RIP Bowie

David Bowie died yesterday. I woke up this morning at 4am, went for a glass of water, glanced at my phone and saw the news: an NYT notification confirming the death. It took me at least a half hour to fall back asleep. I cried a little. Bowie meant a lot to me in a way that’s hard to describe. His effect on me was more channeled through the artists he inspired who more directly touched my life: Blur, Suede, B&S. Of course I discovered Bowie’s music early on, and connected with it deeply, but I believe I haven’t made it all the way through. There are still records I’ve only heard, and not truly listened to. Bowie’s music will have new things to share with me the rest of my life.

It’s been a weird day. Hard to think of much else. Rest in peace, David Jones.

Insta Ads

Too many advertisements in Instagram now. It’s like every four or five posts. I feel like I’m flipping through a coupon book and a not steam of friends and artists. Putting it away for now, like I did with Facebook a few years ago.

Never went back to Facebook.

Amoeba Records

Journaling and Blogging

For the last few years, I've written a lot in a personal journal. The journal alternates between private and public-worthy content, and I find it very hard to pull out what should be published at this site and what shouldn't. It's a design problem I want to solve. I want one place to write which allows me to push to public view if I choose. 

There aren't any apps or CMS's out there at the moment which do exactly what I want. So I've been designing my own. How I build it is another question, but I'm enjoying playing with the constraints and the possibilities. 

What I've come up with is a combination of an iOS note taking app and dropbox-hosted static site CMS. The hope is to construct something which is very easy to set up and use, and reduces as much friction as possible. 

I'm designing something for myself. And maybe I'll build it for myself. Shipping something along these lines is a goal for 2016, and I'll try and document my progress here.

Sleater-Kinney

With Jess.

Blur at MSG, NYC

Third time seeing my favorite band.

Butternut Knolls, Shokan, NY

Friends.

Music and Middle Age

I’ve had the same favorite band since I was 16. That’s not going to change. Now that I’m 34, that music is so packed with nostalgia and invested emotions it will forever be immensely important to me.

I never stopped digging for new music. My deep love for one band led me to a broad love for all. In the late 90’s, I spent hours every week inside record shops. In the early 2000’s, I lived inside whichever P2P network was popping at the time. Now it’s all streaming services; first Spotify, then Rdio, now the new Apple Music app.

I’ve mellowed in my middle age. I’m not desperately searching out the hip and the cool. My generation had it’s time in the musical spotlight during the 2000’s. The hip stuff now is for the kids. I patiently wait for the best stuff to filter to the top, without fearing I’m missing out on anything. When I was in my early twenties, it was important to know exactly where the edges were, what the shape and color of my generation’s art were. That’s all over for me. The kids now are making new shapes and new colors, exactly as they should be. It’s a beautiful cycle.

Does music even exist? Like really? We record the vibrations of sound, dig grooves in vinyl, align magnetic strips on tape, line up 1s and 0s on silicon and MP3 files. Can you really own those grooves? Can those magnetic strips or the 1s and 0s ever belong to you? I’ve concluded that no, no you can’t, no they don’t. You buy the objects which allow for the sound to happen, but the music exists somewhere else.

I used to obsess over my music collection. First with CDs, then with the MP3s in iTunes. Then Spotify. Then Rdio. At some point during all this I learned to let go. I’ve realized I can’t own any of that. Not really. All these collections and playlists have no permanence. They’re not mine. I can’t possess the music, but the music is there for me. Music is always within reach.

The best feature of the new Apple Music service is the curated playlists. They’ve hired actual people to make these, and the quality shows. Trusting in these playlists requires another act of letting go. My 22 year old self would never have accepted anyone else’s authority. I knew better. And any joker could see that the algorithms used for Artist Station radio on streaming services are laughably terrible. But these Apple Music curated playlists are nice. Admitting that has proven to me that I’ve grown up.

There’s even an Apple Music playlist that curates a collection of music that inspired my favorite band. I listened to it and I enjoyed it. They got it right. I could have grumbled about the song selection, even though the chosen artists are perfect. It’s fine. It doesn’t matter. I’ve made hundreds of playlists just like it. Others have made hundreds of thousands of playlists just like it. All that is well and good. Music is a conversation. For now whatever technology has the music in it, I can just press play, and there it is in the air, the music.

Sam Potts vs. Robert Bringhurst

Sam Potts' article on Medium, A Refutation of The Elements of Typographic Style, was confrontational by intent. As a regular reader of TES, I was surprised to find that I agreed with him. Each time I pick up Bringhurst's book, I read it with the same admiration it has earned among my peers. As far as I knew, it had been universally loved and praised. But Potts takes an adversarial stance and makes excellent points about its lessons in typography. I won't paraphrase his refutations here. It's not a long article. If you're interested in this post, you should read his first. Mainly, the issues Potts takes up with Bringhurst have to do with calling out subjective points of view which had been written under the assumption of objectivity. If nothing else, it is worth reading for the new angle on a book most of us have read more than once and will likely read again.

A fact Potts almost alludes to, but never explicitly states, is that Robert Bringhurst is a poet. Bringhurst's writing is floral and full of pretty metaphors, and it takes a near-religious view of his subject. This is one reason type-lovers return to ETS over and over again. Bringhurst clearly sees the beauty in type, which is easy for a designer to sympathize with. No other writer covering typography gets close to the heights of Bringhurst's style.

Potts also shows that as a poet, Bringhurst would have had more editorial control over the appearance of his text than would any other type of writer. Poetry can take liberties with typographic and editorial rules which other forms of writing usually can't. And with poetry, the type treatment itself is often part of the art, whereas with other forms of writing the art is contained within the content of the text. This fact would fall in line with the liberties afforded a graphic designer, perhaps, but not so much the typesetter of a manuscript. It's an issue I happen to understand well. Most projects come with constraints which severely limit type selection, and therefore make it difficult to follow Bringhurst's rules as stated. We can't all be poets.

I'll continue to reread The Elements of Typographic Style. The issues which Potts takes with the book do not reduce it to uselessness. TES remains a beautiful book which shares in spirit my fascination with type and it's history. Not only that, but the many excellent glossaries at the back of the book are worth the price alone. As with any book of instruction or history, the text must be taken with a healthy amount of criticism. And Bringhurst himself gives the reader the right to disagree with him in the Forward, with a passage that has always been one of my favorites in the book:

By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately, and well.

Beacon, NY

Meeting the neighbors at our friends’ new place in Beacon.