ie gras laced steak tartare and a negroni, with an extra burnt orange garnish, will get you “in” if thats what you want.
Don’t: spend your entire time glued to your phone. Chat with the bartender - but metered by how busy they are. Don’t: be that guy telling them super long, boring, stories. Don’t: try and impress them with your obscure cocktail/food knowledge. Don't: ask them "so what's good here?" Do: ask them their favorite pairing / current favorite on the menu.
An oddly converse nuance to the previous rule - though only before 7pm - its usually acceptable to bring your laptop and do a bit of work while you enjoy a proper meal - even at a fairly high-end restaurant. I wouldn’t try and pull it off at Le Bernardin but its probably fine at Honey’s in Chicago. ***If the dinner crowd rolls in, tuck the laptop...bright screens are a bad look.
I’m not much of a small talker, but don’t be completely tuned-out. I once ended up restaurant hopping for an evening with a fellow solo diner who turned out to be a notable figure in the oil business and wanted a bit of a shoulder to cry on about a recent divorce. Was an oddly entertaining evening.
Go on the slow nights! Sunday - Wednesday. For those of us who live with seasons, snow storms are particularly fun evenings to tuck in.
Don’t get drunk. Don’t treat servers poorly.
Don’t rush through it - enjoy it. It’s great “thinking” time.
Bonus: order a “Ferrari” as your meal ender.
BRIIIIICK! The cult & culture of NBA memes...
I love the NBA. Always have and always will. As a kid we all perceived the league's stars as gods with an untouchable cool. Making fun of Michael Jordan in the 90's!? Unthinkable. What platform would one even have had for that back then? Players, teams and agents all mostly controlled their own narratives with traditional media chiming in but leaving little impact. That was all before the internet. Now, not only are the cameras always on from every perceivable angle, but the internet loves a good laugh and knows how to take a quick screenshot. Not something athletes think about while on the court of course, but they must know — if they flop and it's obvious? You're getting turned into a GIF asap by the World Wide Wobs/Timothy Burkes of the world. And if its really bad!? Yikes...have you seen this James Harden/Manu Ginobili video? I mean...someone spent some real actual time and energy making that! It's impressive. But it's also weird. Here we have the world's most elite athletes performing night in and night out at the highest levels for our entertainment being reduced to stupid (funny, but stupid) internet memes. It's kind of fascinating! I always think about how lucky pro athletes who played in the pre-internet era were to completely avoid this phenomenon. Just think - if Charles Barkley had played during the Twitter-era, you would forget what he looked like because he'd have had Crying Jordan Photoshopped on his face every game. (Although he's a weird example since he's part of TNT's incredible 'Inside the NBA' which has itself become a bit of a factory for memes and mocking) On the flipside, most players today understand this is simply just part of the way this generation communicates and often love getting in on the fun themselves. Regardless, I find it super interesting that what was once a borderline unfuckwithable institution has, over the last several years, become one of the funniest sources for laughs on the internet.
Perfectly absurd. My theory on the magic trick of white sneakers.
As a repeat purchaser myself - I’ve always been fascinated with the extremely obvious design flaw with white sneakers. White leather - or worse - white canvas, white soles, white laces, white everything. In a product that is knowingly designed to touch the dirtiest surface of our daily activity - the ground. Dirt, oil, trash, piss, rain, snow, spit, and whatever else you’d never think would be acceptable to get any other piece of our clothing or really any object you own get close to, right? I kind of love it. They’re aesthetically pleasing - yeah - but I’ve always thought it was kind of an incredible expression powered by some genetic desire in humans to be royalty of some sort. Sounds crazy, but honestly?! Is it the appearance of achieving the “impossible” for a short period of time that gives them something beyond just their visual appeal?? Like a magic trick maybe. It’s fairly affordable expression in decadence - for better or worse. I could probably keep rambling - but I’ll sum up white sneaker as: a perfect absurd / paradoxical design flaw that ends up articulating something else entirely about the human condition. ANYWAY…I’m just as guilty as the next. I’ll take another pair of all white Sambas. ***WAIT. They don’t have them on Mi Adidas anymore. Someone at adidas help?!
Back to basics: The work of Bráulio Amado!!!
Bráulio Amado is Portugese-born, NY based graphic designer and illustrator whose work has been everywhere lately, and with good reason. With the last few years of his career including time spent at some amazing places like Pentagram, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Weiden+Kennedy NY, Amado is now in arguably the best position of his career to seriously flourish as an independent designer. I really geek out over super talented people pouring all their efforts into doing their own thing. Anyways, Bráulio's work has such a cool range of influences and aesthetics. At times you'll find his punk rock background shining through with 80's hardcore-tinged xerox influence, then an almost Milton Glaser-esque/Peter Saville/Factory Records meets some kind of damaged Blue Note Records album cover meets mmparis, but through the lens of someone who grew up with the internet...if that makes sense. What I love about it is it's entirely original and its own, with a nod to his influences but never, ever too on-the-nose. You've probably seen some of his most recent work for Frank Ocean with the cover of the 'Lens' single, one that's been written about all over the internet, with writers pondering if it was inspired by the paintings of Kerry James Marshall and then most recently, the artwork for ASAP Rocky's single ''RAF'. It's fun, very "now", and a joy to see a creative person doing what they love for such great clients. Amado has a new book out you can get here. See more of his work @ the link below.
The death of FFFFound & the endless pursuit of image collection...
If you use the internet, which you do, you've saved images you've found interesting for whatever reason somewhere at some point. Inspiration for a current or future project, how to arrange the books on your office shelf, inspiration for an outfit, a haircut, a party, whatever. The most primitive way to do this, of course, would be to actually save the image from website to folder on your desktop, or worse, screenshot it directly to your desktop into a sea of tiny thumbnails unlikely to be referenced ever again. Back in 2007, Japanese design firm Tha, responsible for projects with Wonderwall and MUJI among others, launched what soon became the solution to this disorganized approach for many creative types by launching FFFFound.com, in their words, a "web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user's tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!" I know a lot of designers whose desktops became a lot neater after FFFFound launched, which if you used it consistently, effectively kept all your 'inspiration collection' in one neat web-based place. Kind of a godsend if you ask me, and consider Pinterest didn't launch until 3 years later in March 2010(!). So - FFFFound was pretty ahead of its time and had a great BRILLIANCE-esque barebones design, very content-first, website-second. Fast-forward to 2017 — the beloved FFFFound will be shutting down 24 hours from now as I write this on Monday, May 15 according to a note currently posted on the site. This A) bums me out, because FFFFound was great, and B) got me thinking about how I harvest imagery from the internet that's worthwhile to me now. I tried Pinterest for a minute, even had the little Chrome plug-in, but it just didn't really stick. It does the job, but...I don't know. It's like this BRILLIANCE update - we painstakingly designed our backend CMS to look and feel just like the front-end. The environment in which you play is important. Instagram recently added a Bookmark feature which you can sort into Collections, which is cool but limited to the Instagram platform, not the web. Twitter...I mean, I just like way too many posts to ever effectively reference anything back. Actually, I realize I often 'like' Tweets simply as an acknowledgement to the author so I don't have to reply...maybe Twitter needs to design an "Acknowledged" icon to live next to the heart icon, lol. Like, "Y