Hi friends,
Happy summer! I’ve been heads down this summer on a few big projects for the last two months so this issue will be shorter on the writing and longer on the links, collecting the things I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to lately.
I’m honored to be one of the jurors for this year’s 365: AIGA Year in Design awards, working with chair Abbott Miller and a great group of designers. We’ve spent the last month or so looking through hundreds of submissions which has been an incredibly inspiring process. Also with AIGA, I’m helping to organize and curate this year’s AIGA Design Conference. Like the awards, the last few weeks has been spent reading submissions and proposals for what I think will be a great conference.
I also have an essay or two coming out this summer and am working on a big project that I’m not ready to talk about yet but will say I’m very excited about! More on that soon.
On my blog, I wrote about Lawrence Halprin’s 1969 book The RSVP Cycles.
Over on Scratching the Surface, we’re taking the summer off from releasing new episodes and will be rebroadcasting some old favorites from the archives through August. That’s not to say we don’t have new things to share though. We have a packed editorial calendar for Scratch, our publishing platform, with new stories, interviews, and features ready to go for the next month.
Most importantly, however, is the new Scratching the Surface newsletter. I’ve been writing a newsletter for paying members for the last five years and this year, I’m opening it up for everyone. It goes out the first Monday of every month, and we published the first public issue back in the beginning of June. Each issues features a links to the latest design news, updates on former guests of the show, book roundups, and more. The first issue got a great response and we’re prepping for the July issue now.
Sign up below to get it in your inbox each month:
Vinson Cunningham’s debut novel, Great Expectations, was delightful. A semi-autobiographical novel loosely based on Cunningham’s own time working on Obama’s 2008 campaign, I found myself completely taken with his world and fascinated by his plotting and pacing. Highly recommended.
I also recently read Lewis Thomas’s essay collect Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Thomas was a physician and medical school dean who moonlighted as an essayist and poet. Needless to say, this is not the usual book I pick up but was inspired by the range of his interests and the simplicity and clarity of his prose. Take this, for example:
The greatest surprise of all lies within our own local, suburban solar system. It is not Mars; Mars was surprising in its way but not flabbergasting; it was a disappointment not to find evidences of life, and there was some sadness in the pictures sent back to earth from the Mars Lander, that lonely long-legged apparatus poking about with its jointed arm, picking up sample after sample of the barren Mars soil, looking for any flicker of life and finding none; the only sign of life on Mars was the Lander itself, an extension of the human mind all the way from earth to Mars, totally alone. Nor is Saturn the great surprise, nor Jupiter, nor Venus, nor Mercury, nor any of the glimpses of the others. The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth.
The greatest compliment I can give a work of art is that it makes me want to get better at what I do. This book did that for me.
For a clear-eyed, critical account of the current state of artificial intelligence, Brian Merchant’s Substack, Blood in the Machine (named after his recent book), has become mandatory reading for me. I bookmark and read every issue, no matter what.
The best thing I read recently was Ian Parker’s knock-out feature of how Kanye West bought and destroyed a Tadao Ando home in Malibu. It’s a piece of design criticism, celebrity reporting, and architecture history all wrapped up in one. Also in The New Yorker, no one writes about surfing better than William Finnegan and I completely devoured his recent profile of surfer Jack Sutherland.
Be sure to read this interview with playwright Annie Baker — who you know I love — about her new movie, Janet Planet. Baker was also recently in The Criterion Closet, with her editor, talking about their favorite movies. (Speaking of playwrights in the Criterion Closet, I liked Jeremy O. Harris’s video too.)
Teju Cole, a writer who means a lot me, wrote about the late style of poet Louise Glück for The Yale Review. I had only ever Gluck’s late work so I took this essay as an opportunity, paradoxically, to introduce myself to her early work. It’s a balm each morning the last few weeks.
Here’s Robin Wall Kimmerer, writing for Orion Magazine, about language, nature, and how we affirm our kinship with the natural world:
It is said that we are known by the company we keep, and I wonder if English sharpened its verbal ax and lost the companionship of oaks and primroses when it began to keep company with capitalism. I want to suggest that we can begin to mend that rift—with pronouns. As a reluctant student of the formalities of writing, I never would have imagined that I would one day be advocating for grammar as a tool of the revolution.
I appreciated this short essay looking at Chris Marker’s films about Japan in Metrograph. I go through a Chris Marker phase every few years, it seems, and this may have prompted a rewatch of his short films.
Speaking of short films, we watched Pedro Almodovar’s short Strange Way of Life (Netflix) recently and it got me thinking about the form. There’s something about a 20-45 minute film that feels tight, considered, and experimental. I’m thinking of Wes Anderson’s recent run of Roald Dahl adaptations, or Spike Jonze’s 2010 I’m Here. What other short films should I watch?
Not quite ‘short’ but I finally watched Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology (available to stream on Prime) and recommend them all.
Actress’s new album, Statik, has accompanied me most mornings while I’m writing and Pharoah Sander’s 1977 classic PHAROAH has been playing most evenings.
Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 album Illinoise was an important album in my history and remains an album that means a lot to me (as Sufjan’s entire body of work is). So when I read that choreographer Justin Peck had transformed the album into a musical, I was immediately intrigued. The dancers recently performed the song “Jacksonville” on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert and it is completely delightful. (For more, here’s a 2018 profile of Peck from The New York Times. Dance is an art form I’ve never felt like I understood so I appreciated this insight into his process.)
Once again, you can sign up for the new Scratching the Surface newsletter — which is decidedly more design focused if that’s your thing — right here:
The next issue goes out July 1.
Until then, I’m turning my pepper harvest into pickled jalapeños and enjoying the first blueberry harvest from the garden. I hope you’re enjoying your summer. Thanks, as always, for following along.
Yrs,
Jarrett