Lined & Unlined

Highly recommended: this episode of the UK’s South Bank Show on composer Steve Reich. Reich talks about the development of his work and process in the most casual but fascinating way, it’s well worth a look. Also interviewed are composers like Michael Nyman and Brian Eno. Eno describes Reich’s tape pieces (like “It’s Gonna Rain”) as “aural moiré patterns.” He goes on, “[The pieces] take advantage of the fact that your brain is very creative. [Reich’s] tranferring the job of being the composer into the brain of the listener, saying to the listener, ‘Your brain is actually making this piece of music,’ because you knew what ingredients were, there’s nothing mysterious about how the piece works.” Perhaps that explains my love for Bruno Munari’s Original Xerographies.

Above: Chess Set by Josef Hartwig (German, 1880-1955) from MoMA.

Linked by Air, designers of the wonderful new Whitney.org, share some of their class syllabi, including a chess-visualization assignment that’s after Duchamp’s, Hartwig’s, and my own heart.

The School of Life’s Catherine Blyth weighs in on the peculiar mechanics of diplomatic gift-giving:

As each exchange is a diplomatic act, similar rules apply to presents as to flattery. When Gordon Brown welcomed Barack Obama to Britain with a pen holder whittled from timbers of a sister ship of the Resolute, out of which the Presidential desk in the White House is made, plus a seven-volume, first edition Churchill biography, Obama gave him 25 DVDs including Psycho. Commentators scorned Obama’s ‘insult,’ but the error was Brown’s. His presents were too great to be returned.

Man, I love Stewart Brand:

When roles shift, ideologies have to shift, and ideologies hate to shift. The workaround is pragmatism — a practical way of thinking concerned with results rather than with theories and principles. The shift is deeper than moving from one ideology to another; the shift is to discard ideology entirely.

More on pragmatism here.

The origin and examples of purple prose.

To my emerging collection of paradoxes, I now add another: the joyfully alliterative Parrondo’s Paradox, which states that “Given two games, each with a higher probability of losing than winning, it is possible to construct a winning strategy by playing the games alternately.” The paradox was discovered in 1999.

This article from the New York Times written shortly afterward describes one of Parrondo’s experiments with two games involving weighted (non random) coins: “when a person plays either game A or game B 100 times, all money taken to the gambling table is lost. But when the games are alternated — playing A twice and B twice for 100 times — money is not lost. It accumulates into big winnings. Even more surprising, he said, when game A and B are played randomly, with no order in the alternating sequence, winnings also go up and up.”

When visualized, these games take on a rachet-like shape — a shape central to the explanation of trivial phenomena, like the Brazil Nut Effect, and more fundamental matters, like the design of enzymes and proteins.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to get an advance look at the Guggenheim’s newest show, a project by Tino Seghal. While I don’t want to say too much about it — it’s something best experienced for yourself — I will say that it was remarkable and highly thought-provoking, a deceptively simple mix of walking, talking, and the Guggenheim’s remarkable architecture.

In advance of the show’s opening, the New York Times Magazine’s Arthur Lubow penned a profile of Seghal, a man whose life and art are intensely intertwined. I particularly enjoyed Lubow’s description of selling and staging one of Seghal’s works:

As far as money goes, at a museum-discount price of $70,000 it was a minor MoMA purchase; but [Director Glenn] Lowry was not overstating the cost of time and energy. Since there can be no written contract, the sale of a Sehgal piece must be conducted orally, with a lawyer or a notary public on hand to witness it. The work is described; the right to install it for an unspecified number of times under the supervision of Sehgal or one of his representatives is stipulated; and the price is stated. The buyer agrees to certain restrictions, perhaps the most important being the ban on future documentation, which extends to any subsequent transfers of ownership. “If the work gets resold, it has to be done in the same way it was acquired originally,’ says Jan Mot, who is Sehgal’s dealer in Brussels. ‘If it is not done according to the conditions of the first sale, one could debate whether it was an authentic sale. It’s like making a false Tino Sehgal, if you start making documentation and a certificate.”

Three recent articles with online product reviews at their center:

1. Alice Twemlow’s Design Observer post on the “Poetics of Amateur Product Reviews,” which includes an introduction to writer Geoff Dyer’s concept of “imaginative criticism,” found in his wonderful jazz book But Beautiful (and used in my own article, “Pärt Notes”).

2. Nick Bilton’s data visualizations of Kindle user reviews, which he used to draw his own conclusions on Amazon’s consumer responsiveness for the New York Times’s Bits blog.

3. Virginia Heffernan’s article “The Reviewing Stand” for her column The Medium in the New York Times Magazine, which cites a review of the self-help best-seller The Secret that is simply too kooky to miss. See also: Harriet Klausner, and Justin Ouelette’s opinionated-but-hyperminimalist The Shit to Get.

Khoi writes in with more on space and film:

For a great example of effective spatial narrative in film, watch (or re-watch) Soderbergh’s underrated Out of Sight. The last act of the film is about a gang of thieves taking over a home; they’re all split up in different parts of the house, but somehow Soderbergh makes you understand exactly where they are in relation to one another. It’s something very few directors can do.

