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The Young and the Restless

vintageamd

The animation and film titling work that we’ve created over the years has been in collaboration with Mike Bold of Digital Itch. I’ve known Mike since the early 1990s when he first worked for my wife, Linda, prior to joining my firm back in the mid-90s.

A very talented designer in his own right, Mike eventually fell in love with motion graphics while working on a project for us in 1997—our first foray into animation. Since then, he has developed his skills to the point where the Grammy Awards, the NFL, and The Ellen DeGeneres Show have all come calling.

Lucky for us, he still takes our calls.

Pictured above is Mike (second from left) with our group back in 1996. Also shown (L to R) are me, John Mraz, Debbie Olson, and Sandy Riebe.

Inventories of War

vikingdressupkit

Photographer Thom Atkinson has documented British soldiers’ kit over the last millennium, from the Battle of Hastings (1066) to Helmland Province today. There are thirteen photos over at the Telegraph‘s website, along with detailed lists of the items shown. Mr. Atkinson somehow manages to capture both the horror and tedium of war in these remarkable images, proving that, yes, it is possible to communicate complex ideas without uttering a single word.

The Week that Was

News from around the world:

Just as it seemed Brooklyn couldn’t get any weirder, a jogger makes a gruesome discovery

…while a Swedish “erotic novelist” stumbles upon 80 skeletons stuffed in Ikea bags (naturally) and left in a church.

A set of braids “formerly attached to [Willie] Nelson’s head” will be auctioned in October.

The 25 most widely circulated urban legends, according to Snopes.

seagull-eating python is terrorizing a small town in New Jersey. Meanwhile…

…a new eggnog recipe “somehow ignited” in the Garden State, injuring two workers and destroying a laboratory.

Experts from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife “still cannot definitively identify the type of animal” roaming the streets of Norwalk.

Finally, remember the “six-million-year-old turd” that was recently sold at auction for over $10,000? The one that’s “an eye-watering 40 inches in length”? National Geographic wonders whether it isn’t a “faux poo.”

Eye (and Ear) Candy

Steven Wilson’s The Raven that Refused to Sing is number 9 in Prog magazine’s list of the 100 greatest prog albums of all time. I bring that up for two reasons: because Mr. Wilson’s work frequently occupies one of the coveted spots on my annual best-of lists (see here, here, and here), and as an excuse to share the amazing video for “Drive Home” from Raven. Even if music videos aren’t your thing, stick around for Guthrie Govan’s guitar solo at the 5:07 mark.

Field of Dreams

fieldofdreams

Back when I was a callow youth, July and August meant one thing: harvest.

I drove both truck and combine for several years during high school and college, and learned that each has its pros and cons. Combines had air conditioning but required constant attentiveness; trucks were hot and dirty but offered enough time between loads to down as much as a novel a day. There’s a sense of pride that goes with being a combine driver, but, when you took a truckload of wheat down to the river, there was always a chance you might see a girl. You know, in a swimsuit.

The photo above was taken just a couple of weeks ago. If you squint just so, you can make out a couple of combines and their attendant trucks—they’re the four black specks on the horizon—in one of the very fields I worked 25 years ago.

Stop! Grammar Time!

On page 147 of my copy of Stephen King’s On Writing are the most important words ever written on the subject: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

I thought about Mr. King’s apothegm when I read yesterday’s entry at the Common Errors in English Usage blog:

“One of the clearest indications that a person reads little and doesn’t hear much formal English is a failure to use the standard preposition in a common expression. You aren’t ignorant to a fact; you’re ignorant of it. Things don’t happen on accident, but by accident (though they do happen ‘on purpose’). There are no simple rules governing preposition usage: you just have to immerse yourself in standard English in order to write it naturally.”

Immerse yourself in standard English. Good advice. Or, as a certain bestselling author might say, “Simple as that.”

Happy Birthday, Jerry

Back in 1942, BBC Radio broadcast the first episode of “Desert Island Discs,” a weekly program that asked guests to choose eight pieces of music* (back then it was records), one book, and one luxury item they’d take with them if they were stranded on a desert island. It’s been going ever since.

Now, if I were ever one of those guests, at least one of my picks would be a Grateful Dead album, in part because you get rock, folk, R&B, blues, psychedelia, jazz, bluegrass, country, and even 20th-century avant-garde in the space of about 10 minutes. The Dead’s music encapsulates—better than any other band I’m aware of—the American experience. And if one person can be said to personify the Dead, it would have to be Jerome John “Jerry” Garcia, whose 72nd birthday is today.

I’d try to explain why he has such a hold on my musical imagination, but John Perry Barlow does a much better job of it in Rolling Stone issue no. 717, published shortly after Garcia’s death in 1995. Barlow, who with Dead rhythm guitarist Bob Weir wrote a sizable chunk of the Dead’s song catalogue, sums it up perfectly:

“Jerry was one of those manifestations of the energy of his times, one of those people who ends up making history books. He wrapped up in himself a whole set of qualities that were very appropriate to a certain cultural vector in the latter part of the 20th century: freedom from judgment, playfulness of intellect, complete improvisation, anti-authoritarianism, self-indulgence and aesthetic development. I mean, he was truly extraordinary. And he never really saw it himself. He could only see its effect on other people, which baffled and dismayed him. It made me sad to see that. There was nothing that Garcia liked better than something that was really diverting and interesting and lively—you know, anything that he would refer to as a ‘fat trip,’ which was his term for that sort of thing. And he wasn’t really able to appreciate himself, which was a pity because, believe me, Jerry was the fattest trip of all.”

