Weeknotes 03: Rams, Asawa, Morris

Thought I’d pick back up the tradition of a wrapping up a week’s intake and/or happenings:

• Enjoyed Sophie Lovell’s “Dieter Rams: As Little Design As Possible,” a chunky volume pairing photographs of sharply designed products with essays about the designer’s career and influence. (Gary Hustwit’s 2018 documentary about him is also very good.) Rams’s credo: “We are economical with form and color, prioritize simple forms, avoid unnecessary complexity, do without ornament, instead [there is] order and clarification. We measure every detail against the question of whether it serves function and facilitates handling.”
  
• It was a treat to see the artist Ruth Asawa featured on the PBS NewsHour’s Friday evening program. My wife Tamara curated “Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work” for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2018, and it’s been special to see recognition for Asawa’s remarkable work (and life) continue to grow in the years since.

• I wrote recently about enjoying the NYT’s package on the 100 best movies of the 20th century. Highly recommend this episode of Wesley Morris’s Cannonball podcast, in which he and film curator Eric Hynes discuss the project and, toward the end, talk through their own picks with affection and humor. (Morris on one of his picks, “Magic Mike XXL”: “It’s basically ‘The Odyssey’ with g-strings.”)
  
• This NYT piece made me smile “He Read (at Least) 3,599 Books in His Lifetime. Now Anyone Can See His List.” Like the subject, my own father‘s been doing this for at least 50 years. His habit inspired mine, which began in the late 1990s. While I’ve kept track digitally for the past few decades, I still have my notebook from the early days. Here's one image below from 2001 and early 2022, a fantastic stretch for reading (including "White Teeth," "Ulysses," "Infinite Jest," "Carpenter's Gothic," “For the Time Being,” "Revolutionary Road," and “The Painted Bird").