Love & Work
A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.
In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times Ezra Klein made a statement that resonated with me: "Great bookstores and libraries still provide something the digital world cannot: a place not just to buy or borrow books but to be among them." Quite coincidentally this appreciation of being amongst books emerged more than once in this week's letter.
Happy Friday.
Collecting
The rock star "cart shark"
"In addition to his musical legacy Tom Verlaine (who died on January 28) was a fixture in a small corner of the New York book world....If you swung by the carts that line the Strand’s exterior, where all the books cost $1-5, odds were good that you’d run into Verlaine, searching for grails that had been shunted out to the street. 'Pre-COVID? He was there every day. For at least an hour or so,' said Peter Calderon, a Strand employee of more than 15 years. A former employee, Alice Richardson, described him as most employees remember him: 'He’d be quietly browsing the dollar carts at night, smoking in an overcoat.'
"Strand and Verlaine had a long history. He was one of the store’s most famous alumni, along with (Patti) Smith, fellow Television founder Richard Hell, and Sam Shepard. When the store’s owner Fred Bass died in 2018, Verlaine eulogized him for the New York Times. But his gig in the shipping department was just a blip compared to his decades-long tenure as unofficial Carts Captain.
“'Everyone who worked there knew he was a regular,' said Christopher Pirsos, another former bookseller. 'I don’t think he ever bought a book from inside. He almost exclusively bought cart books.'” - Colin Groundwater
Article: Tom Verlaine was the Strand’s Best Customer
Learning
“Roget's Thesaurus is an oddball philosophy of language masquerading as a reference book.”
"When you go to the library, the books are not arranged in alphabetical order — they’re organized topically. In order to find a book in my local library, you have to look up the book in the catalog, note the Dewey Decimal Number, then find it on the shelf. The beauty of this system, and a major argument for physical browsing collections, is that when you find the book on the shelf, it will be surrounded by books on the similar subject. You may go looking for one particular book and while browsing you might find a better book or the book you didn’t even know you were looking for. This is the way a thesaurus is supposed to work." - Austin Kleon
Article: A Library of Words
How We Live
Like minds do think alike.
Image by Terrance Heath via CC
"While previous theories posited that political polarization results from selective consumption (and over-consumption) of news and social media, a team led by researchers at Brown University hypothesized that polarization may start even earlier.
"The new study appears in Science Advances.
"Individuals who share an ideology have more similar neural fingerprints of political words, experience greater neural synchrony when engaging with political content, and their brains sequentially segment new information into the same units of meaning." - Corrie Pikul-Brown
Article: People Who Share Ideology Have Similar ‘Neural Fingerprints’
Culture
Can we ever understand the feelings of people who are different from ourselves?
"Can we ever understand the feelings of people who are different from ourselves? Psychologists have long sought answers by looking inside our bodies and minds. But what if those are the wrong places to examine? In Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions, Batja Mesquita explains that feelings come from the contexts we live in and the people we live with. Acknowledging the cultural origins and effects of emotions can help us see others’ priorities and actions in new ways." - Caitlin Zaloom
Author Interview: “It Is Not How You Feel”: Batja Mesquita On How Different Cultures Experience Emotions
Commerce, How We Live
Why do people buy things they "don't need"? And why should we care?
“Venetian Fair" shop with two figures, Ludwigsburg Porcelain Manufactory, ca. 1765. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In 2012 Virginia Postrel gave this speech as an after-dinner keynote to the annual conference of the Atlas Network, an international organization of free-market policy-oriented think tanks. She's just posted the transcript on her Substack because the popularity of her WSJ article on shopping and equality got her thinking of turning the ideas into a book, and maybe even an institute.
"Do we really want to leave thinking about demand—the half of the market that accounts for most of our everyday economic experience, and certainly for most of the variety of our everyday economic experience—to the Marxists, the Freudians, and the status-obsessed? To people who have contempt for markets and for what Deirdre McCloskey in her important recent book calls 'bourgeois dignity'?
"Just because thinking about why people buy what they buy means thinking about culture and psychology rather than the role of the state doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant to freedom.
"The good news is that there is a significant group of scholars who do understand that shopping has something to do with freedom.
"They are feminists." - Virginia Postural
Article: Taking Shopping Seriously
Etiquette
Updated rules on how to tip, text, ghost, host and generally exist in polite society today
"The old conventions are out (we don’t whisper the word cancer or let women off the elevator first anymore, for starters). The venues in which we can make fools of ourselves (group chats, Grindr messages, Slack rooms public and private) are multiplying, and each has its own rules of conduct. And everyone’s just kind of rusty. Our social graces have atrophied.
