Mostly been listening to Station to Station on loop this week (a great standing desk album, should you need one), so productivity went out the window as I got distracted by the incredible work of Steve Schapiro, one of the all-time great “oh he shot that … and that … and that?” photographers.
“Don’t wish you could be a famous photographer. If you do, you will fail” – Martin Parr joins WePresent’s excellent pile of manifestos.
All Tomorrow’s Pencils – in which Spencer Tweedy reviews the stationery stores he visited on tour. My favourite bit is the comment from his dad (Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy):
“Remembering one of the only real complaints I ever heard from your teachers growing up, I’d say ‘drummers’ love writing utensils because pencils double as tappity tap tap tapping drum mallets and pens can clicky click click like maracas. In fact they’re probably the first ‘drum sticks’ a future drummer ever holds. Which comes first? The drummer or the innocent child with a maddening urge to tap out a paradiddle with a pencil on a trapper keeper?”
As a relentless desk-drummer and stationery fetishist myself, yep, this all adds up.
Thoroughly enjoying Michigan-based book designer Nathaniel Roy’s A Book Designer’s Notebook, a regular peek behind the curtain of the craft.
Recent Letterboxding, including scattered thoughts on Alien: Romulus and a slog through the Fantastic Beasts films, equal parts cheekbones, coats and gibberish.
Got a little bit lost in Kottke’s posts about maps. I particularly like Andrew DeGraff’s maps of cinematic paths, although the Fury Road one does remind me that the two recent Mad Max movies frustratingly reduced the endless expanse of the apocalypse to an area about the size of the Isle of Wight.
Weird little animations from photographer Jack Davison.
Nolen Royalty (great name) made a website that simply had one million checkboxes and unwittingly created a surprisingly complex canvas for hexadecimal-savvy teens. Love this sort of thing – the internet needs more purpose-less sandboxes like this cough cough cough bring back myspace.
If you’re going to be outed as a serial killer with a trophy wall of decapitated heads in your basement, it might as well be through the medium of LEGO.
The Belvédère du Rayon Vert, a 1920s hotel that teeters above the railway tracks in the southern French town of Cerbère. Stunning. Desperately needs to be covered in neon and rain and plonked into a cyberpunk movie of some sort
SPINNING NEWSPAPER INJURES PRINTER and other Simpsons headlines.
This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.
Header photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash.