I took out my tongue ring, and quit smoking. I made a list of people with whom I no longer wish to communicate, and deleted their entries from my fone. I made another list of people for whom my love is disproportionaltely greater than the amount of time I spend talking to them, and vowed to rectify this disparity. I started working in Merce’s studio again, and with relish. I wrote some code for them that does not viscerally disgust me. I have been using a bunch of 4GL/mainframe/non-RDBMS techniques for all this (hence the entry title), the mere fact of which is enough to make me laugh out loud. I am also a gigantic nerd, for the record.

I started to start a company/studio/collective with two of my dearest friends, and I am very excited about this. I started to do a website for a friend of mine, for which I have already designed a typeface, which of course is far from perfect (or even “decent” or “readable”, really, at this point), but is thus far super fucking entertaining. I also started to do a book for another of my dear friends, like of her artwork, and it’s a supreme pleasure to make a book of someone else’s shit, vis a vis my own, let me fucking tell you.

I went to the infamous Glass House, by the late Mr. Johnson. I took many pictures, and watched the Cunningham dancers dance. I missed my mom for all this, but less in a mopey way and more in a corner-of-your-mouth-smile you’d-love-to-see-this sort of way, which wasn’t 100% terrible, I am glad to report.

I am generally doing pretty fucking well, I should say.

I like working in places that are not explicitly design studios, because then I start to do wierd shit, because I have to impovise with the materials I have on hand (a condition which has, historically, yielded hillarious results). I have yet to get internet in my house, so I have been making do with coffee spots and royally crappy stolen wifi, which is similarly good because it stems the torrent of inbound distractions. I am at Supercore right now, in fact, and it’s beyond fantastic, despite the fact that they plugged all of their electrical outlets up with silly putty, or someshit, thus forcing wifi freeloaders like myself to cling desperately to the last dregs of our laptop batteries.

In a nutshell.

-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