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“Athens, GA (Clarke County) Copyright 2008 D. Nelson
This house on Meigs Street once belonged to Brev Mekis, a schizophrenic. He had divided the house into two totally different apartments, each one featuring different style furniture, different clothes, books, and pets (per Michael Stipe, a cat on one side and a gerbil on the other), to suit his personalities. He would live for a while on one side until his other personality took over, and would then take off his clothes and move to the other side. After he died they discovered a closet filled floor to ceiling with copies of a book he had written called “Life And How To Live It” – since he had kept all the copies locked up nobody ever knew he had written anything. The R.E.M. song with the same title is based on this true story.
I once flipped through one of the copies, and remember it as faschist and biased, to say the least. Vic Chesnutt lived here about the time I moved to Athens, and we watched many a Wim Wenders movie here.”
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My friend Hamish Roberton is a Renaissance man. He works at Vanity Fair, keeps up an insightful Twitter account, consults in NYC and is an all-around wonderful guy and talented purveyor of the arts. When someone like Hamish asks you if you want to work on something with him, you say yes.
I said yes to Hamish a while back when he told me about a zine he was working on, Afterzine. Well, issue one is in pre-order right now, and as you can see, it’s absolutely gorgeous. The theme for this first issue is negative space, and I contribute a mixtape for it, to be listened to while reading and absorbing the rest of the contents. I’m beyond flattered, and completely thrilled to know something I worked on will be side-by-side with work by people like Peter Saville, Thurston Moore, Evan Scott, Andi Teran and many more.
Please go take a look at Afterzine and order your copy today. At $10, it’s a steal. Besides, you’ll have a little bit of Flux-Rad, too.
I’ve had a lot of interns over the years. Some have come out of nowhere and had almost no experience but proven themselves to be incredible, others have come highly recommended and been total disappointments. Through all of it, I’ve always spent my time thinking about what I want from them, and not so much about what they need. It’s totally wrong, because I’ve been an intern too, and I remember sitting in an office waiting for someone to tell me what they needed me for, and how I could be useful.
To help us all out with this issue (though primarily from a design standpoint), Mind the Gap put together a 10 point list of things interns want. It’s really interesting reading. Read them all here.
It just seemed interesting that Larry was evocatively describing Best Coast’s aesthetic in roughly the same terms others have used for teenpop, and given the temporal closeness of the two things, it’s weird that those two things can’t seem to have a conversation with each other anywhere, not just at Pitchfork.
Because editors are often seen as unnecessary, we at IBM conducted a study to demonstrate their value for some of our marketing pages. We took a sample of unedited pages with high traffic from across our various business units and ran them through Dave Harlan, the editing lead for the group that creates a lot of our marketing content. We then ran an A/B test, where we served the unedited versions to a random sample of users and the edited versions to the rest of the users. We then measured engagement (defined as clicks to desired links on the page) on those pages over the course of a month.
"The person needs a good sense of brands across multiple industries, knowing how to play in the space, and an ability to interact with consumers in a more natural way. Can you tell that just by seeing a degree or case study? I don’t think you can."
There’s no real tactful way to mention someone’s previous work without sounding like a lazy writer or some kind of name-dropper. To me, it always seems like that connection is intended to draw me in, even though it’s entirely possible that the new stuff might be completely different. From the artist perspective, I can imagine that there are times when that previous project seems like a burr caught in your shoelace — something that doesn’t hurt, but never goes away.
I preface with all of this because the new Hospital Ships material is really really incredible, and part of the reason I know this is because I was (am) a huge fan of Minus Story. It’s a funny case of big world/small world: I was living in Germany when I discovered Minus Story and fell in love immediately. Those records became my soundtrack for investigating a completely foreign place, and I have really fond memories of walking around listening to Jordan Geiger’s lilting falsetto for that time period. Big world. Fast forward to 2008, Jordan is joining Shearwater (a band my boyfriend is also in) and I get to meet him. I believe I was nervous at first but that quickly went away … his sense of humor is legendary. (See the About section on his MySpace)
All this to say the new material Jordan is doing as Hospital Ships has really blown me away. There is still all the charm and intimacy of the older music he wrote, but working with John Congleton on these songs has really opened up a floodgate. They’re strangely svelt and busty at the same time. “Bird in Furs”, for instance, is just him and a cellist, but the result is a truly warm, distinguished affair. Geiger might be known as a bedroom pop artist but these tunes aren’t skeletal or broken down, they’re rich and compelling and absolutely beautiful.
Order the vinyl 7″ here. Like, right now.
Hospital Ships “Bird In Furs”
Hospital Ships “All the Drugs in the World” (SayMyName Remix)
More info on SayMyName.
idsgn is profiling a selection of couples who live and work together. It’s really fascinating to read about families that manage to share passions, be together constantly, and still smile when the other walks in a room.
The way to solve the perfect problem is to make it imperfect. Don't just bend one of the constraints, eliminate it. Shut down the factory. Walk away from the job. Change your product completely. Ignore the board. If the only alternative is slow and painful failure, the way to get unstuck is to blow up a constraint, deal with the pain and then run forward. Fast.
In one chapter, Egan uses a PowerPoint presentation — that infamous program used by speakers to illustrate their talking points — to illustrate the journal of a 12-year-old girl, using visuals to tell the story of her family. It may seem like a gimmick, but in Egan's hands a much-maligned technological tool becomes a moving storytelling device.
At its best, content marketing helps organizations develop more useful content and fix broken publishing processes; at its worst, it boils down to such magical thinking as “social media will save you from the recession.” In either case, the field is made up of a voluble online community with the incentive to continuously reformulate its tenets to keep up with a rapidly evolving internet.
