“The lines are movement, and the dots are periods of inactivity. (The bigger the dot, the longer the rest.)” (via Door Sixteen » My mouse path.)
Thanks to Hoefler & Frere-Jones for the link.
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I asked Kaminsky if it were possible for him to talk about how he hears his own poems and others’. In his head? His answer could have been given only by a real poet: “Not in the head so much as in the shoulders, legs, hands, chest, brows, ears, hair. You know. Exactly the same way you feel when you read poems that make you go nuts.
San Diego Reader | Tie This Guy Up, Make Sure He Stays at SDSU - Thomas Lux, under whose wing I am privileged to have studied, interviews Ilya Kaminsky, a poet from Odessa. My girlfriend recently had the pleasure of attending Kaminsky’s class at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and like Lux, she raved about him.
I love his answer to how poetry affects the reader.
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Everything we did was entirely absorbed in the act of doing it, in wanting to do it, and everything we did stayed ultimately inside a single extraordinary sphere of life. The design was life itself, it was the day from dawn till dusk, it was the waiting during the night, it was an awareness of the world around us, of materials and lights, distances and weights, resistance, fragilities, use and consumption, birth and death…
When I Was a Very Small Boy: Observatory: Design Observer - Beautiful words from Ettore Sottsass, designer of the famous red Olivetti typewriter.
(via clusterflock)
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In the realm of industrial design, Dieter Rams is Yoda.
THE Q&A: DIETER RAMS, INDUSTRIAL DESIGNER | More Intelligent Life - This interview with Dieter Rams deserves a link for two reasons. One, it’s Dieter Rams. And two, that quote is the first sentence of the article.
The self-destructive romanticism, the artistic self-consciousness, the frenetically unhinged form, the blend of emotional extravagance and cool self-mocking, the vanished boundaries between irony and sincerity and between symbol and reality, the overt cinematic breakdown and breakup, were all of their moment. Pierrot le fou was the last of Godard’s first films, the herald of even more radical rejections and reconstructions to come—for Godard and for the world around him.
Pierrot le fou: Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens - From the Current - Buy it while you can. I did.
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Alcohol tweaks mind wandering in a particularly interesting way, as Schooler and his colleagues report in a new paper entitled “Lost in the Sauce,” published in Psychological Science.
Who doesn’t want to write a serious, scientific paper called “Lost in the Sauce”? Ha!
That particular quote comes from an article on DISCOVER Magazine online, but the link for this comes from Lloyd Morgan’s wonderfully curated Lone Gunman: In Search of the Infogasm. Another choice quote, this time from the linked WSJ article:
In addition, they found that tell-tale burst of gamma waves was almost always preceded by a change in alpha brain-wave intensity in the visual cortex, which controls what we see. They took it as evidence that the brain was dampening the neurons there similar to the way we consciously close our eyes to concentrate. “You want to quiet the noise in your head to solidify that fragile germ of an idea,” says Dr. Jung-Beeman at Northwestern.
Fragile germ of an idea! Love it!
A sometimes-enlightening discussion of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The film historian is an average scholarly bore at best, and the production values of this program leave something to be desired, but McDowell and Burgess are great. (via Google Video)
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What’s left out from these movies is as important and beautiful as what’s included. They’re exercises in doing as much as possible with as little as possible, implying whole swaths of narrative information by allowing the audience to extrapolate events, details, backstories and subplots from only the barest hints of their presence. In fact, what Mann is doing here (and why I am so obviously drawn to this sensibility) is designing these stories — not just their presentation but more fundamentally their construction, too — and doing so in a way that evokes many of the very same things that thrill me about design.
Subtraction.com: Minimalism, Michael Mann and Miami Vice - While I don’t think Mann is doing anything particularly unique among the works of other great directors (see the films of Jean-Pierre Melville, Stanley Kubrick, Wim Wenders, Michelangelo Antonioni, Terrence Malick, etc., and tell me their films aren’t “experiences”), I do like the correlation Vinh is drawing between design and cinematic storytelling.
A great film is great for what it excludes as much as for what it includes, exactly like great design. In that regard design is itself a kind of mise en scene—what is there is how it works, and how effectively it works is a result of how carefully and skillfully the processes that affected the design were refined and employed.
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The newest version of Notational Velocity adds support for Simplenote, a web-based service and iPhone application from Cloud Factory.
Interesting facts about Simplenote support in Notational Velocity - scrodlog - Goodbye Evernote.
Typography on the Web: Questions for Jeffrey Zeldman—Part 1
Two-part interview with Captain Z that provides a pleasant overview of the state of typography on the web. In brief: I’ve got to admit it’s getting better, a little better all the time.
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I feel that as the world continues to fill with clutter at such a disconcerting pace, good design has the task of being quiet and helping people generate a level of calm that allows them to be themselves.
FT.com / House & Home - Simplicity, purity and openness - Dieter Rams.
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How long will it take to complete this Old World to New World shift? My guess? The end is near when you can bootstrap a new iPad application on an iPad. When you can comfortably do that without pining for a traditional desktop, the days of Old World computing are officially numbered.
stevenf.com - I need to talk to you about computers. I’ve been… - Another great piece about computer technology, this time from Steven Frank of Panic.
His distinction between Old and New World computing echoes the distinction I described between traditional desktop computers and personal/mobile computers, devices that produce and devices that consume, respectively. What Steve does here is articulate the point I was merely hinting at; that in order for a true revolution to begin with a New World device like the iPad, devices like the iPad must be capable of developing applications as well as using them.
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With Arnold ussen behind me carrying the laptop, I walked around the Wicab offices. I managed to avoid most walls and desks, scanning my head from side to side slowly to give myself a wider field of view, like radar. Thinking back on it, I don’t remember the feeling of the electrodes on my tongue at all during my walkabout. What I remember are pictures: high-contrast images of cubicle walls and office doors, as though I’d seen them with my eyes.
Wired 15.04: Mixed Feelings - Sunny Bains, writing for Wired, describing the sensation of “seeing” through a device attached to his tongue. Bizarre and thrilling technology.
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Ingmar didn’t like spontaneous meetings with his children,” recalls Rodell, who was also Laretei’s accompanist, “but at the cinema, there was always something to talk about, and you met in some kind of structure. He liked that. Everyone lived in their own house, a little bit apart from one another, and then we met at specific hours.” As Rodell’s partner, Benny Marcel, another close friend of Bergman’s, saw it, “getting quality time with their father wasn’t easy. So on a fantastic afternoon when the sun was shining, they had to sit in a dark cinema to meet with him.
Ingmar Bergman: Art & Design: Wmagazine.com - A considered and perceptive piece about Bergman the person rather than the legend. He was a brilliant filmmaker, but by no means was he a role model for a good person or father.
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The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get “real work” done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the “real work”.
It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.
Fraser Speirs - Blog - Future Shock - This is one of the best things I’ve ever read about technology. Just read it.
