Bobulate, for Intentional Organization

The Mixtape Club is an organization dedicated to the art of the mixtape. Ten people, ten tracks, ten album covers:

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention … and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and … oh, there are loads of rules. [via Hornby]

But as Sarah Vowell so frankly puts it:

Making a mix tape isn’t like writing a letter, it’s like having a job. …. I can make a tape of “I Believe in Miracles” but I cannot perform miracles.

Either way, a top five list, noticeably absent.

Jason Weinberger, resident conductor of the Louisville Orchestra, on becoming a conductor and, more essentially, a leader:

When you go through school you learn the mechanics and, hopefully, you learn about the repertoire. But as a conductor you don’t really learn how to be a leader in a larger sense of the word, whether it’s leading a performance or leading an organization. I try to build consensus and to encourage everybody I work with to buy into what we’re doing. I really admire some of the Silicon Valley companies for the way they do business. I think we could learn a lot from that.

Benjamin Zander, long-time conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and past TED speaker, on conductor as leader:

I had been conducting for nearly twenty years when it suddenly dawned on me that the conductor of an orchestra does not make a sound. His picture may appear on the cover of the CD in various dramatic posts, but his true power derives from his ability to make other people powerful.

Make other people powerful. Not be powerful, support others in doing so. I think of what Khoi Vinh’s colleagues said of his leadership style prior to his departure from the Times:

A good manager inspires those who work for him. A great manager inspires also those he works for.

No matter what field you lead in, it always goes both ways.

Frank Chimero keeps a text playlist:

[O]ne made of the best writing on the web I come across. I take this list and revisit and reread it every 4 to 8 weeks. You could almost consider it a playlist of text: it’s very select (I artificially limit it to 10-15 articles), I typically read them all in one sitting, and the order and pacing is very purposeful. Most revolve around what it’s like to be making things in 2010, and a lot of the people that I respect the most have pieces in it. It’s almost a pep talk in text form. I visit it when I’m down, when I’m lazy, when I’m feeling the inertia take over.

In a bricked basement in Savannah earlier this year, I found myself trading playlists with a woman I’d never met. She, writing a somewhat academic second edition of a book that wasn’t hers the first time around, was experiencing some sort of block. Have you read the “Clackity Noise,” I asked?

It was then I realized that I had a writing playlist.

I explained to her that whenever I’m feeling uninspired, I reread a handful of things that remind me, ground me, reframe and reposition me, sometimes frighten me frankly, back into or out of where I was. I have websites of this sort. Posters. Trees. Scraps of letters. But these, these were the most threadbare. Does she not have that? She did not. I presented her with the playlist. Taking a page from Frank:

Anne Lamott: Bird by Bird

Shitty first drafts are applicable for writing of course, but it’s well beyond that. Broccoli also plays a protagonist.

Frank Chimero: Platforms as Tables, Tables as Platforms

I read this piece as a reminder that one should have research partners in the world, thinking parallel things, doing similar research, inspiring you, pulling you forward. It’s important to have them. You may never meet. In fact, sometimes it’s best if you never meet your research partner. But as partners, you inspire each other to be the best thinker and maker of things you can be. This piece is that reminder.

Jeremy Denk: Yet More Verbiage About The Goldberg Variations

That song you hear playing in the background but you can’t place it? You know you’ve heard it before, but you trust it, you know it. You feel comforted, informed, educated, transformed even by it? This is Jeremy Denk’s writing. No matter what you think of music, hurry off to take a look. A deeply trustable happiness.

Jonathan Harris: World Builders

I read this for the first time as I returned from time away from home where I was on land and space designed by an architect who’d carefully considered how people interact with the surroundings in a natural way. Authenticity, in particular, was intensely important to him. Ever since, I have been trying to build worlds without having to leave my place — to gain objectivity and authenticity while staying home.

Merlin Mann: Making the Clackity Noise

When I forget where I began, and when I can’t remember where to go next, this is what I read. There’s a piece of this post in everything I write.

