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My favorite music of 2010

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 20:23:19 -0500

I’ve made my Top 10 albums of 2010 list and posted it here. I don’t think there are any real surprises on there—if you know me or even if you don’t—but what I think is interesting is tracking my iTunes and last.fm metrics to see what I actually listened to. So here is my “scientific” but not exactly accurate listing of what I listened to in 2010.

According to iTunes, of songs that came out in 2010 these are the ones with the highest play counts:

1. The Tallest Man on Earth, “Burden of Tomorrow”
2. Local Natives, “Airplanes”
3. The Rado Dept., “Heaven’s On Fire”
4. Jenny and Johnny, “Scissor Runner”
5. Gorillaz, “On Melancholy Hill”
5. Jenny and Johnny, “Switchblade”
7. She & Him, “In the Sun”
7. Trampled by Turtles, “Wait So Long”
9. Crystal Castles ft. Robert Smith, “Not in Love”
9. OK Go, “This Too Shall Pass”

Here are the ten records from 2010 with the most songs with 4★-plus rated songs on them:

1. Wild Nothing, Gemini (7)
1. Laura Veirs, July Flame (7)
3. Local Natives, Gorilla Manor (6)
3. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Before Today (6)
3. Trampled by Turtles, Palomino (6)
3. Dr. Dog, Shame Shame (6)
3. Beach House, Teen Dream (6)
3. New Pornographers, Together (6)
9. The Radio Dept., Clinging to a Scheme (5)
9. Phantogram, Eyelid Moves (5)

Here are my top 10 most played artists according to last.fm:

Here are the 15 songs (that came out in any year) I listened to most in 2010:

And lastly, here are some observations on what these metrics mean:

I’m a podcast addict and three of my top 10 artists are from them: ESPN (for PTI, and the BS Report), NPR (Fresh Air, mostly), and TBTL (which still shows up as KIRO, which if you know anything about TBTL is funny).
We listened to the Jenny and Johnny record a lot on our honeymoon drive down Highway One—hence it’s high play count and sentimental-value spot in my Top 10 of the year.
A bunch of the songs on my Top 15 playlist were on a mix I made that we played in the background at our rehearsal dinner. I guess I listened to that mix a lot. (Song #6 in my most played tracks was our “first dance” song at the wedding.)
This was an awesome year for music and a lot of great stuff didn’t make my Top 10: Walkmen, Kanye, Big Boi, New Pornographers, Morning Benders, Surfer Blood, Trampled by Turtles, Phantogram.
Biggest disappointment of the year was probably Spoon’s Transference. If it was any other band I probably wouldn’t be so harsh on it, but I hold Spoon to a higher standard. (The new Band of Horses comes in second.)
I still haven’t listened to The Suburbs all the way through. I know, I know.

Here are two posts from last year about my favorite music of 2009.

My 2010

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 21:14:57 -0500

Inspired by Alex Payne’s concise recap of 2010, here’s mine.

In 2010 I:

Got married.
Quit my job at MASS MoCA.
Joined SFMOMA.
Designed six books (Manglano-Ovalle, Starling, Material World, Coyne, Immendorff, Nimoy) for MASS MoCA that almost killed me.
Spent my first full year living in San Francisco, a city I have grown to love more each day.
Ran 700 miles… would’ve been 1,000 but I missed three months due to injury.

In 2011 I will:

Run a few half marathons and hopefully my first marathon. (I got hurt last year training for the SF half… going to try again for 2011, knock on wood.)
Buy a house. We’re saving and we’re hopeful to find a place in the city that’s bigger than a parking space.
See more live concerts and read more books… two things I was very bad at in 2010.

I’ve been feeling the ocean lately.

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 11:02:17 -0500

I’ve been feeling the ocean lately.

I’m proud that the catalogue I worked on for Simon...

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:03:27 -0500

I’m proud that the catalogue I worked on for Simon Starling: The Nanjing Particles was recognized in Print Magazine’s 2010 Regional Design Annual (even though they mispelled my name!).

The project had a nice collaborative element between Simon and me. Early on he sent me this sketch with an idea for the cover which referenced two large walls at the entrance to the exhibition. I liked it and ran with it.

You can view more images from the book over on the portfolio.

I updated my portfolio with two new projects I did during my...

