Vancouver, Canada

Thanks to long-time friend Ronald Kapaz (of Oz Design in São Paulo) for this quotable… one of many in the presentation he gave at Design Currency today.

Vancouver, Canada

I’m pleased to be participating in the Design Currency: Defining the Value of Design event here this week. Davin Greenwell has been documenting this multidisciplinary design conference, e.g. here.

Photo: ‘Yours truly’ moderating the Sustainable Cities session on Wednesday morning—photo by Davin Greenwell.

Vancouver, BC

I’m out on the west coast of Canada today, enjoying the family and fellowship of designer colleagues attending the Design Currency event… couldn’t be more timely, given that today is also World Graphics Day.

Cheers, mates!

Kabul, Afghanistan

(From today’s online New York Times): Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter. The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan. (more here)

While I have my doubts that PowerPoint can actually make you stupid, I’d agree that it’s a great tool—in an arsenal of many others—that can readily help portray your stupidity… although in the case of the USA and the coerced “Coalition” still fighting in Afghanistan, that seems to be a foregone conclusion.

Thanks to friend Marie-Aline Oliver for the link.

Barcelona, Spain

Javier Jaén just keeps them coming…

Annapurna, Nepal

I’m a moderately-skilled, out-of-shape, low-altitude mountaineer (mostly rock-climbing and summit scrambling)—which puts me in a position of more than a little awe of those who push the boundaries of alpinism. So, naturally, I was quite enthused when I heard from a designer friend in Porto today (Toze, aka Antonio Coelho, himself one of Portugal’s premier mountaineers) that his long-time climbing partner, João Garcia, has just become the 10th climber to summit all 14 of the world’s mountains over 8000 meters (26,246′) without supplementary oxygen. For João, this culminates a quest he began 17 years ago with the ascent of Cho Oyu (João was also the first Portuguese to summit Everest, in 1999).

The summit of Annapurna marked another first on 17 April 2010, the day of João Garcia’s ascent: the 36-year-old Spanish climber Edurne Pasaban became the first woman to summit 13 of the 8000ers, putting her at the front of the race among women climbers to match Reinhold Messner’s momentous 1993 achievement.

Parabéns!

Barcelona, Spain

Smart. Simple. Stylish. Sympathetic… need I say more?

Works by Javier Jaén.

Redding, Connecticut

Mark Twain, aka Samuel Langhome Clemens, passed on one hundred years ago today. The popular American author and humorist is noted (among a great number of other achievements) for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). A friend to presidents, European royalty, artists, and industrialists, and he was also very popular with the common man, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned praise from critics and peers. Upon his death, he was lauded as the “greatest American humorist of his age,” and William Faulkner called him “the father of American literature.”

I read many of Twain’s novels when I was young, and I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Twain’s former home in Hartford, Connecticut (where he lived from 1874 to 1891 while writing some of his greatest works) when I was teaching at the Hartford School of Art a few years back—the classic old home has been turned into a museum well worth visiting.

Here are a few of the many bon mots and eloquent lines of advice, wit, and profundity the great Mark Twain left us to ponder:

+  +  +

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.

Age is an issue of mind over matter.
If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool
than to speak out and remove all doubt.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living.
The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.

Man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to.

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.

It is easier to stay out than get out.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

Noise proves nothing.
Often a hen who has merely laid an egg
cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive;
but it is lightning that does the work.

Be careful about reading health books.
You may die of a misprint.

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds
on the heel that has crushed it.

The most interesting information comes from children,
for they tell all they know and then stop.

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Winnipeg, Canada

Dad—you were born on this day in 1920 into the tough conditions of the Russian Civil War,—then happily escaped that conflicted land with your nuclear family to the new frontier of Western Canada a few years later. As I understand it, you’ve been smiling pretty much ever since… at least that’s the most pervasive and enduring trait that comes to my mind and memory (photos don’t lie either :-)  I remember a line from a magazine article (back about 40 years ago) that described you as “the genial jut-jawed John Jacob Peters”—still as apt and appropriate a descriptor as anyone could possibly pen, methinks.

Thanks for the faith and positive energy you’ve imbued in my brothers and me (along with the thousands of others whom you have given the better part of your life to)… may the next ten years be your best yet—and may your smile continue to warm the hearts and souls of everyone you meet!

I love you Dad. Happy, happy birthday…

(Thanks to brother Jim for the image scans, from last summer’s momentous family get-together in Pinawa.)

Whatever. (via my writer/philosopher/statistician-friend Filip Spagnoli’s excellent Human Rights blog, here… not the original image source, as he notes)

(source)

Vancouver, Canada

Above are just a few from a great online collection by Oliver Tomas—lots more retro design eye-candy here.