Milton Glaser: Ten Things I Have Learned

Often recited from memory, and often used to validate tough decisions, I go back to them often. Timeless.

Paul Graham: What Startups Are Really Like

When a new thing isn’t making sense at all, it’s a good reminder of why we need to be perceptive, aware, paying attention. Familiar models don’t always fit, and the best we can do is be aware of them.

Ralph Caplan: Why you should write in your books. Or, Talking Back to Aristotle and Loewy

Aside from paying homage to my unnatural love for marginalia, this reminds me to get past heady and down to what one cares about as a teacher, as a designer, as a human. Feel something? Don’t shuffle around bewildered about how to get it across. Say it out loud. Shout it from the margins. Thank you, Ralph Caplan.

Robin Sloan: The Future of Designed Content

Ideas, whenever they occur to you — however — should be written about. Sometimes we feel that the desk must be perfect, life must be tidy, the world in order, before we have to do our best work, our clearest thinking. This, one of my favorites from Robin, was written as he sniffled from his bed. His sick bed! Had he thought that way, we would never know his thoughts on the future of designed content. This is my reminder.

Seneca: On the Shortness of Life

Perhaps dramatic and certainly not new, but reminders that need reminding.

There are many more. So, sporadically and without purpose, I track paragraphs I love for no good reason. No playlist per se. But if paragraphs were collected like stamps, butterflies, coins, and stickers, this would be that. And I would be a collector. Thanks, Frank.

Apropos of other music memorabilia, a new dedication site, This Goes Out To:

[It] gives old-school radio dedications a life on the web. Some dedications are transcribed from radio broadcasts, but most come from viewers of the blog via email and Twitter. There is an alchemy to song dedications — canned ingredients combined to express earnest and deeply felt emotion. The music is often saccharine. The words of love and longing tend toward the generic, delivered in the slick, mannered voice of the DJ. And yet, with dedications, as with many forms of private sentiment expressed in public, the emotional pull is undeniable. The fact of an audience intensifies the dedicator’s sentiment, and listeners get a voyeuristic charge from the public displays of intimacy.

All shout-outs and dedications are accompanied by tunes expertly arranged by the talented Taylor Stapleton. From Hall & Oates to George Clinton to Kleer to George Michael, it’s not to be missed. While this project is still in its early stages, just like I was with Casey Kasem, I’m addicted.

Mico Toledo with a weekly dose of song quotes:

Music Philosophy is a weekly graphic/typographic interpretation of philosophical song quotes. All the posters look great as an iPhone desktop wallpaper, so feel free to download them.

If you’re still thinking about your iPhone, that is.

Stephen Worth, director of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, on the importance of skill:

Ever since Andy Warhol made “ideas without skill” fashionable back in the 60s, it seems to me that popular culture has been playing a game of “skill limbo”. How low can we go? How badly drawn can a cartoon be and still be considered a cartoon? How many drum machines and sequencers can we stack up to avoid having to learn a real instrument? How much plastic surgery does it take to make acting skills unnecessary?

Gladwellian-10,000 hours come to mind. He continues:

But when I see someone who has both an idea AND skill, I’m reminded just how doggone powerful and dynamic a creative artist can be. I’m sick and tired of accepting “half a loaf”. Speak to me with eloquence. Dazzle me with your skill. Communicate an important idea. I insist on “all of the above”.

You said it, Stephen Worth, with both idea and skill. And as Richard Sennett reminds us, “making is thinking.”

From the documentary, “What the Future Sounded Like,” a documentary about Electronic Music Studios (EMS), a radical group of avant-garde electronic musicians who composed music using technology and futuristic experimentation:

Comprising of pioneering electronic musicians Peter Zinovieff and Tristram Cary (famed for his work on the Dr Who [sic] series) and genius engineer David Cockerell, EMS’s studio was one of the most advanced computer-music facilities in the world. EMS’s great legacy is the VCS3, Britain’s first synthesizer and rival of the American Moog. The VCS3 changed the sounds of some of the most popular artists of this period including Brian Eno, Hawkwind, and Pink Floyd.

