Category Archives: Personal

Three Things I’m Late On

Round-up time. If only each day was a few hours longer than twenty-four, I wouldn’t be so behind in posting these three items. If only!

First, I was lucky enough to be sitting about fifteen rows back from the third base line at Yankee Stadium on Saturday afternoon when Alex Rodriguez hit that game-winning grand slam against the Baltimore Orioles — in the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs and two strikes. I acknowledge that even an event as unique as that is flirting the edge of what readers of this weblog are generally interested in, but I just wanted to say it was one of the coolest, most exhilarating things I’ve ever seen.

As it happened, my Saturday turned out to be a great day for seats at live events. Later that evening my girlfriend and I had front-row seats to see “Jack Goes Boating,” a two-act production from Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz’s LAByrith Theater Company — both actors appeared in it as well. It’s currently in its original run right now at The Public Theater in downtown Manhattan. Even if it’s not a groundbreaking entertainment, John Ortiz’s confident, commanding and highly watchable performance reaffirmed my contention that he’s currently the best kept secret going in the world of acting.

Finally, I’m very, very late to the party on this one: Wow, have you seen “The Shield”? I’d completely missed this FX Network original series until now, but it’s unbelievably good. Oh, and while we’re talking television, one more thing… Sci-Fi Network’s Battlestar Galactica is the most overrated television show ever.

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Mr. France-y Pants

If you can believe it, I disappeared over the past few days to Paris, France. Yes, that Paris, France: land of unconscionably good baked goods, storybook architecture and head-shakingly beautiful women. Since my father now lives there, I’ll be visiting fairly often (even if my last trip there was nearly a year ago), which poses a semi-interesting question for blogging purposes: should I even bother posting about a trip to a romantic locale when those trips are common-place enough to be not particularly romantic? It wouldn’t seem to make for particularly good reading if I did, which is part of the reason I didn’t even bother to leave a ‘Gone to France’ post last Thursday afternoon, when I flew out.

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Five Years

Five years now since the attacks of September 11th, 2001, and, for me, the distance from the event has left me even more at a loss for what to say than before. Time hasn’t clarified much of it at all, good or bad, right or left, right or wrong, at least not much more than what I knew in the days after those planes hit those towers. Whatever the final judgment of history might be on the way the twenty-first century opened for us, it’s my suspicion that we’re not close to knowing it yet. In certain spells — by myself, in crowds, walking around downtown — I feel like we’re almost further from knowing how future generations will regard us — any of us — than we were four years and three hundred, sixty-four days ago.

So I hadn’t planned on writing anything here on this anniversary. But, after walking around lower Manhattan yesterday evening with my dog and feeling that unavoidable, lingering sense of loss, my brain unexpectedly started turning over the lyrics for David Bowie’s “Five Years.” I’ve been listening to this song forever, it seems, and I’ve never known why Bowie wrote it in the first place, what the story behind it was. None of it seems to matter for today, though, because on this date it seems appropriate in a frightening, open-ended way.

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You Can Go Home Again

AIGA BaltimoreBeing from Maryland and all — I grew up in Gaithersburg — I’ve got a soft spot for Baltimore, for its cozy, rough and tumble neighborhoods, for that special ‘small town trapped in a big town’s body’ feel that it’s got, for the tarnished glory of the O’s. So it’s especially flattering for me to have been invited by AIGA Baltimore to speak for them in just a few short weeks. On Thu 21 Sep 2006, I’ll be appearing at Villa Julie College and giving a talk about work, play, NYTimes.com, and a little bit of my grand, unifying theory on design in the twenty-first century.

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Before the Blackout

After my interlude at Comic-Con International in San Diego, I spent the rest of my week-plus vacation visiting my family in Irvine, California. It was a blast; I sat by the pool, took my nine year-old nephew to a magic shop, and watched a ton of movies. I’ve been back home since late Sunday night, but I’m really freakin’ swamped here, not just with work, but also with all manner of extracurricular and personal activities.

Which explains the lack of blog posts here at Subtraction.com (and this mea culpa post, the likes of which I normally avoid), at least in part. The other part is this damnable heat that dogged me in California and that’s dogging me again here in New York City. Temperatures have routinely been in the upper nineties, with the heat index breaking 105 F. Lovely. Makes it uncomfortable to do much of anything.

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Calling All Famous People

If you haven’t yet seen it, the reigning lion of design criticism blogs, Design Observer, recently launched a new visual make-over. At long last, the tiny white type on dark gray background of their old look and feel has been cast aside, and now it’s finally possible to read the text without incurring lasting corneal damage.

It’s not a revolutionary design, but it’s exactly what it needs to be. The new look is austere, tasteful and orderly, and I like it quite a bit even if I do wish the text was larger still (I’m somewhat prematurely succumbing to that inevitable decline in the power of the eye to make out teeny tiny designer typesetting). I’m not going to get into a big review of it, though — for that, you can turn to the excellent roundtable discussion on this subject over at Speak Up.

Mainly, I point it out because I want to piggyback on a great piece that Michael Bierut published on the site a few days ago about the recent, unfortunate passing of photography great Arnold Newman.

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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About My Day but Were Afraid to Ask

An Event ApartMy speaking session on day one of An Event Apart New York City is called “Dawn ’til Dusk with a Design Director.” The idea is to compress one of my typical work days into a breezy little talk, with the hope that eighteen waking hours of activity will make for at least fifty-five minutes of entertainment. Heaven help me if it doesn’t.

I’ll be chronicling everything design related that happens to me, starting more or less from the moment I wake up, through my day at the office, and into the evening, as I slave in front of my computer in service to this blog and other extracurricular projects. Along the way, and with some humility, I hope to convey at least a few interesting lessons on how good design is created and managed, the various ways design informs those activities not explicitly design related, and maybe even how to have a life outside of design.

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Four for Today

It’s fun to get tapped to participate in a blog meme like the one I’m about to lay on all a’y’all, but it’s distressing, too, especially when my new job leaves hardly any time for that blogging stuff I used to do more freely before. I blame Jason Santa Maria. Not for the new job, but for passing on the meme. And for other stuff, too, but I won’t go into it. For now, some lists of four…

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Site for a Dog

One of the fruits of my long two weeks of self-directed labor is done: there’s a brand new MisterPresident.org up and running now, where you can see the ten most recent pictures of my dog as posted to Flickr. Surely, it’s the least productive of all the productive hours I’ve spent at my desk since the start of the year, but it’s cute, at least. Plus, you can subscribe to the RSS feed, which I know you didn’t know that you ever needed to do, but here it is at last. Yes, I know, I’ve become a crazy dog person, but at least I didn’t add a Mister President blog. Yet.

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Making Work for Idle Hands

Though I left Behavior at the end of December, I won’t start my new position at The New York Times until next Tuesday, 17 January. This has left me with roughly two weeks off, the first such period I’ve had to myself — with no getaways to exotic locales, no long trips to see family, and no short excursions to New Jersey to see Joy’s family — in a long time. One might have expected me to spend this two weeks watching movies, meeting for social lunches and/or drinking nightly, but I can’t imagine feeling like I have less time for those sorts of distractions.

Rather, I made a long list of Things to Do, goals large and small that have been nagging at me for attention for ages: sell some old junk on Ebay, buy new shelves, re-organize my file cabinet, buy that long-delayed wedding gift for a friend who got married last summer, and tie up a few loose ends remaining from my commitments at Behavior. Every morning I go over the list again, then spend my day putting check-marks next to as many items as I can; unfortunately, I’ll inevitably add as many new tasks as I finish. The net result is that I feel busier, and in some ways more productive, than ever. I don’t know how I ever found time for a real job.

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