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 21:29:55 -0400

I updated my portfolio with two new projects I did during my final months at MM. The first is the exhibition catalogue for Material World: Sculpture to Environment, a really great group exhibition featuring seven artists whose work deals with material’s relationship to space. For now, the book is only available in the MM store. The show is on view through February 2011.

The second project is a re-design of the museum’s seasonal performing arts brochure. We changed the design of this piece a lot during my four years at the museum, and I was never totally pleased with the final result… until this one.

New Site for Lex

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:51:56 -0400

New Site for Lex:

As Lex Tweeted, “When @iamdanmckinley gets a week off, i get a new website.” It’s true.

What's Next

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 11:08:34 -0400

I am excited to announce that I have accepted an offer to become the next Art Director at SFMOMA. Of course, this also means that I have resigned from MASS MoCA, where I have been a proud employee for the past four years. Friday will be my last day.

MASS MoCA is a special place. My successor will have the good fortune to work with some brilliant artists and performers, not to mention a tirelessly dedicated staff and an inspiring museum director. I am very proud of the work I did there and look forward to see where they go from here.

(If you or someone you know is interested taking my old job, the posting is here.)

Getting married and changing jobs in the same month—a month where the seasons change, no less—has meant that I’ve been doing a whole lot of self-reflection lately. On my place in the San Francisco community. On our goals as a family. On taking (or not taking) risks with my career. On realizing that I’m going to be commuting to work on Muni every day (yikes!).

I am still reflecting on these ideas and maybe they will crystallize into a future blog post, but I can say now that I am energized about SFMOMA and cannot wait to tackle what’s next. I start in October.

I’ve posted images for the exhibition catalogue for Iñigo...

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:33:00 -0400

I’ve posted images for the exhibition catalogue for Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With over on the portfolio. The catalogue accompanies Iñigo’s exhibition in our Building 5 gallery—an upside-down, half-scale replication of Mies van der Rohe’s House with Four Columns.

This book was a real pleasure to work on. It was an unplanned, crash project (we did the whole thing in about a month) and through curator and editor Denise Markonish’s fearless stewardship, we actually pulled it off. The book is simple, but full of heart and attention to detail. If, like me, you enjoy geeking out over specs, here they are:

Dimensions: 8.25 x 8.25 inches
Pages: 88+cover (five 16-page signatures and one 8-page signature)
Ink: three signatures at 1/1 (Pantone 433U), two signatures at 4/4 (CMYK), and one signature at 2/2 (Pantone 432U+Magenta); cover is 1/0 (Pantone 430U)
Stock: Finch Fine Bright White Ultra Smooth 80# Text, Mohawk Via Smooth Light Gray 70# text (screenplay), and Mohawk Loop Linen Pure White 110# DTC (cover)
Typefaces: Futura, National, Courier
Cover: 1/0 with a clear foil stamp

The book is for sale here. The exhibition is on view through October 31, 2010.

New Site for Kidspace

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:04:00 -0400

New Site for Kidspace:

Today the new website for Kidspace is live. I designed the site with assistance from the badass Jack Turner of jackadam.

New Site for SOMArts

Tue, 25 May 2010 21:26:00 -0400

New Site for SOMArts:

Over the weekend we launched a new website for SOMArts, the community arts center in San Francisco run by Lex. I designed the site with some help from my friend Fran at Durable Goods Design. We’ll be adding more content and features over time, but we think this a great step forward for the organization. Enjoy!

How to work from home (and not lose your mind)

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 22:31:00 -0400

When most people find out that I work from home they almost always respond with “Oh wow, that’s awesome. You’re so lucky.” I nod and say “yes,” but I know that they’re thinking of those snowy days where they work from home, curl up with their coffee and Snuggie, and lounge. Maybe they’ve turned your phone off. Maybe they’ve kept their pajamas on. Yeah, well, it’s not really like that.