While we’re on the subject of Soderbergh, I’m reminded of this excellent appraisal A.O. Scott wrote about the director back in 2000, as Soderbergh was preparing to release Traffic. Ten years later, the article remains insightful and fresh. Here’s one of Scott’s takeaways from The Limey:

[The] director uses the plainness of the story as an opportunity to linger over telling details and explore its rich subtext. The movie, with its jump cuts and its forays into fantasy (Mr. Stamp’s character imagines the death of his antagonist many times before it happens), becomes an extended meditation on the puzzling relationship between personal and historical time. Specifically, it’s about the 60’s, a much-mythologized decade evoked not by costumed flashbacks but by the flickering shadow of Mr. Stamp, a young, brash, beautiful star of the period, in clips from one of his old movies.

An absolutely fascinating interview with ECM founder Manfred Eicher on the occasion of the label’s 40th anniversary last November is now online. Though he downplays the importance of the label’s cover designs, they were tremendously influential in shaping my initial interest in graphic design. Lars Müller’s book of ECM covers Sleeves of Desire is almost always in reach of my desk, and another, Windfall Light, is soon on the way.

In answering jazz critic Gary Giddins’s question about the sleeve designs, Eichner cites Gertrude Stein’s maxim to “think of your ears as eyes.” ECM often uses the quote in its materials, but Eichner says it was used first in liner notes for the elegantly understated design of Keith Jarrett’s 10-LP box set The Sun Bear Concerts. (Eichner also playfully describes designer Barbara Wojirsch’s choice for the box binding material as “trash paper.”) The Tokyo concert’s meditative second section continues to be one of the most remarkably evocative things I’ve ever heard on the piano—play it, and you’ll no doubt see the rain falling.

David Shen asks, “Why aren’t there more graphic designer venture captialists?” His answer: fewer designers relative to other disciplines, lower chance of designers receiving a large cash windfall to get started, general fear of higher-risk investing among non-investors combined with lack of venturing know-how and adequate time horizons, and atypical skillsets vs. standard VCs with business and management backgrounds.

Shen’s post was written at the end of 2009 and cites Method and Fuseproject as counterexamples, design firms that have worked for part-equity stakes (rather than service fees) in the past, and commenters rightly include 37signals and Coudal Partners as well. However, many of the obstacles Shen mentions are already in flux: there are more design grads, more designers owning their own small businesses, more designers seeding other designers’ startup projects, etc. In short, I think we’re on track to see more and more designer VCs in the years ahead, and Shen agrees. Here’s hoping.

Geoff Manaugh of BLDG BLOG on Bruce Willis’s John McClane in Die Hard and his exploration of Nakatomi Space:

Over the course of the film, McClane blows up whole sections of the building; he stops elevators between floors; and he otherwise explores the internal spaces of Nakatomi Plaza in acts of virtuoso navigation that were neither imagined nor physically planned for by the architects. His is an infrastructure of nearly uninhibited movement within the material structure of the building.

The spatial dynamics of films fascinate me endlessly. A few other great spatial films: The Shining, North by Northwest, and The Limey. There are surely many more. Also of interest: Steven Jacobs’s recent book The Wrong House. (via)

Seth Godin channeling Lewis Hyde at Cool Hunting on behalf of his new book, Linchpin:

What’s a gift? If I see a Chuck Close painting in a museum, I didn’t pay for that painting, I just get the benefit of seeing it. If I see a Karl Lagerfeld outfit walking down the street, it didn’t cost me anything to see it. If someone takes the time to use a beautiful Bodoni typeface kerned properly, it doesn’t necessarily communicate the words more clearly, but there was a gift element associated with it. We need to start with this idea that there isn’t just a transaction every time—I do something, I get money, we move on—that what gifts do is they create a connection, because they’re not even. Someone gave me something, I couldn’t give them anything in return. We’re not even-steven.

Also worth noting is Godin’s innovative PR model:

We started by offering a review copy to the first three thousand people who gave a donation to the Acumen Fund, which is a charity I support. And it didn’t take very long to have more than 2,000 people do that. We raised $100,00 in about a day and a half, exceeding our goal. So those books went out yesterday. We also sent 250 people who live internationally a shorter digital version (about a fifth of the book) so that they wouldn’t have to wait for shipping. It’s already showing up on Twitter. It’s already being reviewed. Some people don’t like it, some people like it a lot. What will end up happening, my prediction is, that between 500 and 1,000 reviews of one sort or another will get posted online, which will certainly reach far more people than a review in The New York Times ever could. My principle goal is to leverage personal interactions so that this book reaches the people it needs to reach, the people who are open to hearing what it has to say.

Above: Harsh Patel’s “Comedians & Musicians” and “Kim Deal.”

