My old buddy from college Josh e-mailed me not too long ago asking if I’d trade my copy of Bright Eyes’ Digital Ash In A Digital Urn, and actually traded me Orange Rhyming Dictionary 2×12 on white for it. Now, Digital Ash is still in print and Jets To Brazil is pretty hard to find and pretty expensive when you can (such as the copy asking $200 on eBay).
But Josh said that he knew how I felt about music, and he hadn’t listened to JTB in years, and knew I wouldn’t just hawk it on eBay. And I never would; I fucking love this album. But even if I was going to sell it, it’d be for $15, just the way I sell anything else I’m looking to off. Music, all art, needs to be about that, the art. Commerce is a distant second. Art needs good homes, respectful owners. So kudos to my friend to having that level of integrity, and I’m glad he respects me enough to know we’re on the same level.
(By the way, Josh also sent me the 7″ of his band, Twin Cousins, and it is thunderous and glorious and if you play it at 33rpm instead of 45 you can feel your heart being run over by a pack of wild elephants. It’s also beautifully packaged, so check that shit out.)
Anyway, I’m sure it’s sacrelige in the Bay Area to praise Jets To Brazil as much as I do, given Jawbreaker’s hometown is just across the bridge and all, but fuck, I love this record so much. I never actually saw a sea anemone until this year and now that I have and what came of the situation that lead me to them, I started listening to that song pretty heavily, but this one has always been just a standout (regardless of the guitar’s similarities to “Heart Shaped Box”) … I don’t know, something about someone screaming, “You keep fucking up my life” over and over, it’s easy to relate to on the idea of waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats and nightmares about the other people that have succeeded in making happy those you just wish you could.
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I live in a hotel. Must keep writing if I’m to be better than everyone else. Like figure skating, like asphyxiating on your own seeping fumes, you’re just waiting. Living in a hotel but I’m not traveling between two points. In mid air I’m levitating above the earth beneath the sky with eyes like static in my three feet from bed to wall. Sleep’s a genius.
Leave me here to my devices. The call could come at any time. They’re playing love songs on the radio tonight. I can’t relate to that right now.
Note so self : no one cares. Your voice is average. In worried piles I typed for miles and you just stood there. I will begin, I will put right this morning terror. I have been kissed between the ears by human error.
Leave me here to my devices. I need a word to change my life. I’ve tied my ankles to the table legs with wire. He can’t write so much as type.
Leave me here to my devices. I can’t think with all this noise.
They’re playing love songs on your radio tonight. I don’t get those songs on mine. You keep fucking up my life.
You keep fucking up my life.
Anyway, thanks goes to Josh. I’ve paid too much for a couple records before and I just hate supporting the idea of punks eating their own culture by selling shit for more than the cost that it’s worth, because the culture should be about the music. Integrity and honesty go a long way in my book and it’s good to know that my friends live up to those standards. Which is probably why I call them my friends. Also this album is so sad and great it is terrifying.
At the party last night I was talking to Anne Marie, the girl who ran the workshop I attended earlier in the day, because both of us thought we’d met before and couldn’t figure out where (our best bet was in Boston, but still couldn’t figure it out totally). Regardless, we were talking about how the workshop came about, as I wasn’t sure if it was initially part of W+K’s strategy for the brand. (Turns out, it wasn’t, but rather something that Levi’s got pitched).
But we both did agree that no matter what sort of corporate sponsorship there was, and even though it was a huge PR stunt, it was the absolute best kind possible. As she put it, “it’s PR, but it’s fucking awesome.”
The photocopier was free for anyone to come in and use, with zines hanging all around and a bit about the how all great zines start with a photocopier, and a note to “Print your f&*#ing life.” A silkscreen studio, darkroom, exposing machine, not to mention two giant letterpress machines and a ton of wood type. All for the public to come in and learn and use. Computers sat in the back with Adobe CS5, but who really gives a shit about computers in a setting like this.
Levi’s campaign right now (all about work) is kind of great, but in this setting, it’s fantastic and inspiring. This was nothing but encouragement for people to learn, to be creative, to take some time from their lives to realize maybe what printing is or at least have some fun.
