better matters

My favorites from the past years include the jelly-filled donuts from The Departed, rows of apple juice (pee) in jars for The Aviator in 2005, pointy-ended baguettes for Michael Clayton in 2008, and the boy covered in chocolate pudding (poop) in 2009. I realize I have two types of bodily fluids represented here in my very short list of favorites but I guess that stuff will just always be funny.

2010, here we come! A little slow on the uptake, but momentum is gaining for this weekend!

From Making Stuff and Doing Things.

This is a new section of my blog. It features compelling insight about design that you can ONLY get from someone going to a prestigious design school with ‘design’ in its name.

First, we have the Minnesota Twins’ Target Field Inaugural Season logo. Focus on the word ‘inaugural’ then focus on my insight.

I was trying to find a specific graphic from the inauguration, but it turned out to be too much work. Turns out you just have to go to barackobama.com and there is the Gotham font, navy blue, and white text in all caps. Case closed, Target Field! I’m not being disparaging, Target Field, because it’s a really nice logo. Good job. But you need to tone down the use of that logo next to the blockier, less attractive Bank Gothic. K!

Next:

I’m not saying that the new Caribou logo looks like the Cars movie logo, but I am saying that the new Caribou logo looks like a hood ornament on a shiny convertible making its way down the Pacific Coast Highway. Is this bad? Yes, because if you have ever been to a Caribou Coffee, you will know that it’s schtick is the whole North Woods Lodge homey, fireplace-y vibe. Note to self: NEVER try to make a caribou out of a coffee bean and never use Futura Bold for the logo of a North Woods lodge.

This is what a Kristina Panic Attack looks like.

It’s 5 pm on a Sunday. You’re at Target in Edina to buy copious amounts of cat food, food for dinner, some shampoo, and some extraneous items of clothing you decide to buy because you feel bad for yourself. You walk in, and suddenly, you see this Edina Target like you are 7 years old and visiting your grandparents for Christmas. Everybody in Edina Target is so Scandinavian, so Minnesotan, and you can’t believe you’ve been living here, on and off, but mostly on, for the past 6 years. As you drive home, you can’t believe that you have the ability to drive, and furthermore, that you own this car; this car is yours. What should you do with it? Why do you have so much responsibility? Why do you think to yourself, better salt those steps, you don’t want anybody slipping. Why are you home alone, making decisions for yourself? Where is your mother?

Most importantly, why are you cutting out 5mm letters and using two x-acto knives to apply them to a piece of paper, back hunched over like a watchmaker, fingers crippled like a jeweler?

These donkey woodcuts by John Welles Bartlett (who I almost typed as John Wilkes Booth) are pretty awesome. Pair them with Where Donkeys Deliver, an article for Smithsonian written by Susan Orleans. Toss with a taste for adventure, a yearning for walking, and a soft spot in your heart for hard-working, flea-bitten creatures, and enjoy.

I have already deleted two entries in which I am complaining about things. It is never an attractive thing to complain without valid and worthwhile critique and insight.

No one grumbles among the oyster clans,
And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.
Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want
Heaven to be, and God to come, again.
There is no end to our grumbling; we want
Comfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven.
But the heron standing on one leg in the bog
Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content.

Robert Bly, Wanting Sumptuous Heavens

The German pair and their clown outfits: What really bugs me is the fact that they completely misinterpreted Steven Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” which is really about a doomed relationship. Not about clowns. Not even about clowns in a doomed relationship.

Stephane Lambiel: Really. He beat Johnny Weir in the free skate. His whole program was like watching a balloon deflate and then get run over by a car. Love him, but he was horrible. I think it might have to do with his musical arrangement. I didn’t watch the program live, but I went online to watch it because I knew he skated to La Traviata. The prologue was business as usual, but as he got to the bits where vocals needed to be cut, it suddenly turned into the Coney Island Carousel version of La Traviata. No good.

Men’s: Plushenko’s comments. Yeeeeah. Boring controversy.

Ice Dancing: Why are people paying attention to it all of a sudden? Why are people just now realizing that their costumes are ridiculous? And that other countries are not as all-consumingly politically correct as the States? Why do people think they are clever by using this ingratiating comparison: “It’s like Dancing with the Stars…ON ICE!” People.