In fact, working from home is absolutely nothing like that. After a few days the novelty of keeping your pajamas on all day wears off and you want to, well, work. If you’re used to working in an office, though, you have to change your routines. So here’s a few handy tips if, like me, you suddenly find yourself working from home…

Get dressed.
Yes, it’s easy to stay in your pajamas all day, but don’t. Shower, change, do you what you need to do to make sitting down at your computer to work the real deal.
Evening exercise.
When I worked in an office I would go to the gym in the morning, before work. But now, I go for my runs at the end of the day. It provides a clean break from work time to personal time and it gets me out of the apartment.
Chores.
Or any task really. I try to give myself one 10–15 task every morning and every afternoon. Nothing crazy—just a little thing to give me a quick breather. When you work from home there are no distractions, no pop-ins, no water coolers. It can be hard to step away. These little chores help me do that.
Remember how lucky you are that you don’t have to commute.
Ugh, commuting. I’ve had a number of different commutes in my life. (The worst being a 75-minute drive—EACH WAY!—from Northampton to North Adams. It was terrible, especially in the winter.) I know some people like their 30-minutes in the car or on the subway, but think about it: I take that time I’d normally spend chained to my car folding laundry or doing the dishes (see tip #3).
Don’t live alone (and I don’t mean roommates).
If I lived alone, I don’t know if I’d ever stop working, but when Lex comes home from work I shut it down.

There are more, sure, but I find that these five tips keep me sane and happy.

This afternoon, Lex and I went to SFMoMA to check out the...

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:08:00 -0500

This afternoon, Lex and I went to SFMoMA to check out the new Luc Tuymans exhibition. Go. It’s really great.

Tuymans (b. 1958) is a Belgian painter who creates dreamy yet haunting scenes from source photography as well as his own memories. His work is almost always political—works in the SFMoMA show reference the Holocaust, WWII, the Congolese independence movement, and post-9/11 America—yet the activist messages can be subtle (though sometimes they’re not). You have to dig a little, step back, move forward, or return to a work. But that’s okay—you’ll want to linger.

The painting from the show that is sticking with me the most is the title piece from his Holocaust series Der Architekt (shown above). The painting—a portrait of Hitler’s chief architect, taken from a home movie shot by his wife—shows a man wearing skis, laying prone on the ground after a fall. His face is blank, a ghostly splotch of white paint. The audio guide references Hannah Arendt’s famous line about “the banality of evil,” and that is so fitting here. Absolutely mesmerizing.

The show is up through May 2, 2010.

Lex & Dan

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:56:25 -0500

Lex & Dan:

Oh, wedding planning. I could blog endlessly about you here, but I’ll spare my five readers. (We’re getting our wedding blogging ya-yas out here.)

But I will share this: our wedding site is live. It’s dorky… but full of info!

About a year ago, after a walk through the Elizabeth Peyton...

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:40:00 -0500

About a year ago, after a walk through the Elizabeth Peyton exhibition at the New Museum, my friend Jessi and I popped into the SoHo WholeFoods to pick up beer for the evening. We were instantly grabbed by the Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout and decided to procure a number of other chocolate stouts and make a tasting out of it. We invited a bunch of our friends, decided to present the beers Model U.N. style, and voilà, Beer Club was born.

Since then we’ve sampled oatmeal stouts, IPAs, and a selection of beers from Berkshire Brewing Company. When Jessi and her boyfriend Will made plans to visit San Francisco this month we began plotting our first West Coast Beer Club gathering. We landed on coffee stouts, which, well, wasn’t a very good idea. Almost all the beers we tasted, with the exception of AleSmith’s Speedway Stout, were terrible. The common complaint? The coffee flavoring was overpowering, making the beers either too sweet or too bitter and basically drowning out all beery goodness.

Will has written more about the trouble with coffee stouts over on his new weekly column “The Draft” on GQ’s Forked & Corked blog, which, if you like beer, should be added to your feed reader.

She Lives Here

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:40:06 -0500

She Lives Here:

Lex is featured on the latest post over at i live here:sf. It’s a nice piece about how the arts have helped her find a footing in our new city. The post is accompanied by a really great (and quite glamorous, I must say!) photo shoot.

TBTL-athon

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:29:18 -0500

TBTL-athon:

Ahoy hoy.

Too Beautiful to Live is my favorite thing, and by “thing” I mean regularly-consumable cultural product. It’s up there with my favorite television and public radio programs. I’m a devoted Ten. I probably like TBTL too much.

TBTL is a daily podcast produced by Luke Burbank, who you might be familiar with from Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. A few months ago TBTL was cancelled by the Seattle station KIRO. Since then Burbank has been producing the show from his home, and in my opinion, its only gotten better.

Obviously, I recommend TBTL highly, but you have to listen to it consistently for several eps in a row to really give it a fair chance. This week Luke’s been running a pledge drive to keep his “imaginary radio show” on the air. Listen to TBTL for a week and if you like it to, throw him a few bucks if for nothing else than because you care about my well-being.

