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Monday, November 30, 2009

A note from Mandy Brown on extracts from Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful:

Along with a new vision for eating, McKibben notices an alternative definition of work—one in which the value of work is held in higher accord than the labor it demands.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Father Jonathan:

A church lady, at an oxymoronous event called “the coffee social,” chided me for not being up to date.

“Are you on Facebook, Father?”

“No, I’m not,” and she looked stern, because she was ready to offer me a prize that had something, but not exactly, to do with Friendship.

[…]

“You probably don’t even Tweet.” Her disdain was peeking out from under her suburban charm.

No. I shook my head like Charlie Brown in the discouraged pumpkin patch.

[…]

I couldn’t manage it. I could not read or think with all the chatting and practices and associations and shows and games. I could not think in paragraphs, or a sentence, with all the talking about what other people are doing while they themselves are wondering what I’m doing while I’m pecking and swiping with thumbs on a touch-sensitive screen.

What are you doing? Typing? What are you saying while you chat? What are you thinking, while touching the wares at Chico’s and Brookstone’s? What do you mean, behind the screen?

Nothing, of course, is the answer — but nothing while the background music is at full.

She and her Facebook Friends, usually frenetic, are bored. Full of information, but unable to hoist belief against the anxious and

…

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

A scene from The Ramen Girl:

Mother: “Her broth is bland.”

Sensei: “I wonder why. She’s mastered the technique perfectly.”

Mother: “Sometimes too much technical training can get in the way. You cook with your head. Your head is full of noise. You must learn to cook from the quieter place deep inside of you. Each bowl of ramen you prepare is a gift to your customer. The food that you serve your customer becomes a part of them. It contains your spirit. That’s why your ramen must be an expression of pure love. A gift from your heart.”

Abby: “I don’t know anything about love. Every time I feel it, it’s gone. It disappears. And all I have left is pain and sadness.”

Mother: “Begin by putting your tears into your broth.”

Monday, November 23, 2009

I got the new Dwell magazine in the mail today. It is all about the future, and the future of design. Within is suggested that “modern” design could be counted as “timeless” design. It struck me that modern design, by definition, is not and cannot be timeless. Modernity is very much part of a particular time in history, and its influence is necessarily always looking forward, anticipating change, pushing boundaries; its very purpose is lost without time. Even its dismissal of history is wrapped up in time. And so, though it has now transcended not a handful of generations, it cannot be timeless. I think there is a quality about it that is trying to be described that is true — that it will keep its course through the future of time — but that word is not timeless.

Friday, November 20, 2009

I took out a winter coat today and found, pocketed, a paper with this quote written on it (no source noted; Google didn’t find anything):

The future is technological, mechanistic, and robotic, but our souls and bodies are only truly fulfilled when connected to nature and the earth.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

This summer

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Extracts from Beatrice Warde’s crystal goblet (PDF) (published 1932, 1955):

If books are printed in order to be read, we must distinguish readability from what the optician would call legibility. A page set in 14-pt Bold Sans is, according to the laboratory tests, more ‘legible’ than one set in 11-pt Baskerville. A public speaker is more ‘audible’ in that sense when he bellows. But a good speaking voice is one which is inaudible as a voice.

[…]

Calligraphy can almost be considered a fine art nowadays, because its primary economic and educational purpose has been taken away; but printing in English will not qualify as an art until the present English language no longer conveys ideas to future generations, and until printing itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor.

[…]

The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author’s words.

[…]

Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Bill Kauffman reviewing Hollowing Out the Middle for The Wall Street Journal:

The middle of America, so long treated with mirth, mockery and mawkish condescension by coastal smarties, is shrinking. “The Heartland’s most valuable export,” write husband and wife sociologists Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, is not “crops or hogs but its educated young people.” This migration has devastating effects. From North Dakota to upstate New York, a youthful exodus is “hollowing out many of the nation’s small towns and rural communities.”

The article ends with this worthwhile thought, surely extracted from the book:

The solution to rural depopulation begins in relearning the value of that simple and underrated word: stay.

The irony in this, for me, is that I wouldn’t mind to leave Louisville; I wouldn’t mind to not stay. Of course, Louisville is not rural, and my family is not from here, but I’ve nonetheless known it as home for the last several years. But still I wouldn’t mind to leave here and plant myself elsewhere. It could be something borne in me. My family is from California. But now we also live here in Kentucky, and in Alaska, Tennessee, Missouri, Texas, and …

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

I made this poster for an event next week which brings people together to discuss transportation issues in Louisville. They don’t know it, but I was inspired by Paul Rand, putting the cruciform to use in the overarching shape of the text. In his book A Designer’s Art he discusses the power of symbolism in design, and shows examples from his own work having used the cruciform. I don’t think the poster would’ve worked well at all without this, even as subtle as it is. It was screenprinted by Monkey Drive.

UPDATE: Download PDF, distribute freely.

Thursday, November 05, 2009

John Dewey, Art As Experience, as quoted by Paul Rand in A Designer’s Art:

Wherever conditions are such as to prevent the act of production from being an experience in which the whole creature is alive and in which he possesses his living through enjoyment, the product will lack something of being aesthetic. No matter how useful it is for special and limited ends, it will not be useful in the ultimate degree — that of contributing directly and liberally to an expanding and enriched life.