If there’s any type of advertising that will work on me, it’s this kind of advertising. Nothing about this appealed to anything negative stereotype or lowered the bar on visual culture. If anything, it raised the bar about 400%. This was pro-active, and from the beginning (when Mission locals had vandalized it due to its corporate nature) I felt that it was such a bold statement that anti-corporate sentiment falls short of realizing that if there is anything good about corporations, it’s this right here.
I’m not going to go out and re-stock my wardrobe filled with shit from Levi’s, but chances are next time I want a t-shirt, I’ll probably pick it up from them. Because there aren’t many other major companies I see right now doing things like this. Clothing companies can talk all they want about being made in America (or at least sweatshop free), but this is the difference between a company and a brand. But as far as I’m concerned, if it keeps Levi’s interested in doing things like this, I’ll certainly support them over anywhere else.
Levi’s elevated their brand with this, and I’m trying to find an excuse to fly to New York to get to experience the photography workshop opening up in October and running through December. If nothing else, this entire place was, somewhat ironically, about DIY. Sure, there were a couple shirts and jeans for sale in the middle of the floor, but it took up a minimum amount of space. I’d imagine you’d be allowed to screenprint on them if you bought one.
There are many aspects of the world that are inspiring. Just living in the Tenderloin here in San Francisco inspires me on a daily basis, but that’s more in a way to push myself to never give up. It’s also visually enamoring in many ways. But seldom have I ever seen something a corporation does and thought, “Man, that is just spectacular. That makes me want to go do something with my life.”
So kudos to Levi’s, and the print shop, and the however many people it managed to get to make their first zine or poster, explore the idea of sentiment on paper and see what all designers would do with their life if the medium allowed for such time to be granted to the craft. I wish it was a permanent fixture in the Mission (or anywhere), but for now I’m just glad I got to see it once, on the last day.
My boss and I were talking about the implications of social networking on people at work the other day (he and I see eye to eye on many different things, sort of another reason my job rules) and he brought up a point I’d not yet considered; the way that the suburbs exist due to the automotive revolution and a person’s ability to commute to work from distance with ease, seemingly next would be how people think as it relates to their existence in a digital world.
Do you go places knowing you’ll check in on Foursquare? Do you not check in to some places, because it might affect how your peers would see you? Do you write about certain things in your blog, but not others? Tweet some ideas, or preemptively think about what you’re going to do and how you’ll tweet it?
I thought about writing this post before I wrote it; granted, writing with a point in mind means your thoughts should be organized, and I’d probably write similarly were this for a book or project I was working on. But the medium is the message, and it is all affecting how our brains work.
This is a pretty interesting read on people overwhelmingly absorbed by technology. And I’ll gladly admit I’m in that realm; while I don’t have a zillion social networking accounts, I am on a computer about 12 or 13 hours a day. At work I always have my Google RSS reader, GMail, and Adium running. My iPhone makes it impossible to ever really avoid work or personal communication. And while lately I’ve been taking a more pro-active approach against always being around technology, at this point it’s become consumptive, if for no other reason than being employed by a forward-thinking company means it’s practically required to always be aware of what is happening, or about to happen, in the world. And that requires at least a similar amount of immersion in the same technological ocean a majority of the world is.
Guilt by association, if you will.
And so as our lives become more dependent on technology, or our social networks become more digital and less personal, we adapt our brains to survive in such environments. The root of human nature is simply self preservation, and a large amount of that is now wholly based in one’s ability to utilize and perhaps manipulate the technology available to forge the next step in society’s “growth.”
But it is something to think about; when I come home from a day of shooting photos, while developing and sifting through the ones I’m happy with, I think of what I want to be put up as Image Of The Day and what would go better on the blog. I think about what stages to document paintings at, and then if I want those to be made public or just kept for my own records.
