Your brain needs a Dad

Right now: What are you doing?
"I’ve started to become a lot pickier about where my attention goes as I observe what it means to my work when it drifts. But, I still have a long way to go. Long way."

— MerlinMan

E.L.L.A

A Musical Celebration of the Florida Female Artist

“E.L.L.A, A Musical Celebration of the Florida Female Artist,” is here to showcase to the people of Orlando the wonderful and extremely talented women that grace our fine city and state. We believe that Florida has some of the strongest and most talented women in the world, and they deserve to be heard, viewed, and celebrated. By creating this festival, we want to make sure that they are."

— Robert Johnson,
promoter/founder of E.L.L.A.
Elevate.Listen.Love.Appreciate

Blog Action Day 2008 is October 15

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from
Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

Poverty is affecting society, the enormous hole left by possibilities that go unrealized becomes even greater with our discomfort in acknowledging the gap. The rapid aging of the population in the Western hemisphere and the failing of public systems contribute to increasing demands on individuals. Many of us are called upon to assist our families in two directions for the future — children and parents.

"I believe a determined group of people can change the conversation for the better. Our first action step is awareness — talking about it. Your voice counts and so do actions. Go sign up now and join the conversation on poverty, October 15. You can make a difference."

— Valeria Maltoni, Conversation Agent

SOURCE: ConversationAgent

Kayo Dot streams new music

SOURCE: Kayo Dot

Que hora es?

The Second Annual Orlando Hispanic Film Festival (OHFF) comes to the heart of Orlando, Florida, during Hispanic Heritage Month
Oct. 10th — Oct. 12th, 2008.

It is a competitive independent film festival and a platform that recognizes independent filmmakers from around the world who integrate the Hispanic culture in their work and exposes the talent of Hispanic actors, directors, producers, screenwriters and cinematographers.

SOURCE: OHFilmFestival

George Carlin just knew…

SOURCE: GoGreenTube

Introducing Seun Kuti & Egypt 80…

Seun Kuti & Egypt 80
West Africa
Nigeria

Seun Kuti is Fela Anikulapo Kuti 's last son. Seun's father, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, was Nigeria's most beloved popular musician and most acerbic social critic until his death in 1997.
[READ MORE]

From a recent interview:
Is the Nigerian government still trying to suppress Afrobeat music?
Yeah, because you can’t support something that is against you. They know what Afrobeat stands for, so it receives no support from the government or police. They support all these Nigerian hip-hop bands. It’s very cheap low-quality pop.

SOURCES: AfroPop.org, L.A. Record

Introducing Rachel Goodrich…

"hello. i'm rachel goodrich. i am a songwriter. i write songs. i sing..... and play guitar and other instruments ........like....... keys, uke,kazoo,harm oni ca,ja wharp,recorder,xyl ophone, ban jo,man dolin,spoons, pots,pans .........and with that......... i make music."

Rachel is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, performer from Miami Beach. Her music is a wonderful mix of folk, Django Reinhart-drenched, acoustic ragtime-ish psychobilly and moxy. She's a dynamic performer with just enough attitude to give her a punkish edge. She's personable, humble and going to become yr new favorite performer. I'm biased because she's good. Rachel is working on her new record with co-producer George Martinez. She says "'Tinker Toys' is coming along wonderfully." Highlights include new songs 'Light Bulb' and 'The Black Hole.' The new record will be self-released very soon. Stay tuned.

SOURCE: Rachel Goodrich

Byrne/Eno collaboration, record

"Brian Eno and I recently finished our first collaboration in about 30 years. For the most part, Brian did the music and I wrote some tunes, words and sang. It's familiar but completely new as well. We're pretty excited. In August the music will be available via this Web site, free for streaming and available for purchase in a variety of options that allow you to download immediately and receive physical formats when they become available later in the Fall. One of the songs will be available free of charge.
In September I will begin a tour, on which I will be playing music from the new album as well as music from our previous collaborations — 3 Talking Heads albums, Bush of Ghosts, etc. If you'd like to be updated as this story unfolds, please add your email address via the box below (we will not contact you for any reason other than to tell you about this David Byrne and Brian Eno project and the tour and we promise not to give or sell your contact to anyone else or even to the government).
The name of the new record is Everything That Happens Will Happen Today."

SOURCE: David Byrne

The future sound of London

In Gibson's Neuromancer, when Case & Molly meet the two surviving founders of Zion, there is talk of hearing a "mighty dub" in the Babel of tongues signaling the "final days". If indeed we're living in these 'end times', as many predict, then there can be no more of an appropriate soundtrack for the coming apocalypse than The Bug's "London Zoo".



