candybowl

candybowl

happy holidays!

candybowl

The Nightmare before Christmas

candybowl

candybowl

Besides Maria Bamford, I think Norm is my favorite comic.

candybowl

candybowl

Sneaker Wars: The Enemy Brothers Who Founded Adidas & Puma & the Family Feud That Forever Changed the Business of Sports

This is quite frankly, one of the craziest (nonfiction) books I’ve ever read. It tells the story of Adi Dassler and his rival, Rudi – as they created and fought for business over the decades since just before WWII with Adidas and Puma, respectively.

But arguably the most crazy (and interesting) part of the story is Adi’s son Horst, who literally built the Adidas brand and worldwide presence we know today, through athlete product endorsements, additional clothing lines and relentless promotion across nearly every sport imaginable. From the way the book portrays him, he’s all but a head of state in many ways, especially given the relationships he creates and cultivates until he passes away at a fairly young age in his early 50s.

Puma is kind of an also-ran in the later years as depicted in this book (Rudi also had a rival son to Horst, but seems to continually come up short on nearly all fronts, save for a few cases) – but it’s also interesting to see along the way how Phil Knight learned the lessons of Horst well and built his own, even bigger shoe and clothing empire starting with one Michael Jordan….the research that went into this book is top-notch and obviously took years to accumulate and review, especially given these are private companies, not governments or public entities.

defnitely one of the best books I’ve read this year.

candybowl

Kerewin and I went to see the Andrew Wyeth Retrospective at SAM this past sunday afternoon. Very interesting …. here was an artist I may have heard of in passing but knew nothing about, nor any of his art. Not unlike the Yoyoy Kusama exhibit of a few months ago, a neat surprise (completely different type of art from hers – Wyeth is predominantly tempura and watercolor painting).

What’s also interesting about Wyeth is that he only lived in two places his entire life, and was painting right up until he passed away. And (some might say of course) he seems to have had a hidden obsession with one of his female models for a long period in his later years.

The exhibit has a number of great paintings but I think what I liked best were the watercolors, because they were still very detailed for that type of painting (I don’t think that’s typical) – apparently he used the same types of detail methods to paint despite using a different medium.

Definitely worth seeing, it’s there until Jan 15.

candybowl

It could have been soooo much simpler, according to this picture….

candybowl