The prominence of Facebook Status Updates and Twitter, well, tweets or whatever … have created a sense that the immediacy of what any individual does at any moment is actually important, so much now that I fear big picture idealism is getting muddled and lost. The ability to see the whole board, understand complex situations and cultural nuance, political relationships and religious beliefs takes a brain developed to believe such things are important (which they are, and moreso in a globally digital world). Yet here we are, spending most of our time tweeting about the fact we just, well, tweeted, or something.
I don’t give a shit where you get coffee or what mall you’re shopping in. Let’s talk about some substance, let’s have a discussion, get into a debate. I’ll meet you there and you can check in to Facebook Places and everyone can read all about where we are. I care more about where we’re going.
Shuttered newsstands and crowded trolleys. Weird how some aspects of the past remain romanticized, while the more important ones die. Sentiment is a motherfucker.
It’s really too easy to poke fun at Fox News. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert have made quite a living from doing it very well. The Huffington Post well, they just basically blog the shit that The Daily Show airs and calls it profit, so whatever. Liberal techno geeks delight in pointless endeavors of convenience, I suppose.
But there really is a story to be made of NewsCorp’s recent investment into the Republican party, and this actually applies on both sides of the aisle.
NewsCorp’s very name implies the fact they’re involved in, well, journalism. The public record. And by donating to a political party they draw a line in the sand. They say, “We support this.” Without even reporting on anything with a slight (or not so slight bias) — they support the right. This wasn’t exactly news to anyone, but it’s certainly quite a line to cross for a news organization to cross.
Various infamous editors of newspapers have claimed so much to their objectivity to which they don’t even vote. I figure a person is a person, a citizen has the right to vote, but the job you get paid for, the job you show up to, is the one you do. Just because you’re opinionated doesn’t mean you can’t become at least moderately level headed for the value of journalism, which is inherently the public service of information dispersion.
It takes absolutely no insight to ridicule NewsCorp for this investment. But therein lies bigger problems; if GE, which owns NBC, and thus MSNBC, donates to the democratic party, how much fault lies in the motivations of the news directors? I guess, a grander point is thus: as information becomes controlled by fewer and larger organizations through a digital age, these organizations will more than likely be partnered with giant corporate affiliates who, after this latest bullshit supreme court ruling, can donate to political parties. What happens when a conflict comes, when NBC has a story to break about a candidate GE directly supported? Or perhaps not GE itself, but one of the many smaller corporations under the umbrella?
We’re getting on shaky ground for capitalism and I’m fine with that, but the freedom of the press is also being relegated to second class status in this environment. The more technology becomes present, the more larger brands of the past will latch on to media conduits of the future. And while the media conglomerates at least should, at their core, pretend to care about conflict of interest, it’s hardly likely they will hold affiliates to that same notion.
And that’s what we can look forward to. Comcast, the largest broadband provider, now with NBC. MSNBC being a weak voice of weak liberals on bad television, but television nonetheless. Net neutrality. Special interests. Broadcast standards, advertising time and revenue. And none of that helps solve the problem that consumerism is the tool of the devil, and there are so many bigger problems to be solved, that politicians will have greater avenues of sidelining so long as they have direct access to someone who can control the news.
It takes about four minutes of reading The Elements of Typographic Style, or maybe one intro to typography class, or about half a day of thinking logically about information architecture to realize exactly why websites like The Huffington Post are the worst fucking thing to happen to news in a long time.
Before we get into nitpicking, let’s take a look at the grander problem: blogs are hard to maintain. Unlike print media, blogs and online information agencies need to be organized by a content management system, instead of say, an art director. And so while newspapers allow for a grid structure, where an art director and team of designers can utilize a canvas to create interesting layouts that will display information at a resolution appropriate to the reader, the internet is actually less dynamic in this sense. There are screen widths to consider, there is a lack of time to consider. There are typeface issues, with standard, cross-platform web fonts being minimal (and awful).
The New York Times has used 96 point type on the front page four times in history. One was when Obama was elected. The time before that was 9/11. They reserve this sort of thing for important events. But on The Huffington Post, giant ass headlines in huge, obtrusive and ugly Arial are posted consistently, no matter if it’s Tiger Woods fucking some new model or the NYSE taking a 800 point hit. Sometimes it’s color coded, but that’s not the point: it’s all the same.
