Robert Christgau
Some found materials and reading collected while spending the weekend pondering the mind-numbing decline of Robert Christgau, Dean of American Rock Critics1, who placed American Saturday Night by Brad Paisley atop his 2009 ballot for the Pazz and Jop poll. While I’ve little remaining appetite for further infographics, there’s likely an intrepid soul willing to take on the charting of Christgau’s decline in a format as easily-consumed as Paisley’s quasi-country-with-a-slice-of-the-21st-century pop. Until that day when The Village Voice takes a cue from Etsy and opens up its API, the Dean himself has made the data available. While you and I wait patiently for the designs to emerge, we’ll entertain ourselves with this infographic, depicting the dissection of the packaging containing American Idol Barbie.
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Make:Electronics
While waiting patiently for the elder statesmen of rock journalism to fade from view, bent on spending eternity worshiping at the altar of Roland Barthes, we can take comfort in the ever-more grounded teachings of the good people of Make, who bring us not one, but two gifts of joy. The first comes in the form of a set of links designed to delight those interested in the mechanics of flight, using the paper airplane as a means of instruction. My best wishes to those seeking to break the all-time distance record for paper flight, an astounding 207′4″2.
Tom Igoe chimes in with a thoughtful review of Make: Electronics, published late last year and authored by Charles Platt. Igoe makes a particularly impassioned case for the tome, distancing it rather from the Time Life books on my father’s shelves with this gem:
Exercises like licking a 9V battery, or measuring the resistance of your tongue seem scary at first, but are safer than they seem, and valuable learning exercises.
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Spoon: Transference
Personal Twitter meme of the weekend: The quality of Transference, the new album from Spoon. Initial survey results: mediocre receptions from folks like Andrew Jasperson and Gareth Kay, and a positive spin from Mr. Brian Clark, who writes:
The new Spoon wanders within dangerous proximity to sucking and then emerges proudly, raggedly victorious. Excellent.
After purchasing the album this afternoon, I’m inclined to the takes of the former, but caught enough glimpses of Kill the Moonlight-era brilliance to conclude that the record will, given appropriate opportunity via a roadtrip or torrid love affair3, wear well.
As a side note, who knew that labels were making available albums for purchase in FLAC format? I did not. Kudos to you, Merge. You are forgiven your dalliance with Seaweed.
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Typeface van Doesberg
The fine folks at Pentagram Design are far more refined in their tastes than I, which explains, perhaps, why their ‘What Type are You‘ application has returned for me the van Doesburg face. By Pentagram’s logic, I am ‘emotional’, ‘assertive’, ‘progressive’ and ‘disciplined’ – an assessment which might well garner some debate among those in the know. On the other hand, I’m apparently a perfect typographic match for Australian installation artist Lauren Brown, she of the She Sees Red weblog4.
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A Gage/Betterton still
Base has posted the second of a two-part interview with Brooklyn-based photography duo Jenny Gage and Tom Betterton. The work, save for the requisite Gwynneth Paltrow/Coldplayman5 shot, is lovely, and I particularly enjoyed this interchange:
B: How do you define an “ideal job”?TB/JG: Being lucky enough to work on a job where, because of a million separate reasons, all things align in such a way that you are able to make beautiful pictures that you will always be proud of.
It’s rare, I think, for artists to so readily acknowledge the role of serendipity. Last week, I heard a remarkably similar sentiment spring forth from a scientist working in the field of proteomics. Perhaps kismet is on the upswing.
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- Truly a confounding title, no? [↩]
- this video, purporting to showcase a similar flight, is likely the most boring thing I’ve found on the interweb in some time [↩]
- don’t bet on the latter [↩]
- and not altogether bad company, I think [↩]
- Yes, I know his name is Chris Martin, but it’s a great deal of fun to point to the television screen and blurt out ‘there goes Coldplayman’ [↩]
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