My current picks from the major food groups of media: MUSIC, GAMING, PUBLISHING, and MOVIES. If there's anything good on TV I may include that as well. Since websites get covered here all the time, I'm just going to skip over those.

This set of selections is totally subjective, not endorsed by AOL, slightly skewed toward design, and, ultimately, pointless in nature.

warner bros.

SPEED RACER still lingers pleasantly in the memory. Sure, Iron Man is the better film, but I feel this one got an incredibly bad rap from the press eager to have first blood in the Summer movie season. On IMAX, it was incredible and visually AWE-INSPIRING. An incredible design effort went into this film. Where Indiana Jones was lazy as heck, this big shaggy movie tries its heart out. The Oscar for Art Direction? Too bad everyone will be too hung up on the box office to give credit where it is due. A shame overall.



DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE"S new album Narrow Stairs is a musical revelation and another in a string of well-crafted and heartbreaking releases by the band. The lyrics evoke Paul Simon at his destitute and shattered-relationship best-- beautiful word-smithing that resonates and effortlessly rises above pop music cliches. When I am jamming on a Keynote presentation or tooling about with my photos on flickr, this is the current soundtrack of my nights and weekends.



NINJA GAIDEN 2 is my gaming poison of choice this month. I have been waiting for this game for four or five months. Renowned as the most difficult platform game on the market since 2004, I am proud to say I have completed the first game all the way through and am on Level 3 of this blazing sequel. It's bloody, it's pointless, it's infantile, but after a long day of work there's nothing like wall-running over a moat of lava or slaying the minions of Hell to put things in perspective.



Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, is Malcom Gladwell's next book after the excellent "The Tipping Point", and was my commuting read this month. I know it came out two years ago, but it is a great read relative to strategy and design in that it tries to scientifically explain intuition and that feeling you can get about things at first glance. The book explores why that feeling is usually right on and often pummeled to death by excessive amounts of data pulled in to validate decisions (otherwise known as "analysis paralysis"). Illuminating. I wanted to send a copy to my Mom and say "you see? All those years you accused me of not thinking!? That was TIME WELL SPENT!!!"

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