And The Huffington Post isn’t the only site to blame. Media aggregates such as Gawker (and affiliates) have consistent streams of linked out content, and it could be anything, but it all visually is similar. And so to the mind of a reader, it all equates to the same thing.
Visual hierarchy, specifically within the realm of typography, is the greatest loss journalism (and information architecture in general) is losing in spades with the transition to the internet. Due to the need to run all modern websites through a CMS, only The New York Times does any sort of attempt to make some headlines greater than others, feature some stories moreso than others (because really, it should be expected of them).
This problem becomes more significant due to the way in which people interact with the internet. Pages aren’t turned, and rarely clicked on. People expect all information to be displayed in front of them, as opposed to in a newspaper where sections are designated and the medium constitutes a relationship of turning pages, folding them, and moving from section to section. The internet, in haste to show how valuable a tool it is to display information, has colluded the mind to believing all prominent information is displayed immediately on the front page. As if it wasn’t hard enough to find pertinent news before this, now anything that gets posted in non-front page sections will be consistently lost. The action of clicking “Arts” on an online newspaper would be the same as clicking back to your homepage, switching to an IM, or closing the browser. This is far different than print, because to read the arts section, you pick it up. To check your mail, you get up and go to the mailbox.
Our physical actions, and the priorities to which we put them and the way to which we organize our lives through them, are being replaced, and worse, associated with one another. Keeping up with people you don’t know is the same action as keeping up with those you do, via Facebook; in the real world, it means being a peeping tom versus writing a letter or making a phone call. These are important differences.
It always saddens me to see the world fall into this cave of static, especially considering the uphill battle graphic designers everywhere fought through the ages to make typography relevant to the public discourse. But I wonder what impact this all will have on us as an international culture, and how we’ll start treating things equally, even when they don’t deserve to be, but in all the information available online, nobody thought to typeset it.
There’s a big new uproar about the alleged Google / Verizon net neutrality destroying meetings that have been taking place (which both companies havedenied).
Regardless as to who is telling the truth in this, the end of the story remains the same: net neutrality is the single most important first amendment issue in the 21st century. From this point on, anything involving communication and technology will be pertinent so long as net neutrality is not established as law. The idea of corporations like NBC/Comcast funneling the flow of data online is just absurd. But, then again, this is not about constituents of senators who will make this law, it’s about who is lining their pockets.
(It’s nice to see FCC chairman Julius Genachowski endorse net neutrality, but the FCC doesn’t get a say in the matter really.)
Controlling the flow of information is power. Whoever the first genius is that is able to find a profitable way of dispersing news online will go down in history. But this isn’t the way to do that.
While many see the freedom of information available on the internet as the essential democratic medium, they’re slightly mistaken. Information should be readily available, not free.
I’ve got no problem with the New York Times starting a paid content firewall in 2011. We need good and honest journalism in the world, and to do that, journalists need a paycheck like everyone else. Rupert Murdoch’s attempts to de-index NewsCorp from Google are going to play out hilariously I’m sure.
But the partisan divide of journalism is bad enough right now; the distrust of the Fox News types of established press institutions mirrors the lamentable excuse of MSNBC basically just throwing around liberal mud back at O’Reilley and Beck. Hopefully this will revert back to the days of print when the cost of news online increases; it will then be about what people choose to read, as opposed to all the noise being dumped into the air and blogs gaining traction for basically being a content filter. (Also, hopefully, people will watch less cable news.)
It’s going to be interesting enough when news can’t just be re-posted by a blog (hopefully this knocks out some of the Huffington Post’s ego as far as being a legitimate institution is concerned). But if net neutrality isn’t signed in to law, a giant like NewsCorp could find a way to make sure that the NY Post loads faster for subscribers to (whatever internet service they get in bed with) than the NY Times. That certain information will be available faster, even if you’re paying extra to subscribe to a different service.
