TSW #17: Nov 2019

Published in

The Source Weekly

5 min readDec 27, 2019

Pharrell Williams has an epic conversation with Rick Rubin; The Roundtables — iProspect conversations driving change; an engrossing look into the mind and inspirations of Guillermo Del Toro; the definitive guide to TIFF 2019; Stanley Donwood reimagines J. G. Ballard book covers; Pharrell on Evolving Masculinity and “Spiritual Warfare”; meet the Instagram influencers who walked away from the fatigued medium; Abstract: The Art of Design Season 2 from Netflix; designer Peter Mendelsund on creating the new look for The Atlantic; The New York Times Magazine chronicles NYC’s first skateboarding superstar Tyshawn Jones.

Pharrell Williams and Rick Rubin Have an Epic Conversation

“To me chords are coordinates. They send you to a place.”
“It takes a lot of experimentation that the machine can predict and get to, but there’s a different thing that man has that the machines don’t. It’s an intuitiveness. And intuition and prediction are two different things.”
“You can’t take art out of the context in which it was made.”
“What gives art its pertinence is when the artist is pushing it.”

The Roundtables

An ongoing collection of conversations driving change from iProspect

Guillermo Del Toro: At Home With Monsters

An engrossing look into the mind of one of the great creative visionaries of our time.

“When I was a child — a very young child — a hairline fracture became evident in my soul. I felt growingly disfranchised, puzzled, at odds with the adult world. It was made up of rules and notions that were both alien and unexplained, and life came to feel like a rigged game. It was almost entirely composed of lies.
Adults lie to themselves and others. They endorse their concerns and inventions — the ones they all agree to (money, power, war, repression) — as real. But fantasy is frowned upon as childish.
For some of us, it is not.
I believe that we are all birthed with a certain quality of glass within us, and that we resonate with specific vibrations — notes — of the universe.
The note I resonate with is low, dark, and full of monsters.”

The Definitive Guide to TIFF 2019

Scroll and explore the very best of the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival

Stanley Donwood’s J. G. Ballard Book Covers

Iconic Radiohead graphic designer Stanley Donwood matches his dystopian visual splendour to J. G. Ballard classics.

“It was a tremendous honour to be asked to create the covers for JG Ballard’s books. He’s possibly my favourite author of the 20th (and a bit of the 21st) century, and someone whose books I’ve reread loads of times. To my mind, his incredibly incisive take on his childhood and his childhood observations made him one of the most prescient students of humanity as it dwelt in the strange edifice of late-period Western capitalism. Who else but Ballard could have begun a novel with the image of an urban professional devouring the remains of a dog on the balcony of his luxury penthouse apartment?”

Pharrell on Evolving Masculinity and “Spiritual Warfare”

Pushing the masculinity conversation forward with one of pop culture’s most influential futurists. Pharrell has been an agent of change his whole career. When he broke into the public consciousness, about 20 years ago, as a producer and then as the frontman of N.E.R.D., he looked different from everyone else in hip-hop, wearing slimmer jeans, more fitted skate tees, and mesh trucker hats. That might not sound earth-shattering now, but a whole generation of young African American misfits will tell you that Pharrell Williams was the first time they saw themselves in pop culture. A weirdo called Skateboard P who stood confidently apart from rap’s monolithic archetype. A nerd who made being different feel cool.

“When Oliver Munday, my senior art director, and I began rethinking the wordmark, we tried a number of angles, mainly finding ways to repurpose and redraw old marks from The Atlantic’s past. But the notion occurred to us that we would eventually need a mark that wouldn’t be so horizontal; in other words, a mark that wasn’t a word, such that it could fit in all of those confined spaces where, physical magazine aside, The Atlantic lives. Like on your phone, and on your social-media feeds, etc. It seemed obvious to us that what we needed was an emblem — a logo. A “swoosh,” if you will. But what could that logo possibly be? At some point, we noticed that we had already been clicking on that very logo, every time we went to The Atlantic online, or on the app, or on Twitter — that is, a giant A. There it was, staring us in the face. And the more we explored The Atlantic’s long history, the more we saw that A, Zelig-like, showing up. Which is to say that, although the A seems radical, it is in fact historically grounded. Like The Atlantic itself.”