Steinbach, Manitoba

Best wishes for the next 60, Jim!

all your draws are 12″ long
your kid climbs harder than you do
you’ve worn out a set of cams
there is scar tissue on the back of your hands
you quit sport climbing because you can’t do any of the routes
you’ve set up a belay with the only piece of gear left on your rack
you do a first ascent and report the names of both members in your party
you say, “what?” when your leader says, “take!”
you can wear your climbing shoes all day
you don’t know what your body-fat % is
you drop your belay device and you still know how to belay
you remember when climbing gear didn’t have springs
you wake up at 2:00am to go climbing
you spend three hours removing a fixed cam
you think a bong is a type of piton
you enjoy guilt-free eating
you take a forty footer
you still use a gear sling
there is a holster on your harness
you rappel six pitches in the dark
you rappel six pitches in the snow
you drop your water bottle and it takes five seconds to hit
your best memories are from the epics you’ve had
you miss work on monday because you epic’d on sunday
a whole block of chalk fits in your chalk bag
you drive all night so you can climb all day
you’re up so high the trees look like broccoli
you wear socks in your climbing shoes
you think “beta” is a video format
you don’t want beta
you coil your rope.

Good judgment comes from experience,
but experience comes from bad judgement.
—John Fullbright

(sound familiar? thanks to Trango for the quips)

Happy Birthday, Beverly.

Tyuratam, Kazakhstan

Fifty-nine years ago today, on the 12th of April in 1961, the first manned spaceship left our planet from the Baikonur cosmodrome in the Soviet Union with a singular and heroic (if somewhat diminutive) man aboard—Yuri Gagarin, the world’s very first “rocket-man” or cosmonaut…

This was the beginning, the blazing of a trail which has now become a road to the cosmos. One after another, spaceships are leaving earth for the wide expanses of the universe. Today, space pilots live and work for months aboard space stations, they fly to the moon; and Soviet and American spacemen have accomplished a joint experimental flight.

In the near future, perhaps, earthmen will go still further, journeying to other planets and universes. But alongside the names of these future explorers there will always rand the name of the first Soviet cosmonaut, for Yuri Gagarin’s 108-minute flight in space represented not only a triumph of science and engineering, but also a bursting of the “bounds of possibility,” the breaking of a psychological barrier. It was literally a flight into the unknown.

Being a pilot, he had flown many demanding assignments, including flights at night and in blizzard conditions, and at home they would wait anxiously for his familiar step. Even so, he was never very far from the earth. But now… he had gone out into the unknown where no man had ever been before. Valentina, his wife, well understood all that this entailed but had agreed. And this, too, was an act of heroism for the mother of two small children.

From Zvyozdny Gorodok (Star Town), Yuri had flown to the cosmodrome. It was quiet at his home. The children were asleep. The sky, washed by recent rain, was studded with stars. The night seemed to be waiting for something. The wet pines stood motionless, and the houses merged together in the stillness and bluish darkness. In only one of them shone a yellow rectangle of light…

“Am I happy to be setting off on a cosmic flight?” said Yuri Gagarin in an interview before the start. “Of course. In all ages and epochs people have experienced the greatest happiness in embarking upon new voyages of discovery… I want to dedicate this first cosmic flight to the people of communism—the society which the Soviet people are now already entering upon… I say ‘until we meet again’ to you, dear friends, as we always say to each other when setting off on a long journey. How I should like to embrace you all—my friends and those with whom I am not acquainted, strangers and the people nearest and dearest to me!”

(From a booklet published by Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Moscow, 1977—which some might call “propaganda?”)  Care to ramp up the nostalgic context a little more? Have a listen to the Soviet National Anthem, here (best with lyrics, I find…).

People of the world!
Let us safeguard and enhance
this beauty—not destroy it!

Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba

I’ve been helping my girlfriend Evelin Richter assemble and photograph some of her ceramic sculptures recently. She’s just entered a piece entitled (no fixed address) into the “Home”-themed Manitoba Crafts Council 2010 Annual Juried Exhibition. A slab-built stoneware sculpture with iron oxide stain, low-fire glazes, and assemblage elements (brass ring, antique key, jewelry-box base), the piece measures 280mm x 220mm x 380mm.

Ev’s comment: “It’s thought to be a great honour to receive the “key to the city”… the very streets of which so many call “home” today—(no fixed address) speaks to this irony.”

You can see more of Ev’s work and activities here.

Beginning in the Edo period…

Boro is a Japanese word meaning “ tattered rags” and it’s the term commonly used to describe patched and repaired cotton bedding and clothing lovingly used much longer than the normally expected life cycle. “Boro textiles were made in the late 19th and early 20th century by impoverished Japanese people from reused and recycled indigo-dyed cotton rags. What we see in these examples are typical—patched and sewn, piece-by-piece, and handed down from generation-to-generation, where the tradition continued. These textiles are generational storybooks, lovingly repaired and patched with what fabric was available. Never intended to be viewed as a thing of beauty, these textiles today take on qualities of collage, objects of history, and objects with life and soul.”