A gift is something you can’t get by your own efforts; it must be given to you. That’s how I came to receive a paint-stained package of little books by a young Los Angeles-based artist named Harsh Patel. Enclosed were a dozen or so handmade, photocopied booklets with titles like “Lee Mavers,” “Kim Deal,” “Cascando” and “Echo’s Bones.” The first two titles are the names of musicians. The latter two are titles of poems by Samuel Beckett. Each falls squarely within the fanzine genre, which Wikipedia describes as a “nonprofessional and nonoffical publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon (such as a literary or musical genre) for the pleasure of others who share their interest.” And yet something more than the adulation of an admirer was motivating these zines. Their vision was cohesive, bracing, and fresh.

For years, Patel’s zines were available only as gifts to his friends and family, but many of the same zines from that paint-stained package are now available directly from Patel via his website, Sister. One of my favorites is called “Comedians & Musicians.” Picking it up, I’m confronted first with a division symbol whose bottom dot is made up of cells subdividing, copying and recopying their DNA in an act of self-distribution familiar to viral marketers and, of course, zinemakers. Turning the pages, I see a set of token-like symbols and remnants from an archeological dig that read like something from George Kubler’s famous 1962 book The Shape of Time, cited by fellow L.A. artist John Baldessari in his 1966 “Painting for Kubler.” Then comes a set of morphologically-similar lesions found on young African faces—Patel grew up in East Africa—followed by a set of Dali-esque floppy circles burned across the sky. The subject seems, at least to me, to be the dispersion and interpretation of signs. In the old days, the professionals evoked in the zine’s title brought the news and spread the word. Now, of course, we have books for that. After I finished, I wrote to Patel, who expanded on the zine’s title: “More often than not, when I am talking about a work ethic or working model, I refer to comedians and musicians—especially young black guys working with limited means—much more than I ever do to fine artists.”

And yet Patel’s work is not without its artistic analogues as well. I have already referred to Baldessari, but looming larger still is Ed Ruscha. Patel’s zines share Ruscha’s sense of humor, appropriative appetite, and lightness of touch. Patel’s work also expresses an even more direct link to the L.A. punk scene, particularly to the work of Raymond Pettibon and the scene’s DIY ethic. When “reading” Patel’s work, I often get the sense that I am looking at a visual incarnation of the great (and, for a time, L.A.-based) rock critic Richard Meltzer’s book The Aesthetics of Rock (1970).

Patel’s work comes during a year that has witnessed the resurgence of interest in the zine as a form. Ten years after the final issue of zine encyclopedia Factsheet Five was published, the 2008 Most Beautiful Swiss Books jury honored Nieves, the zine imprint founded by Benjamin Sommerhalder, with its most prestigious prize, the Jan Tschichold Award. Writing for the jury, artist and Printed Matter director A.A. Bronson explained the significance of the choice: “In 1972 we began FILE Magazine […] and occasionally pumped out little artists’ chapbooks and passed them out to friends. Those chapbooks, which we now call zines, are the obvious progenitor of Nieves.” Bronson noted that the alternative nature of zines points “a way toward the future, and a method of sustainable economic development that escapes the hubris of money and power.” Patel would agree. A few months ago he sent a draft of a statement he’d been working on, titled “The Ideal Book.” It said, in part: “Designed simply. Produced to be respectful of resources, environmental and otherwise. Free of all profit- or ego-oriented details. Affordably priced. Treated with reverence and dignity.” These are the ingredients of an ideal book, and Patel’s are truly that.

This article was commissioned for the “Kaleidoscope Files” section in fourth issue of Kaleidoscope Magazine. The brief was simple: suggest or recommend something you really like. Patel’s work definitely fit the bill. More here.

Above: a subtitled still from Michaelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte, one of Stanley Kubrick’s top 10 favorite films. Watch the entire scene here.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Serial Series is a six-part meditation on the production of text from the text’s point-of-view. It was written serially and published serially during the three-week run of Dexter Sinister’s The First/Last Newspaper, a project for Performa 09.

Above, from top: a Sholes & Glidden c. 1873, the model used by Mark Twain; a Hansen Writing Ball c.1882, the model used by Friedrich Nietzsche; the Adler typewriter found on the desk of Jack Torrance in a still from The Shining; the Smith-Corona on the desk of Theodore Kaczynski (aka the Unabomber) in a photograph of his Montana cabin.

Shortly after buying his Remington Model 1 typewriter, Mark Twain dashed a letter off to his brother in 1874. In his note, he seems equal parts addled and satisfied with his new purchase:

I am trying get the hang of this new fangled writing machine, but am not making a shining success of it. […] I believe it will print faster than I can write. One may lean back in his chair & work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don’t muss things or scatter ink blots around. Of course it saves paper.

Knowing they had a notable writer for a customer, Remington’s salespeople contacted Twain to see if he’d vouch publicly for their Remington Model 2, which he’d purchased as soon as it was released. In a typed note of all caps he declined, signing off not as Twain, but with his given name, Samuel Clemens:

Please do not use my name in any way. Please do not even divulge the fact that I own a machine. I have entirely stopped using the Type-Writer, for the reason that I never could write a letter with it to anybody without receiving a request by return mail that I would not only describe the machine but state what progress I had made in the use of it, etc., etc. I don’t like to write letters, so I don’t want people to know that I own this curiosity breeding little joker. Yours truly, Saml. L. Clemens.

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