On a recent visit to the new and wonderful Whitney Museum in downtown Manhattan, we came across an exhibit of the works of the American painter Stuart Davis (1892-1964). His bold, graphic colors and abstract shapes—along with an inherent playfulness—reminds me of our very own backyard artist, Harold Balazs.
An old friend of mine alerted me to The Man Who Built Cambodia, a short (30 minutes, give or take) film about architect Vann Molyvann. “He defined this Khmer Modernist style of architecture that fit in with the country’s historical/cultural roots,” emailed my friend, who lives in Phnom Penh, “but which also looked progressive.”
That observation pretty much nails Molyvann’s ethos—and, to my mind, represents an ideal in architecture that’s achieved only by the truly gifted.
A graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Molyvann was the first qualified Cambodian architect when he returned to his country in 1956. What happened over the next 14 years is, well…just watch the film. It’s beautifully shot and edited, with a haunting musical score that lingers long after the credits have rolled. I promise your eyes will be opened to more than just a forgotten architect.
Remember back in June when I used this space to rail against the misuse of the word curate and its various inflections? No? Stop right now and read it. I’ll wait.
Caught up then? Great.
Seems I was on to something. Bartom Swaim published a piece in the September 9 issue of the Times Literary Supplement (the piece can be read in its entirety over at Medium) pretty much making the same case:
“This usage has begun showing up in all sorts of places, typically where something is being sold, as a fancy substitute for ‘chosen’ or ‘selected.’ It’s a way to give a commonplace statement an aura of aesthetic sophistication.”
Swaim then goes on to poke fun at collaborate, bandwidth, stakeholder, and other stains on the language left by corporate America. Curate is merely a symptom, it seems; the disease itself is far more pernicious.
“Some people covet it, others flee from it,” writes Marc Abrahams, editor, Annals of Improbable Research. “Some see it as a hallmark of civilization, others as a scuff mark. Some laugh with it, others laugh at it. Many praise it, a few condemn it, others are just mystified. And many people are madly in love with it.”
Mr. Abrahams is referring, of course, to the Ig Nobel Prize, created in 1991 to honor “discoveries that cannot, or should not, be reproduced.” The 2016 prizes were awarded last night at the 26th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre.
Japan’s Atsuki Higashiyama accepted the Perception Prize for “investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs,” while the Reproduction Prize went to the late Egyptian Urologist Ahmed Shafik “for studying the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats, and for conducting similar tests with human males.” (Shafik apparently found significantly lower rates of sexual activity among the polyester-clad rats, theorizing that it may have had something to do with the material creating electrostatic charges.)
The complete list of winners is here.
Occasionally my dad sends pictures updating me on his life. As a bush pilot of 36-plus years working in Alaska, you can probably guess that these are not your typical photos. More often than not they’re aerial shots of the Brooks and Alaska Ranges, shot from his plane and usually containing a wing or a tire in the frame. Half the time they’re blurry or crooked. The other half of the time they’re his airplane. Just parked. Nothing else. Just that. Like it’s his fourth kid and he’s just so proud to see it head off on its two thousandth flight.
This has always been normal for me. This was my life growing up. My dad showed off mountains and his planes from all over Alaska. I flew in Super Cubs and Cessnas and had friends who owned sled dog teams. We wore bunny boots and when I wanted to go to a friend’s house I just hopped on the snow-machine and drove there. We cross-country skied in elementary school gym class (barf) and had midnight sun soccer tournaments where the older you were the later you got to play (the last games started around midnight). We drove 6.5 hours to get to the closest state tournaments and in the winter we drove on the completely frozen river—in our car—to either get the best view of the northern lights (which were ridiculous, by the way) or to just get to the airport faster.
I’ll be the first to say it, my childhood was weird. But looking back and comparing it to my life now, it was pretty damn cool.
“Alone of the four cardinal virtues,” writes Christopher Ricks in Dylan’s Visions of Sin (Penguin, 2003), “fortitude does not go in for an adjective or an adverb. Temperance is happy to grant us temperate and temperately; prudence, prudent and prudently; justice, just and justly. But fortitude declines to allow fortitudinous and fortitudinously.” Ricks being Ricks, though, he includes a note at the bottom of the page: “The OED [Oxford English Dictionary] records that Fielding and Gibbon in the eighteenth century tried ‘fortitudinous.’ But the language wasn’t having it.”
