Search Results for: log book

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: AN EATER’S MANIFESTO BY MICHAEL POLLAN

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

“To reclaim…control over one’s food, to take it back from industry and science, is no small thing: indeed, in our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts.”—Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food

This was an fantastic book that deserves a better map. Oh well.

Earlier today my friend Tim asked, “What is your most naïve question?”

Mine was, “Why do we live like this?” Which, of course, is also a way of asking, “How should we live?”

I loved this book because Michael Pollan answers my question in terms of food: “Why do we eat like this?” and “How should we eat?”

The answer to the latter: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

In a lot of ways, this book reminds me of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. In an age where food has become nothing but a commodity, something packaged and sold, it’s time to treat it like a gift. “Shake the hand of the one who feeds you,” as Pollan says.

Speaking of great writing about food, I’d like to wish Maureen McHugh a happy birthday! Check out her blog and contributions to Eat Our Brains for some exquisite culinary lit.

GERD ARNTZ AND THE WOODCUT ORIGINS OF THE STICK FIGURE

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Stick Figure

Here’s another thread in my ever-growing collection of connections between comics and information design: the ubiquitous stick figure used for modern infographics actually has his origins in the early 20th century woodcut. Here is the beginning of Eric Lewallen‘s wonderful talk, “A History of the Stick Figure“:

Our stick figure’s past actually begins with statistics, and for that we jump back to around 1920 in post-war Vienna and the work of social scientist Otto Neurath. Now, at this time, much of Europe is still reeling from the aftermath of World War I. There’s a growing interest in constructed universal languages: many people feel that through a common language we could better understand each other and avoid conflict. Neurath believed it was words that led to these misunderstandings in the first place. His interest in hieroglyphics led him to develop a system to help people understand social and economic facts with a minimum of words. To help him develop his system he collaborated with Gerd Arntz, a Vienna artist well known for his black and white woodcuts. Arntz worked in a simple style that could be easily understood by ordinary people, so Neurath molded this style into stick figures that became the building blocks of his pictured statistics.

Further proof that there are no coincidences, Gerd Arntz (1900-1988) was part of the Weimar Era, with contemporaries such as George Grosz (previously blogged) and John Heartfield.

[Arntz] wanted to strip art of bourgeois preciousness. In order to efface all evidence of his individual hand, he invented a stylized vocabulary of symbolic forms. His predilection for the flat, black and white tonalities of woodblock further served to obliterate the artist’s personal touch. Nevertheless, his incisive visual analyses of German society, corruption and political factionalism can hardly be considered impersonal; even in stark black and white, Arntz’s work reveals the artist’s political predilections and idiosyncratic viewpoint….[He] decided to concentrate on woodcut and linoleum cut because he was attracted to stark contrasts of black and white and because these mediums reminded him of certain family photographs that he had repeatedly perused during the war.”

Here I’ve cut and pasted the best images of Arntz’s work that I could find on the cybertubes (not a whole lot to be found, a Google search is your best bet):

Gerd Arntz

And some of his infographic work (done with Neurath):

Gerd Arntz Infographics

If anyone knows more about Arntz’s work or where one get get a decent book on him, please leave the info in the comments!

Big thank you to Eric Lewallen for bringing this to our attention! Here’s his presentation in its entirety (be sure to visit his blog, Words Are Pictures Too).

MUSICOPHILIA BY OLIVER SACKS

Monday, February 11, 2008

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain is okay. As a huge Oliver Sacks fan and a musician, I thought I was going to like it more than I did. But really, it’s a pretty scattered book. There’s not much of an overarching theme or thread — just 350 pages of Oliver Sacks writing about music and the brain. Which is very cool and all, but it doesn’t make for an engaging long narrative. It might be a good bathroom book: you just pick up a chapter here and there, rather than reading it straight through.

Here’s a big roundup of links related to the book:

THE GIFT BY LEWIS HYDE

Sunday, February 3, 2008

There was a good article about this book in the LA Times:

Hyde’s 1983 book “The Gift,” subtitled “Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World,” argues that inspiration comes to its creator the same way a gift does. Because of this, both the artist and the resulting work itself become uneasy in a market economy. This gift is most comfortable, instead, when it is kept moving — offered or traded — instead of being hoarded or commodified….Over the years, “The Gift” has developed a cult following among writers and artists who rarely lend their names to anything as potentially sentimental as a book on “creativity” — David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and Geoff Dyer among them. To Jonathan Lethem, it’s “a life-changer”; video artist Bill Viola calls it “the best book I have read on what it means to to be an artist in today’s economic world.”

Mr. Hyde himself gives a good summary:

The main assumption of the book is that certain spheres of life, which we care about, are not well organized by the marketplace. That includes artistic practice, which is what the book is mostly about, but also pure science, spiritual life, healing and teaching….This book is about the alternative economy of artistic practice. For most artists, the actual working life of art does not fit well into a market economy, and this book explains why and builds out on the alternative, which is to imagine the commerce of art to be well described by gift exchange.

In other words, “Don’t quit your day job, dude.”

I’m not really sure what to say about this book. It just kind of re-affirmed a lot of what I’ve been thinking about making art: that it’s important for me to have a day job, so I can separate work from play, and that the more generous you are with your audience (through blogging, teaching, sharing, etc.) the better off you’ll be as an artist—spiritually and financially. Good companion reading would be Cory Doctorow’s article, “Giving It Away.”

Has anybody else read it? Thoughts?

THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. Why did I read this book? It was all Tim and Mark‘s fault. Also, the fault of the UT librarian who displayed it prominently in the new books section.

After skimming about 2/3 of the way through, I took Tim Ferriss’s own advice from page 88:

Practice the art of non-finishing…Starting something doesn’t automatically justify finishing it…If you are reading [a book] that sucks, put it down and don’t pick it back up…

Great advice! I once wrote a post about walking out on bad concerts that suggested the same.

Like any self-help book, there are a few little fortune-cookie nuggets of wisdom. My favorite was a solution to some questions that have been puzzling me lately: What if I don’t know what I want? What if I don’t have any huge goals? Ferriss suggests, that I’m asking the wrong questions—that what I should be asking is, “What excites me?”

I like that.

The other good part of the book is the idea of a “Low Information Diet.” That is, get off the f***ing computer, don’t watch TV, try to limit your reading only to those things that truly give you pleasure and enrich your life.

Which is why I’m putting this book away and starting Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.