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kaizen and fight or flight

Via 43Folders (Merlin, glad to see you back stringing together more than 140 characters at a time!), this little snippet in a NYTimes piece from M.J. Ryan on the benefits of practicing kaizen...

Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain. ... If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.

Usually when I quote things like this I say "go read the rest." But this time, not so much. That's basically the best graf in the piece. (Look, I've just saved you time! Now go outside and enjoy the sunshine for a few minutes.)

rauschenberg on erased de kooning drawing

I went looking for a bit of Rauschenberg on YouTube this morning, and came across this quick four and a half minute piece on one of my favorites of his, the Erased de Kooning Drawing, from 1953.

I love this bit, about a minute and a half in...

"I kept making drawings myself and erasing them. And that just looked like an erased Rauschenberg. You know, it was nothing. So I figured out that it had to begin as art. So it was going to be a De Kooning. It was going to be an 'important' piece. You see how ridculously you have to think, in order to make this work?"

Michael Kimmelman's obit in the New York Times also captures this great Rauschenberg quote:

"I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly," he once said, "because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable."

everything you hear is a decision

Andrew Bird has a great post in the Times today about the process of recording music. It's a great look into the thousands of little decisions that go into making a great record...

We discuss a lot of things to help us get the songs just right — like not hitting cymbals because the crashes can be "cheap thrills." Instead we favored the dark, walloping sound of the toms. Often times the choice becomes: Do you give the song what it wants? Or do you go against its demands? "Oh No" seemed to be asking for a 1970s Jackson Brown or Fleetwood Mac type of dead snare drum sound. That "everything’s gonna be just fine" sort of beat. The pitfall of approaching it like this is that your song can get hijacked by someone else’s record collection. I personally feel that the world has had its fill of 70s light rock. So we’re forced to be more creative.

The post is a great reminder that everything you hear that comes out of a studio is the result of thousands of little decisions that build on top of one another. And that when the technology affords you the ability to do anything you want, you need a strong vision and sense of purpose to guide what you're doing.

next up, our own executive chef

Join Six Apart and you too can get your hair cut by co-founder Mena Trott.

i miss my keyboard shortcuts

There's very little motivation for Microsoft to do this, but oh how much would I love to have all the keyboard shortcuts for menu and dialog navigation be available in Excel 2008 for the Mac that were available in Office for Windows? Being forced to mouse around in Excel to do simple things like insert a row is absolutely infuriating, when in pre-switch times it would be a split second alt-I-R away. Not having these available is turning my trust swiss army knife of business computing into a dull, oversized butter knife.

(Oh, and have I told you lately that when I start a band it will be called Alabaster Whine? Wanna join? I'm looking for a bass player.)

pandering just doesn't describe it

I'm sure this is linked all over the place today, but the lede of Friedman's column in the Times on the "gas tax vacation" is worth quoting at length.

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

Dear lexipeople -- I think we need a stronger word than "pandering" to describe what politicians do with absurd and ridiculously shortsighted proposals like this. I'm imagining something that combines themes of prostitution, crack addiction and, say, pant suits.

chefs and kitchen design

Metropolis has a great piece where some of the country's best chefs -- including Alice Waters, Grant Achatz and Wylie Dufresne -- talk about their kitchens. Here's a snippet from Waters on Chez Panisse...

Architects really need to think about all the waste a restaurant creates. That relates completely to an important part of the restaurant -- welcoming the suppliers into the kitchen. I'm obsessed with the fact that the back of the house has to be as beautiful as the front.

And Achatz on the process of designing the Alinea kitchen...

When I had the opportunity to build my own kitchen, I thought, Hey, let's wipe our heads clean of conventional kitchen design. I'd worked at the French Laundry, Charlie Trotter's, Trio, so of course I grew up in kitchens, and it shocked me that they were all kind of designed the same. Everyone followed each other.

I felt like nobody really looked at the food, which was a great irony of kitchen design. No one really looked at the style of cooking they were going to do and designed the kitchen around that. We were like, "Let's really look at the food and decide, based on the style of cooking, what we need. What do we need as far as equipment? What do we need as far as space?"

context-free words...

...offered for no particular reason, other than they just crossed the transom of attention for some odd reason.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Forster, of course, from Howard's End. Advice so powerful that it probably doesn't even belong in the advice category but should instead be filed under "ignore at your own peril."

upside down and backwards

A hallway at the San Francisco Tennis Club has a bunch of early photographs of San Francisco, including this one (snapped with my iPhone; apologies for the perspective and quality) of the west side of The Embarcadero in 1913.

What I love about this photo (and it's probably hard to see here) is the billboard for Owl Cigars, with the reversed mirror image type. When you quickly walk by the photo of the billboard you do a double take, and I spent a few minutes confirming that this wasn't some weird artifact of the photo itself. (The photo didn't appear to be doctored at all.) The effect of this as a massive billboard must have been something. I'm no student of outdoor advertising, but while I can definitely remember plenty of instances of seeing trompe-l'oeil effects in billboards, I don't think I've seen something as "simply stunning" in a long time.

My colleague Sean Williford pointed out that The Standard Hotels does something related with their logo, turning their simple typeface upside down.

I love both of these -- simple twists that force the casual observer to stop, spend a bit more time processing what they're seeing and become memorable because of their simplicity. That said, if everyone started flipping their type around, everyday life would be more than a bit annoying.

Who else has done this kind of thing well?

My coworkers have great toys

Best Lego car ever, originally uploaded by msippey.

Combining the two huge passions of my childhood, Speed Racer and Legos. It's like a little slice of heaven.