In another life, I was a wannabe luthier.
The intoxicating scent of Brazilian rosewood and Sitka spruce, the arcane and elegant tools and forms, the thrilling sensation of bringing an instrument to vibrating, singing life … ah well, turned out ’twas not to be.
I have built a couple of guitars, and fixed a whole [...]
My last day in Berlin for the year, so I decide to drop by a museum that don’t know thing one about, save for its intriguingly all-encompassing name: Museum der Dinge, the Museum of Things.
Well. Aren’t they all?
Ye-es, technically correct, but the categories that museums typically set for themselves are very, very narrow. Things [...]
Guerrilla artist/graphic designer Shepard Fairey is world famous (um, notorious) for papering the alleys, underpasses and abandoned storefronts of the world with starkly powerful images limned in black, white and red. I still remember the first “André the Giant Has a Posse” sticker I ever saw, somewhere in the San Francisco Mission District in 1989 [...]
“Does this guy have some kind of cult?”
We’d just seated ourselves in the packed auditorium, and my colleague was eyeing the dozens of glazed-eyed autograph-seekers lined up for their moment with Edward Tufte. His seminar “Presenting Data and Information” had sold out well in advance, and the place was quietly buzzing with conversation and — [...]
The Kehlet Typewriter Company of Sacramento has finally thrown in the towel after a quarter-century in the business. It’s the end of an era — or perhaps, since this little shop opened at the tail-end of the Analog Age, the end of the end of an era.
I’ve walked past this storefront of jumbled office machines [...]
One of the pleasures of strolling the streets of another city is the discovery of visual quirks native to that spot. Berlin is one of my favourite places to play this game. There are lots of examples in Germany’s densely layered Hauptstadt, and exhibit A can be seen just about everywhere — it’s the striking [...]
