Happened to read this passage from “The Diaries of Franz Kafka” about 10 minutes after checking in with my Day One app and reviewing the (unsunny) “On this day” diary entries I’d left on other October firsts one, seven, and eleven years ago. Grateful for that space.
Excellent recent interviews with Ta-Nehisi Coates by Jon Stewart and Terry Gross. Have ordered “The Message” and can’t wait to start reading.
New Poems from Carl Phillips
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Spent a lovely few weeks making my way, intentionally slowly, through Carl Phillips’s new book of poetry, “Scattered Snows, to the North”. A huge fan of his sensitive, fluid-with-pauses work. A few lines I was especially struck by (though reading the original in print, with line breaks, is preferred):
From “Thicket”:
It’s a quiet night—quiet / the way the animals here, east / of touch, but slightly north, / still, of penetration, live / mostly quiet. Most disappear.
From “Career”:
What if all the truth is / is an over-washed sweatshirt, sometimes on / purpose worn inside out?
From “Back Soon; Driving”:
The way the present cuts into history, / or how the future can look at first / like the past sweeping through, there / are blizzards, and there are blizzards. / Some contain us; some we carry / within us until they die, when we do.
“Muse retrospective” — Though I wasn’t a committed user of the Muse app, I used to enjoy listening to the intelligent podcast put out by the team. Here, and I’m late to this, Muse’s Adam Wiggins offers a perceptive, considered look back at the ups and downs of building a new “tool for thought.”
Toni Morrison, in a 1975 lecture, quoted by Ketanji Brown Jackson in her new memoir, “Lovely One”, which I’m reading now:
The function, the very serious function of racism … is distraction. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped property so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms, and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
“Studio Culture Now”
Monday, September 9, 2024
Paging back through the Kickstarter-backed “Studio Culture Now” from Unit Editions and realized I neglected to note it here. It’s an enjoyable volume featuring indie design studio heads talking shop. A few themes:
- There’s freedom in staying small.
- Having a nice workspace is a plus, but too much overhead’s a crusher.
- Output matters, but so does process, leadership, and owning your POV.
- Social posts and basic PDFs can aid business development more than a high-maintenance, glacially updated website.
- You can find success based anywhere, but be engaged with the field and your community.
“On Cancer and Desire”, by Annie Ernaux: A superb and probing piece of writing, with accompanying photographs.
“Phoenix Is a Vision of America’s Future”: A typically sweeping and sensitively observed George Packer cover story for The Atlantic.
Tina Brown: “America needs editing.”
Sunday, June 2, 2024
What pure pleasure this book was to read: The Vanity Fair Dairies: 1983 - 1992 by Tina Brown. I love on-the-job memoirs/journals, especially anything rooted in the editorial world. The entries are zippy, yet considered — a decade of moments jotted down after whirlwind days. Brown’s a sharp observer and summarizer, and a deft workplace strategist.
A few passages, all from the mid-1980s:
I went for a drink at the Algonquin with Wallace Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker’s son, who I have been told wants to write. I loved his creaky voice and twinkly, creased-up eyes. He’s like a small, anxious hippo, so full of quotable insights. “America has no memory,” he explained. “Nothing LEADS to anything in New York.”
Had a terrific drink tonight with Tom Wolfe, who is tall and thin like a candle in his white suit, with a dryness suddenly illuminated by shafts of pure malice.
A drink with Martin, who is passing through, made me realize how much I miss Englishness. I had a sudden pang for Oxford days when we lay in the little single bed in my St. Anne’s room in the Woodstock Road, doting on Larkin’s sentences in “The Whitsun Weddings.” I thought of London spread out in the sun / Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat. My ideal place to live would be Transatlantica, an island that combined English irony, country lanes in summer, the National Theatre, and a real pot of tea they never seem to be able to make here, with American openness, lack of class barriers, willingness to give away money to good causes, and the view of Manhattan from the Rainbow Room at the top of Rockefeller Center. I miss the pleasing streak of delinquency in the English character.
