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Enough Is Not Enough

iPodMy iPod has instilled in me a disturbing insatiability for more music, more often. Where once I was satisfied with a new CD or two each month, I now find myself on an endless trawl for MP3s to add to my hard disk. It’s a sickness; I have more music now than I could possibly have time to enjoy — my iTunes library alone is 8.5 GB, and I have stacks of Squat CDs that haven’t been ripped yet, plus all my old CDs from my pre-MP3 days — and yet it never seems enough.

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The Keymaster

BeachI have some tips for those beachgoers entrusted with the keys to their rental car. First, don’t forget to take the keys out of the pocket of your swim trunks when you go swimming in the ocean. If you do that and, by some minor miracle, the keys haven’t been extracted from your pocket and swept up in the ocean foam, you should immediately take the keys back to a safe place, along with your wallet, house keys, sunglasses, lucky rabbit’s foot, Palm OS device and other valuables.

Do not think to yourself, “There’s a lot of wet sand all over these keys, perhaps I should wash it off quickly in the water before taking it back to my beach towel,“ because the tumult of some crashing wave may inadvertently knock the keyring out of your hand, swallowing the keys up in the briny depths of the shore, causing expletives to drop out of your incredulous, gaping jaw.

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Head in the Clouds

For the Fourth of July, I’m planning to take it easy, recuperate from my trip to Montréal, and grill myself a nice fat steak. This may mean that I don’t get to post to this site too much over the three-day holiday, so as a minor consolation, I’ve posted a new masthead image of some nice, fluffy clouds. Here’s a tip for budding design critics: any time you see a designer use clouds, hands or close-ups of an eye in any significant way, it’s a pretty good sign that he or she is out of ideas and is coasting on hackneted metaphorical shorthand. So maybe when I’m back in the full groove of things, I’ll replace it with something more meaningful. Also on my list is creating a little gallery of all these masthead images; coming soon.

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The Math of Charlie’s Angels

Charlie's Angels Full ThrottleThe problem with a movie like “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” is that it will clearly fail the critical metric applied to films like “The Pianist,” or even “The Matrix Reloaded.” This sequel is too loud, ridiculous and calculated, and yet it’s also a hell of a lot of fun. I’ve been thinking about this problem lately, about how film criticism always needs to be parsed, and how the difficulty in parsing a film review can obscure the value that an average moviegoer — someone like, say, me — might get out of watching three beautiful women shake their moneymakers and kick some ass.

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Food for Thought

DinnerSomeone I was talking to over the weekend was saying that he felt that design is currently “over-supplied,” meaning, I guess, that in this market there is an overabundance of available design services, talent and studios. I started thinking about what that meant, really, and I have a feeling that a lot of thinking and postulation about the design business relies too heavily on the idea that design is basically the same as a service business — like say McKinsey — or a product business — like say Nike.

But I’ve started thinking — and this theory is still less than a week old, and I have yet to properly flesh it out — that design is most like the restaurant industry, which is a multibillion dollar business, and which allows for the co-existence of multiple levels of success, from mass-market chains to speciality boutiques. The more I think about it, the more I like this model, because the restaurant business is highly varied, is not a zero sum game, and everybody needs to eat, just like everybody needs design.

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R.I.P. C&G

Casady & GreeneI have a soft spot for utility software — especially for the Macintosh — because the authors, engineers and publishers who work in this niche almost always seem to be real fans of the computing experience. The very nature of utility software — those little add-ons and enhancements that subtly or significantly alter the behavior of the operating system — is one of tweaking, of altering the way of things in a particular, sometimes obscure way so that the universe seems just a tad bit more in order… and it’s usually the most devoted computer geeks who will tweak.

Utilities make computing more efficient and personal, and especially with those programs written for the Macintosh, they make things more fun. Which is why I’m so sad to see longtime Mac utility publisher Casady & Greene shutter its operations.

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The Eyes Have It

What little I know of the Off-Broadway production “Staring out the Window” is derived entirely from my own experience with it this very evening: my girlfriend reminded me that I had agreed to go see this double-feature theatrical event with her and some friends; I showed up at the Red Room, a little-known theater stowed away one flight above the semi-famous KGB in the East Village; I watched, first, a production of Don Nigro’s “Specter” and, immediately afterwards, Jhon Doria’s “Eye Can’t See You,” both one-act plays united by the fact that their principal players spend much of their time on stage staring straight ahead. I really, really enjoyed “Specter,” a funny and unexpectedly frightening conversation between two strangers in a car. Apparently, I’m in good company: a Google search reveals that it’s been produced many times by small theaters around the country. It was a fun night; I need to get out and see more theater.

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French Canadians Are People Too

I approached Montréal with skepticism; here was a population of Caucasian North Americans who spoke English but preferred French, and what’s more, the Queen of England’s face was all over their money. The very proposition of such a city seemed contradictory, at best, and schizophrenic, at worst. But as soon as the temperate air of a Montréal summer evening hit me, I was in a more open mood for having escaped the New York swelter, at least. It’s a pleasant, clean city, exceedingly moderate in everything I could see, from architecture to debauchery, though of course I only saw downtown. I had a good time, I’d go back and take in some more sights, listen to some more Canadian French, spend some more American dollars. But right now I am exhausted.

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Week in Review

Later this afternoon, I’m leaving for a 3-day trip to Montréal on the occasion of a good friend’s bachelor party. The number of things I know about Montréal are few: it’s clean, everyone speaks French, they have a famous jazz festival which I fear that I will be forced to attend, and it’s generally cooler than New York — at least it had better be, because it’s sweltering here. I imagine my experience will be somewhat like the experience I had in Syndey: pristine, elegant and pleasant, yet small and mediocre. I’m such a snob! Anyway, I’m looking forward to it, and keeping an open mind.

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The Page I Made… Except for the Tabs

Amazon.com It’s almost a sure thing that I will never buy anything from Amazon.com’s ‘Apparel & Accessories,’ ‘Magazine Subscriptions,’ ‘Home & Garden,’ or even ‘Camera & Photo’ stores, and yet, in random order, they show up repeatedly in the navigation each time I return to the site. It’s a wonder to me that Amazon, perhaps the most highly personalized experience on the Web (as in architecturally responsive to user profiles), doesn’t allow me to configure the tabs that appear at the top of my screen.

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