1. This profile of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard has an excess of good pull quotes, but I like this one:

“I have a little different definition of evil than most people. When you have the opportunity and the ability to do good and you do nothing, that’s evil. Evil doesn’t always have to be an overt act. It can be merely the absence of good.”

2. Much like Dune, I don’t talk about my love for the J. Peterman catalog of the early 90s much because it’s just too hard to explain. But I am absolutely convinced Peterman is why I got into advertising, so I was happy to see a little piece on the illustrations over at Racked:

The original J. Peterman illustrator and art director was “a true artist”: Bob Hagel, who died in 2013. “If you look at the early art in the catalog,” Peterman says, “it was very, very artsy.” Hagel’s style set the tone for the Owner’s Manual; his paintings “didn’t always give you all the details of the product,” but they made sense alongside the stories of rebellious women in silky georgette and wickerwork pedicabs that take you to your seaplane.

1. Would you like your mind blown today? Read this longer piece in The New Yorker about “virtual embodiment.” It sounds like some amazing opportunities for learning and healing with this–so I bet we’re going to make it commercial and destructive instead. Regardless, the most interesting thing I’ve read all week.

“I need you to think of a personal problem that is causing a bit of distress in your life,” Neyret said, while I went through a few embodiment exercises. “You will explain the problem to Freud. Then, when you finish speaking, you will press this button”—she guided my hand to a controller—“and you will enter Freud’s body. Listen carefully to yourself, and try to give yourself some advice.”

The virtual world shifted. I was sitting at a desk in an expansive, glass-walled house. Outside, wildflowers punctuated a sunlit lawn. Across from me, behind his own desk, sat Sigmund Freud. There was a large red light on my desk. It turned green.

I paused, uncertain how to begin. “My mother is in a nursing home, and when I get updates from people who visit her I feel guilty,” I said.

I pushed the button, and the world shifted again. Now I was Freud. I looked down at myself—white shirt, gray suit—and, in a nearby mirror, inspected my beard. Across from me, behind a desk, sat my avatar, wearing a blue shirt, gray jeans, and brown boots. He opened his mouth, then closed it. He settled his hands in his lap and looked at them.

2. This is old but I have been thinking of it again, along with the handy chart: How Not To Say The Wrong Thing.

“Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, ‘Life is unfair’ and ‘Why me?’ That’s the one payoff for being in the center ring.

Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.”

1. It’s Good Friday in the Christian calendar so that means it’s time for my two annual religious experiences: Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and the Good Friday Music from Parsifal.  

2. Similarly inspirational, a transcript of a new talk by artist Austin Kleon: “How To Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Chaotic Times.” I love #9 (“The demons hate fresh air”):

Pretty much everybody knows that walking is good exercise, and most of us know that it’s great for thinking, for releasing our INNER demons. What we don’t emphasize enough is that walking is also a great way to battle our OUTER demons — the people who want to control us through fear and misinformation.

Advertisers, marketers, politicians…it’s in their best interests for us to be plugged into our phones or watching TV, because then they can sell us their vision of the world. If we do not get outside, if we do not walk out in the fresh air, if we do not see our everyday world for what it really is, using our own senses, we will have no vision of our own with which to combat the disinformation.

1. National Geographic says its coverage has been racist. Good for them.

2. From a Lenny Letter a couple weeks ago: The Healing Power of Rage Cleaning.

Do you have a down-puffer coat with makeup on the collar that makes you feel like garbage and curse the six months of winter in the terrible place you’ve chosen to live? Have you taken it to the cleaners and received it back again with the same smears in place? All hope is not lost… With a bowl of hot water handy, squeeze a gentle dish soap onto an old toothbrush and scrub the oily spots on the front and back of the collar, using just enough water to create suds. Wash the coat on delicate, and put it in the dryer with three tennis balls until it is absolutely dry. This might take a few cycles. Tennis balls in the dryer are really loud, so it’s the perfect time to scream into the void until you pass out.