It’s going to be an interesting next few years and I’d hope that the 2012 elections have some substantial debate about net neutrality, or at least issues in regards to privacy and antitrust in the digital era. (I’d very much look forward to hearing, say, Sarah Palin talk about that stuff.)
(Yes, that’s a Lagwagon reference. I think there might have been two days during 10th grade when I didn’t listen to that record. Still holds up.)
It’s Friday and I could be at Happy Hour or somewhere with people who probably want to see me or maybe. But there’s work to be done, good work to be done and work that means something.
I was talking to someone last night and I said I don’t believe in the ‘live to work’ mentality, but rather ‘work to live.’ She said that I do seem to live to work (this conversation was last night around 11:30 when I was, well, trying to work but too exhausted to get anything done). But I have different qualifications for working and living.
To me, doing what you’re good at in a positive way for little or no compensation isn’t work. That’s what life is; it’s to fight your battles, try and make a difference. My work is what I get paid for, to sell a product and hope that the paycheck buys enough ingredients for spiffy martinis like this to not hate myself completely for that trade off.
I’m going to sit at my desk tonight, my dirty, worn out table covered in the remnants of countless similar nights. I’m going to put everything I can into a project that means something to kids who don’t have much in the world. Meanwhile I’ll watch people walk to and from Olive and Whiskey Thieves, feigning sincerity in order to try and not go home alone, being who they think they should be for the attention. I don’t know how what I do could be considered work and what they’re doing could be considered life.
Life is the fight, life is the struggle, and life is the process of getting what you can out of it all. It’s being excited for cold weather in summer and sad songs on the radio, appreciating the sleeping bags on the street because it’s motivation to work that much harder. It’s taking your time and putting it towards what you believe in. It’s not like I’m being forced to do anything. I have a lot in life. I have a real job that’s letting me basically do anything I want to develop ad campaigns at my leisure. I have a pile of pop punk (and other) records and a cabinet full of top shelf liquor, a fun cat and a pizza place across the street.
And so I have all these things and I think that because of these things, I should spend my nights and weekends here, at my desk, “working” on ways to give back, because they’re the best ways I’m capable of. I’m not sad because of my choices in life. I’m sad because so few people out there think that these decisions make sense to them.
You know, I had a big rant written up about the ridiculous appeals the far right is buzzing about in the press for various amendments to the constitution, how the Prop 8 repeal is, but also is not, a good thing because it just shows how insanely behind we are as treating one another as equals, and how politicians should talk about laws instead of people.
I had this rant, but I guess my idea is just now, if the homophobes and right wing crazies really hate gay people as much as they let on to, then they should really be celebrating the decision today in court, since now the gay community will be allowed to feel the full devastating effect of divorce.
I guess I’m just disappointed in everything tonight. The fact it’s 2010 and gay marriage is being celebrated as a judicial victory instead of just being acknowledged as another thing. I don’t know. I mean I’m not ignorant here, I do realize all the achievements today, and the way the judge wrote the decision will make it even tougher on the appeal (A+).
But we shouldn’t be proud of this. We should be ashamed that it ever came to this, or that we allowed for such discrimination to occur in the first place.
So hey, cool. Another demographic is legally approved to add statistics to the divorce ratio. One more pile of numbers that attempts to show the inevitable failure of ever trying to be good for anyone.
Okay this huge WikiLeaks story that is breaking right now is ridiculously amazing (from a journalistic standpoint). The Guardian and NY Times are running front page stories in conjunction with the release of the documents, and there’s even a pretty great map of some of the bigger events discussed.
I’d have more to write about it, but I think Julian Assange, who spoke recently at TED, covers most of it on his own:
All of this is so fucking awesome. (Except the fact that it’s all happening because we’re still in these ridiculous conflicts.) The only bad part is that now the Obama administration is going to have to answer for all of these documents, which are all between 2004 and January 2009 before the new Afghanistan strategy was crafted. That being said, war is war and it was his call to stay there. I just wish there was a retroactive policy where the Bush policy advisers would have to answer for some of this shit.
Also that TED talk is pretty great. “Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.”