SOURCE: NinjaTune

Grizzly Bear on Letterman

Grizzly Bear performed the new cut "Two Weeks" on Letterman this past Wednesday. Signature harmonies? Check. So much sunshine? Check. Another silly good look at what's shaping up to be the Grizzly pop album everybody's hoping for? Check, please.


SOURCE: Stereogum

Documentally speaking…

Sweat hard. on 12seconds.tv

SOURCE: Documentally

Helvetica the movie

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices
and aesthetics behind their use of type.

SOURCE: Helveticafilm.com

10
TELL THE TRUTH.

The rabbit joke is relevant because it occurred to me that looking for a cabbage in a butcher’s shop might be like looking for ethics in the design field. It may not be the most obvious place to find either. It’s interesting to observe that in the new AIGA’s code of ethics there is a significant amount of useful information about appropriate behaviour towards clients and other designers, but not a word about a designer’s relationship to the public. We expect a butcher to sell us eatable meat and that he doesn’t misrepresent his wares. I remember reading that during the Stalin years in Russia that everything labelled veal was actually chicken. I can’t imagine what everything labelled chicken was. We can accept certain kinds of misrepresentation, such as fudging about the amount of fat in his hamburger but once a butcher knowingly sells us spoiled meat we go elsewhere. As a designer, do we have less responsibility to our public than a butcher? Everyone interested in licensing our field might note that the reason licensing has been invented is to protect the public not designers or clients. ‘Do no harm’ is an admonition to doctors concerning their relationship to their patients, not to their fellow practitioners or the drug companies. If we were licensed, telling the truth might become more central to what we do.

— Milton Glaser,
Ten Things I Have Learned
Part of AIGA Talk in London
November 22, 2001

Who's watching the watchers?

SOURCE: Paramount Pictures

Milton Glaser's 10 things…

9
ON AGING.

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 that 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. Then I heard a marvellous joke that seemed related to rule number 10. 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?’

— Milton Glaser,
Ten Things I Have Learned
Part of AIGA Talk in London
November 22, 2001

Flatstock 17 Poster Convention

Flatstock 17, presented by Pitchfork Music Festival and The American Poster Institute, will be held for two days, July 19th and 20th, 2008 at Union Park on the grounds of the Picthfork Music Festival in Chicago, IL. This event will take place RAIN OR SHINE and takes place OUTDOORS. You must have a Pitchfork Music Fest Pass to get access to the Flatstock show. Pitchfork has sold out every year so far so don't hesitate to get your tickets.

Pictured:Casey Burns
SOURCE: AmericaPosterInstitute

Milton Glaser's 10 things…

8
DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY.

Everyone always talks about confidence in believing what you do. I remember once going to a class in yoga where the teacher said that, spirituality speaking, if you believed that you had achieved enlightenment you have merely arrived at your limitation. I think that is also true in a practical sense. Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable. It makes me nervous when someone believes too deeply or too much. I think that being sceptical and questioning all deeply held beliefs is essential. Of course we must know the difference between scepticism and cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to the world as passionate belief is. They are sort of twins. And then in a very real way, solving any problem is more important than being right. There is a significant sense of self-righteousness in both the art and design world. Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often begins with the Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.
Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad – the client, the audience and you.
Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable. But self-righteousness is often the enemy. Self-righteousness and narcissism generally come out of some sort of childhood trauma, which we do not have to go into. It is a consistently difficult thing in human affairs. Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co-existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read ‘ Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’ Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine.

— Milton Glaser,
Ten Things I Have Learned
Part of AIGA Talk in London
November 22, 2001

Milton Glaser's 10 things…

7
HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN.

The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body. I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch; perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know how - that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if someone was to yell at me from across the street my brain could be affected and my life might changed. That is why your mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama was right. Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.

— Milton Glaser,
Ten Things I Have Learned
Part of AIGA Talk in London
November 22, 2001

Old news is good news

Blender Magazine Welcomes New Senior Editor

Blender magazine has hired well-known Radar magazine senior editor, Tyler Gray. Gray is also an upcoming author of the highly anticipated Harper Collins book The Hit Charade: Lou Pearlman, Boy Bands, and the Biggest Ponzi Scheme in U.S. History. The book hits shelves on November 11, 2008.

SOURCE: JJ's Dirt