Art at the airport

Thursday, May 2, 2019

TSA madness aside, Atlanta might be my favorite airport in the country right now because of all the wonderful public art they have on display throughout the terminals.

Yesterday, I got off a flight and saw one of Brian Dettmer’s book autopsies. (Part of very cool “the book as art” exhibit in Terminal E.) This morning I saw their permanent display of Zimbabwean stone carvings in Terminal T. (Picture above.)

A few years ago as I was walking between Terminal A and B, a pilot stopped to show me the “Flight Paths” exhibit.

“A piece of art located in a prominent spot in the airport will be seen by as many people in a week as visit MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art) over the course of a year.”

Imagine if airports across the country filled their walls with art, played Eno’s ambient music over the speakers, and tuned all their horrible airport TVs to Turner Classic Movies…

Diner diary

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

One of my favorite things ever is to sit in a diner with a cup of coffee and a notebook and record whatever comes into my head. (See my posts “The magic of diner booths” and “Community and creativity in mundane retail spaces.”)

Diners are especially comforting to me on the road. You spend so much time in motion, it’s nice to sit still and let the world move around you. To catch your breath and catch up with yourself.

The food doesn’t hurt, either. (This is Pam’s Farm House, outside of Raleigh, NC.)

Want quick knowledge? Visit the children’s section

Monday, April 29, 2019

Here’s a unposed stack of books I found on our coffee table over the weekend. (When we have obsessions around here, we give in to them, completely, and feed them many, many books.)

I often think about how the kids’ books do a better job of informing and entertaining on various subjects, so I got a kick out of this bit from Jeopardy champion James Holzhauer, who admits he was “never a diligent student”:

I have a strategy of reading children’s books to gain knowledge. I’ve found that in an adult reference book, if it’s not a subject I’m interested in, I just can’t get into it.

I was thinking, what is the place in the library I can go to to get books tailored to make things interesting for uninterested readers? Boom. The children’s section.

Another Jeopardy connection: the Ken Jennings books illustrated by Mike Lowery are a big hit with our nonfiction-loving six-year-old.

(via @mattthomas)

Phones smash, notebooks bend

Sunday, April 28, 2019

Robert Macfarlane shares the notebooks he accumulated while working on Underland, and why he sticks with paper:

People sometimes ask me why I don’t use a phone to take notes when I’m ‘out’ in the field. The answer is that phones smash, while notebooks bend. I also like the way that notebooks record where they’ve been not just in terms of what’s written in them, but also in terms of the wear they bear as objects.

In a wonderful thread on Twitter, Alastair Humphreys shared one of his, soggy from the field:

Here’s one of my own notebooks, which got soaked while encountering the wilds of my washing machine:

And elsewhere on Twitter, user @bernoid shared their nature journal to much fanfare. (They take a hybrid digital/analog approach: Photos out in the field, drawings later in the notebook.)

https://twitter.com/bernoid/status/1121778177771220997

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Paper is a woonderful technology.

Papa’s home (for now)

Saturday, April 27, 2019

We’re half way through this tour. When I agreed to do 25 cities, neither my wife or I quite anticipated the toll it would take. Last time I did a 20-city tour for the journal, Owen was 3 and Jules was just six months old. Rough, but doable. This time, Owen is 6 and Jules is 4, and it’s just a whole different level of hard on every one of us.

This weekend we’re trying to squeeze all the time together in that we can. Owen asked me to get out my old Tascam Portastudio and teach him how to record on tape. I told him I wanted an engineering credit for my expertise, and he made me this:

Jules is just happy to have his crew back together, and spent a good part of the afternoon drawing The Three Little Pigs.

We have had great turnouts on tour and I’m grateful to everyone who’s come out. But right now I do not want to get back on a plane Tuesday morning! (Been thinking a lot about the documentary The Other F Word.)

“Daddy’s Home” …for now.