Tagged, Double-Tagged Even!

I suppose I should have seen it coming when an author I reviewed called my rambling stream-of-consciousness take on his book "brainy". Now I get hit by the tag-team (pun intended) of Eisha and Jules over at 7Imp as both a "Thinking Blog" and for another meme concerning the non-lit blogs I frequent.

Yikes.

The Thinking Blog thing has me a bit stumped as I've been watching all my thinking blogs get tagged before my very eyes. And since I don't believe "tag backs" are fair I'm going to have to give that post a little more thought than my non-lit post.

My five non-lit blogs, in no particular order...

• ModMom is my secret doorway into the world Mid-Century Modern art and design. Well, it's not so secret, just my secret. Maybe secret isn't the word. ModMom celebrates the art and style of an era that taps directly into the innocence and nostalgia of my elementary school days. It showcases the boldness in design that briefly promised us a future of unique furnishings in 1970's colors that weren't only avocado and burnt orange. It also rounds up contemporary artists, designers, businesses and retailers who are capturing and reviving that spirit today and bringing it back for retro hipsters.

• Keri Smith's The Wish Jar may get a double-hit here because I think of this as both a creative artist's on-line journal and a Thinking Blog. Keri calls herself "Author, Illustrator, Guerrilla Artist" but so much of what she posts are also meditations on the creative act. In February she participated in "A Thing A Day" month by creating something and posting it without fail. Many of the "things" could be viewed as the kind of creative exercises an artist might do when feeling stumped in their regular work, but with Keri each is carefully considered, grouped each week by theme, and presented almost like silent lessons in jump-starting your brain. Or my brain at least.

• This one's a bit off the rails. It's Seth Godin's Blog and perhaps one of the oldest blogs I've kept tabs with. Seth is a marketer, but he's also an innovator. He writes about the ideas surrounding marketing from a point of view that takes common sense and turns it on it's head. Seth's books looked like someone misplaced some fiction titles in the business section, the art was fresh and fun and the titles themselves were not like most business titles: The Big Red Fez, Free Prize Inside, The Purple Cow, All Marketers Are Liars. What's not to like? At that point I actually had to rethink my position on books in the business section and began to read both his blog and the places he takes me for views on how people think and act in the marketplace. If you read this post on brands and mythology with an eye toward Harry Potter you'll know why I keep checking him out.

• Time for the out-of-the-blue segment. When I was in fifth grade I wanted to be an animator. Lacking the actual ability to draw, and not having the foresight at that time to see that digital cartoons were on the horizon in a dozen years, I gave up the dream but never the interest. To that end I like to check in on the blogs of animators, artists who work in animation, and a handful of animation student who seem promising to me. Lorelay Bove is a character animation student at Cal Arts, a college founded by Disney that focuses primarily on animation. Her works reminds me of Mary Blair, going back to that Mid-Century thing again. She works both traditionally (with paint) and digitally but prefers the hand-drawn and when viewed side-by-side you can see the warmth that always seems to be lacking in digital work by artists. She's not a frequent poster -- she is a student after all -- but when she does the illustrations she posts are like little tea time pauses in a text-bound day.

• Finally, I cook. Five nights a week. I'm not great, but I can hold my own. I have any number of places that I like to visit for recipes and general info but Coconut & Lime is the place I go to when I want a good kick in the rut. Rachel Rappaport has been featured on NPR and was the winner of "best original recipes" category in the 2006 Food Blog Awards. You know, I didn't even know that until just this moment when I was double-checking her info for this post. Unlike other food blogs where people post their variations on established recipes, Rachel always seems to be exploring the possibilities and her recipes stand out as a result. Well-illustrated, nicely designed, it's a good blog all around. And it tastes good, too.

So that's my five. Passing it forward, I have the same problems as with the Thinking Blogger tag: everyone I know appears to have been hit already. The problem of being low man on the totem pole. If you're reading this, and you haven't been tagged, and you want to participate please (a) feel free to do so and (b) give me a hard time in the comments for not tagging you properly.