than they are to a novel or a short story.

For more on the man Stephen King called “the great American writer,” here’s an Atlantic article from a couple of years ago.

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