Iteration 37: The Myth of the Perfect Thing

Almost Everything with Jeffery Saddoris

At the end of 1999, I bought my first new car: a 2000 Chevy Blazer Sport in black, with a dark grey interior. I had never bought a new car before and the purchase process took months. Literally. I think I test drove every car available under $30,000 — multiple times. It got to the point where sales people at several local dealerships knew me by name. As it turned out, the local Chevy dealer was owned by the father of a guy I went to high school with, who ended up making me a great deal on the Blazer — I think in part so I would stop coming in to test drive his cars. Still, I loved that car and drove it for more than a decade before trading it in. When I decided to upgrade to a new mic, I tested more than 20 different mics — condensers, dynamics, even a couple ribbon mics — before landing on the ElectroVoice RE320 that I currently use. And then there’s my search for a new camera, which was a running joke for about five of the six years of doing On Taking Pictures. The point is, I do an exhaustive amount of research on the tools I buy. On the upside, once I finally get to a decision, I rarely have buyer’s remorse. Seller’s remorse is another story — specifically, a mint-condition Nikon F2AS with 50mm f/1.2 lens that I still don’t know why I sold.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts | Overcast | RSS

Freakonomics Radio recently did an episode called How to be Creative where they asked a bunch of academics, artists, musicians, scientists, and inventors: how do you define creativity?

Photographer Nick Brandt just launched a teaser for his next body of work called This Empty World, which as he writes “addresses the escalating destruction of the natural world at the hands of humankind.” It looks like another stunning body of work and I’m looking forward to getting the opportunity to talk to Nick about it.

I’ve recently finished the latest season of The Man in the High Castle and in watching was reminded how much I love the opening titles, which were done by a company called Elastic, who also did Westworld, The Crown, The Punisher and a ton of other really terrific work.

Music in this episode: The Wrong Way (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0