A decade ago I worked at a downtown Spokane ad agency whose culture was, shall we say, unforgiving. Not a day passed without at least one account executive in tears—or the entire creative department brought to its knees. Sometimes both. And I was there for over three years.

If it hadn’t been for “Cheddar Chad” Rattray and the hot dogs he peddled from a cart across the street, I’m not sure I would have made it as long as I did. But it wasn’t just my standing order—Italian sausage, sweet-hot mustard, grilled onions—that offered relief. It was the opportunity to spend even just a couple of minutes in the company of a truly decent human being; to talk about everything from jazz to the weather to the structural integrity of Costco’s hot dog buns; to marvel together at the weirdness of life and the inanities of the advertising business.

Chad died yesterday morning. It’s a little odd, I suppose, to reflect on the impact of a hot dog vendor on one’s life. But Chad wasn’t just any hot dog vendor. Requiescat in pace.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  comments(1)

More odds and ends today, but this time from the worlds of art, architecture, and poetry. So, you know…no Bigfoot.

MoMA has decided to auction a Monet from its collection to “benefit the [museum’s] acquisition fund.” It’s expected to fetch $13.8 million. But as Jerry Saltz points out, “the market is now so distorted and tilted toward contemporary art that $14 million raised from the auction of a Monet is less than the cost of a large work by a contemporary art star like Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Peter Doig, and many others.”

When even starchitect Frank Gehry admits that “98% of everything that is built and designed today is pure sh*t,” one wonders what’s become of his profession. It’s not just Gehry, either. In a recent New York Times column, establishment architect Steven Bingler wrote that, “for too long, our profession has flatly dismissed the general public’s take on our work, even as we talk about making that work more relevant with worthy ideas like sustainability, smart growth and ‘resilience planning.’”

I’m old enough to have taken both high school and college courses in which memorization was a requirement. As a result, I can still recite the Gettysburg Address and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116—among other, less useful things. These days, though, teachers have somehow come to the conclusion that memorization = not learning, and seem to go out their way to discourage it. Mike Chasar explains why we should consider returning to the days when “poetry memorization was freighted with unusual importance.”

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

It turns out that carefully planned, creatively developed, and strategically executed image campaigns actually work. Who’d a-thunk it? (Why, yes—that’s helveticka’s handiwork he’s referring to. How’d you know?)

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

When Pressworks asked us to help them with their letterpress promotion, we were delighted. For years, I’ve been wanting to do a project that takes advantage of this old-school printing technique. A trip to their letterpress shop was like stepping back in time. The black steel presses, spinning fly wheels, ink rollers, mechanical movements when the paper meets ink, and the beautiful patina of wood type. It’s like looking under the hood of a classic car. It’s all there to see. Straightforward. Simple.

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: the design life  |  comments(1)

…is English, sweet English.

Forget Mandarin Chinese. From “the unwritten tongue of Iron Age tribes in Denmark” two thousand years ago to a language spoken by one in every three people on the planet today, English is now “so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort.”

So it looks like English is becoming the scrappy little language that could.

I remember doing some research for a paper in college—yes, it was a while ago, but not that far back—during which I learned that English was spoken by a quarter of the world’s population. So: from one in four to one in three in a single generation. Still think the high school foreign language requirement is a good idea?

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

So. We’ve picked the best albums of 2014 in 10 different genres. Which means that, if your Christmas shopping list includes gifts for a music lover or two, you really have no excuse to not shower them with awesomeness. I’ve done all the work for you.

Except…there’s someone we haven’t mentioned yet: Aram Bajakian, who released three (!) albums in 2014.

Dálava is a modern take on Moravian folk songs with vocalist Julia Ulehla; Psychomagia is a genre-bending collection of John Zorn tunes by the band Abraxas, and there were flowers also in hell—Bajakian’s second solo effort—is a master class on guitar technique. Each was a finalist in its respective genre; each is completely different from the others. Bajakian is hands-down the most exciting musical discovery I made in 2014, and my pick for artist of the year.

Merry Christmas, everyone. See y’all in 2015.

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

pulchritude (noun) Physical comeliness; beauty.

Though Aaron’s writing was woefully subpar, CK—sensing that the young man’s radiant pulchritude might come in handy during client presentations—offered him a job anyway.

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

N. M Gwynne has proven that happiness depends on grammar. No, really. Here he is in Chapter Two of Gwynne’s Grammar, which would make a nice little stocking stuffer for the language lover on your list:

Step one. For genuine thinking, we need words. (By “genuine thinking” I mean as opposed to merely being conscious of feeling hungry, tired, angry and so on and wanting to do something about it; in other words, anything that animals cannot do.) Thinking cannot be done without words.

Step two. If we do night use words rightly, we shall not think rightly.

Step three. If we do not think rightly, we cannot reliably decide rightly, because good decisions depend on accurate thinking.

Step four. If we do not decide rightly, we shall make a mess of our lives and also of other people’s lives to the extent that we have an influence on other people.

Step five. If we make a mess of our lives, we shall make ourselves and other people unhappy.

In summary of the proof: grammar is the science of using words rightly, leading to thinking rightly, leading to deciding rightly, without which—as both common sense and experience show—happiness is impossible. Therefore, happiness depends at least partly in good grammar.

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