October 2007 Archives
I don't especially like The National, but they put on a great show. I found myself at their show at terminal 5 last night, expecting a relatively uninteresting night. The opening act was ridiculous [in a bad way], the drinks were expensive [17 dollars for a Red Stripe and a Jameson & ginger?], and the National took over an hour for their sound-check.
But then they came on stage... and the drummer was totally in the pocket... and the violinist stopped being a prima-donna and rocked the f*ck out... and the coke-addled singer started crooning into the mic...
So it was a good show. Great energy. Weird crowd. Cool venue. I still don't really like The National... but they put on a damn good show.
But then they came on stage... and the drummer was totally in the pocket... and the violinist stopped being a prima-donna and rocked the f*ck out... and the coke-addled singer started crooning into the mic...
So it was a good show. Great energy. Weird crowd. Cool venue. I still don't really like The National... but they put on a damn good show.
Last night, I picked up a little book called Everyday Engineering by Andrew Burroughs + IDEO. Maybe 'picked up' isn't quite right, as I've been anticipating this book for a couple weeks now, popping into bookstores around the city all this week, looking to see if it had finally been shipped. I ended up finding it at Williamsburg's Spoonbill & Sugartown, a stone's throw from my loft, and one of the best bookstores around. But not to digress...
The book itself is tiny - 4x6 inches - with a matte black cover cut to show the title and binding. It carries like a journal. And it reads like a spiritual pocket-book - which makes total sense. The book is intimate, offering prose in a slightly-more-formal-than-conversational tone, with the greater emphasis on the accompanying photos. While the book is broken up into stratified sections, they are more exploration than ontology, which is refreshing. Burroughs, in a clever move, divided the book into two main sections - Creation and Degradation - and exploring aspects of each.
Again, the book is missing a sense of finality, refreshing, as Burroughs seeks to evoke the thoughts of an observing engineer. The index provides more detailed and directed exploration into the content of the photos.
The book itself is tiny - 4x6 inches - with a matte black cover cut to show the title and binding. It carries like a journal. And it reads like a spiritual pocket-book - which makes total sense. The book is intimate, offering prose in a slightly-more-formal-than-conversational tone, with the greater emphasis on the accompanying photos. While the book is broken up into stratified sections, they are more exploration than ontology, which is refreshing. Burroughs, in a clever move, divided the book into two main sections - Creation and Degradation - and exploring aspects of each.
Again, the book is missing a sense of finality, refreshing, as Burroughs seeks to evoke the thoughts of an observing engineer. The index provides more detailed and directed exploration into the content of the photos.
