"There’s no demonstration of life’s futility or language’s emptiness that is so profound, it can’t one day be turned into a reassuring fridge magnet, and that thankfully helps put pessimism back in its place."

"When did TED lose its edge? When did TED stop trying to collect smart people and instead collect people trying to be smart? (...) What began as something spontaneous and unique has today become a parody of itself. What was exceptional and emergent in the realm of ideas has been bottled, packaged, and sold back to us over and over again. The whole TED vibe has come to resemble a sales pitch."

"To celebrate the release of Nick Hornby’s Songbook, several authors wrote in about their favorite songs."

"In considering the contemporary design world, I identified three categories of popular practice that seem largely uncriticized (...)

The first is living legends: the power of excellence. If you do beautiful work for more than 20 years, indeed, why should anyone take notice of a few lesser projects? In this category I would put Vignelli himself, along with Chermayeff & Geismar, Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and organizations like the Museum of Modern Art and Oxo. They are our collective influence, which makes it difficult to stand apart from them and critique. Their best work is already in the books, so their worst work is immediately dropped from the historic record, or assimilated into the narrative as a stepping-stone on the way to more success. (...)

A second category is those too good to be criticized: the power of intentions. When the work in question is meant to improve lives, save the environment, or even just educate, who are we as critics sitting in our comfy ergonomic desk chairs to criticize? (...)

The last category of the uncriticized is perhaps the newest: the power of happy. I speak mostly of the bloggers, those too helpful, too tasteful, and too relentlessly positive to be critiqued. There are two versions of this: the ostensibly neutral online magazine, like Dezeen and Fast Company’s Co. Design blog, and the more personal design blog."

"Some of the most interesting documentary films take their structures from organic phenomena like the hours of the day, or the trajectory of a river from source to mouth. Others are essays that follow a structured thought process. Still others divide into sequences or parts that need to be understood and compared as discrete units for the film to generate meaning in the viewer. In fact, there are nearly infinite possible documentary structures, of which I think we've only seen a small fraction. By contrast, the mainstream documentary focuses on what's now called "storytelling," a highly traditional representational strategy that in recent years has come to imply the omnipresence of characters (good and evil), a narrative arc and a conventional act-based structure in which seemingly insurmountable problems are frequently solved."

Mark Kermode destroys Michael Bay.

Joshua Benton's reaction to Andy Rutledge's NYTimes redesign. Good conversation in the comments.

Paul Scriven's answer to Andy Rutledge's NYTimes redesign.

"Triple Canopy is an online magazine, workspace, and platform for editorial and curatorial activities. Working collaboratively with writers, artists, and researchers, Triple Canopy facilitates projects that engage the Internet’s specific characteristics as a public forum and as a medium, one with its own evolving practices of reading and viewing, economies of attention, and modes of interaction. In doing so, Triple Canopy is charting an expanded field of publication, drawing on the history of print culture while acting as a hub for the exploration of emerging forms and the public spaces constituted around them."

"A few months ago, while Pitchfork were unveiling their expansive set of fin-de-siècle articles and lists, I spotted someone on the I Love Music forum say that they wished there could be a Stylus list. Despite my hatred of lists, this seemed like a good idea, and reasonably accomplishable too; most of us who used to write for Stylus are still in regular contact, and it wasn’t as if we’d never made a list before."

Pitchfork assemble a list of 60 favorite books about music.

"From synth pop to Hollywood remakes to collecting manual typewriters, we're busy plundering the past. But why the fatal attraction?"

"How come the very kind of people who would have once been in the vanguard of creating new music (bohemian early adopter types) have switched roles to become antiquarians and curators?"

"The 'future' I’m always looking for from music is really just a word – and perhaps an increasingly unhelpful word – for the not-past, for the never-heard-this-before."

"New York Times columnist and author (Letters from New Orleans, 2005) Walker makes no pretense at being a master of modern marketing. But he does, through intuitive, savvy observations of human and corporate behaviors, solidify his argument for what brands mean in today’s society. His claim that brands such as Hello Kitty and the iPod, among others, balance our need for both belonging and individuality is not revolutionary. So what’s new here? That Walker is one of the prime analysts dedicated to probing our minds, our behavior, and, specifically, our buying patterns. He addresses the demand for authenticity and the nearly accidental formation of consumer communities, almost in spite of commercial persuasion campaigns, creating a real connection that many Americans are seeking." -- Barbara Jacobs

Kevin Slavin about how the current concept of Augmented Reality is broken.

On Terminator: "the world with a bunch of informatics overlaid on it, as if a fucking computer needs to read, as if this would be the way for a computer to note information to itself, to write it and then read it"

Alternate video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o03wWtWASW4

Bookmarking this for the dynamic logo. (But also awesome altogether)

Steven Heller on how everyone is a Sagmeister these days.

"Note for my list: Clichés are bad. Yes, it is tempting to make a list. Shorthand is easier than longhand. Bits and bites are more immediate than narratives. And when lists are on a screen at a presentation, the speaker has a guide to work with. But the bottom line is this: When Sagmeister did presented his list, it was a fresh old idea. Even shortly after, when Bruce Mau issued his “Incomplete Manifesto for Growth” (a list by any other name), the notion was fairly new. But now it is a conceit, a means of framing a talk, and enabling people to take notes. Almost everyone I know keeps lists, which is good, but hearing them at conferences has become tedious."

An index to the articles published by Rouge.

"Rouge is a triannually-published online film journal edited by Adrian Martin, Helen Bandis and Grant McDonald. Based in Australia, it publishes essays by critics from all over the world, many of them as translations. It is often cited as one of the premier online-only film journals and has been described as "[maintaining] one of the highest standards of writing of any online film journal" and as "championing some of the most exciting and innovative critical writing being done anywhere in the world."

Nicholson Baker on nail clippers.

"Back in the day, AOL had a lot of secret gardens. According to my friend Erin, there was a Spin magazine message board frequented by established rock critics that was at an off the index location. A lot of corporations and publications created “channels” which would include chat rooms and message boards. These were about as successful as the businesses with Second Life presences. But some users would take over the dead space and make it their own. Several online friends and I once claimed the message boards for a Canadian radio station long after it was launched and quickly abandoned. Likely the citizens of Second Life do that with virtual ghost town storefronts."

URL updated, previously at http://tomorrowmuseum.com/2010/02/08/facebook-is-worse-than-aol/

Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film