where we ache to go again

Don Draper's best pitch from Mad Men. Kodak are doing their rounds, listening to what various ad agencies are offering. Don's marriage is in trouble. The guy that walks out - his has ended. The speech takes us from personal anecdote through technical detail to personal imagery and the emotional impact it has. The best line is "where we ache to go again". He means it here as an ache to go back to a time and place where we knew we were loved. Like when marriage is young and the fire still burning. But we all ache all the time for a time and place before that. Back to the primal experience of all-consuming love and nurture. This ache underlies every desire we have.

maximum quality

here

don't make me destroy you

not allowed to be original

"The students that take my class know how to write. I can hone their skills further but instead I choose to challenge them to think in new and different ways. Many of them know how to plagiarize but they always do it on the sly, hoping not to get caught. In my class, they must plagiarize or they will be penalized. They are not allowed to be original or creative. So it becomes a very different game, one in which they're forced to defend choices that they are making about what they're plagiarizing and why. And when you start to dig down, you'll find that those choices are as original and as unique as when they express themselves in more traditional types of writing, but they've never been trained to think about it in this way."

From 'Proudly Fraudulent,' an intvw with Kenneth Goldsmith here

urban-zen generation

"To ward off the nagging sense that a move to the suburbs is tantamount to becoming like one’s parents, this urban-zen generation is seeking out palatable alternatives — culturally attuned, sprawl-free New York river towns like Hastings, Dobbs Ferry, Irvington and Tarrytown — and importing the trappings of a twee lifestyle like bearded mixologists, locavore restaurants and antler-laden boutiques."

From 'Creating Hipsturbia' here

flat circle to something

“The (aluminium) bar is transported to Downey, California (from Pinjarra, Western Australia), where it is rolled flat in a rolling mill, and turned into aluminium sheets. The sheets are punched into circles and shaped into a cup by a mechanical process called drawing and ironing – this not only makes the can but also thins the aluminium. The transition from flat circle to something that resembles a can takes about a fifth of a second. The outside of the can is decorated using a base layer of utherane acrylate, then up to seven layers of colored acrylic paint and varnish that is cured using ultra violet light, and the inside of the can is painted too – with a complex chemical called a comestible polymeric coating that prevents any of the aluminium getting into the soda. So far, this vast tool chain has only produced an empty, open can with no lid.”

from here

pic from here