tankt

I have listened to Squarepusher’s new album, Just a Souvenir, almost daily ever since its early release last month, but another one of Tom Jenkinson’s songs is front and center tonight due to a wonderful combination of recent events.

I can’t recall how or when I discovered Design Supremo, but I was instantly sold on the limited edition “Love Will Tear Us Apart” poster by Peter Crnokrak. Since there were only 30 available, and given my now notorious issues with currency conversions, I had to buy one. The idea is brilliant: map over 85 versions and covers of the classic Joy Division song by time and artist. The artwork is visually stunning from afar, and so intricately detailed up close, it’s no wonder that even the second version is now sold out too!

At any rate, mine sat safely in its tube for quite some time until Abby had it beautifully framed for my 35th birthday last month. Now it occupies a prime spot in our living room, just outside of Sawyer’s room. I find it difficult to pass without catching the melody in my head, and I realized the other day that it’s Squarepusher’s version, not the original:

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I don’t know that this is a fair representation of the Squarepusher sound, but many of his signature elements are present if a bit subdued. I have much more to share from him in the coming days, including my favorite track from his new album, “A Real Woman.” It’s epic, absolutely epic.

That’s how I feel about tankt right now.
Too many other more enticing ideas on my mind:

• I wanna see who. (Not really sure how.)
• Building and simultaneously demolishing grids.
• User vs. Designer vs. Developer. And the astonishing difference in my expectations depending on my current position.
• Apathy, decency, and subtlety. Fuck ‘em.
• The future. It’s about time.
• Too many tees. (They’re a walking banner ad.)
• You say you want a revolution. Get up. Stand up. Save your own damn self. Take the time to think.
• Is it feathers on a bird or lotsa different chickens?
• Machines for living.
• Embrace the glitch.
• Fragments. Bridges. Limited editions. 10″ wax presses. Social mixes. Unconventional remixes. Oh, and a Truitt / Brown collaboration known as TruBro. Is that offensive?
• Outside.in in Brooklyn. Warp Records in London. Family in Ohio. Three in San Francisco.

And,

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

- Steve Jobs

What was once and always ‘all in my head’ is now ready to see the light of day. Like branches on a tree, some will thrive, while others whither and die. It matters not which is which, merely that they exist.

The rich tapestry of life seems especially so these days. After several years of deep and difficult introspection, I feel whole again, and stronger than ever. I am loved and loving more than I ever thought possible. I (really, we) feed and sustain me.

I am grateful for my lot in life, truly blessed, and finally prepared to share it with the world, not for gain or glory, but for the chance to make new connections, gain new experiences, and maybe just get a little closer to a deeper understanding of the world.

As always, more soon.

Great music. Incredible color and composition. Anamorphic wide-angle lenses over lush landscapes. A meandering plot predicated on a succession of seemingly random vignettes, all loosely tied together at the end. Oh, and Futura everywhere.

It looks to be another epic, and classic, Wes Anderson film. I can’t wait for the September 29.

I have much to do, though perhaps it’s better said there’s much I would rather do, but I have been absolutely consumed with bloxorz. Honestly, I knew I was screwed from the moment I read Jason’s short “Oh, so you like the addictive games, eh?” intro. Even though I saw the link over lunch, I somehow waited until tonight to play — how’s that for willpower, not normally my strongest suit! I am already up to level 17 too, and chances are I will be up most of tonight trying to finish all 33. I truly should have waited for the weekend…

On a related note, I have always wanted to link to another fiendishly clever blend of art and technology at albinoblacksheep: the end of the world.

It seems somewhat unfair to find joy in such silly diversions, with all the chaos and upheaval in the world. In many ways this is by design, we are constantly lulled to sleep by idle pursuits like seven straight hours of Monday Night Football (both of my teams won too) and 14 hours of college football on Saturday (poor Michigan and Notre Dame, it breaks my Buckeye heart to see them suffer). That’s all well and good, but the simple fact of the matter is that life as we know it is fundamentally changing, and not necessarily for the better…

I wholeheartedly believe that art and technology, when focused and directed and sustained, can truly change the way we relate to the world around us. If nothing else, I hope I can at least awaken our collective inner rebel, the voice that doesn’t blindly accept the world as is. We are much more powerful than we realize, but only if we awake from our collective slumber (or stupor), embrace our long-dormant imagination, and exercise our sense of humor and good will.

