Apropos of absolutely nothing, my son informs me that there’s a striking resemblance between our erstwhile intern Tony Kuchar…
…and German drummer Benny Greb:
Think about it for a second. Designer and musician are both creative professions; “Tony” and “Benny” are two-syllable names ending in “nee.” And I’m willing to bet that these guys have never been seen in the same place at the same time.
I’m not a fan of the animated words. Seen enough of that in the past couple of years to last me a lifetime. But what Fry says in this video is certainly thought-provoking. As a confessed member (in good standing, I might add) of the Grammar Police myself, I’m a bit chastened. However—and this is something Fry and his ilk never seem to address—before you go around breaking rules, oughtn’t you first know those rules?
Fry’s elitism (“semi-educated”) grates, and his defense of “actioning” is simply deplorable. But it’s well worth a listen anyway.
Like I mentioned last week, this is the time of year when you can’t throw a stick without hitting a best-of list. We’re going to join the fray with a selection of ten albums I liked from 2013. To avoid making any judgment calls, I put them in alphabetical order rather than rank them.
Blackfield, Blackfield IV
Carla Bley/Andy Sheppard/Steve Swallow, Trios
David Bowie, The Next Day
Bob Dylan, Another Self Portrait: 1969–71 (The Bootleg Series Vol. 10)
Henry Fool, Men Singing
Dave Holland, Prism
Charles Lloyd/Jason Moran, Hagar’s Song
Pat Metheny, Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels, Vol. 2
Various Artists, ECM—Selected Signs III–VIII
Steven Wilson, The Raven That Refused to Sing
Regular readers will wonder why no classical albums appear on this list. I have to admit I was surprised myself. But the ECM multi-volume set includes works by Shostakovich, Reich, Pärt, Kurtág, Mansurian, Bach, Haydn, Kancheli, Silvestrov, et al., so I think we’re good on that score.
My favorite of the bunch? Hard to say. It depends on my mood, really. Steven Wilson’s Raven probably got played the most, but Dylan’s is the album I’ll still be listening to in twenty years.
This brief remembrance of Alvin Eisenman, who started America’s first university graphic design department at Yale in 1951, is worth a read—particularly for type geeks and fans of “clarity and chaste simplicity.” As a long-time subscriber of The New Criterion, I’m not at all surprised that its appearance is the result of careful, intentional, lasting design. Professor Eisenman died in September at ninety-two.
Two of my favorite things—jazz and album cover art—come together in episode 9 of A Noise from the Deep, the Greenleaf Music podcast. Trumpeter Dave Douglas and bassist Michael Bates talk with New York-based designer Steve Byram about his process and oeuvre, which, strangely enough, includes the covers for the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill and Slayer’s Reign in Blood. Check it out.
I’ve taken several versions of the Myers-Briggs personality assessment over the years, and have always come up with the same result: INTP. According to this, that makes me Yoda. And according to this, I’ve somehow stumbled into an appropriate career. Good thing.
Here’s a quick and painless test you can take to determine your type. And don’t laugh—the results can be pretty revealing.
“There is no technology, no time-saving device that can alter the rhythms of creative labor. When the worth of labor is expressed in terms of exchange value, therefore, creativity is automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the technology of work.”
Lewis Hyde, from The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
Perhaps the headline is a little unfair. But, generally speaking, “smart celebrity” is an oxymoron on the order of “Microsoft Works,” so I’ll stick with it for now.
Anyway, this morning Hugh Laurie tweeted something worth drawing your attention to:
“If a thing is done less than perfectly, there are two possible explanations: the person doing it is not competent, or the thing is hard. Critics generally concern themselves with the first of those.…”
Forget for a moment that there’s a third possibility—that the person judging whether the thing is done perfectly isn’t qualified to render such a judgment. Just try to remember that, the next time you’re about to get all high and mighty over someone’s perceived ineptitude, there’s at least one alternative explanation.
Not sure what to make of this: In the two weeks (!) since since our last blog post, there’s been nary a peep from anyone.
On the one hand, it’s good to know that, when things get crackin’ around here, we can focus on client business without upsetting our regular readers. Or—and this is far more likely—it could be that we just have no readers to upset.
Whatever. We’re back. With a story that, quite frankly, explains a lot. (At least about the company I keep.)
sciolist (noun) One whose knowledge or learning is superficial; a pretender to scholarship.
“It’s clear from the narrative portion of SPOMa that the person responsible is nothing more than an academic sciolist,” said the jealous wannabe writer from the competing design firm.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rexKqvgPVuA
From The Open University comes this creative, funny, and—strangely enough—quite informative look at the development of our language over the years. Do try to watch all of it.
The best part of Spokane’s annual Fall Folk Festival are the impromptu jam sessions that spring up anywhere there’s room to open a mandolin case. I shot this last Saturday, right after a performance by Juliana & PAVA in SCC’s Laird Auditorium. (You can just make out Ekaterina Badaeva and Galina Kalyuzhina—two of the heavenly voices in that ensemble—at top left.)
Because I was a dork long before it was cool, acute schadenfreude is really the only possible response to a story like this.
It seems that some Webster University “student athletes” are upset that (gasp!) a couple members of the school’s national championship-winning chess team are featured on a billboard in athletic garb. As if that weren’t offensive enough, the billboard reads “Our top recruits are chess players.”
Oh, the humanity!
“Webster directly compared the chess team, which does not compete as a part of the athletics program, to the rest of the athletes on campus,” whined WU basketball player Kevin Miller, who then went on to complain—apparently without irony—about “the lack of facilities our athletics department has for student athletes and the other students who want to come in and have a good workout.” Miller also tweeted his displeasure: “I train all year 2 be able to run up and down a basketball court to represent my school. Not just move wooden pieces.”
By the way, Webster’s chess team is coached by Susan Polgar. Yes, that Susan Polgar.
Here’s the thing: the billboard is funny. It’s memorable. It’s self-deprecating. And it shows that the school attracts some really smart people—which is, you know, what colleges ought to be doing, right? Most important, though, is that the billboard works, a concept apparently too complex for Webster athletes to grasp.
Apart from a few streets and sidewalks, the concrete and stucco shell of Hanford High School is all that remains of the old town site. Originally constructed in 1916 and rebuilt after a 1936 fire, the building served as a construction management office during the Manhattan Project and, more recently, as a training area for SWAT personnel.
See here and here for two other posts related to our recent Hanford Site tour.
Another shot from our Hanford tour. (Check out yesterday’s post for a quick explanation.) Off in the distance you can see the steam cloud from Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station—the only commercial nuclear energy facility in the region.