The blog has moved.
I also re-did my website! It’s a good thing they’re finished, since I just printed a bunch of cards with the new address. See you over there. Good bye, bettermatters.net. Kisses.
Latest Entries
Almost broke this.
I almost broke this blog. I’m in the process of creating a new blog over at my new Official Graphic Designer page, but I jumped the gun and almost destroyed everything.
Anyway, I’m moving over fairly soon (hopefully in the next couple days). You will be able to find me and my blog over at kristinafong.com. Exciting, I know.
I will miss this place. It’s been a while. Don’t you worry, the blog will still be entitled ‘The Better Matters Blog.’
Alone and at work
Emotions at work are entirely isolating. You can sit there despairing, or worse, weeping, and people are three feet away from you and say nothing! Or you are hiding under headphones when suddenly you feel your heart spasm in love and wonder. In fact, your entire heart can break into a deep, yawning canyon and flocks of chattering birds will dip low and dip long as they migrate to the rest of your chest where it gets suddenly too hot and too cold at the same time.
You stand alone. It’s a secret that you are feeling these things and they are yours to keep as you open that spreadsheet back up, as you stare at those columns too long, those numbers meaning nothing for a few more minutes.
I Had Been a Polar Explorer
I had been a polar explorer in my youth
and spent countless days and nights freezing
in one blank place and then another. Eventually,
I quit my travels and stayed at home,
and there grew within me a sudden excess of desire,
as if a brilliant stream of light of the sort one sees
within a diamond were passing through me.
I filled page after page with visions of what I had witnessed—
groaning seas of pack ice, giant glaciers, and the windswept white
of icebergs. Then, with nothing more to say, I stopped
and turned my sights on what was near. Almost at once,
a man wearing a dark coat and broad-brimmed hat
appeared under the trees in front of my house.
The way he stared straight ahead and stood,
not shifting his weight, letting his arms hang down
at his side, made me think that I knew him.
But when I raised my hand to say hello,
he took a step back, turned away, and started to fade
as longing fades until nothing is left of it.
“I Had Been a Polar Explorer” by Mark Strand
What do you do when you have no ideas? That’s where I’m at and I’ve been tossing and turning at night trying to conjure something from my mind. How can I have no ideas? I have an open road in front of me and a month and a half to travel it–and nothing. Last night I took out my bike and tried to pedal out those demons around the lake, sure that it would tell me something. It did not. The man wearing a dark coat and a broad-brimmed hat has been standing in front of my house, as well.
The Letter ‘I’
I came to post the bottom image, the photo of a spot in an atlas that says ‘Island (Unconfirmed)’. It’s from a set of photos by Judith Schalansky, author of the magical Atlas of Remote Islands. As I opened the folder to upload the image, I noticed how all the other images around it whose file names also began with ‘i’ all held the same power.
icebergs
if_ruscha
iguazu4
island_unconfirmed
Try Harder
A slight fluttering of the heart makes up for so many letdowns.
(Image: Jason Lazarus, Otis Redding Motivational Poster Installation)
Stick with Duluth/it needs you
Last month, a group of us went up to a cabin just outside Duluth. We celebrated a graduation and some ends of semesters. The weather was nice enough to spend a good amount of the day outside. It felt like a day you’re supposed to have more of the time.
Yeah, you know what I mean.
Cults - You Know What I Mean by cultscultscults
Wait until you get to 0:47. And then 2:08.
Good things on the internet/Several digressions
I am reading a wonderful book called The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean and this morning in the waiting room of Steve’s Tires & Autos, I read this devastating line:
“The polar zones are done.”
And you know, this expert is probably right. I thought ahead to a world with no Arctic Circle and no Antarctica and I really don’t want to live in that world. I thought of the thousands and thousands of penguins on South Georgia Island–gone. I thought how even if I blow through all the money I’ve ever made, I really need to get there. But right now I’m wondering if maybe bringing giant ships and people there isn’t part of the problem? I don’t know what’s good and what’s bad. Good: the natural world. Bad: destroying the natural world. That’s about it. Right after I got back from the Galapagos, I looked into becoming a volunteer on the islands and then maybe trying to figure out how to start over and become a naturalist or a marine biologist or any sort of biologist that could help save these places.