I believe it can be done. And I think I have a pretty good idea of how to do it too. Now if only I can stop playing bloxorz long enough to get it started…

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

On the growing masses of Apple iPhone fanatics, most of whom are ardent advocates eager to share its many virtues with you, and the lessons those of us in the music industry must apply to our business and bands, Bob Lefsetz saidbest:

So you’ve got to create something great. And it doesn’t have to sound like anything else, it’s just got to fire on all cylinders within its chosen genre. Hell, if Apple were a major label it wouldn’t have put out the iPhone because there was nothing else like it in the marketplace, there’d be no demand for it. But a great band creates its own demand. And, it takes a while for it to catch on.

We’ve been focusing on instant. Ever since we learned video can blow acts up.

But those acts crashed back to Earth just about as fast. Turns out if you want something to last, it’s got to grow slowly. You need early adopters, who believe and spread the word. You’ve got to let your act percolate in the marketplace. True riches come down the line. And they last, because you’ve got a legion of believers.

I live this every day, on both sides, with an iPhone and a small but promising music label. Believe me, the iPhone is a lot easier to share…

Earlier this summer, my good friend Stewart Brown created five exquisite organic electronic tracks for a project called Sky Observer’s Guide, and I put together the FORKLIFT ENTERTAINMENT website to present it to the world. Right now we’re seeing a handful of hits each day, with plenty of positive reaction, but very little growth momentum. At first I was disappointed, but over the past few weeks I realized that everything is proceeding as I expected, albeit much more slowly than originally planned.

We rightly recognized that putting a price tag on these songs is a barrier to entry, and so we designed the site to make the music immediately accessible. We simply want everyone to hear these songs, and if they like it they can share it with their friends. That’s why each and every song can be streamed in its entirety for FREE, downloaded for FREE, and purchased on the cheap (I know Bob will say lower the price!).

There is no field of dreams to speak of, and certainly no instant payoff, and that is why we have completely taken the money out of the experience. I do believe we will attract interest, given enough time we will develop fans with strong and lasting passions, and then and only then we will be able to reap the rewards, whatever they may be.

All of this is a round-about way of saying, “I hear you, Bob.” And I would love to hear what all of you think of the music, the strategy, the implementation, or anything else that strikes you as interesting or odd. I’m all ears.

Some design wisdom from Milton Glaser:

Last year someone gave me a charming book by Roger Rosenblatt called ‘Ageing Gracefully’. I got it on my birthday. I did not appreciate the title at the time but it contains a series of rules for ageing gracefully. The first rule is the best. Rule number one is that ‘it doesn’t matter.’ ‘It doesn’t matter what you think. Follow this rule and it will add decades to your life. It does not matter if you are late or early, if you are here or there, if you said it or didn’t say it, if you are clever or if you were stupid. If you were having a bad hair day or a no hair day or if your boss looks at you cockeyed or your boyfriend or girlfriend looks at you cockeyed, if you are cockeyed. If you don’t get that promotion or prize or house or if you do – it doesn’t matter.’ Wisdom at last.

A week or two later I read a joke that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. A butcher was opening his market one morning and as he did a rabbit popped his head through the door. The butcher was surprised when the rabbit inquired ‘Got any cabbage?’ The butcher said ‘This is a meat market – we sell meat, not vegetables.’ The rabbit hopped off. The next day the butcher is opening the shop and sure enough the rabbit pops his head round and says ‘You got any cabbage?’ The butcher now irritated says ‘Listen you little rodent I told you yesterday we sell meat, we do not sell vegetables and the next time you come here I am going to grab you by the throat and nail those floppy ears to the floor.’ The rabbit disappeared hastily and nothing happened for a week. Then one morning the rabbit popped his head around the corner and said ‘Got any nails?’ The butcher said ‘No.’ The rabbit said ‘OK. Got any cabbage?’