From the excellent blog Accidental Mysteries. More background on boro textiles (and lots of samples) here. Today’s pre-aged, stone-washed fashion mimicry doesn’t even come close…

Oporto, Portugal

Lots of wit, acerbity, pathos, and considerable illustrative talent on display in this virtual cartoon museum founded in the home of port wine back in 1997… thanks to designer/climber friend Antonio Coelho (Toze) for the link.

(wherever, right about now)

Oh, I do so like clocks… (might I fault growing up in punctilious Basel, Switzerland for this)? So, perhaps predictably, I was delighted when Carol, our wonderful Coordinator (at Circle—the design consultancy I have commuted to almost daily for just over 34 years now) sent me a link to this great online CLOCK resource yesterday.

(Admittedly the viewpoint expressed by means of the streaming data seems somewhat U.S.-centric, but that bias aside, it still rocks!) Find out for yourself, here.

(from the beyond…)

Only days before his untimely death in 2001, Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) gave a riveting talk at the University of California that sparkled with his trademark satiric wit—about, amongst a myriad of foci, blind river dolphins (in China), reclusive lemurs (in Madagascar), and a seemingly doomed parrot (in New Zealand) that is as fearless as it is lovelorn… “an ingenious commentary on his own personal, close encounters with these rare and unusual animals… revealing that evolution can actually be mighty fickle.”

Without a doubt, the best online talk I’ve viewed in months… watch it here (close to 1.5 hours in length, and worth every single minute). Enjoy!

Did you ever read Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut?

“…April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away…” (more here)

Johannesburg, South Africa

The last i-jusi Magazine was published just a little over 2 years ago (i-jusi translates loosely as “juice” in Zulu)—begun in 1994, it was an experimental graphics magazine by longtime designer friend Garth Walker, born along with “the New South Africa” and posing the question: What makes me African?

By dent of being on the i-jusi mailing list, I received notice today of the launch of the first i-jusi Portfolio (which recently made its debut at the Joburg Art Fair). The portfolio consists of 10 lithographs (7 graphic, 3 photographic; each signed by the artist) in an edition of 50. The selected works are by renowned South African artists who have been featured in i-jusi Magazine and include David Goldblatt, Pieter Hugo, Anton Kannemeyer, Mark Kannemeyer, Brandt Botes, Conrad Botes, Garth Walker,  Wilhelm Kruger, Bride Vosloo, and Mikhael Subotzky.

Sales have apparently been brisk… with just over 20 of the 50 editions sold (buyers include San Francisco MOMA, the library of the International Center of Photography in New York, The Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston, and the Minneapolis Art Institute).

More information here and here.

Unknown location* (and unknown original image source)—but I like it!

*Update: on 14 May 2010 I heard from Steven Hamilton, who writes: “I was browsing your blog and noticed a photo from my backyard! Just thought I’d let you know the photo of the face on the wall with the hanging ivy hair is in Columbus, OH, in Pearl Alley between Paterson and Oakland Ave., just North of Ohio State University… I pass it every day on my way to class.”

Thanks, Steven!

Toronto, Canada

Two years ago, I had posted about an El Lissitzky poster I’ve had hanging in my home for the past few decades—one of several dozen given to me by the curator of the magnificent Poster Collection at the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Applied Arts) in Zürich when I visited there in 1986—I’d been surprised to stumble across the original photo-montage prep the famous Russian Constructivist had used in preparing the dramatic poster.

A week ago, I was delighted to hear from Adell Shneer, a Toronto-based food stylist and now Senior Food Specialist at Canadian Living magazine who had come across my earlier post in a quest for more information about twenty or so large-sized posters she had re-discovered (rolled up in a tube and forgotten in the basement of her home). Adell studied graphic design at York University in the early 1980s and then at the London College of Printing (a diploma in Advanced Typographic Design), and in an experience similar to my own, had been given a variety of posters by the congenial old curator of the Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich’s poster collection when she visited there. It was a reunion with former design classmates last week that spurred Adell to hunt for the posters she still had somewhere in her basement…

Adell is interested in establishing a value for these posters (they’re in excellent condition), though she’s not sure she actually wants to part with them—she has also considered donating them to a museum. I’m curious as well, as I still have six of these same posters (shown above) in my collection. I put Adell in touch with friend Rene Wanner (who offers comprehensive advice and information about poster collecting on his exhaustive website here), and offered to post some thumbnail images on this blog [√]. I invite anyone who’s interested in these posters to contact me—I’ll gladly pass your query or information on to Adell.

Please forgive the poor quality of the images shown above—Adell photographed the oversize posters with a point-and-shoot digital camera while standing on a chair and sent them to me for informational purposes… ergo the image foreshortening, inaccurate edge trim, distorted aspect ratio, variable focus, and dodgy colour fidelity—the original DIN A0 posters are truly spectacular (each is 841mm x 1189mm, or 33.1″ x 46.8″).

Amsterdam, the Netherlands

How timely, methinks… an architectural hen-house for Easter. Inspiring, and quite lovely… by Frederik Roijé.

(thanks Kevin)

(intention seems clear—image source unknown)