I have a chronic and long-standing hatred and contempt for my own work. It’s endemic to the profession, generally… like the common cold of design. Or really, any field where making things out of ideas is the stock and trade.

But so: my dear friend GAC, if you don’t know him, is a supremely excellent photographer based in PHL. He can really point a camera at stuff, and he can really whip a llama’s ass with a belt. After I fretted publicly about not having decent photos of my design crapola, he suggested that he might assuage my stated disparity, and we hatched a plan. We had a raucous 24-hour work-bender-photoshoot, some of the results of which you see here.

But yeah: so it’s really really really fucking nice to see someone else seeing your stuff. Whatever one might say about the stuff in question (and a lot of this is debatably not even “my stuff”), it feels SO GOOD to see it from a point of view that is somehow liberated from your own weatherbeaten prism. Like an eyeball massage or someshit. Yes.

Anyway. I’m just sayin’. Wanted to share and all. You should do this, really, if you’re stuck: have your friend do your portfolio, and do theirs in return. It’ll be awesome.

And yeah I’m sure you already know all this shit already, but I am nothing if not grotesquely naive. I mean, I got swindled out of my gizmos by a pituitary mutant. So you probably saw it all coming a mile away. C’est la guerre, no? Yis!

The other evening, Mr. Alkaitis-Carafelli were sitting in a bar discussing various things, and the subject of esteemed book-jacket designer Chip Kidd came up, and we were both rather agush regarding his work, particularly the cover on Lunar Park. Quality shit, no? But then he has to turn around and do shit like this:

… which is so beyond fugly it makes me want to throw up. I just bought this book (in hardcover, yes, like the idiot I am arguably) and I’ve already taken the jacket off and stomped on it. WHAT IS UP, MR. KIDD?!? I want to like you and all, but hey. Also, I find the inadvertant infantile allusion of your last name endlessly confusing.

Incedentally it’s nice, really, that your average hardcover fiction book is actually smyth sewn and has headbands and all that, but for 25 bucks, one would hope that you bookbinders could condescend to do ‘em up with actual bookcloth, rather than whatever cheap colored stock you fuckers seem to employ. I know talas charges an arm and a leg for that shit, but you (and by “you” I mean whoever is in the employ of FSG and Knopf and who knows who else to do this shit) can get volume discounts, rite? ok yeah.

But anyway enough. I must eat cheese now, cuz if I don’t, the cheese will go bad, and how will I feel then?? Like a complete assmaster, that’s how. Yep.

-fish