Knowing what books someone loves is to know their perspective and their journey, to have something special in common, to share a language.
The CWC Mellor-72 - I love the overall shape, but especially the arrow icon above the 6.
My law of music: there is no song that Aretha Franklin could not perform slower and therefore better than everyone else.
Newly discovered corollary: except possibly Pierre Boulez and Beethoven’s 5th. So slow, nearly belabored. Love it!
Drew Austin on high/low-brow music, how it fits into album reviews and club culture, and how all that has shifted in our current state of distance. Energy Flash:
“For Reynolds, “at home and at album length” refers to a process of decontextualization, the musical equivalent of the modern gallery’s white cube: a belief that any cultural product meriting serious appreciation must prove that it can survive outside of its native habitat by becoming a fungible unit of culture, fitting into the standardized format of Pitchfork album reviews and solitary, focused listening. If music sounds good in a packed nightclub at 3 a.m. but not through headphones on your couch, is it real in the same way that Kid A is real? Right now in quarantine, the contextualizing environments in which culture traditionally incubates are closed off and dormant, so everything has to sound good in the living room whether it’s meant to or not. We live in the white cube now; anything that relies on a specific source of external context is an endangered species. We’re one month into a worldwide experiment to learn whether the internet alone can produce sufficient meaning on its own, or whether we must keep mining our memories of an embodied shared reality to bridge this gap.”
A new cannonball run record set - a surprise and unintentended consequence of pandemic and shutting down the economy. It’s now much easier to drive a car really fast from New York to Los Angeles. The new record is just a few hours over a day.
The Majestic Monolith can become The Citadel - when a function of the monolith becomes unwieldy, split off an Outpost to service that need specifically. I like to call them sidecars, because that seems more fun!
Introducing Watchsmith - I love the idea of using customizable, bespoke complications to get a foot in the door of customizable Apple Watch faces. I’m trying it right now, so far so good!
I’ve been tinkering this weekend and MVP.css may be one of my new favorite tools. Drop in some CSS and then just use HTML elements as their name would suggest. No layout, no grids, no typographical system. No classes to memorize. Build now, worry about all the other stuff later.
This weekend, I’m revisiting some of David Perell’s writing on writing, thinking, and aiming high. My favorites: Why You Should Write, Learn Like an Athlete, Networked Writing.
That is a beautiful machine. I must have a soft spot for extensive air-cooling schemes. If Windows/PCs were a thing I could get with, I would get with this hardware.
We took all the dogs on a walk today. Even the sixteen year old one who walks janky. I have never seen so many people out walking in our neighborhood. So that’s nice! Add that to the list of things we should considering preserving once we reach the new normal.
Stop the Coronavirus Corporate Coup. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
The aerospace giant of course wants a $60 billion bailout. Financial problems for this corporation predated the crisis, with the mismanagement that led to the 737 Max as well as defense and space products that don’t work (I noted last July a bailout was coming). The corporation paid out $65 billion in stock buybacks and dividends over the last ten years, and it was drawing down credit lines before this crisis hit. It is highly politically connected; the board of the corporation includes Caroline Kennedy, Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein, three Fortune 100 CEOs, a former US Trade Representative, and two Admirals, one of whom is the board’s only engineer. Using the excuse of the coronavirus, Boeing is trying to get the taxpayer to foot the bill for its errors, so it can go back to making more of them.
The jazz icon Sonny Rollins knows life is a solo trip. Seems like a surprisingly wise, grounded performer.