I’ve been enjoying photography this year — or, more accurately, professional anxiety spun the big wheel of interests in my head, and landed with full force on photography. Picture making has been a treat, to be sure, but I’m very much addicted to reading, comparing, learning, buying (gulp), and all of the activities around photography. The research of the craft, one can say.

Ichiro Suzuki recorded 4,367 hits over a 28-year career split between Japan and the United States. If you consider both hemispheres of his career together, Ichiro had more hits than anyone else in history (Pete Rose slapped, clawed, and hustled his way to 4,256 hits between 1963 and 1986).

Only 235 of these were home runs.

It’s an appropriate time to set intentions, not only because it’s the first day of 2025, but because in about a week, I’ll drive to Savannah to install a solo show—“You’re the Man Now Dog”, natch.

My Spotify Wrapped this week was entirely expected—the number one song I listened to, without question, was Carnival by Bikini Kill.

It’s probably foolish or shortsighted to say it’s my favorite song, period, because frankly having a favorite song is a fun thought experiment but ultimately an empty statement. I have plenty of favorite songs, tied to specific memories, individuals, psychic moments, deep emotions, even tiny flashes of clarity and inspiration. Seeing This Must Be The Place in Stop Making Sense for the first time. The first time All My Life kicked up on one of my Dad’s homemade mix CD’s. Getting wistful and sentimental for my grad school life when I stumble into Windowlicker deep in a playlist.

Much of the mental bandwith in my studio lately (when it’s not getting clogged by the force of will required to land the plane of another semester) has been dedicated to thinking through why so much contemporary design looks…kinda the same? I’ll concede that this might simply be a me problem — algorithms exist to feed me slop I’ve volunteered to like, and even in the theoretically more open confines of are.na, the work is reflective of the tastes of a somewhat self-selected cohort, aesthetic, and worldview. I’ll even concede that I’m excluding vernacular and especially normie commercial design, although even those worlds are trending toward visual collapse in a way that’s terrific meme fodder.