While you’re chasing away the end-of-summer blues, Core77 has a great set of articles they’ve commissioned entitled Hack2Work. (Props to whoever came up with the scull-and-crossbones–inspired coffee mug and Artimide lamps logo.) Among my favorite posts is Michael Bierut’s inspired take on designer-client dynamics entitled How to Make Your Client’s Logo Bigger Without Making Their Logo Bigger, Liz Danzico’s Check Please: How to Learn About Your Clients From Their Table Manners, Alissa Walker’s pithy Dos and Don’ts For Your Design Firm Blog, and, most of all, Lisa Smith’s Listen While You Work: Try These Podcasts Instead of Music.

Smith, who sports a longer list of queued podcasts than I do (which is truly saying something), shares classics like This American Life and Kurt Anderson’s Studio 360 along with new favorites like UBUweb’s Avant-Garde All the Time, which highlights “audio works that you really should know about about but most likely don’t.” Also new to me: podcasts from the Slought Foundation, which features “leading theorists and practitioners of our generation in conversation about contemporary debates in art and architecture, geopolitics, and critical theory.” First on my new podcasts playlist: Werner Herzog in conversation with Karen Beckman from 2007.

In an unguarded moment some months ago, I predicted that the public concert as we know it today would no longer exist a century hence, that its functions would have been entirely taken over by electronic media. It had not occurred to me that this statement represented a particularly radical pronouncement. Indeed, I regarded it almost as self-evident truth and, in any case, as defining only one of the peripheral effects occasioned by developments in the electronic age. But never has a statement of mine been so widely quoted—or so hotly disputed.

Despite the opposite of this having turned out to be true — the concert, at least for popular music, is more alive and vital to artist revenue than ever — Glenn Gould’s seminal essay, The Prospects of Recording, seems as fresh today as when it was written in 1966.

Read a shortened version from the link above, or tune into UbuWeb for the 90-minute radio documentary, broadcast a year earlier and featuring the voices of Marshall McLuhan, Leopold Stokowski, and many more.

Jayme Yen at the Walker Art Center Design Blog pointed me to yet another indespensible wing of Kenneth Goldsmith’s vast cultural archive at Ubu.com, the “Ethnopoetics” section. Its curator Jerome Rothenberg writes, “In the present Ubuweb collection of ethnopoetic openings, it’s our intention to build a sampler of what we take to be the second great breakthrough of the modernist poetry project. The search here is for a range of poetries outside the domain of customarily accepted literature. In particular we’re interested, in the spirit of other segments of Ubuweb, in soundings and visionings that are the traditional and often culturally acceptable counterparts to what in our own surroundings have been seen and heard as radical, even disturbing departures from conventional practice.” All of Rothenberg’s selections are compelling, but I was particularly glad to see his inclusion of Shaker gift drawings and visual poetry in the project. More of my thoughts on the Shakers’ gift drawings here.