Google Imitates Jackson Pollock

Shortly after writing about Pi Day on Sunday March 14th, I discovered an essay in the Sunday New York Times T magazine called "Google's Doodles." The author, Alice Rawsthorn, talks about the Google tradition of creating day-specific logos, and the possible broader implications for branding and design. Google, she argues, pushes against the "consistency imperative" (my words) that typically rules under Apple/Nike-style branding. Instead, many of its day-specific logos seem casual, or even amateur in their execution. Yet they fit, somehow, under the wide sweep of the Google identity.

The image used for that article, courtesy of Google, is a take on a Jackson Pollock painting. Of all the day-specific Google logos, this more subtle one is my favorite. It reminds me of a Smithsonian magazine article by Henry Adams, from November 2009, about his wife Marianne Berardi's discovery of a hidden Pollock signature in the 1943 painting Mural. Because the letters in both images are so obscured, they evoke the very act of "searching." Rev up your search engines, and look carefully behind the lines.

Happy Pi Day: March 14, 2010

It's Pi Day, Albert Einstein's Birthday, and the day we spring ahead with daylight savings time. Numbers and formulas are significant today. Google has even made a special logo to mark the occasion. Here's the scoop about Pi Day from Erictric:

Since pi approximately equals 3.14, March 14 [3-14] was chosen as the date to celebrate pi in countries that use the month/date format. Pi Day was founded by now-retired physicist Larry Shaw 1988 at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Nowadays, the holiday is celebrated by eating different kinds of pie, and by discussing the relevance of pi.

I'm wondering what those discussions sound like. We haven't gotten that far at my kitchen table, I'm afraid. But I have always had a mad fondness for pi, as the refuge of both the "irrational" and the circumference of a circle. And I wish I'd had some math teachers who talked more about the ideas in math – my kids have been lucky that way. (Thank you, Mr. Berzins!)

Here is what Google, the King/Queen of algorithms, has to say about pi – strangely enough, that logo is missing on that page, though it appears on the search page. (Here's a link to a couple of other Google logos. My nieces are onto it: they've made pie!

"'Charlie Rose' by Samuel Beckett"

Something fun for a Saturday morning.

You all know that Samuel Beckett didn't really shoot this brilliant little video, right? In a virtual world, you can never be too sure. Hence, all those apostrophes. Here's to Sam Beckett...and to Charlie Rose. And to Andrew Filippone Jr., the filmmaker. (I can never get Craig to talk to me about his economic model, either.)





April is No Longer the Cruelest Month

It's April Fools' Day, one of my favorite holidays as a child. The images today are paintings by Susan Bee; they seem to capture the capacious foolhardiness of the day. I love her trees, laden with objects: this one is called "In a Medieval Garden."

I wish I had a good "fool" for all of you here at elenabella, but the best I can do is remind you to keep your ears open when listening to the news today on National Public Radio – they always do a delicious story that veers off into the absurd. I recall the year when the Starbucks CEO talked about an American coffee pipeline (hot Joe from the kitchen tap!) and the year a teenager described her cosmetic surgery procedure for belly button removal. Here is more, from that great aggregator, Wikipedia:

National Public Radio: Every year National Public Radio in the United States does an extensive news story on April 1st. These usually start off more or less reasonably, and get more and more unusual. A recent example is the story on the "iBod" a portable body control device.^[22] In 2008 it reported that the IRS, to assure rebate checks were actually spent, was shipping comsumer products instead of checks. ^[23] It also runs false sponsor mentions, such as "Support for NPR comes from the Soylent Corporation, manufacturing protein-rich food products in a variety of colors. Soylent Green is People.”^[24]

Google also does April Fools' Day hoaxes, so be on your guard.

It's also a good day to take a look at T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," a poem that was recently modified by the new American poet laureate, to make it less depressing. Under the Obama administration, the poet laureate has been charged with going back and expunging negativity and obscurity from poetry, making it more accessible and transparent. The opening line of this famous poem now reads:

APRIL is the kindest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

I like that, and it does seem pretty clear. The Greek epigraph to the poem has also been removed (because, after all, who reads Greek anymore?!): references to Hades, even when in a dead language, can only signal a disincentive to hope. (It's also really annoying when poets produce footnotes to their work, making you dig deeper to excavate meaning: who has time for that? Try to get it into a tagline, people!)

Let's hope the new Obama poetic language initiatives work, producing an April more kind than cruel.