1. I’d been saving this NY Times interactive piece about “The Art of the Dinner Party,” forgot about it, and then just found it again. The opening essay by Gabrielle Hamilton, talking about dinner parties of her youth, is perfection:

…Over the next five years I persisted in spending my school money on brisket and whole sea bass and bone-in fresh ham, and my weekends sketching table arrangements, clomping through fields collecting grasses and branches to be laid artfully down the centers of tables for dinner parties at which, unfailingly, three people I invited and accounted for said they would come and then didn’t. Or someone I did invite showed up, late, with three people I didn’t invite.

…But there were always, also, a couple of guests who knew exactly what to do. Who never arrived too early but allowed you a 10-minute breather just past the hour they were expected. Who never just plopped their paper cone of bodega flowers on the kitchen prep table in the middle of your work but instinctively scanned the cabinets for a vase and arranged the gerbera daisies then and there. They found the trash and put the wrapping in it, leaving your counters clean and your nascent friendship secured for eternity.

2. Advice from Lisa Congden:

1. For your Friday long read, a series of essays by artist Hillary Predko about making things, waste, the global supply chain. It’s a little rambling, but it introduces the concept of “kipple,” (aka stuff–a term from Phillip K. Dick) and has so much in there that’s on my mind lately, too:

I’m worried about extraction, climate change, waste, and entropy. But leaving Yiwu, feeling convinced that the maker ideology that had inspired my work for years was politically ineffective, and feeling convinced that the designing and manufacturing of products and commodities is legitimately a bad business that has negative impact on the planet, I still wanted to work designing and producing objects. Our societies, and our daily lives are entirely shaped by material culture. Despite all my frustrations, sitting down to create something from scratch is one of the greatest pleasures in my life.

(I think I found this from Kottke? I’ve been sitting on the link for a while wanting to finish the whole series.)

2. Related, even if there’s an inescapable supply chain behind the things you use to create:

(via)

1. More like Fri-YAY, amirite? At least it’s a three-day weekend. (I probably won’t post on Monday.)

2. windowsofsf.com is mesmerizing:  “Explore San Francisco by looking out of 100 windows around the city.” It’s like Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day? come to life.

3. This is also cool: Hunting For the Ancient Lost Farms of North America (via Kottke)

1. This is from 2015 but it’s great: “Works in Progress,” aka eleven female artists in their 80s and 90s who are just now receiving popular acclaim. Make something every day, even when you’re 99!

2. Quincy Jones in Conversation is full of gossip and swearing and crazy-old-man-ness but you just can’t stop reading–and he knows his music. I love his opinions on formal training:

Musical principles exist, man. Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain. Music is emotion and science. You don’t have to practice emotion because that comes naturally. Technique is different. If you can’t get your finger between three and four and seven and eight on a piano, you can’t play. You can only get so far without technique. People limit themselves musically, man. Do these musicians know tango? Macumba? Yoruba music? Samba? Bossa nova? Salsa? Cha-cha?

1. There’s a delightful New Yorker article making the rounds entitled “The Life-Changing Magic of Clogs.” (Fact: I had client meetings Wednesday and wore clogs and my cheetah shirt.)

“The clog, comfortable on levels both physical and spiritual, has for me come to stand for an existence untethered to the corporate grind. Clog life is not lived off the grid but grid-adjacent. It’s a fuzzy, fancy realm, littered with alpaca sweaters, Rachel Cusk novels, and trees that grow indoors, in charmingly primitive ceramic pots.”

2. Current mood/I need this:

1. Another month, another article about how terrible smartphones are for your brain: Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. So why can’t you put it down?

2. Related, a case for nuking your Facebook account from orbit.

3. New to me: The Moon Lists. “Each month I ask three different women to respond to a list of questions. I have found it interestingly difficult to remember what has happened in the near past; consider the idea a sort of checking in with how time is spent, recalled, reflected on.”

It’s fun to read but I also may copy the idea and get a list of questions together for myself. Way better than the Facebook “On this day” feature, right?