This is a documentary in three parts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. A recommended pairing with reading 2010: Living in the Future, the book, and a period-piece snack.

Jeremy Denk’s take on simplicity versus complexity as told through Chopin:

Chopin’s simplicity rebukes Chopin’s complexity. The Genius of Chopin is sitting there, in his self-rebuke, sandwiched between an almost-clichéd chromatic transition, a pedal point, and a lyrical slow section rocking between the two most common chords there are: this glimpse of screw-you-I-can-write-something-so-beautiful-that’s-made-of-almost-nothing, as an unearthly transition between things that are also almost nothing.

“Almost nothing” as a theme. I like this. As people who create things, we’re often striving to achieve thoughtful reduction ourselves. Denk continues:

One of the great and strange elements of the Polonaise-Fantasie, one of its “themes,” is that the act of listening is woven into its fabric. Chopin wants you to listen–carefully! thoughtfully!–to certain sounds, certain pitches, certain moments; the structure of the story he is telling is utterly dependent upon this listening. But he knows that listening is an inherently lazy activity, often thoughtless, often lulling itself into complacency. Just look around the boxes of Carnegie [Hall] some night if you don’t believe me on this.

Listening is lazy. Of course it is, but I’ve never considered this. I immediately thought of McCullough’s reference to Walter Benjamin, “architecture is experienced habitually, in a state of distraction.” Architects must then weave ways to flow people and resources through built environments. How does Chopin do it?

Chopin writes “enforced” listening moments into the piece–strangely arresting moments, like that F# held, alone, then heard against an astringent dissonance, then heard alone again, then heard against the “correct” dissonance…

Enforced listening moments. Intentional pauses woven into the experience (here music, but elsewhere they could be websites, products, service experiences, architecture) that make people “act, stop, listen” as Denk describes them.

As designers, for all the simplicity we intend in our work, for all the intentional moments we craft, what enforced listening moments are we creating? What rhythms are we designing? Where’s the F#?

[Image: Opening Chopin Polonaise. Think Denk.]

Make sure to head over to listen to the curated piece directly.

Jeremy Denk on Bach as reactionary:

Bach is distilled Something Else. He composed against the currents of his day; he swam upstream; he was a reactionary (for example: composing elaborate difficult counterpoint when the musical world was simplifying into homophony). His genius, according to the usual view, is not that of inventor or destroyer, but belongs to that colder virtue of perfection. Separation from Time is part of the Bach myth; against his island of perfection the vicissitudes of music history uselessly and cyclically break their waves. He ushers in no new Style, no Movement, no Ism; he opens the door to no Revolution; and therefore he is “pointless,” historically speaking. He would not “Stick it to the Man;” he is The Man.

On the contrast in Bach’s D major Partitas:

The minor keys in the major movements of the D major Partitas do not seem to oppose the prevailing mood but to fill it out; these momentary sadnesses seem to make the overall joy believable. …. The turn to major arises from the confirmation of minor; sadness is a cause for celebration and vice versa; the happier and sadder moments do not rebut each other, they are no dialectic; even the terms “happy” and “sad” may not be applicable; they each draw on the other, and blur the other, in a chain of logic, inspiration and cause.

I recommend grabbing the Partita No. 4 in D Major (BWV 828) by Gould immediately. Listen out for the humming.

Contrast makes overall joy more believable.

In a 1906 edition of Appleton’s Magazine, John Sousa predicts a deterioration of music and musical taste — “impending harm” — because of the introduction of “music reproducing machines.”

Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang of Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul. …. From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful. And now, in this twentieth century, come these talking and playing machines, and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things, which are like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful, living, breathing daughters.

For technophobes, this is nothing new. Ars Technica covers in terrific detail what fears these emerging technologies bring out in rightsholders. From the introduction of writing itself to radio to television to the digital camera, there’s been handwringing over the destruction to the natural state of things bought by advances in technology.