Lifted in its entirety from Monoscope, just as it was originally copied from davidthedesigner. I just had to pass it along, and didn’t want to lose anything in the process.

Slowly catching up on the past two weeks…

John Gruber, on the unique constraints and enormous potential of the iPhone interface, saidbest:

The iPhone’s screen measures just 3.5 inches, but it’s now the biggest frontier in interface design.

I am so much more dependent on my iPhone after traveling for the past two weeks. It performed flawlessly. In fact, I have since become very attached to Twitter’s mobile interface (it’s much less cluttered) and I am truly blown away by the iPhone specific Facebook interface (though far from perfect, it may be the one thing that keeps me interested in Facebook, for now). I have an idea for game too, but no idea how to make it happen. =)

Fred Wilson, on the near ubiquity of Twitter and his desire (mine too) to see it work natively with Facebook, saidbest:

I want to use Twitter to update my Facebook status. I don’t update my Facebook status. I twitter it to my blog, my friends phones, and countless other places on the web. I hope that Facebook will be another of those places soon.

Easy prediction: Twitter is the next big thing for everyone. My mom will never join Facebook, but I bet she’s following my tweets by year’s end, and adding her own shortly thereafter. Without a doubt.

Khoi Vinh, on consuming information online not for convenience alone but for the opportunity to do something with it, saidbest:

But, truth be told, the lion’s share of my recreational non-fiction reading happens online now. It’s not just that the diversity of content and the immediacy of that content is so much richer online, it’s the fact that there’s so much more one can do with content when it lives online.

Even my modest attempts at joining the conversation are incredibly satisfying and richly rewarding. I find I’m much more engaged with my thoughts, more coherent in their expression, and more passionate in their application (no doubt much to my father’s dismay).

Seth Godin, on using contrast to define an identity, saidbest:

One of the hardest things to do is invent a brand with no opposite. You don’t have an anchor to play against.

Perfectly obvious, yet often forgotten, and even then rarely done well. See the following for proof.

Digby, on the overwhelming data that indicates an incredible opportunity for Democrats to change the terms of debate in America, saidbest:

But you have to be optimistic, at least, that the American people are eager to hear a new story. The question is whether the Democrats can tell it.

I have some thoughts here, as you might imagine. Now if only I can find the time…

Peter Semmelhack, on the absolute brilliance of his just-announced Fred Wilson-backed company, BUG Labs, saidbest:

So what is BUG exactly? It’s Legos meets Web services & APIs. Imagine being able to build any gadget you wanted by simply connecting simple, functional components together. Now imagine being able to easily program, share and connect these gadgets in interesting ways. In essence, we’re building an open source-based platform for programmers to build not only the applications they want but the hardware to run it on.

You had me at legos. Sign me up now!!

Umair Haque on the creative bankruptcy, strategic blunders, and epic failure of imagination of old media’s new internet plays, saidbest:

More simply: before you can worry about capturing value, you’ve gotta understand how value is created.

There is a lifetime of wisdom in that one simple sentence, and a fortune for whomever figures out how best to apply it.

John Edwards, on the dichotomy of being hopeful by nature but incredibly frustrated by world we have allowed George W. Bush to dictate, saidbest:

“I’m a naturally optimistic person who feels an outrage that should be expressed, and I think that will come across as genuine and authentic. There is no strategy to it. I just have to be myself.”

This is me to a tee. Consider yourself warned. =)

On the sincerity and authenticity that comes only from allowing anyone and everyone to speak on the behalf of the company at large, Rob (the “CEO” of Etsy) saidbest:

As I see it, large corporations try to sanitize all their outgoing messages for the sake of keeping face. It is very easy to identify this kind of behavior. Whenever you read something and it sounds like a series of pre-made phrases strung together, instead of a human being speaking, this is sanitized communication. To me, this stuff sounds inhuman.

