Design: Healthier by design

A good slide show article from Slate - Healthier by design: A new charitable trust asks whether good architecture can help cancer patients.
Excerpt from the last slide:
"One lesson of Maggie's Centres is that architectural talent is too precious to be confined to cultural monuments and—in Lord Rogers' case—high-end office buildings. It's nice that art museums and corporations have great architecture, but it would be nicer—and much more valuable for most of us—if hospitals had it, too."

Books / Technology: Books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together

An excerpt from - Scan this book - from the NY Times Sunday magazine:

Search engines are transforming our culture because they harness the power of relationships, which is all links really are. There are about 100 billion Web pages, and each page holds, on average, 10 links. That's a trillion electrified connections coursing through the Web. This tangle of relationships is precisely what gives the Web its immense force. The static world of book knowledge is about to be transformed by the same elevation of relationships, as each page in a book discovers other pages and other books. Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together. The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can't see in a single, isolated book.

Kala Ghoda, Bombay. December 2005

Art: Theory is neat. Art is not.

A good excerpt from an artnet article - Learning on the Job - by Jerry Saltz. Found the link on the MAN ArtJournal blog.
To me, theory and positions are important, but they often lead to dogmatic thinking, obscure writing and rigid taste. Knowing where you're coming from means knowing what you like before you like it and hating what you hate before you hate it. This takes all the life out of art. Theory is about understanding. Art is about experience. Theory is neat. Art is not. My only position is to let the reader in on my feelings; try to write in straightforward, jargon-free language; not oversimplify or dumb down my responses; aim to have an idea, a judgment or a description in every sentence; not take too much for granted; explain how artists might be original or derivative and how they use techniques and materials; observe whether they're developing or standing still; provide context; and make judgments that hopefully amount to something more than just my opinion. To do this requires more than a position or a theory. It requires something else. This something else is what art, and criticism, are all about.

Art / Design: Choreography in public spaces

A great article from last Sunday's NY Times - At the New JetBlue Terminal, Passengers May Pirouette to Gate 3 - that was linked on a new blog I found - The Artful Manager.
Excerpt:
"The two men thought a lot about which public spaces in New York were well "choreographed" — that is, which shaped people's movement successfully — and which were not.
Mr. Rockwell had been pondering the general subject for decades. Even while a student at Syracuse University, he would stand on the roof of the architecture building and study the patterns carved in the snow by a sort of unspoken group will, patterns he would later connect to those described by the urbanist William H. Whyte in his classic studies of public space. What caused them? It wasn't just expedience, because the paths were often curved, where a straight line would be more direct. People moved as they did, Whyte believed, at least in part because they sought out pleasing experiences; they voted with their feet.
If Whyte was right, then why are so many public spaces so deeply unpleasurable — and sometimes almost dangerous — to move through? How could the exquisite choreography of Grand Central Terminal, with its powerful beams of natural light making what Mr. Rockwell called a "gateway inviting people into the city," coexist with the claustrophobic purgatory of Penn Station? (Penn Station seems to sneer and say, "Get lost!") How could the Grand Foyer at Radio City have the same function as the bewildering entry to the Marquis Theater on Broadway, which is cruel enough to suggest that the place was named for the Marquis de Sade?"

Quote: Writer vs. Author

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. -Colette, writer (1873-1954)

Kemps Corner, Bombay. December 2005

Music: New CD - Deerhoof

Deerhoof - Milkman: A third Deerhoof album to add to the shelf. Discordant and melodic. This one is loosely a concept album about the Milkman pictured on the cover.

Art: Criticism

"Critic's descriptions are lively. Critics write to be read, and they must capture their readers' attention and engage their readers' imaginations. Critics want to persuade their readers to see a work of art as they do. If they are enthused, they try to communicate their enthusiasm through their choice of descriptors and how they put them together in a sentence, a paragraph, and an article." --Terry Barrett, Criticizing Art: Understanding the Contemporary.

Music: New CDs - Talking Heads

I had the Stop Making Sense record when I was a teen. Today, as I was surfing around some music blogs I came across a reference to the Talking Heads. Hmm.. off kilter rhythms by an arty band. Off I went to Waterloo Records and got three cds:
More Songs About Buildings and Food
Remain in Light
Speaking in Tongues

Kabhi Khushi, Kabhi Ghum (Bollywood film title). Bombay December 2005

Quote: Reading as excercise

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. -Joseph Addison, essayist and poet (1672-1719)

Quote: Reading to write

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. -Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

Design: Is management of agreement still an issue

An article - The Abilene Paradox: Is the Managment of Agreement Still an Issue - linked from a David Pogue blog post.
Excerpt:
It is provocative to ask why people would actually speak against their own desires. What psychological reasons are there for doing something that is bound to result in both individual discomfort and in a lack of full and valid information for the group and our organizations? It is believed, according to Harvey, that people behave in this manner because they are afraid of the unknown. His hypothesis, quite different from others, is that we know what we are afraid of and that it generally has to do with loneliness, being left out, separation, and alienation. To avoid these, we will actually act against our best interests, hoping to be "part" of something, members of the whole.
We also tend to believe that any decision or action is better than no action at all. The problem is that there is incomplete information in individual minds. The need to act together, to be seen as cohesive, overrides the need to be explicit about group assumptions, desires, opinions, and even facts. Harvey calls this "action anxiety" and he believes it works in close conjunction with another piece of the paradox puzzle: negative fantasies. These are fantasies each individual harbors of what they think would happen if they actually spoke their minds and offered their desires or opinions to the group.

Quote: Thoughts lead to....

Giselle sent this: "I really liked this one young grasshopper…"

Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.--Frank Outlaw

Music: New CD - Gnarls Barkley

Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere: A good blend between old school R&B soul and hip hop. Short poppy songs - very enjoyable.

Zeitgeist: Talent is overated - Practice makes perfect

An article from Sunday's NY Times - A Star is Made - reviews research by Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University from his upcoming book Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.
An excerpt:

"...the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.
Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better."

"Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome. "

Books (Comics): Phantomville

A new graphic novel publisher in India (read about them in Time Out Mumbai): Phantomville

Books / Art: Michiko Kakutani & criticism

A good line from a Slate article about NY Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. Good words to remember for the art reviews I write.
As a student at Oxford, the future drama critic Kenneth Tynan got back a paper with this comment: "Keep a strict eye on eulogistic & dyslogistic adjectives—They shd diagnose (not merely blame) & distinguish (not merely praise.)"

Music: New CD - Built To Spill & The Knife

Built To Spill - You in Reverse: A bit more sprawling and less polished than their last one. Always enjoy Doug Martsch's distinctive vocals and crunchy lead guitar.
The Knife - Silent Shout: The yummiest sounding synths. The album peters off towards the end though.