The change of the seasons from brutal cold to sudden heat made me think of the sweet decorum of our London patio in the spring, the rhododendron bushes drowsy with raindrops. I long for the English countryside in ways I never did when I lived there. I suddenly see the great country houses that gave us so much irreverent copy at Tatler as a rich national resource, custodians of passing time. Here, time is to be spent, like money; time is to be killed, time is to be forgotten. Everything is a race against time. Trying to beat it is the pressure at your throat. I dream of London’s manageable scale, its compactness, its conversation. America is too big, too rich, too driven. America needs editing.
From How Design Makes Us Think, by Sean Adams:
Film director Billy Wilder enjoyed daily naps limited to fifteen minutes. Friends Charles and Ray Eames designed a chaise lounge for Wilder to assist with the fifteen-minute rule. The chaise has a narrow profile. If Wilder began to sleep longer, his arms would fall to his side and wake him. The base is exposed and honest, the form follows the function of short napping.
Low, “The Plan” (Can I hold it?)
Saturday, April 13, 2024
This rich new New Yorker piece on Alan Sparkhawk — about the death of his late wife and Low partner Mimi Parker and the music he’s been making since — sent me back to band’s incomparable catalogue.
There was a stretch of months in 2003 when I’d started a new writing job at the Saint Louis Art Museum, and I’d play Low’s album “The Curtain Hits the Cast” over and over at a low volume in my little office; it was the soundtrack to my days in a new job in a returned-to city.
Here’s that record’s transcendent song “The Plan”:
Here’s a live version from April 2007, perfectly fuzzy and just out of reach of mere mortals:
Good timing from the NYT — I’ve been wondering about the story behind the day-improving @artbutmakeitsports account. (No, he doesn’t use AI.) In the spirit of doubles, his work brings me back to reading Lawrence Weschler’s wonderful “Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences” 15 years ago.
Year in Review: 2023
Saturday, December 30, 2023
Continuing a 23-year tradition of rounding up cultural highlights from the past 12 months, here’s a recap for 2023:
15 Books I Especially Loved This Year
An Additional Batch I Enjoyed
(That first hard-to-ID book is “Pentagram: Living By Design," which I had to scramble to procure before it sold out. The brown one in the middle column is “Scaling People”, a terrific book about team- and company-building. The full list of what I read in 2023 is here.)
TV
Especially grateful for “Succession” (a perfect close), “Patriot” (committed to its singular vision), “Reservation Dogs” (often profound and goofy within the same shot), and “Slow Horses.” Enjoyed “Jury Duty,” “Fleishman Is in Trouble," and “Vienna Blood.” “The Diplomat” was fun in parts.
Movies
Each year it’s a fresh bummer to have seen so few new movies, considering how many my wife and I used to see pre-kids. In terms of what I saw: I loved every minute of “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” and also really liked “The Banshees of Inisherein” and “A Quiet Passion.” Two good docs: “Beckham,” “Navalny.” “The Killer” was well-made, but I wondered why I was spending time on that subject. Enjoyed rewatching “Tár” and “After Yang” and “Karate Kid” (Leo screening). Couldn’t get excited about “Mission: Impossible,” except for that last extended escape-the-train scene. Wish I liked more: “Asteroid City." “Air" was entertaining, but didn’t quite seem like a full movie.
Music
Enjoyed new albums from Joanna Sternberg, Youth Lagoon, boygenius, Mitski, Killer Mike, and Veeze (a discovery for me).
Podcasts
New-to-me this year: “Heavyweight” (so late to this; now cancelled : / ), “The CITY Voice,” “After Hours,” “The Power of Teamwork” (it was fun to have pitched this to Adobe; congrats to my former colleagues on S2) and “Dissect”’s deep dive into Radiohead’s “In Rainbows.”
Articles & Essays
A few highlights from The New Yorker: “Words Fail," by Rachel Aviv; “The Fugitive Princesses of Dubai," by Heidi Blake; “The Greatest Showman," by Alex Ross. A few standouts from The Atlantic, which gets better every year: “We’re Already in the Metaverse," by Megan Garber; “The Moral Case Against Equity Language," by George Packer; “The Resilience Gap," by Jill Filipvic; and “Black Success, White Backlash” by Elijah Anderson.
