Obsessions
Things that are mine. No professional justification required or offered.
The Corpus Hermeticum, The Kybalion, the principle of correspondence. As above, so below — the oldest systems thinking there is. I have been reading this literature for twelve years and it still moves.
Tool, Isis, Neurosis, Megadeth, Mastodon. Precision underneath aggression. The best metal sounds like a system running at maximum designed load.
Farsi as a second native language, learned in the house and at school. Hafez, Rumi, Ferdowsi. The food. The music. The architecture of Isfahan.
StrongLifts 5x5. Squat, bench, deadlift, overhead press, barbell row. The simplicity is the point. Five exercises. Linear progression.
A painter whose work carries its influences without being reducible to them. Immediately recognizable as one person's vision. The target.
The information design of the Voyager mission era. Functional beauty. The aesthetic of confidence through precision.
Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca. The daily practice more than the doctrine. Meditations is a working document, not a text.
A city built on water it stole and freeways that were supposed to fix congestion. Thirty-four cities pretending to be one. I have lived here my whole life and I am still not done with it.
The ones that have survived: Garamond, Caslon, Gill Sans, Helvetica. What makes a typeface last four centuries and what makes one last four years.
A Romanian philosopher who found existence inexcusable and said so with great precision and style. Not nihilism — honest diagnosis.
The Shining, 2001, Full Metal Jacket, Barry Lyndon. Every frame a considered decision. The only director I have studied shot by shot.
Taking things apart to see how they work. Understanding a mechanism by destroying its mystery.