Substrate

Substrate

A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.

reflections updated

We are all of us kings now surrounded by devices whose only purpose is to prevent us from thinking about ourselves

Sometimes you read things that explain eloquently something you've felt but not been able to articulate. For example, this from Sam Kahn:

There was a point when the middle class... was more culturally aspirational. The heyday of this probably was Mortimer Adler’s great books program and the ubiquity of Encyclopedias Britannica and Great Books boxsets in middle class homes. It’s still discernible in, say, old Woody Allen movies where a major part of Allen’s neuroses is that he’s not measuring up to what he takes to be a European cosmopolitan ideal.

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reflections updated

Validation, recognition, and credentialing

So, I was "the reader" in question which prompted this post from my good friend Laura:

A reader pointed out that in my second assignment, I sort of waved off the question of “What does validation look like?” My protagonist was, to be fair, quite snarky in telling the professor what validation would look like. Thus, I am submitting this brief reflection for extra credit (or for full credit since I lost credit points by being dismissive of the question).

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notes

Design: what it feels like to be living now

At a 1962 conference at the Museum of Modern Art, conservative art critic Hilton Kramer denounced Pop Art as “indistinguishable from advertising art” because “Pop Art does not tell us what it feels like to be living through the present moment of civilization. Its social effect is simply to reconcile us to a world of commodities, banalities and vulgarities.” But perhaps the content of graphic design is exactly that: an evocation of “what it feels like to be living through the present moment of civilization,” with all its “commodities, banalities and vulgarities.” How else can we discuss the content of a typeface or why the typography of a surfing magazine suddenly becomes relevant? Or how a series of made-up or ‘self-initiated’ posters—already a medium of dubious functionality— can end up on the wall of a major design museum? Work must be saying something, which is different than being about something.

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reflections updated

To philosophise is to learn how to die

As I've grown older, I've realised that one of the joys of reading is not only to discover new books but to re-read and re-discover ones I've read before. Just as listening to a song when you're in love is different to when you're not, so (as I've commented before somewhere) reading a book at one age is different to reading one at another.

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