Good morning. It’s 5:23 AM, and I’m sitting on my friend Jed’s couch in Brooklyn. All sorts of important school shit started to go down today in Providence, but I was privvy to none of it. We had one last frolic out at the beach, this weekend, you see. Just a handful of us, and it was a fantastic last hurrah for the summer. The temperatures were within range, the people were concordant and the relationships could be accurately described by an adjective that means the opposite of “awkward”. I’m sure you just got back to work and so the last thing you need is someone yapping about their complacently happy beach time while you have to fix the TPS reports and whatnot.

But so: I had told fidelity to put a lot of money into my checking account at bank of fucking america. I had issued this order last Thursday, and I’d only done it so late because the FIRST one I did, when I called on Tuesday, didn’t go through at all. But the second proved to be a far more nettlesome thing, really…. the transaction didn’t go through until Monday, so I had to bum cash off my friends and generally be annoying about money, a state of being I detest with the passion of 10,000 supernovae. So but so: on monday, licking my chops to hit the ATM, I check my balance on the intertron, and what is it I see? Why, the fools have executed a WITHDRAWAL and not a deposit. So there is a gigantic number in my bank account as I expected, but it is most unexpectedly red, like straight-up #FF0000, and there is a minus sign next to it.

After much phone-calling and yelling and screaming of “ESCALATE ME NOW!!” and the like, I got one dude to admit that the broker had literally CLICK THE WRONG FUCKING BUTTON. this was a real show-stopper factoid, I have to say… at RPI, I was in charge of the security and proper treatment of lots of peoples’ personal info. I didn’t even touch money stuff with my systems, but believe me, if I had done something like that to even one of my charges’ data, I’d have been super ultra fucking fired. AND BUT SOOOO, these dildos haven’t fixed my fucking shit yet!! I won’t go into all the details, really, but WTF, you can click a mouse and ruin all of my savings at once, but you can’t click it the OTHER way and FIX IT?!?!?! Color me boggled by this shit.

Anyway, I guess the upshot is that I learned a lot of stuff about American financial infrastructure. Did you know that the Federal Reserve closes at 2:30? Maybe. But did you know that most contemporary ACH transfers, while slower than federal wire funds, actually ENCOMPASS a federal wire fund transfer within their transactional boundary? That is fascinating. I learned shit like that, in between breaths while I yelled at bankers. Yes.

Anyway I will be back in PVD soon, and back with the REAL WRITING too (someting more for Ms. Ganssle, yeah!)… in closing, I would like to apologize also for being a shitty communicator this summer. I have a few legit excuses: I couldn’t get GTalk to turn off on my fone for a few weeks, so it only looked like I was giving you the cold, silent finger. Not long after, the fone was lost in entirety while I was riding the infamous cyclone down at coney island. I swear, it was totally in my pocket in what I thought was a secure fashion… I couldn’t have been wronger; the fone was tossed to the breeze, and so I had to upgrade ad-hoc and scramble my contacts together from pieces of paper, and even answer calls with queries like “who is this?” … blech.

So these are my excuses, but fuck them. Soon, we will chat all through the night. It will be wonderful. But before that, I’m going to crash here, and hopefully scrape up enough cash to achieve the requisite fiduciary momentum to leave New York. Fuck yes. Salud!

YO MY WALL IS UP!! Come to the fucking mason building and SEE!!!! I’m very happy with this shit. I know you’re not supposed to like your own shit, but I am taking an exception this time, and liking it. Yeah!

Also I have a new article up on SpeakUp and Writing Design Criticism. Do tell me what you think if you have some time to waste. Because I love you, and your opinion is paramount. Indeeeeed yes!

Anyway that’s it for now. I will be unbroke in about two hours so talk to you after I buy some food and eat it. Until then.

-fish

What follows is a rather annoying essay I had to write for grad seminar, in which I “reflected” on a presentation I gave on my influences vis-a-vis my work. Please excuse the rampant pretense. Yes.

There are a great many things in this world that pique my interest. Of those that fall under the general aegis of my practice and work, I’d say it’s pretty easy to draw a line down the middle of them. On one side, there are the things that I love because something about them speaks directly to my persona.

Figure 1. Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room, synchronized light bulbs and mirrors, 1965.