Two weeks ago I finally got around to setting up our jerryrigged...

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:46:00 -0500

Two weeks ago I finally got around to setting up our jerryrigged television setup. The pieces were sitting around for over a month, and I wondered if we even needed them, but I couldn’t resist a good NFL playoff binge (Go Jets! Boo Favre!).

The setup involves a USB Adapter (Elgato’s EyeTV Hybrid) and an HD antenna (Terk’s HDTVa Antenna Pro) running through my 20-inch iMac. (Affiliate links, y’all. Hope you don’t mind.)

The reception on the HD antenna is excellent, and one nice thing about HD signals is that they are either strong or nonexistent—all or nothing—so no futzing with static. This setup, however, didn’t work so hot on our Wii. Technically it “works” but the resolution is awful and there is a lag big enough to make playing a game like Super Mario Wii impossible. Oh well. One out of two ain’t bad.

More music metrics

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 15:24:00 -0500

I’ve been a Last.fm user for a while now. I don’t play the stations often, but I like having them there when I’m sick of my music, and I enjoy the metrics. Last.fm “scrobbles” your music as you play it and offers recommendations based on your taste. You can also view what your top artists and songs over various timespans. Here are two snapshots of the past 12 months:

Before it's too late: my 2009 music wrap-up

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:24:00 -0500

This is a little late, but since it’s only January 17, I deem a post like this still acceptable. It’s hard for me to look back on 2009 and pick my favorite music, and a year from now, my favorite 2009 album could be something I don’t even own yet. What I can do is analyze my iTunes data—particularly play counts and star ratings (which I obsessively keep).

According to iTunes, of songs that came out in 2009 these are the ones with the highest play counts. My two favorite songs of 2009 are “Lalita” by The Love Language and “Walkabout” by Atlas Sound and Panda Bear, neither of which cracked the top 10.

1. Bat for Lashes, “Daniel”
2. Bon Iver, “Blood Bank”
3. Grizzly Bear, “Two Weeks”
4. Bon Iver, “Beach Baby”
4. Grizzly Bear, “Ready, Able”
6. Elvis Perkins in Dearland, “Doomsday”
7. Built to Spill, “Hindsight”
8. Delorean, “Seasun”
8. The Dodos, “Fables”
8. Say Hi, “Maurine”

There were dozens of great albums this year. These aren’t my favorite albums of the year, but they are the ten albums with the most 4★-plus rated songs in my iTunes library.

Five 2009 albums I loved which aren’t on this list (probably because I was too busy rocking out to rate the whole thing) are Bitte Orca by Dirty Projectors, Bird-Brains by Tune-Yards, Fever Ray’s self-titled record, Now We Can See by The Thermals, and Songs of Shame by Woods. Ok, the list (number of 4★-plus rated songs in parentheses):

1. Elvis Perkins in Dearland, s/t (8)
2. Neko Case, Middle Cyclone (7)
2. Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest (7)
4. Freelance Whales, Weathervanes (6)
4. AA Bondy, When the Devil’s Loose (6)
6. St. Vincent, Actor (5)
6. Antony & the Johnsons, The Crying Light (5)
6. Dark Was the Night (5)
6. Camera Obscura, My Maudlin Career (5)
6. Fanfarlo, Reservoir (5)

I’ve lost my taste for coffee. My daily intake is just a...

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 16:50:00 -0500

I’ve lost my taste for coffee. My daily intake is just a way for me to get through the early morning (where I go about three steps from my bed to my desk and immediately log into work—which is already buzzing on east coast time). A couple years ago I just started drinking espresso because I didn’t like the taste of coffee so much that I couldn’t bear to sit and sip anymore.

Moving to San Francisco and having easy access to wonderful roasters—like Philz, Blue Bottle, and the nearby Ritual Coffee on Valencia—has revived my interest in coffee. So I’m taking action.

One Saturday morning at the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market I noticed that Blue Bottle coffee uses a pour-over method, and after a little research it didn’t long for me to stumble upon Chemex coffee makers. I threw one on my Amazon wishlist and shortly after received one from my future in-laws for Christmas.

Game on.

It took me a couple tries to get my technique down (the video above was extremely helpful), but I can happily say that I thoroughly enjoyed a few batches of Chemex (affiliate link) coffee this week. I hope it stays that way.