Words Seem Out Of Place

You can read the following article at Sequart , but I wanted to archive it here also. Punk rock records spoke to me like few others ever had, and they've been an integral part of my life since my late teens. The music also reminds me of people I met along the way who loaned me their old beat up copy of 1969: The Velvet Underground Live or extolled the virtues of Television's Marquee Moon . The music of Patti Smith, Lou Reed, the New York Dolls, and Iggy Pop, among others, also inspired me to question authority—and truth be told, distrust it—and to live by certain principles. As a Gen Xer, this was already baked into my genetics, of course, but music, art, and literature inspired by a punk ethos just further cemented my approach. Plus there was the aesthetic of punk rock, the art and design of it all. When I do design work, I constantly remind myself to use clean lines and bold yet readable typefaces, to remove any and all elements that are extraneous and don't add a...

David Bowie passed away on Sunday January 10. He was only 69. Fuck cancer, seriously. It's a long shadow that hovers over us all, constantly encroaching into our lives, taking people from us that we'll never have another drink with or talk to about our day again, or people we don't actually know like Bowie, but whose music impacted our lives. I just want to set down a few words about a musician I loved, whose music has soundtracked so much of my life. When I heard the news--Elizabeth saw it online after we got up and before we went into the get the kids up and ready for the day--I was gobsmacked. She told me while we were feeding the babies and I just couldn't come up with the words. I just kept repeating "Wow" and "Damn." It wasn't sinking in. Once we were eating our breakfast later, I found a performance of "Five Years" online and played that in tribute to the man, the myth, the legend. When I started thinking about Bowie songs,...