Meanwhile #012
Robert Macfarlane reflects on the wistful archetype of childhood adventure: the humble tree house.
“The trees become his house; he learns to sleep cupped by their branches and crooked in their boughs. He balances armchairs in their crowns, and he hides in their hollow trunks. He lays an ear to their bark, listening to the flow of sap, and the timbre of timber.”
Ben Kay reports from Inside The Writers Room With Mad Men panel.
“Interestingly, the tiny chat I had with Robert Towne involved me asking if he had really been one of the writers on Bonnie and Clyde. He told me he had. Is his name on the credits? No. Did he get paid? Yes. Did he get pee'd off and cry in the corner? No, he wrote Chinatown. Write Chinatown.”
“Ghost Army members walked into French taverns wearing counterfeit arm patches from other divisions. They'd talk loudly about fictitious exploits, figuring the lies would find their way back to the Nazis by way of local spies. Fred Fox, who'd produced baby food radio commercials during peacetime, championed these charades … he believed in more showmanship and less military. If you impersonate an infantry division, then you need someone posing as a general roaring up to the fake command post in a jeep. You're not supposed to impersonate high-ranking officers in the army, but Fox persuaded his superiors to go along with it.”
Fred A. Bernstein looks at how graphic designers interpret the built environment.
“Designers were amazed to read that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had paid Landor Associates $3.57 million for a new World Trade Center “identity”—but the client seems to have gotten its money’s worth. Landor’s logo somehow suggests the missing twin towers, their famous trident beams, the two memorial pools, the parallel shafts of the yearly “tribute in light,” the new skyscrapers that angle up toward 1 World Trade Center—as well as the W of World Trade Center and of Westfield, the operator of the center’s new mall. And it does all those things without seeming to try too hard. (If, as some designers have noted, it resembles a former Wired Magazine logo that hardly reduces its effectiveness.)”
Tony Brook talks to It's Nice That about the new, and justifiably enormous, Spin monograph.
“Every time I think about it this, pain starts to come in the centre of my forehead … I am not used to lugging around 20 years of Spin studio with me and thinking about it all the time, everywhere. That’s a different level of absorption. I think I have probably been a complete space cadet as far as everyone else is concerned for the past year and a half, because you kind of have to be.”
That is all.