My latest Smashing Magazine rant is up: A Social History of Jamaican Album Covers. The intention was to write something that’s enjoyable if you’re a fan of the music, interesting if you’re not a fan, and validating if you hate the music. Accordingly, my favorite twitter comment so far was when somebody wrote, “This looked [...]

Speaking of Congolese mambo… here’s Matthew Wilder! A few comments on this: 00:01-00:17: Mystifying disparity between the number of people on stage doing things versus the overall quietness of sound. There seem to be 95 people dancing, playing various keytars and instruments and pumping out Matthew Wilder’s unique blend of white reggae… and yet I [...]

My latest time-consuming shenanigan has been to organize a show of student work for an exhibition called Rock-A-Mambo. The work comes out of an assignment called ‘Culture & Cliché’ that I gave to eight successive semesters of bewildered students for my Ideas Generation class. Basically, students are tasked with designing a CD cover (although I’m [...]

There are many annoyingly two-horse aspects to life in Prague. You can’t get a half-decent burrito here, for starters. People don’t throw parties with American red cups. (In fact, Czech people aren’t really much into throwing parties at all. I’ve been to three proper house parties in Prague and one of them was my own. [...]

The Guardian and several other news outlets have – predictably, yet brilliantly – had ‘Who’s line is it?’ contests where you have to guess whether a given quote was uttered by Charlie Sheen or Muammar Gaddafi. I tried this one and got only 6 of 10 right. Shortly, however, my mind began to wander and [...]

The discourse highlight of my Twitter dabbling so far (and may I never write ‘Twitter dabbling’ ever again) happened in the wake of the Superbowl halftime show, when somebody wrote: Next year, Celine Dion, Justin Bieber, Nickelback and Maroon 5 to perform at Halftime of Super Bowl. Only way it could be worse. This reminded [...]

There’s a third article for Smashing Magazine that I’m currently doing research on and kind of poking around and mulling over. Just to be clear: the first article was on type– that one’s done; the second one is the thing about the unicorns– that one’s almost done. This third one is about typography and design [...]

A running diary of the Hooters’ contemptible ‘And We Danced’ video: [Note: if you're looking this and trying to decide whether or not you want to read on, I suggest scrolling down and clicking on the second video clip-- it's the best part.] 00:07-00:14: Opening scenes. A hazy vision of rural, 1950s heartland America, a [...]

Semi-loyal reader KG recently saved me from the terrifying drought in good new music releases by turning me onto Scratch Radio, a station that streams nonstop rocksteady and dub. One of my stock tiresome soapbox rants is the position that Jamaican music is the most unfairly maligned and buttonholed genre or nationality of music (next [...]