I’m not sure whether this is an argument for prescriptivism or descriptivism. Or an argument at all. But it’s interesting that my dictionary, published three years earlier, lists fortitudinous as the adjective form of fortitude.
So what gives? Over at the Oxford Dictionaries blog, Lynne Murphy writes that such discrepancies might have more to do with American and British (Ricks is a Brit) attitudes toward dictionaries than the dictionaries themselves. Even the way they’re marketed is completely different:
“One big general-purpose British dictionary’s cover tells us it is ‘The Language Lover’s Dictionary.’ Another is ‘The unrivalled dictionary for word lovers.’
“Now compare some hefty American dictionaries, whose covers advertise ‘expert guidance on correct usage’ and ‘The Clearest Advice on Avoiding Offensive Language; The Best Guidance on Grammar and Usage.'”
I think Murphy has a point. The American in me wants an authoritative answer; the Brit in me finds words like fortitudinous inherently unlovable. “The language wasn’t having it,” says Ricks. In this case, the language was right—and the dictionary is wrong.
While visiting my daughter in Bozeman a couple of weeks ago, I stopped in at Vargo’s and picked up a copy of Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (Viking, 2014). Here he is in Chapter 2:
“Writing is an unnatural act. As Charles Darwin observed, ‘Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, whereas no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.’ The spoken word is older than our species, and the instinct for language allows children to engage in articulate conversation years before they enter a schoolhouse. But the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood and beyond.”
Pinker is a psycholinguist and cognitive scientist. He’s the chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. He’s the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard. And he’s a legit public intellectual in an era when that term is carelessly applied to all manner of charlatans. But I’m going to edit him anyway. Ready? Here goes: Writing is hard.
There. That about sums it up.
The thing is, I’ve been at it professionally for more than 15 years now, and it hasn’t gotten any easier. Was it supposed to? I dunno. I guess I thought that, at some point, it might come a little more readily. It hasn’t. Pinker explains:
“Writing is above all an act of pretense. We have to visualize ourselves in some kind of conversation, or correspondence, or oration, or soliloquy, and put words into the mouth of the little avatar who represents us in this simulated world.”
That’s the problem. It isn’t that I lack the ability to string words into a coherent sentence. It’s that what I produce—whether it’s a script for a television commercial or a billboard headline or a rambling blog post—is only one side of a conversation. And I’ll likely never get an opportunity to hear the other side.
Still beats working for a living, though.
oppugnancy (noun) opposition; hostility; resistance
“Hope you don’t have plans this evening,” sighed CK. “The deadline just got moved up.”
“No problem, boss,” said Aaron, always ready to pitch in at a moment’s notice.
Both turned to look at Courtney, whose normally sunny disposition had darkened under a cloud of oppugnancy. “WhatEVER,” she grumbled.
This is the coolest thing you’ll watch all day. Heck, I’ll wager it’s the coolest thing you’ll watch all month.
Here’s the synopsis, in case you need more convincing:
“A film created by Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss documenting the last day of hot metal typesetting at The New York Times. This film shows the entire newspaper production process from hot-metal typesetting to creating stereo moulds to high-speed press operation. At the end of the film, the new typesetting and photographic production process is shown in contrast to the old ways.
“There are interviews with workers at NYT that are for and against the new technology. In fact, one typesetter is retiring on this final day as he does not want to learn the new process and technology.
“This is the first time the film has ever been available in HD from the original 16mm master film.”
Go on. Watch it. Watch it right now. Your boss will totally be cool with it.
For our third and final hike of the week, the missus and I headed to North Idaho’s Selkirk Crest. As far as alpine experiences go, Harrison Lake might not be as majestic as, say, the Stuart Range. But it’s quite a bit closer—and far less crowded. Plus, it’s hard to argue with views like these.
And then there’s the lake itself, the sight of which is more than a suitable reward for the 1,600 feet or so of elevation gain from the south trailhead. (While the north trail is slightly less arduous, it’s also nearly twice as long.)
