Inspiration, Imagination, Discipline

. "...or go to the ocean. And drink coffee."

Last night my mom, Emily and I went to see Patti Smith play a few songs and read from her new memoir Just Kids. It was great, the most inspiring thing I have witnessed for a long time. I'm too swamped to write much about it right now but just wanted to mention it, and to post a link to a very good recent interview with her on Fresh Air.

Photo by Angelo Cricchi from pattismith.net

Do You Remember

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NPR has a great interactive feature on their website right now remembering musicians who died this year including, among others, Estelle Bennett (pictured above at far right) of the Ronettes, and Joe Cuba, the king of Latin Boogaloo, pictured below.

I also really enjoyed a story I heard on NPR in the car yesterday, driving back from Idaho, about a man in Monroe GA who has been clipping obituaries from the newspaper and pasting them into scrapbooks for over 50 years. They haven't posted the audio yet but you can click here for the story and hopefully they'll post it soon.

Image of the Day

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There was an interesting interview on KUOW this morning with Vashon Islander Brad Matsen, author of The Sea King, a new book which explores the life of Jacques Cousteau. Among other interesting facts, I learned that Cousteau's ship Calypso (pictured above), built in Ballard as a WWII minesweeper and converted after the war for use as a ferry in Malta, was purchased in 1950 for Cousteau's use by Loel Guinness, heir to the beer fortune. Cousteau's wife and partner Simone sold her jewelry to finance the cost of fixing and fueling it up, and in 1952, they set out with their crew to explore the Red Sea. You can set out to listen to the podcast here.

While we're at it, here's a concept drawing for Calypso 2:

Pretty cool.

Police Scanner

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So I don't know if everyone outside of Seattle knows this, but within Seattle at the moment there is a manhunt going on for Maurice Clemmons, the suspect in the assassination of four police officers in Tacoma this past weekend – and you can listen to the whole thing on local TV station KOMO's live feed of the police scanner. I'm not gonna make a habit of doing this or anything – I'm not going to be that guy – but it's intense. I hope they get him soon.

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[update – they got him]

7 Things

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Portfolio, a new Steidl-produced printing of Robert Frank's photography portfolio at the time he moved from Switzerland to the US, in 1947, at the age of 23. Visit steidlville to view images.

Rainydawg Radio, an underground radio station from the University of Washington. Production value very low but I was listening in my office all last night and I don't think they played a single bad song. Old and new stuff, a big variety. You can listen online – click here.

Kimberly Ovitz PF2010. Very minimal and modern, kind of one idea done a bunch of different ways. I think Emily would like this stuff, but she's under 7 million schoolbooks right now, so I'm posting it for her. Hi Em.

Wine box floor boards. The chicness...the chicness.

My favorite Land Rover, featured in a New York Times article about Land Rovers a few years back. I know, I know... I've just been thinking about these a lot lately.

Irving Penn's first Vogue cover, October 1943. Beautiful colors, composition, and typography.

I can't remember where this came from but I love it

Where Am I

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Lordy Rodriguez Westward

Leo Saul Berk was on KUOW's Weekday this morning with a few other art peeps, talking about maps. As a lover of maps who probably only did not become a cartographer because I'm really bad at math and frightened of science, I found this delightful.

Joyce Kozloff Walk-In Globe (the maps inside are Kozloff's paintings of places the USA has bombed)

Click here to download the podcast.
Warning: if you don't love maps, you will think it's boring.

Dark Side of the Sun

. I've heard Larry Mizell Jr. play various cuts by local hip-hop outfit Dark Time Sunshine a few times on KEXP and it catches my ear each time. The beat on this one is especially solid:

Dark Time Sunshine The Wrong Kids mp3

The rest of their densely layered debut album, Believeyoume, falls somewhere between Company Flow and left of there (I can't give specifics, my eyes glaze over when people mention stuff like Aesop Rock and Jedi Mind Tricks) but it has that certain I-don't-know-what that makes it a good album. Download the whole thing (plus coveted instrumentals) for free at fakefourinc.com.

Cities Need To Act Like Cities

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First & Columbia, Downtown Seattle, 1901 [via Vintage Seattle]

This morning on KUOW, Weekday featured a 20-minute convo with Bruce Katz, the VP and founding director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, which "seeks to redefine the challenges facing cities and metropolitan areas by researching major demographic, market, development and governance trends." Katz's comments regarding Seattle – the 19th largest city in the country and growing quickly – are particularly interesting. Here's one:

You just built this transit system...I think what now has to happen is you need to change the land use and the zoning along that corridor so you really can achieve the potential, the benefit, of having a world-class transit system.

Listen to the podcast at KUOW.org (skip ahead to 4:35 if you've already donated to public radio and don't want to hear the seemingly endless fundraising chatter).

Katz is also speaking at 6:30 this evening at the University of Washington's Kane Hall. Read one of his recent speeches, at University of Minnesota, here.

TBD

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I've been listening to a radio show called Too Beautiful To Live since it started up in early 2008. I always look forward to it and at this point it almost feels like the host (Luke Burbank), the producer (Jen Andrews), and the sound engineer (Sean DeTore) are a part of our family. Well, I'm happy to announce that today TBTL gets even better. Having been dropped by its radio station (KIRO, where the show always seemed like a boozy cousin Ray-Ray to the station's other programs), Too Beautiful To Live is defying its name and switching into DIY-podcast mode. They're actually broadcasting right now, as I type.

Listen live every day at 11:30AM, or download the podcasts, at TBTL.net.

Grow Up

The second oldest known photo of Seattle, dated 1869 – from Pioneer Square at Yesler's Wharf, looking North.

Anyone interested in the past and future of growth of the Seattle area should check out this KUOW podcast of an hour-long "debate" between Knute Berger and Timothy Egan. I deploy the rabbit ears on the word debate because Berger, Egan, and the moderator (Crosscut editor David Brewster) spend way too much time reminding listeners that they're all friends, and not enough time actually debating; with something like one million people expected to move here in the next twenty years, the topic deserves much more heat than they give it. Still, it's a start, and they trade a lot of interesting observations on the Northwest. Click here to listen.

Photo via Vintage Seattle, courtesy of the Washington State Historical Society.

TBTL

Here's a t-shirt design I did for former NPR host Luke Burbank's new radio show in Seattle, Too Beautiful to Live. (You can listen to the show by going to the audio archives section of their site.)