Yayoi Kusama’s monumental works, through which she sought (nay, seeks; she’s still a practicing artist) to defray the constant crackle of her neurological problems, inform my process in a way that naturally goes beyond mere formalism. Her work offers a viewport into the war she fights with her own errant brain on a daily basis. As such, it serves as an example of how such a force can be channeled, rather than pacified or otherwise “cured”, into art. I see things like that and I think, aha yes, I could do that.

Figure 2. James Turrell, Live Oak Friends Meeting House, light installation, 2000.

James Turrell, on the other hand, produces work that is austere in presentation, punctilious in process, and clear in intent. My hands aren’t steady enough to make the things he makes, and my mind lacks the zennish clarity one needs to conceive of these things in the first place. I’m attracted to the work, because it offers something I need. Turrell himself, however, is not someone I particularly identify with: we have little in common in most aspects. I’m sure that if we were stuck next to one another on a plane and forced to converse for a time, we’d wind up pissy and uncommunicative long before landing. (Not that that would ever happen; he’s most likely flying first class these days, whereas I’m stuck in coach.)

Figure 3. Karel Maartens, Counterprint, experimental monoprint, 2004.

Unsurprisingly, those few characters who straddle that line are among the most compelling: Karel Maartens, for example, is a supreme master of printing processes and data visualization. However, he does not allow these highly technical and systematized facets of process to rule his work; he still finds value in irregular metal junk, as the monoprints in his “counterprint” monograph wonderfully illustrate. His work multiplexes the calclulated and calming qualities I find attractive with the ragged human aspects I can identify with.

Figure 4. Maya Lin, Topologies, variable installation, 1997.

Ditto Maya Lin: In her Topologies show, she had meticulously and mathematically CNC-routed slabs of wood happily intermixed with prints she made by inking fragments of glass. The stochastic and the inductive were both bent into form by her vision.

This, I think, is what I aspire to do: I would like to harness the edge of my constructed systems. The points at which these constructs break down is frequently where the most fascinatingly unexpected situations can arise. In edge-cases like these, these break-down points frequently serve as on-ramps, as it were; they are where the humanity of the maker can break through the mask of the system to greet those on the outside.

You know, like this:

Figure 5. Unknown Artist, Longcat vs. Tacgnol, apocalyptic cat vision, 2007.

I am so easy, when it comes to dance music. Alls I need is a good mix done by someone who knows how to use a low-pass filter. It’s that easy. It can be anything: house, Warp, 80’s, norwegian black metal, Sufjan Motherfucking Stevens, I don’t care*. As long as you can avoid jarringly crashing the songs together (not easy; such cacophony is SOP for some) and you sweep the mids, you have me at hello.

Not that I’ve been dancing much (with a handful of notable exceptions; most notably the drunken CAVE danceathon depicted above, which maybe I will tell you about sometime) but dance music == work music, and the nights have been quite late here. The writing has been haphazard, but I did get an article out the door for a magazine my dear friends back in RISD architecture are doing. It’s called Public Relations, and when I know more about this publication and its whereabouts, so will you.

Anyway. Also, a few weeks ago I went and got some new pants in new york. I usually get pants from Diesel, but I wanted to mix things up a bit, so I went to the “G-Star RAW” store across from Stackhouse, despite their entirely stupid name. While the pants I got there are nice, the people who work there are retards. Furthermore, they managed to reinforce my conviction that ASSHOLES and RETARDS are the new fundamental dichotomy that defines all of humanity:

Figure 1. Assholes versus retards. As originally referenced herein.

… and so here’s why: when you go to Diesel, the people who work there are snotty, overdressed pieces of hipster trash who don’t condescend to give you the time of day (née “assholes”). When you come out of the dressing room in your putative new pants, they look you up and down and sort of snort derisively. I am not precisely sure why, but this whole routine makes them sell more pants. Like you’ve somehow earned them by dealing with their shit.

But so the “G-Star RAW” people are sycophantic douchebags (née “retards”). First off, the pants guy actively helped me find some pants. That was their first mistake. I do not want nice pants people; I want to be brutally put in my place for my naïve fashion sense and rampant consumerism. Furthermore, he tried waaay too hard to please. I came out of the dressing room in some pants, and one of his pants cohorts looked at me and immediately said “those look nice!” … I went over to the mirror and saw that he was a lying sack of shit. The pants were horrendous, and I in fact sent them back. Plus, all the “G-Star RAW” employees were not dressed in the over-the-top absurd manner I have come to expect from top pantsmen. The whole experience left me baffled, and I can’t say I’ll be doing much business with them in the future.

Anyway yeah. This whole entry was a procrastination scheme, so I’m going to call it over and do some real work. Fuck yes!

-fish

My greenpoint neighbors had been kind enough to leave their wireless access points wide-open all summer, but that charity ended abruptly last friday. C’est la guerre, no? Right before a big deadline at the Merce job, too.

No internet == no research, == sad. I had just made a list of my research tools, and lookit how many of them are internet-based:

del.icio.us: everywhere I’ve ever been that I thought worth remembering at the time. Say what you want about “web 2.0” nonsense; I do enjoy “tags” in this context, for slicing and dicing my own data, and the data of others.

Nexis: Anything anyone wrote that was somehow officially sanctioned. Nexis is information crack. Whittle away an afternoon searching your friends and enemies! Yes. Unfortunately, Nexis does not support google’s query syntax, which is hard to unlearn. It also doesn’t seem to support the ‘back’ button of the browser.

google: of course. The perfect complement to the two aforementioned services. I’m sure you understand.

The Complete New Yorker: Although this content is largely accessible via Nexis or their web site, reading the original articles in their original context is a rare treat. You get fantastically distracted by all kinds of things (nice old typography in ads, inexplicably anachronistic unindexed blurbes, et cetera), such that it’s wholly worth the 60 bucks and the dependance on physical media objects.

spotlight: I love pdfs. Whenever I run across one, I save it in a big, disorganized folder, which the macintosh OS is generous enough to sort for me.

cigarettes: As disgusting as the habit is, I love the way smoking dovetails so well with my work habits. I get away from the computer once every two hours or so, and in doing so I can clear my head and avoid getting bogged down with some detail. Also, if other people around you are smoking, you can ask them questions like, “So, Chris, what do you really think of semiotics?” and maybe they’ll direct you to some sort of valid resource. Yes.

… see? most of these things require the interweb, which as I mentioned I have been recently (albiet fairly) deprived of. Maybe I shouldn’t have run all those torrents? Who’s to say. Yes.

On an unrelated note, the other day I saw a girl walking down the street, wearing one of those perpetually unfunny “ironic cooper black t-shirt” shirts. It said “I’m cute in front”. I don’t understand this. The text was printed on the front of the shirt, indeed, so was she trying to insist upon her own perceptions as fact? Or making fun of herself and her own percieved cuteness? Or maybe trying to specifically say “stop fucking me in the ass” to someone (or, perhaps, anyone at all)? I don’t know. I want to hate this t-shirt, but I don’t understand it, so I can’t. Phooey.

Ok, now I must order another coffee in order to remain online. Salud, wish me luck.

-fish

The High Line was urban infrastructure and architecture, in harmony. It came about in accordance with the economic logic of the day, that which produced buildings whose programmatic ties to train-based logistics were physically manifest… the remnants of which can be seen along any of the rundown exurban areas Amtrak’s northeast corridor passes through, where sagging warehouses directly interface with little rusty side-branches of track that split off from the main route. There was no abstraction between commerce, logistics, infrastructure, and architecture… all such interactions were right there, in the open, and quite legible.

Figure 1. High Line train passing through what is now Westbeth Artists’ Community.

… When Bryan had talked about infrastructure in housing as an API, my first thought was something like

Ok yeah, but unless you are stamping like thousands of these things out, all with slightly different structural, logical, and perhaps programmatic requirements, the API idea kind of breaks down, cuz it’s overkill, I mean after all an API is something you use in order to approach a component-based system of structures in a black-box sort of way, whereas in architecture that makes little sense considering the amount of post-construction, errm, dynamism in the system.

… points which, I should mention, a) went unuttered outside of my own bedroom and b) were summarily addressed, more or less, immediately afterwards. But I am always wary when ideas from software engineering are brought into other disciplines, because really most everything in software is metaphor to begin with. That, coupled with the “fail better” mentality fostered by apple-Z and, more recently, the whole agile-development thing, seems like a philosophy that would complicate things faster than it could simplify them.

But fuck that, really, because “complex” and “simple” is probably the worst false dichotomy like ever. The manhattan grid, and later the 1916 zoning law, created (by dint of abstracting the ideas of “city block”, “avenue”, etcetera) a simple system in which people could build shit. This happened to coincide with the advent of individualism in the last century, and the dovetailing of said individualism with rabid hypercapitalism, and so volia, yes, the modular and slightly abstract system made a lot of sense. so people built shit.

The edge cases are the most interesting, tho… like when people want or need to programmatically exceed that system. The inevitable friction between the parties involved when such things are executed is, too, a consequence of the abstraction; if we’re still talking in terms of things like APIs, it’s kind of like “DLL hell” I would say. The almost balletic integration of the High Line with the buildings it serviced does, I will concede, have a nice parallel with the earlier days of computer engineering, before APIs were trans-national legal concerns, when code was written for love, and not much else.

Figure 2. The High Line, immediately prior to the commencement of reconstruction.

Most designers (including myself on most days) would like to ignore the cold, hard, logical fact of the economic context. It is always the thing in the background that drives all of these engineering decisions, whether you’re building an API for software or for plumbing. I mean, the Friends of the High Line are going to end up with a mighty fine bullet-point to lend to nearby luxury condo developers, despite their proclaimed 501(c)(3) status. It looks to be very pretty, yes. But I fear that the simultaneous decoupling of the place, from both its economic and physical contexts, will rob it of its power.

Is this sort of universal abstraction simply the spirit of the times, or is it a fluke of globalization? Who knows. I don’t. If you know, tell me. In the meantime I’ll be reading more Houellebecq, which is what started me thinking about all this nonsense in the first place. Yes.

-fish

good:

• rebuilding merce cunningham’s internal database
• frying hot dogs in butter (the only worthwile thing I got from the book “dry” by augusten burroughs, you axed me)
• the similarity of mcgorlick park with washington square park, not just in design (that sort of radial french-garden plan thing) but also in the way that each lane in the park seems to self-segregate into a micro-region based on foot traffic (e.g. in washington square, southwest corner = chess players, west middle corridor = nyu students going to class, center area = tourists watching breakdancers, etc… in mcgorlick park the distinctions are a mite more subtle, like polish dog walkers vs. new moms with bugaboos, but they’re still there).
• maybe maybe maybe selling a book, knock on wood, yes yes
• interviewing people and having them blab about design and language on tape for hours
• cupcakes from billy’s
• dancing with girls, all night long
• riding a bike from greenpoint to redhook with your friend on a summer day … normally I enjoy deriding “bike people” as hillarious fanatics, but I can sort of see where they’re coming from with that. weaving in and out of the little niches between cars at high speed gives you this total man-over-machine type buzz, and plus if you’re doing this in new york, your perspectival POV of the city is very similar to how the video game Grand Theft Auto looks, which is entertaining. the whole thing is further enhanced by stopping at grimaldi’s and/or swimming in a redhook swimming pool, indeed.
• doing laundry … just now in my laundry, I unexpectedly found an almost-new deerhoof shirt that I know is not mine, but is in my laundry and is my size. this never happens, but karmatically it makes sense considering the staggering quantities of my own clothing that has disappeared without warning or explaination into washing machines and dryers throughout my 27+ years of garbed existence
• cutting video again
• shakespeare in the park

bad:

• the G train
• hangovers
• when someone you love very much is in a bad way, such that it makes them seem mean and nasty when really they’re just tired and scared, so you have to repress your emotion when interfacing with them, which is not easy because you love them and seeing someone you love in pain makes you kind of emotional
• the total wasteland of despair that is typographic control in CSS
• dumping liquid into your new laptop, destroying the keyboard
• talking before thinking
• drinking too much
• forgetting recipes
• transcribing interview tapes where both parties are hyped on coffee and talking 400wpm or thereabouts
• money
• not being able to sleep because of hideous anxiety attacks concerning life decisions and whatnot

ugly:

• old polish men peering in your window at night and catching you dancing to really stupid shit
• thinking proudly to yourself, “wow, I haven’t seen a single cockroach in my apartment all summer”, because as soon as you have thought that, you have of course irrevocably jinxed yourself and you basically see a huge one crawling up the wall as soon as you’ve finished the thought
• rats that have been smooshed by cars
• the hipsters who have formed a kickball league (replete with un-funny ironic team t-shirts) and play relentlessly in mackerren park
• the blackouts currently plaguing brooklyn and the subway in general
• leaving a cabinet open, forgetting you have done so, and then smashing your temple on it when abruptly standing up

… basically, yeah.

so let me bring you up to speed. here is the deal: I am in greenpoint. I am in apartment #3F at 67 driggs, near mcgorlick park. I am subletting this spot from a chick I met on craigslist. I spent all my spare cash on the rent here, and on the rent in my PVD spot, and on a new computer I didn’t really need but kind of wanted anyway, and so no I am closer to broke than I’d like to be, which is why right now I am drinking miller genuine draft. I have an air conditioner and an enormous turbine-sized industrial fan so I am not too absurdly hot. I am trying to work on my book and so far ofer erenfeld, david reinfurt, stephan moore, and a few other kids have agreed to give me interviews, which will give me enough material to prevent the whole project from collasping under the weight of its own hideously self-referential footnotes.

I am doing some freelance work but it won’t pay me for a while. I went, the other night, to Hiro, to see VHS or Beta spin for the Hot Chip release party, and I danced like a complete utter retard, thanks to the unique combination of compounds and music I was subsequently exposed to. I have a fire escape here where I can watch the sun set over the park. I have sort of exposed my head and neck to enough sun to begin the tanning process, but the skin there is still kind of pinkish, and the rest of me is classic computer-geek pale white, so I literally look like a red-neck, which is very sad.

I couldn’t go to a party this weekend up in troy, which is also sad. I went to a party at the new O-R-G studio the other night, where many people including my ex-girlfriend had received summonses for drinking outside, like just before I got there, and they were selling a magazine called “tourette’s”, the mere presence of which in my personal space kind of bugged me out so I spent 10 bucks to acquire the two issues of it that they had for sale, and I was handed them by stuart bailey himself, which I did not realize until after the transaction, during which (thanks to the three or so hastily consumed warm heinekens) I made several comments that (in retrospect) made me sound like some sort of douche, and I will not reproduce them here, for your benefit.

I recently went through all my old fiction writing and found, unsurprisingly, that it was all utter garbage, but amusingly there are bits of it that are so amazingly bad that they successfully transcend and become bad in a fascinating way that catches and refracts all wavelengths of light all around you when you look at them, like a prism of horror sort of. I amused myself one morning by taking the best of the worst of it and typesetting it all neatly, with small-caps numbers and flourishes on the page numbers and hillariously ornate drop caps and shit like that. I will not show you this, again for your benefit.

I get headaches like all the time but I’m out of advill. I am trying hard not to start smoking again.

I’ll let you know more when I know more. yes.

-fish

• if you don’t already have them, buy the following things:
  • big fucking cutting mat
  • olfa L-1 (do not bother with any other pussy olfa blades)
  • x-acto and box of 100 spare blades
  • C-THRU ASE36 metal ruler
  • some leadholders and soft leads
  • silkscreeening stuff (if only to just leave around your house and impress undergrads of the opposite gender)
  • “elements of typographical style”, bringhurst (make sure to carry it in your bag for like a week so it’s all abused-looking)
  • epson 1280 and a continuous ink system
  • bone folder
  • a vanity domain and web hosting


• do not bother buying:
  • a scanner (the school has plenty)
  • “life style”, bruce mau (I mean please)


• never ever ever EVER buy software. there is always some geek in the studio who will priate it and install it for you, if you buy him/her coffee or cigarettes or what have you.


• if you do smoke, smoke kamel red lights, because the box will impress your fellow graphic designers without fail.


• do not say “I’m interested in architecture”. you will sound like an idiot. if you are actually interested in architecture, just quietly take the drafting class they offer at the BEB in the fall and don’t talk about it till after. the class will probably kick your ass all over town, but a) you’ll get your fill of architecture type nonsense and b) drafting, if you don’t already have the skill, is incrediby valuable for typography and type design. be prepared not to sleep every thursday night.


• in fact, be prepared to do 1 all-nighter a week, until the last three weeks of the semester, in which case sleep is pretty much catch as catch can. (it could be worse, you could actually *be* in architecture, in which case forget about sleep in any meaningful way really).


• learn how to bind a fucking book. you will have to make at least one book per class, pretty much. most often these are “process books”. designing a process book is easy: pick your favorite grid from “grid systems” and dump everything from the semester into it. if you bind it nicely, tho, you might be able to bump your final grade up a notch (if you care about such things) cuz the process book will often be the only thing the teacher has to assess you on when grades are due.


• I would admonish you to learn to embellish your speech with intelligent sounding nonsense at this point, but I fear you will learn to do that on your own to a fantastic extent.


• read non-design books and go see movies. if you don’t, you will become some sort of raving academic sycophant, or worse, an AIGA member.


• if you have interesting skills from before you were a grad, don’t talk about them. keep them hidden deep inside and then bust them out for a project w/o telling anyone. trust me, it will be awesome. plus if any of those skills are computer-related, keeping them inside will effectively prevent everyone from considering you the de facto “tech support” go-to person. I hate that shit.


• go to new york all the time. even if you’re some kind of fanatical burrito-eating west coaster, go to new york whenever you can afford it. new york has:
  • awesomer design shit and museums than providence
  • places to buy awesome design shit (talas, kate’s, spoonbills etc)
  • better cheese
  • infinitely better bars and music
  • drugs


• … the apex of the new york thing will happen at some point during your first semester, when you realize everyone in your class is dating someone who lives in brooklyn, and you will have a strange moment some hungover sunday morning when you are walking down the street in green point looking for eggs and you see all your fucking classmates doing the same thing.


• conversely, don’t bother with boston. boston is for dorks. trust me.


• get a good-looking winter coat. providence can get stupidly cold.


• if you have a choice between doing something explicitly “digital” (code, flash, web shit etc) and something “analog” (bookbinding, printmaking, etc) I would say go analog. you can learn flash any fucking time you want, with just a laptop and google, but how often are you going to run across a letterpress studio with a polymer-plate machine?? I mean, who the fuck do you think you are, anyway???


• one thing about crits is: at almost every crit there is a winner and a loser. if you don’t like competition and you think we should all just get along and collaborate and all that, well hey. but the truth is that there is almost always someone who is way out front of everyone else in the crit, be it in terms of content, concept, execution, whatever. it’s not always fair. some people “win” by just producing way more than anyone else and not editing their shit down. everyone else in the class, besides the “winner”, will be at more or less the same level, except the “loser”. this person maybe didn’t understand the project, or they technically fucked up their work somehow, or maybe they’re just an imbecile.
  
  the arc of most classes has this same pattern, typically with the person who “wins” the most crits “winning” the class. it seems to be like RISD de rigeur to give one person an A, the rest B’s, and one person a C or F in like every class. I don’t know if all the teachers got together and decided this one day, or if the situation just happened to converge on that pattern, but there it is.
  
  if you know in your heart that you are a good designer, you won’t care about “winning” or “losing”, but it can be quite fun and stimulating to engage in hearty interclass competition, and it makes you think about your work in a different way. you’re all still friends at the end of the day, and you all still go for beers at the end of the week… “losers” get gossiped about, and “winners” get secretly lauded, but that’s the extent of things really.

I just imported my old movabletype archive, with all types of posts spanning a large chunk of my life, going back to august 2000, across multiple CMS architectures and several continents. it’s mostly drivel and all the links are busted, but at least it’s vaguely organized into three eras: the eatshit.diaryland.com era, the secret-floating-textbox hand-rolled-XML-format-based-CMS super minimalist era, and the looks-just-like-this-version but-coded-with-html-tables-not-CSS also-slightly-more-orange and-with-movable-type-2.66666 era.

I do not know why I did this but there you go. someday, I’ll read through it all, but not today, cuz I have school shit. all the images and most of the links are busted; that will be fixed, I am sure, at some point in time that most likely resides firmly in the future.

yes!

-fish