Plus, you get to see the headwaters of the Pack River, which burbles somewhat inauspiciously from the lake’s lowest point.
Check it out now—while the huckleberries are still on the bush and before the snow starts to fall. Just keep an eye out for bears. (And the occasional woodland caribou.)
About five years ago I read a book entitled White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America’s Deadliest Avalanche. In fact, I mentioned the book on this very blog. Let me quote myself:
“It’s about the massive storm of 1910 that shut down the rail lines in Stevens Pass just west of Leavenworth, and the resulting avalanche that swept two trains and a hundred people into the canyon below Wellington. The author, Gary Krist, is a novelist, and that makes a huge difference: instead of a dry historical account, you get a beautifully crafted story, with characters, plot, and a climactic chapter that is simply breathtaking. And not a word of invented dialogue, either.”
Last week, I finally got a chance to visit the site of the disaster. And it’s every bit as chilling as you might imagine.
After a 700-foot elevation gain over the first mile, the trail levels out, following (for the most part) the old Great Northern rail bed.
At about the 3.5-mile mark, you enter a massive concrete snow shed. It was built in 1911—the year after the avalanche—on the site where the two trains were hit by a wall of snow, ice, mud, and rock 14 feet high and a quarter of a mile wide. Toward the end of the snowshed, an overlook indicates the precise location where the trains went down. Naturally, I interpreted that as an invitation. So I skirted the fence, picked my way through some dense overgrowth, and descended (via a rope someone had thoughtfully left behind) to the bottom of the Tye River Canyon.
And there it was: the 106-year-old wreckage of Passenger Train 25 and Mail Train 27, scattered over hundreds of yards across the forest floor. While some of the passengers had been killed instantly, others survived the impact—only to suffocate under several feet of densely packed snow. It was four months before the last body was recovered.
People say the place is haunted. I don’t know about that. But there’s a stillness there among the trees that’s, well…unsettling. Not sure I’d want to be there when the sun goes down.
When CK returned from his vacation last month, he regaled us all with tales of German architecture, Italian opera, and Swiss design. (You can read his travelogue here, here, here, here, and here.) Since my compensation package is pegged to the Argentine peso, however, my recent time off was…a little more modest.
Not that I’m complaining or anything. While I’m sure Tuscany has its charms, I’m really more of a Channeled Scablands kind of guy. And one of the best ways to experience ’em is on foot—via the Escure Ranch. You not only get coulees, cliffs, and canyons, but also a sparkling oasis at around four miles from the trailhead: scenic Towell Falls.
Now, you’re supposed to keep an eye out for rattlesnakes, and you should probably not hike this under the merciless August afternoon sun, but still…this area is well worth a look-see. Just take plenty of water.
Aaron has been on vacation all week, and now Courtney is home sick, so I have been required to write a blog post. If you know me, then you know how much I am enjoying this right now.
So, this one’s for Aaron – Man vs. Punctuation.
And for Courtney – since her world might be technicolor right now.
Check it. The new hotness from Mohawk arrived at our office a few weeks a go and I am just recently able to put it down long enough to photograph it. A Maker’s Field Guide is geared towards designers looking to A. elevate their print projects to the next level, and B. explain to clients how paper can springboard their projects into the next galaxy. Yep… galaxy. Filled with examples and specs, color and killer graphics, this book is printing eye candy! My favorite quote from the book?
“Make effective things, great things, that slow people down,
activate their senses, and command their attention.”
If you’re a regular reader, you already know of my love for the Grateful Dead. If you’re not a regular reader, well…I dig the Dead. (Also, if you’re not a regular reader, why the hell not?)
So you can probably imagine my joy at receiving this a couple of weeks ago. Fifty-nine songs totaling five and a half hours on five CDs; artists as varied as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Vijay Iyer, and Marijuana Deathsquads; a truly epic performance of the entire “Terrapin Station” suite featuring So Percussion and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Really, it’s a monumental achievement — and, as if that weren’t enough, it’s all for a good cause.
Care for a taste? Here’s the National performing “Morning Dew”: