April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
from The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot (1922)
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
from The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot (1922)
The edco catalog represents one of the interesting ways projects come about. I last saw Clayton Goldsmith, international sales manager for edco, back in August of 2002. At the time, he was working for a furniture manufacturer in the Midwest, and we were assisting in planning their upcoming promotions. The client eventually imploded—thankfully before our actual work began. So I was surprised to receive an email from Clayton (subject line: been a long time…) last October. He’s now living in Germany and working for a Swiss/Dutch company in the bike business.
After completing a 2016 product catalog for him—edco’s introduction to North America—Clayton and I finally met up again at a bike show in Sacramento. I’m just hoping it’s not another 13 years before we work together again.
Premier and premiere are, respectively, the masculine and feminine forms of the word for “first” in French. But is there a difference in English? Glad you asked.
Only premier is used as an adjective:
Aaron is the premier chess player at helveticka world headquarters, due in no small part to his gigantic intellect.
It can also be a noun:
Philippe Couillard, Premier of Quebec, signed into law a bill mandating the consumption of poutine and maple syrup during all Canadian high holidays.
But then, premiere is also a noun…
The premiere of CK’s one-man show, “Chewelah Chewbacca: My Struggle with Hypertrichosis,” promises to be the must-see production of the season.
…except when it’s a verb:
Shirlee will premiere her bold line of camouflage business casual attire later this spring.
So:
adjective = premier
noun = premier/premiere
verb = premiere
Or, to wrap it all up in a tidy little sentence:
Premier Couillard premiered Shirlee’s premier clothing line at the premiere of CK’s one-man show.
Franco Zeffirelli is one of Leonardo da Vinci’s descendants. (Well…sort of.)
Dame Carol Ann Duffy (no, you’re thinking of Carol Anne—I’m talking about Britain’s Poet Laureate) won’t be writing anything for the Queen’s 90th birthday. Seems she’s busy penning an ode “celebrating the end of the old gas and electricity meters, which are to be replaced by 2020.” Totally understandable.
Speaking of poetry, James Parker makes the case for Les Murray as “the greatest poet alive.”
Next month, the Guggenheim will install “a preposterously scatological apotheosis of wealth whose form is completed in its function.” Donald Trump is gonna be hella jealous, as the kids say.
Just two days left to catch Rob de Oude’s solo exhibition at DM Contemporary in Manhattan. Can’t make it? Check out some of de Oude’s remarkable work here.
It’s the classic David-and-Goliath story: The widow Yolanda Signorelli von Braunhut, “isolated, cash-starved, often without electricity or running water on a palatial estate on the Potomac River in southern Maryland,” against—and I swear I’m not making this up—Big Time Toys, represented by the national law firm Epstein Becker & Green.
And that’s not all. There are knockoff Sea-Monkeys from China, scientific breakthroughs, 1960s bondage films, Jewish neo-Nazis, and “Cupids Arrow” Mating Powder. At stake: Nothing less than the late Harold von Braunhut’s mail-order aquatic-pet empire.
You’re gonna have to read the article to see how it all connects.
Though I have mixed feelings about the colorization of black and white photographs, I have to admit that this time lapse is pretty darn mesmerizing:
There’s something deeply satisfying in the cleanup part of the process, isn’t there?
The video, by the way, comes to us courtesy of The Paper Time Machine, a crowd-funded publishing project that, as of this writing, is at 20 percent of its goal.
Envelope? Or ahnvelope? Pretty sure I’m the only one at helveticka world headquarters who pronounces it without the nasal French affectation. Must be something they teach at those fancy design schools.
But which is correct?
Well…the word was borrowed into English from French some time in the early 18th century. Like envoy, encore, ennui, ensemble, entree, entourage, and entrepreneur, it retained its pseudo-French pronunciation—at first. But these days it’s pretty much completely anglicized, such that less than a third of the population says ahnvelope any more. That number is likely dwindling.
Both pronunciations are acceptable, though. So if you want to be a pretentious twit, say ahnvelope. But if you’re a patriotic American, well…you know what to do.
“New York’s least likely media mogul was the mastermind behind Environments, a series of records he swore were ‘The Future of Music.’ From 1969 to 1979, he took the best parts of nature, turned them up to 11, engraved them on 12-inch records, and sold them back to us by the millions. He had a musician’s ear, an artist’s heart, and a salesman’s tongue, and his work lives on in yoga studios, Skymall catalogs, and the sea-blue eyes of Brian Eno. If you haven’t heard of him, it’s only because he designed his own legacy to be invisible.”