I’m afraid I’ve digressed again (in writing and mind) and I can’t get back to the post where I was going to write about really pretty logos (Centre Pompidou, because it looks like a Sol LeWitt, duh) because compared to South Georgia Island, they are nothing. I’ve actually written this post from the middle down, then gone up to the introduction, and then skipped around in there, so this is actually the last sentence I write.
The photo above is by National Geographic polar photographer extraordinaire: Paul Nicklen. I’m a little emotional already today, but tell me your heart doesn’t skip a beat when you look at this set.
Via design work life, the illustration of Marc Martin whose work, lo and behold, I have admired before, in the form of Harvest Magazine. It’s a beautiful publication, and when I saw Martin’s designs for the Emerging Writers’ Festival, I immediately wished I had done it. The all-over patterns are very me-ish, if I was 2000x more talented. These animal illustrations are from his book, The Curious Explorers Illustrated Pocket Companion to Exotic Animals. It was difficult to pick one set of animals for this spread, but this walrus was extra charming. (Some of my other favorite animals included: kangaroo, tasmanian devil, Galapagos tortoise, narwhal.)
It’s become such a, oh let’s say it, a cliché to oooh and aaah about “vintage” things, at least when you’re absorbed in a little subculture known as graphic design. But you know there’s a reason we’re all there, and the reason is that for much of our life, we have been attracted to things like the typography used in museum displays. This photo comes from Courtney at design work life as well (just go over there) and is part of a nice set of richly saturated images from the Museum of Natural History in New York. Remember when your heart used to beat faster when you saw signage and things in life like this and you couldn’t quite understand it? You didn’t know why. There wasn’t a name for it. You didn’t know you could go to school to study it and pick it apart and berate yourself when the beauty you dreamed and flailed your arms about wouldn’t come to fruition under the guidance of your sloppy hands.
Groovy groovy dance dance.
It’s become commonplace to address places and things in the second person–a bit of vernacular born out of social media. Often people begin their sentiments with a ‘Dear Place/Thing’. It’s used for two fairly specific purposes: either for a love letter or a complaint letter.
Example:
Dear Minneapolis, on weekends like this you UNDO me. Your lakes, your easy streets to bike on, your arts, your music! How is it that you can outdo yourself two nights in a row? Oh, YOU.
Example:
Dear eBook Readers, why do you exist? Why do you ruin the beauty of a blank page? Why do you ruin the power of the shape of text, the size and placement of it? Why do you ruin everything good in the world?
And so on and so forth. It’s a little annoying. I’ll try not to do it ever again. This was merely a detour to what I came here to say and that is that I saw two really fantastic music shows this weekend. I don’t write about live shows that often–I certainly am not very arcticulate when it comes to writing about music, but let me try, because I have been inspired.
Last night I saw Tunng at the Walker. Only slightly familiar with their music (from a 2006 album I haven’t listened to in ages), their music is much more interesting now that I’ve seen them live. It rarely works in that order with most bands–but that’s how you separate the men from the boys. My favorite part about Tunng is how often they did Dewey’s boopy dance (which is also my default dance):
Tonight I saw Buke and Gass play with tUnE-yArDs (the band so awesome I forgive sticky caps) at The Cedar. Check, check, check! How can you lose? I did not lose.
Buke and Gass build up their sound with by each playing two custom instruments/noise-makers at a time, while tUnE-yArDs does it with masterful looping of drums and voice, accompanied by a guitar and two saxophones for back-up. Tunng did it with a percussionist who used all four limbs to activates wchimes, seashells, and maracas and a musician who sat in the back with a keyboard and made all sort of whirring electronic noises and loops.