Ice Dancing 2: I am sitting at home after class, reading Peter Carruthers’ live-blogging of the ice dancing free skate. (I don’t know.) Meryl (whose mother’s name is Sheryl) Davis & Charlie White are skating and he mentions: “Beautiful opening — they’re one minute in. The voice of Michael Crawford coming in right now.” I just watched their free skate from the Nationals. Boy, that is not Michael Crawford.

Ice Dancing 3: As the years have passed since I quit skating, I find myself appreciating very different things about skating than I used to. Ice dancing was always the boring thing to watch because they didn’t do any jumps. But somewhere in the past several yeras, I’ve realized that jumps were the easiest things to do and good footwork was the hardest thing to do. We all spent 85% of our practices on doing jumps over and over again. As I watch my programs back 10 years later, I am struck by the fact that a) I wasn’t huge and fat at 12 like I thought I was and b) I wish I had spent more time on my spins and footwork. I wish I’d really understood the beauty of skating into the ice, not on top of it.

There are many things to regret in a life. I don’t regret much, I’m happy to say, but I do regret the way I just stopped going to the ice rink because everything was too hard, I was too tired, too jaded, too sad about being those things. Oh, if you only knew, 14-year-old Kristina. If only you could see yourself now, heart moved by the sound a blade makes against the ice, wishing you had used that La Boheme short program and that Sunset Blvd long program, and you had just tried a little harder, gotten out of your head, and tried that double axel over and over again until it came to you like the rest of them. You thought you felt old then.

http://notthewinterofourdiscontent.tumblr.com

From bitching (to Paul, who suggested I tell tumblr, not him) –> blog

Ellsworth Kelly is heading to the place in my heart that is reserved for those who create beauty (be it with words or images) that I can’t explain. I’ve been working on some work stuffs for the new exhibition at the Walker, and whenever I flip through a little booklet to look for information I need, I stop at the page that has this image of Ellsworth Kelly’s self-submitted collage to the New York Times’ Herbert Muschamp. It makes my heart skip a beat; it fills it full with water.

Muschamp, explaining it well, in this article from 2003:

To cope with the World Trade Center catastrophe, many New Yorkers have had to construct a kind of remoteness between themselves and 9/11. For some of us, architecture has been an effective construction technique. To borrow Mr. Kelly’s term, the design process has offered a series of distractions, both from the horror of the event and from the spiritual imperatives it has imposed on both the city and the nation.

Economic forces, political maneuverings, the power plays of civic and professional organizations, not to mention the inspired ideas produced by many artists, architects, planners and designers: all this has provided an endless stream of diversion from the simple, tragic fact of human carnage that took place in our midst. In this sense, complexity has helped to sustain sanity even as it has threatened to undermine it.

…

Yet it is true that minimalism has held a particular appeal to Americans. It enables us to withdraw from the midst of complexity without denying the manifold reality of contemporary life.

Mr. Kelly’s collage holds this appeal for me, as I suspect it will for many who once hoped that a dignified way could be found to express the unity of death and regeneration. The Manhattan cityscape has long been a standard visual metaphor for differentiation, for the breakup of unity that defines and haunts the modern world. Mr. Kelly has shifted the architectural jumble to a new metaphoric plane. His trapezoid has turned the disjointed cityscape into a symbol of the complex emotional and ideological forces that have been raging around ground zero.

I ran into this video today of The Morning Benders performing a new song with a bunch of their Bay Area music friends. I have been a casual fan for a while, but oh boy, are they adorable little Berkeley-ites. Also, they all have worked at Disneyland. What could be better?

“Julian ran Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride,” said Chu, “Joe worked Pirates of the Caribbean. I was in the yogurt shop that was the only place where you could buy pineapple yogurt.” Bassist Tim Or is a more recent addition, though they claim Tim was a Disneyland worker as well. “He was maintenance,” said Chu with a laugh.

P.S. The yogurt shop he is referring to is the stand outside The Enchanted Tiki Room, of course. That pineapple whip stuff is delicious.