With a long history of innovation and leadership in the commercial printing industry, Hemlock Printers has just launched an online version of their popular newsletter, Inklings. With news and updates from their plant floor, e-Inklings newsl [...]
Posted by: Mark Busse on Thursday, October 26th, 2006
Categories: Learning, News, Printing, Reading, Technology, Tips | No Comments »
Sometimes I never think to turn to places like Adobe for resources other than things related to the software of theirs we use, but I just came across their Design Center Think Tank filled with intelligent and thought provoking articles on t [...]
Posted by: Ben Garfinkel on Saturday, October 21st, 2006
Categories: Design, Inspiration, Reading, Technology | 1 Comment »
September 23 – 30 is Banned Books Week which recognizes those great works of literature that society for one reason or another has taken issue with. Catcher in the Rye, Ulysses, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, all of these works at [...]
Posted by: Kevin Broome on Thursday, September 14th, 2006
Categories: Reading | No Comments »
The inimitable McSweeneys pitches a few Mac Ad Ideas of their own. (via Coudal)
Posted by: Kevin Broome on Friday, September 8th, 2006
Categories: Advertising, Fun, Pop Culture, Reading | No Comments »
Answering an email has become much like taking a breath for many people, in the process of firing them off, they end up losing a lot of coherency in spelling/punctuation/grammar regardless of spell check (especially if you’re Mark). S [...]
Posted by: todd smith on Friday, July 7th, 2006
Categories: Reading | No Comments »
After a decade of reading online that he collects meteorites Douglas Coupland, thought about it and realized, ‘that’s not actually a bad idea.’ So now he really does collect meteorites, going so far as to include them in a [...]
Posted by: Steph Tekano on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006
Categories: Reading | No Comments »
It is this topic of life's darker edges that seemed to continue to be addressed over the course of the two hour discussion last night that was being recorded for an upcoming episode of North By Northwest, hosted by Sheryl MacKay and Georgia Straight's John Burns for CBC Radio Studio One's Book Club.
Vancouver, as much as we wish to ignore it, has a rather notorious underbelly - and not just the open and festering wound exposed on the Downtown Eastside. As Coupland pointed out, we don't really make all that much here aside from pushing a few pixels around on a screen and some high-end real estate. And yet, no one asks a lot of questions about where all the money is coming from; instead we remain complacent, like a good mafia wife. "We are living in a unique place, at a unique time" Coupland stated. That is one of the main reasons that he based his latest novel J-Pod here. (Well, that and the fact that he was feeling too lazy to travel).
So it should come as no surprise to anyone that the discussion tonight veered onto such topics as "where is the best place to dump a dead body" It was in relation to the passage he read in which the main character's mother kills a biker who tried to extort her for a share of her basement grow op. But Coupland is visibly pleased to be sitting up in front of us, relating his experiences during the research phase of driving around Vancouver looking for the perfect place to get rid of a corpse. From the novel:
It's strange how everything in the world changes the moment your focus becomes extremely specific. Hmmmm....is that a good place to bury a body? No, soil's too thin.
Mom suggested Stanley Park, on the edge of downtown. "If there was ever a place to dump a body, the park is it. At this point in history, there are probably more bones there than soil."
His choice of reading, he told us, was inspired by a report on NEWS1130 of three grow ops exploding out in New Westminster earlier in the day. "This is the only place in the world that they don't have to explain the term 'grow op' on the news" he wryly observed. And then, in the same way that he had done at the last reading I had attended, he stumbled over an explanation in the attempts to set up the scene of the selected passage, loose thoughts trailing after one another with starts and pauses until suddenly it all seemed to gracefully take flight and you realized that he was reading.
There were a lot of those last night, trailing loose thoughts and quirky starts and pauses, as Coupland took questions from the audience about his take on programmers, micro-autism, the Google phenomenon and our divorce from history. This is the first time in the world that we have nothing to look back on and learn from, he told us. "History cannot help us anymore. We must begin fresh and figure it out as we go". Which is exciting, in my opinion, and optimistic. And it ultimately ends this entry ..on a positive note.
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Douglas Coupland doesn’t want to end the Book Club meeting on a positive note. They always end upbeat he explains. For once, he wants things to end darkly. “Doomed. We are all doomed.” He throws this out there as his final [...]
Posted by: Kevin Broome on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006
Categories: Events, Pop Culture, Reading, Vancouver, We love | 1 Comment »
The Field-Tested Books project is our version of the Heisenberg principle: reading a certain book in a certain place uniquely affects a person’s experience with both. The writing you’ll find here is grounded in that idea. You wo [...]
Posted by: Kevin Broome on Friday, June 9th, 2006
Categories: Industrial Brand, Reading, Travel | No Comments »
Designers don’t have many advocates as enthusiastic and highly-placed as Bruce Nussbaum. An assistant managing editor at Business Week, he’s spearheaded the magazine’s coverage of design and innovation for years, and has b [...]
Posted by: Mark Busse on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006
Categories: Design, News, Reading | 1 Comment »
A veritable tasting menu of literary outtakes from his collected works of articles, stories and misadventures, Bourdain's candid gastronomic exposés and self-deprecating style makes each short chapter easy to digest and fun to read. To read Nasty Bits is much like sharing a meal of spicy tapas with an old friend who just returned from a year of traveling. Good one Tony.
For those lucky enough to live here in Vancouver, BC, Chef Bourdain will be autographing books after the taping of CBC Radio's next episode of Studio One Book Club at the historic Yale Hotel on Granville this coming Sunday, June 11th, 2006. The event, co-sponsored by CBC Radio One, The Georgia Straight, The Vancouver Writers Festival, and Barbara-Jo's Books to Cooks is sold out, but check the website for upcoming events.
UPDATE: I wrote a follow up review of the event on our other food-related site, Foodists.ca.
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You know how much I love good food. I also love a good read. Nobody combines both like Anthony Bourdain. The infamous chef, author and television host – and personal hero of mine – has once again outdone himself, this time servi [...]
Posted by: Mark Busse on Tuesday, June 6th, 2006
Categories: Events, Food, Inspiration, Reading, We love | No Comments »
I like to read the “I saw you” section of the paper. Not because I’m hoping to be some stranger’s muse, but it feeds an aspect of the voyeur in me that also loves the interesting snippits gleaned from overheard conve [...]
Posted by: Ben Garfinkel on Wednesday, May 24th, 2006
Categories: Inspiration, Pop Culture, Reading | No Comments »
I would have thought Douglas Coupland to be a Mac user… Check out the website for his new book jPod, to be released May 15th. Also, If you are in Vancouver check out The Futura Bold Collective’s exhibit The Vancouver Show at 810 [...]
Posted by: Steph Tekano on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006
Categories: Art, Reading, Websites | No Comments »
Our buddy Eric over at IdeasOnIdeas.com has put into words what I’ve been trying to communicate to students for years. Effective design of any sort is borne of “messing about”, sketching and thoughtful writing. Being able [...]
Posted by: Mark Busse on Thursday, March 30th, 2006
Categories: Design, Reading, Tips | No Comments »
There’s a new design magazine in Canada called Design Edge that just launched in February with up-to-the-minute news, a national job board, events calendar, contests, links and resources. Its companion e-mail bulletin is published eve [...]
Posted by: Mark Busse on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006
Categories: Design, Learning, Reading | No Comments »
Since October, The Times and Canongate Books have been running an international call for submissions to illustrate Yann Martel’s brilliant Booker-prizewinning novel, Life of Pi. The entries have now been narrowed down to 15 shortliste [...]
Posted by: Kevin Broome on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006
Categories: Art, Reading | 2 Comments »