"We wanted to help. So we started with the problems — not the obvious stuff, like whether it’s okay to wear a backpack on the subway or talk loudly on speakerphone in a restaurant (you know the answers there). We asked people instead what specific kinds of interactions or situations really made them anxious, afraid, uncertain, ashamed. From there, we created rigid, but not entirely inflexible, rules." - Editors of The Cut, New York Magazine
Article: Do You Know How to Behave? Are You Sure?
Advertising, Graphic Design
A new exhibition at Manhattan’s Center for Italian Modern Art looks at the cross-pollination between avant-garde art and commercial posters in post-WWII Italy.
 
"In 1926, Italian Futurist painter Fortunato Depero debuted “Squisito al selz” at the 15th Venice Biennial. The painting advertised Campari, a popular Italian aperitif, and belonged to a genre Depero called quadro pubblicitario or “advertising painting.” Depero’s Biennial presentation was an offshoot of a half-decade collaboration between the artist and the brand; in 1924, he was put in charge of the company’s advertising brand and campaigns, and produced many materials for them in his signature style.
"This fine art crossover of Depero’s commercial art triggered a movement within avant-garde Italian art that lasted a solid 30 years, through Italy’s economic boom following World War II. This blurring of influences between experimental art and advertising is the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York." - Sarah Rose Sharp
Article: Italy’s Commercial Posters Are Works of Fine Art
One-liners
Article: What Causes Déjà Vu?
Article: This Oslo Office Building Is Made of 80 Percent Upcycled Building Materials
Article: Author Helen Gardner Has Given Up on Happiness in Favor of "Small, Random Stabs of Extreme Interestingness".
Article: High Demand for Neighborhoods That Don’t Require a Car Has Made Many Increasingly Unaffordable.
Article: Nestle To Pilot New Returnable, Refillable Packaging In Germany
Playlist
Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith, September 1974 (Pierre Schermann/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images)
The day after Tom Verlaine died Patti Smith posted this on her blog:
"On Saturday (January 28) at 2:39 in the morning we lost Tom Verlaine. Words cannot express my sorrow for the loss nor the joy for having known him. All who loved his music may wish to play his records. I am offering Break it Up. It’s the song that Tom and I composed for Horses in 1975. The lyrics reflect a dream I had of the death and imagined resurrection of Jim Morrison. Tom’s uniquely beautiful and expressive guitar work can be heard throughout."
Blog Post: Remembering Tom
A couple days later she wrote a longer remembrance in The New Yorker:
"(On) Easter night, April 14, 1974. Lenny Kaye and I took a rare taxi ride from the Ziegfeld Theatre after seeing the première of 'Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones,' straight down to the Bowery to see a new band called Television.
"The club was CBGB. There were only a handful of people present, but Lenny and I were immediately taken with it, with its pool table and narrow bar and low stage. What we saw that night was kin, our future, a perfect merging of poetry and rock and roll. As I watched Tom play, I thought, Had I been a boy, I would’ve been him."
Article: He Was Tom Verlaine
The same day, January 30, guitarist Chris Forsyth posted a long-form article that articulates Verlaine's contribution through the ears of a musician and musicologist:
"The early records of bands such as U2 and REM are unfathomable without Verlaine’s influence – Television basically invented the Athens band’s IRS years in a single song, Days from 1978’s Adventure – and a whole slew of artists, including Patti Smith, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Church, Siouxsie and the Banshees and many more took Verlaine’s innovations to a wider audience. In short, the arc of what was once called punk, then new wave, then college rock, then alternative rock, then most recently indie rock can be traced, musically and aesthetically, directly to Verlaine’s fretboard. Even the popularity of arguably the most iconic and ubiquitous guitars of the last 30 years – the Fender Jazzmaster and Fender Jaguar – was kicked off by Verlaine’s prominent use of models that were unfashionable at the time."
Article: Tom Verlaine: a Guitar Antihero Whose Sensibility Was More Classical Than Clapton
I made a mix-tape of music that he wrote, produced and/or performed. Some of his later work is not available on streaming platforms, so be sure to search for him on YouTube too. I am moved by his cover of Bill Evans's Peace Piece, the last cut on his 2006 album Songs and Other Things. And Tom Verlaine and Kronos Quartet were a match made in heaven: Spiritual.
This is the fourth post in my new weekly series of mix-tapes, Big Sounds from a Small Planet.
Mix-Tape: He Was Tom Verlaine
Image of the Week
The Image of the Week is from a photo essay called ABZGRAM, by Karolina Wojtas.
"This series explores a question we don’t often ask: is education always necessary? Would a different, more experimental way of education be better for our children? Wojtas believes rules are not always the most important aspect when it comes to running a school. It is important for students to have outlets in their learning environments to experiment and do things that intrigue them. There is opportunity for creativity in every school, if educators encourage students to do so." - Samantha Milowitz
Article: Karolina Wojtas's "ABZGRAM"
Artist's Web Presentation: karolieawojtas.com/abzgram
What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
If you get value from Love & Work, please pass it on.
|