By the way, if you happen to be in the Bay Area this weekend, you might want to head over to San Francisco’s McLaren Park for the 12th annual Jerry Day festivities.

*Feel free to leave a comment with your eight Desert Island Discs. Then I can judge you.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I discovered the following from the Twitter feed of A Way with Words, the weekly public radio program. Turns out it came from Jared Diamond’s 1991 book The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, so I’m a little late to the party.

Anyway, it’s a look at how English has changed over the last 1,000 years, using the first two verses from the 23rd Psalm as a reference.

Old English (800–1066)
Drihten me raet, ne byth me nanes godes wan.
And he me geset on swythe good feohland.
And fedde me be waetera stathum.

Middle English (1100–1500)
Our Lord gouerneth me, and nothyng shal defailen to me.
In the sted of pastur he sett me ther.
He norissed me upon water of fyllyng.

King James Bible (1611)
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.
He leadeth me beside the still waters.

Modern (1989)
The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
He lets me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me to still waters.

Now, the “modern” version Diamond uses—whatever it is—is pretty soulless as far as Bible translations go. I prefer the English Standard Version, published in 2001, which uses the 1971 Revised Standard Version as a textual basis. The ESV renders the same passage thus:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.

Not so different from the King James, is it? Pretty remarkable, considering that nearly 400 years had passed between the two versions.

I fear, however, that within my lifetime it’ll be nothing but emojis.

“Yeah I’m a writer deal with it.”

Want to read “the story of what it means to live in a cultural climate that stifles almost every creative impulse, and why it so often seems we should stop trying”? Me neither, especially since it’s just a compilation of tweets.

But looked at it another way—like, say, as an opportunity to poke fun at the “delusion, narcissism, procrastination, boredom, self-congratulation, confusion” that mark today’s aspiring novelists (and, let’s be honest, pretty much all writers ), well…Working on My Novel could be a lot of fun.

Here’s a taste: At 11:44 p.m. on September 23, 2012, Stephen Mangol tweeted, “I’m working on my novel again, and it feels good, you guys. I love my mind.” Almost, writes Dan Piepenbring over at the Paris Review‘s blog, “as if he’s just done fifty reps with it and is admiring it all engorged with blood.”

New Music

How’s about some Big Bill Broonzy—as interpreted by brothers Dave and Phil Alvin*—to start the weekend? It’s a little tune called “Saturday Night Rub,” and it’s just as awesome as its title implies.

*Their first album together in 30-some years is called Common Ground, and it’s well worth a listen.

Wow. Just…wow.

Do you think that the Weird Al video I shared last week is funny? Kevin Gallagher, who refers to “garden-variety internet pedants” and “Strunk & White fundamentalists” in his article claiming that—get this—Weird Al is the humorless one, doesn’t like it one bit.

And if you do think it’s funny, well…you’re probably a racist. Lauren Squires reveals the sinister “linguistic discrimination” behind Mr. Yankovic’s parody:

…a little rumination on Weird Al’s violent reactions against “bad grammar” raises deep and longstanding questions of social equity regarding class, education, race, age, ethnicity, gender, and how these relate to languages, dialects, and social registers. There is ample research on these issues (which any sociolinguist could point you to), but the upshot is that the notion of “Proper English” typically serves to prop up the already-privileged speakers whose native language variety it is (sort of) based on. This puts speakers whose native language variety does not approximate “Proper English” at an immediate disadvantage in society, the same way that privileging Whiteness puts those who are not White at an immediate disadvantage in society. It is not the linguistic differences themselves that do this (just as it is not the racial/ethnic difference themselves that determine privilege), but the *attitudes* about them. This is why many linguists are having a hard time laughing with Word Crimes: to do so feels like complicity in an ongoing project of linguistic discrimination that intersects with class, race, and other kinds of discrimination.

You have to read the whole thing, if only to see for yourself what passes for higher education in this country.

For those who are ready to admit that they need help, there’s hope. And for Kevin, Lauren, and all the other dour descriptivists whose self-regard trumps everything else, Sergeant Hulka has a message:

This Day in History

T. H. White’s July 23, 1934 diary entry, which he later published in England Have My Bones, a memoir about country living:

“There is something in our effete old English waters after all…And in them stands absorbed the ruminant angler, unconscious of time, deft with his fingers, puzzling his beloved fly-box, breathing his pipe smoke regularly in the bliss of concentration, pitting his quivering wits and tackle against the rosy-spotted tiger-fighters of the drinkable water, sun-struck into another infinite universe like the heron. I suppose the heron must be the happiest of living creatures.”

Every Noise at Once

Ever wonder what an “algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1251 genres” would look like? And wish it contained sound samples? Wonder no more.

Word Crimes

The estimable Mike Miller—who handles all programming- and IT-related matters around here—seems to think “Weird Al” Yankovic and I are kindred spirits. Can’t imagine why.

25 Years and Counting

avista100

In the fall of 1988, we designed our very first annual report for Avista. It was noteworthy for at least three reasons. One, it was the first project we ever produced for what was then known as the Washington Water Power Company. Two, it was the first major print project for our newly formed firm, Anderson Mraz Design—which officially began doing business on January 1, 1988. And three, it was the year that, midway through the design process, WWP decided to call it the 100-year anniversary annual report, since it was mailed out in early 1989. Recalling this project makes me feel a little like—dare I say it?—an industry veteran.

Congratulations to Avista for 125 years of service. We’re pleased to have worked with them on countless projects for 25 of those years.

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