I want Etsy to stay human. This means allowing each person’s voice to be heard, even if it’s squeaky or loud or soft. I will not put a glossy layer of PR over what we do. If we trip, let us learn from it instead of trying to hide it; when we leap, let’s show others how to leap. Hence the title of this whole blog post: Open Etsy.

The first paragraph is nothing new, but the second (especially the part I bolded) is both brilliant and beautiful. It’s an amazing end to such an incredible post.

On the imperative that designers must be not only engaged early in the process of creating products, but also in the development of the marketing / messaging and even the larger business strategy, Joshua Porter saidbest:

Now, ask any designer and they’ll tell you that design is about communication. But, how effective can designers be if they don’t have any seat the table where the communication is being decided?

Design can be so much more than a simple veneer. Done well, it can permeate both the product and the process with a unique and instantly identifiable personality. And that, in my opinion, is a worthwhile endeavor, as it brings a competitive advantage that very few can duplicate.

I am not a musician. In spite of such a strong personal affinity to music, I lack even the most basic instincts among its instruments. Instead, I rely on my deep appreciation of it, one which admittedly borders on the obsessive at times, to bring me near to nirvana. To be sure, I am a helpless junkie, always looking for a new fix to tickle my ears and lift my head to the heavens…

I am fortunate to have met and become close friends with many extremely talented, and prolific, musicians in my life. We have, at various times, with various strategies, and with even more varying degrees of success, attempted to sell their wares on the open market. It was not an easy business to enter, let alone master, to say nothing of making a profit. Even with critical acclaim, the cost of doing business the old fashioned way (pressing vinyl, of course) was prohibitive.

Ultimately, we put those dreams on hold and went our separate ways. I was thrilled when Stewart Brown and I recently realized that we were living less than a mile apart in San Francisco, and finally reconnected after nearly ten years apart. We are older and wiser now, and while still foolish enough to dream that same dream, we are intent on finding new ways to fulfill it…

To be perfectly honest, I never stopped thinking of how best to market music, and these thoughts only intensified as this “second life” of the internet and its free and easy tools of creation came to be. Brown’s music is infectious (in a very good way) and made to be spread far and wide, and it has long been clear to me that the ease of “spread-ability” is the key to success. So we set out to eliminate anything that inhibits the free flow of music, starting first with the cost to acquire it, so that everyone can hear it instantaneously. That is why you can stream every song in its entirety within the page itself, and even download good quality 128 kbps mp3s (no DRM!!) for free.

I was adamant that we spend as little money as humanly possible (I think our greatest expense so far was buying the domain name). Brown wrote and recorded the music, I designed and built the website, and Kristin tied it all together with her words. If I may say so, it looks and sounds like a million bucks!! Check it out at FORKLIFT ENTERTAINMENT.

I want to point out and thank a few of the many people who helped make this happen…

To Hugh MacLoed and Fred Wilson, two guys who continually experiment and explore new ideas in real-time, right before our very eyes. Their passion and persuasion inspire me to no end. I had trouble finding a singularly illustrative quote from each one, but if you’re at all interested in reading more there’s a combined 71 posts tagged on my del.icio.us from Hugh and Fred.

To Bob Lefsetz, who sums it up best in a recent post entitled “The New Reality”, “You can’t reach them by asking them to buy first. Quite the contrary, it’s like catching a fish. You’ve got to drop quality bait and wait.” He continues, “You establish a beachhead. You try to get people to notice you. And the way you do this is not through endless cross-linking and widgets and all the tools of the helpless, hapless wannabes, but quality music. It’s the only way you can get recognized.” That’s the blueprint right there.

And lastly, to my beautiful wife Abby, who has lived through my countless great ideas and nonexistent execution, who nonetheless never once wavered in her support and always encouraged me to go for it. I could not have done it without you. I love you.

Wow, that was way more than I originally intended to write; still, I left so much out.

I think Brown’s music is poised to take off, and I believe our approach to doing business can help make it happen. I am so excited to see where this goes. I would love to hear what you think, so leave me a comment here or on FORKLIFT ENTERTAINMENT.

As always, more soon.