Read the fascinating story of Irving Solomon Teibel over at Atlas Obscura.
Tired of all that “obligatory mutual admiration,” Sadie Stein has a proposition: that we “proceed under the assumption that we all look great.”
News from the world of archaeology: On Glastonbury, King Arthur, and “spiritual resonances.” Also…
“Despite thousands of years of hard work by brilliant scholars, the great enigma of where Hannibal crossed the Alps to invade Italy remained unsolved. But now it looks like we may just have cracked it – all thanks to modern science and a bit of ancient horse poo.”
Professional designers weigh in on some of the best movie title sequences ever.
Wanna watch a philosopher, three theoretical physicists, and a cosmologist debate whether the universe as we know it is a computer simulation? Catch the 4 p.m. live stream here.
Finally got around to reading David Browne’s magisterial So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead. Granted, I’m a bit biased (a sizable chunk of my home’s shelf space is taken up by Dead books and CDs), but this is an extraordinary look at—in Browne’s own words—”one of the last uncompromised and uncompromising organizations in pop culture.”
Sure he lowered the rim and partially deflated a child-sized ball in order to appear as if he could dunk. But damn, he looks good doing it.
photograph courtesy of the now-former Mrs. CK Anderson
Fashionable Clark Wallabees in maple suede? Check. Michael Jordan tongue extension—six years before it was a thing? Check. A wild and untamed mane that all the Chewelah girls yearned to run their fingers through? And…check.
Lest you think this was a staged photo, consider that, in addition to playing as power forward (#32) on the Jenkins High School basketball team, Mr. Anderson was the quarterback on his school’s state championship-winning football team, the triple jump record-holder until just a few years ago, and a pitcher on the baseball team. (And King of the Prom, naturally.) Really, you can’t make this stuff up.
But we digress. Back to the Final Four. So who won it all that year? Duke beat Kentucky, 94–88. As for this weekend, helveticka is rooting for the underdog. Go Orange!
THE VISIBLE AND THE IN-
Marge Piercy
Some people move through your life
like the perfume of peonies, heavy
and sensual and lingering.
Some people move through your life
like the sweet musky scent of cosmos
so delicate if you sniff twice, it’s gone.
Some people occupy your life
like moving men who cart off
couches, pianos and break dishes.
Some people touch you so lightly you
are not sure it happened. Others leave
you flat with footprints on your chest.
Some are like those fall warblers
you can’t tell from each other even
though you search Petersen’s.
Some come down hard on you like
a striking falcon and the scars remain
and you are forever wary of the sky.
We all are waiting rooms at bus
stations where hundreds have passed
through unnoticed and others
have almost burned us down
and others have left us clean and new
and others have just moved in.
from Made in Detroit (© Knopf, 2015)
Thanks to Lars Müller Publishers, the principles that shaped the career of the late Massimo Vignelli (1931–2014) into one of the 20th century’s great design masters have been made available to us mere mortals. The Vignelli Canon is loaded with the truths he and his firm established and so doggedly followed.
Here’s just one:
We are for a design that lasts, that responds to people’s needs not to people’s wants. We are for a design that is committed to a society that demands long-lasting values, a society that earns the benefit of commodities and deserves respect and integrity. We like the use of primary shapes and primary colors because their formal values are timeless. We like a typography that transcends subjectivity and searches for objective values, a typography that is beyond time—that doesn’t follow trends, that reflects its content in an appropriate manner. We like the economy of design because it avoids wasteful exercises, it respects investment and lasts longer. We strive for a design that is centered on the message rather than visual titillation. We like design that is clear, simple and enduring. And that is what timelessness means in design.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. I mean, of all places, a cemetery ought to offer some respite from the inexorable onslaught of commercialism, right? Then again, a guy’s gotta make a buck. I just would’ve liked to have seen a more creative headline. Something like… “Think Outside the Box.” [rim shot]
Time for a little reminiscing. I recently ran across these photos of my oldest daughter, Haley. Just nine months old, she’s sitting in our firm’s second office location—back when we were still known as Anderson Mraz Design. It’s 1992 and she’s pounding away on just the second Macintosh computer we ever purchased, which featured an extended keyboard and a square mouse.
Who would have thought that, 22 years later, Haley would graduate with a Bachelor of Design degree from the University of Washington? (And no, neither of her designer parents ever imagined this). Now working as a graphic designer in Seattle, Haley just celebrated her 24th birthday. And by the way, she still looks great in pink.