Visual Art
Not a lot of museum-going this year (or travel, which often leads to it). But it’s always such a pleasure to see my wife Tamara open a show at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Pictured: Opening night at “Faye HeavyShield: Confluences," with our kids vying for the spotlight.
A Song That Struck Me
In many of these year-end posts I include an especially memorable songwriter discovery (Weyes Blood, Haley Heynderickx). This year in his Substack newsletter, Jeff Tweedy mentioned that the band keeps a Spotify playlist where they share music they’ve been enjoying. While streaming that mix in the background, a song called “Life According to Raechel” by Madison Cunningham stopped me cold. Many repeat listens that day, and days after. Here’s a solo version to share with you, followed by one with an ensemble:
Happy New Year, and best wishes for an enjoyable 2024.
“The Lost Voice,” a new two-minute short film from Apple, directed by Taika Waititi. A richly told story about a single, powerful accessibility feature.
Interrogating Privilege
Sunday, September 24, 2023
From Nick McDonell’s new book “Quiet Street: On American Privilege”:
Such skills arose not from any extraordinary talent or discipline but from the enormous resources invested in each child. And though I have here emphasized traditionally highbrow skills, we were groomed to be comfortable at every level of culture, in every room—to appreciate Taylor Swift as well as Tchaikovsky, to make small talk with the custodian as well as the senator. The deeper lessons were confidence, poise in any context, what sociologist Shamus Rahman Khan calls ease. Old-fashioned exclusionary markers could in fact be a liability, in the same way an all-white classroom was. All the world was ours not because of what we excluded or inherited but because of our open-minded good manners and how hard we worked—which, all agreed, was very hard indeed. This superficial meritocracy masked, especially to ourselves, a profound entitlement.
Reading McDonell’s slim memoir brought to mind one of my all-time favorite works of nonfiction, “Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy”, Ben Sonnenberg’s high-culture self-flaying that begins this way: “I was a Collectors’ Child.”
The authors are very different people (as were their parents, consequentially), but they share an interest in examining what privilege has done to them. I grabbed “Lost Property” from the shelf and found a squiggle next to this passage of homecoming.
For once in my life I liked going to 19 Gramercy Park, going there with my wife and baby daughter. My mother and father loved Alice, and I loved showing Alice where I’d grown up and showing off to the servants. One afternoon, watching Susy, on the needle-point rug, in the paneled library, I rememberd how once at a dealer’s, a decripit old collector came, with his young wife and new baby, to inspect a white-figure wine jug of the fourth century B.C. The baby pulled at something, the lekythos nearly fell, and from the way the collector looked, I knew if he had had to choose between the vase and his baby, the baby would be dead. I’m not like that, thank goodness, I thought, watching Susy on the rug, watching my parents watching me, turning my foot from side to side, catching the light on my shoe.
Fantastic, instructive book: “Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building," by Claire Hughes Johnson. She’s a real-deal practitioner, and many of these lessons trace back to her infrastructural work at Stripe, which she helped grow. The book’s focus is on the operating principles to create within an organization — “how to create and embed the systems that help build a company you can be proud of.” (Since her primary reference point is Stripe, having a “writing culture” plays a role.)
Prompted by this Jarrett Fuller post, I scooped up and quickly read “Two-Dimensional Man: A Graphic Memoir” by Paul Sahre. Funny, poignant at times — a great read for any creator. The memoir includes a good deal of striking work shown between prose pages, including several book covers I’ve long admired. You can get a good sense of Sahre’s sensibility by knowing that when he officialy launched his solo design business — the Office of Paul Sahre — he embraced its unintended acronym: O.O.P.S.
“‘My Body Is a Clock’: The Private Life of Chronic Care,” a moving and arresting photo series + essay by Sara J. Winston:
Every 28 days, I point the camera toward myself to document my illness and care. I have used my time as a patient in the infusion suite, a place where I sometimes feel powerless, to reclaim my autonomy as an artist and photographer.
One of the best books I’ve read this year: “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer," by Siddhartha Mukherjee. What an immensely impressive person: a first-class physician-scientist who’s also an exceptional storyteller with a deeply literary sensibility.
In love with just about every one of these Janet Hansen-designed book covers.