Love After Love
One CommentI read this poem in a book about coping with depression:
Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Derek Walcott
Favorites 2008: Björk
•Volta is not my favorite Björk album (I have to admit to being still somewhat secretly obsessed with Vespertine), but this single is fantastic. The amazing, 3D video (shown here in 2D) makes it even better.
She’s a weird creature, that Björk.
Favorites 2008: Vivian Girls
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Do you know why I love the song “Where Do You Run To” by Vivian Girls? And why I love Vivian Girls, in general? Because they remind me of a bunch of my favorite bands, favorite bands that joyfully blasted out of my headphones when I was a punky little teenager, sitting on the school bus: the Frumpies, Huggy Bear, and Tiger Trap. They also dig into some nice, but crunchy, Beach Boys-like harmonies, in this song in particular. Perfection.
Where Do You Run To - Vivian Girls
Photo by Flickr user Sam?
Favorites 2008: MGMT
•
I will admit this much: my disengagement from pop culture trends is such that I didn’t even hear this song until about a month ago, when I was in New York, and I saw the video on the lo-fi, much beloved (and much missed) public access television show, “New York Noise.”
Dang, this is one catchy song! I exclaimed at the television, while rainbows and lasers shot out of the television screen, and snowflakes rained down on the shirtless, smooth-chested, grungy young elf-punk there. Soon, I found myself jumping up and down with child-like abandon on the couch. MGMT has disabled embedding of their videos at YouTube, so I’ll just link to it: Time to Pretend.
The song has the kind of overmodulated, crashing drums, and phoenix-from-the-ashes, post-apocalyptic, joyous abandon that I associate most closely with New York and Brooklyn in those months after 9/11. (Even though what I was listening then to was, admittedly, more like The Strokes.) And although I can’t say I live adhering firmly to the advice of this song, I can still appreciate it, and I can see how stadiums full of kids might, too, one day:
This is our decision, to live fast and die young.
We’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun.
Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do –
Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute?
Photo by Flickr user Pupkin
Scrolling
•Scrolling came up in a conversation I was having with a client the other day.
“No scrolling,” the client said. “We hate scrolling. Scrolling is for jerks.”
Okay, maybe I’m paraphrasing.
True, no one likes to scroll all the live-long day. But what the heck is wrong with a little bit of scrolling? (Can I tell you a secret? Yes? Sometimes, I even click the “Show printable version” button on long articles in the Times, then resize my browser, so that I don’t have to click from page to page. Ah, sweet, sweet scrolling.)
Of course, it’s part of my job to make my clients happy, and in this case the no-scrolling mandate was a reasonable design objective. Nevertheless, I was delighted when I came across the article, The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard, at Information Architects Japan.
Among other so-simple-they’re-often-overlooked web design mandates, they offer this wonderful bit of genius, one I wish I had at my disposal the other day, during the conversation with my client:
Don’t tell us scrolling is bad
Because then all websites are bad. There is nothing wrong with scrolling. Nothing at all. Just as there is nothing wrong with flipping pages in books.
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