PLEASE NOTE: the following bit contains information about the iphone, including (but not limited to) my opinion about the iphone, thus rendering it of little consequence to basically anyone on Earth.

So I had an iphone, for about 24 hours. The virtual keyboard was a total dealbreaker. Maybe my fingers are too fat, maybe they have been spoiled by the tactile feedback afforded to me by my blackberry… regardless, the iphones’ input method was a dog. I mean yeah, you go to the apple store, you play around with one, and perhaps you think (as I did), “wow, that iphone is quite a sexy litte number”. But the thing did not stand up to actual standard use.

Then also, the whole lack of text-selection and copy-paste, and the interface quirkiness (it’s all very well thought out, as anyone will tell you, but that is exactly the problem: it is well thought out, but that hardly guarantees intuitiveness to anyone who is less than 100% cerebral in the manner in which they use their fingers) and the rather strained ichat metaphor for txting… and, and, and. It’s cute, but it fails. Plus, what is with the email options? It will check for new messages either a) never; b) once every 15 minutes, or c) once every half-hour??? What the fuck am I, twelve years old???? My ugly-ass blackberry (to which I have reverted) gets my email as soon as you fling it at me.

Plus, you know, six hundred dollars is class money.

Yeah so yeah. I didn’t drink no Kool-aid. Just so you know. You wouldn’t think that, necessarily, given that you can’t swing a dead cat in my personal living space without knocking over at least 8 or so apple products, but anyway no. Not this time.

Anyway. It’s been a pretty good summer, despite the fact that I spent most of it completely freaking out and acting generally antisocial. For a while there, I didn’t really want to do anything except draw letters and write code. I was fortunate enough to live near Christian (and indeed I still am, for a few more weeks), cuz he would drag me out and make me drink beers, even when I was maximally clammed up. He would then altruistically permit me to effusively babble on about whatever it was that I was thinking about at the time (usually type design) while graciously and generously not smacking me in the face. Really, I couldn’t ask for much more.

So yeah yeah. A few more projects to wrap up, and then it will be fall. I suppose this was my last “summer break”, but really I had such a blast doing actual work, such that the very idea of a “summer break” is complete moot. I am ready for the REAL WORLD, again; bring it on I say. I do have to get through this nastay thesis thing, and then ok yeah. Yeah! I’ll see you back here next year… you can buy me a beer at Enid’s, and I’ll draw a typeface for you. Yes.

Yeah so it’s that time, again. Here we go:

Good:

• Moved to Greenpoint for the summer. Down the street from last summers’ sublet… I’m basically at the corner of Driggs and Leonard.
• A ton of my highly esteemed colleagues are either in the general region, or are converging on it shortly, which is unbeatable.
• Executive Decision wrapped things up quite fucking nicely in PVD, I think. Kevin and Isaac traded off DJ sets par excellence and rocked everyone until the cops came at around four. I think I may have pushed the practical limits of what I can get away with in my house, partywise, but that won’t stop me, I should think. Indeeeeeed.
• King-size bed in my summer spot!
• Girl talk remix of “Let’s Call It Off” by Peter Bjorn and John on repeat
• Thee Bang Gang Deejays remix of “Ice Cream” by New Young Pony Club on repeat
• Mylo remix of “No More Conversations” by Freeform Five on repeat
• Breakbot remix of “Let There Be Light” by Justice on repeat
• Pretty much anything else linked to and/or mixed in by the Acid Girls (who are not girls, incedentally; and plus their music is so awesome I am not even going to mention the kerning on the logo like the twerp that I am)
• It was kind of hillarious how my finger was a topic of discussion at the last round of parties before everyone left for the summer (see “ugly”, below). Everyone was all like, “I heard about your finger!” and “How’s your finger doing?” … no matter the circumstances, those are funny sentences, amirite??
• Got an alarm clock with an ipod dock. Waking up to a mix entitled “Loud Noises” by the aforementioned Acid Girls is pretty unbeatable.
• This is shocking, totally: I got a book on semiotics that I actually love. Like not just “don’t dislike”, “would think twice before burning”, or any of these kind of qualifiers I’d normally apply to books on semiotics. I fucking love it. Mainly it’s because the guy writing it actually seems to hate semiotics as much as I do, or at least the prevalent strain of semantic nonsense that passes for “semiotic theory”. I maybe will go into why it’s awesome if I see you in person, but I certainly won’t defile the internet with any more verbose tripe on the subject, but so yeah, there you go. I’m not ashamed. Fuck yes.
• Generally, my summer reading stack is pretty awesome, I would say.
• Before coming down here, I was up late in the studio with a friend of mine, and we threw the I Ching. I had never done this before. I must say it was absolutely terrifying how punctilious my prognostication was. It wasn’t mystical or nonsensical, it was just straight-up pragmatic in a frighteningly accurate way. I mean, I get it… you surrender your editorial urge to a stochastic operation, and instead use the result as a template for what you already understood, yeah yeah yeah. It was still eerie. Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime, after I get done raving about the semiotics book, when I see you. Right. Ok. Trust me on all this. Yes.
• Air conditioning
• Upgraded AirPort to 802.11n draft version; it’s very nice and shiny, with blinking lights.
• Freelance work that isn’t hell
• Doing portfolio and all that stuff, for real. This is actually fun and not torture, for some reason.
• Might be able to talk Mr. Vit into a permanent thing over at SpeakUp, which would be super fucking fantastic, I’d say. I will have to go out to his Park Slope house and bring his new baby a bib, or some sort of apropos newborn-baby-type gift, to be nice. Right? Right.
• McCarren pool is still free! Rock music, hipster chicks on a slip’n’slide, and Brooklyn Lager at 12 noon. Well hey.

Bad:

• I miss my mom.
• Not done with miserable stuff yet. After school I will have to sell my mom’s house, and other such things… it will not stop anytime soon. As I told a friend of mine recently: it’s going to break my heart, many times over, and I can see it all coming the same way you can see storms coming in the midwest. Yeah.
• I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when you are sad, Apple Computer’s music products have the uncanny ability to sense it, and they like to exacerbate things by shuffling up the most heartwrenching music in your library.
• In a word: girls.
• I’m going to miss my friends so so so much. Half the GD grads on their way out were the kids I started here with, and they are awesome. I fucking love them; thank god a mess of them are coming to New York. It will not be the same without them in any way, nonono.
• I need to freak out. I have been repressing the swell of emotions I had after my mom died, and I need to freak out and deal with it. That’s never pleasant, but it is necessary… I hope I do it right. Basically.
• Have to finish some work up from school, cuz I missed so much stuff last semester.
• Apartment is misgraded quite steeply; one end of the computer desk is notably lower down than the other. I’d bring a level in here to check it, but it [the level] would just laugh.
• Had to order DSL cuz all the wireless around here is locked up, and I need me some internet for real. I thought I could go the rest of my life without touching another RJ-11 plug… I was wrong. So so wrong.

Ugly:

• There appeared to be a mammoth stock of DVDs in the apartment I’m subletting. The day I got here, I was classically hung over, on top of the typical exhaustion from an interstate move, and so I got all comfy on the couch, with ice cream and juice from the bodega on the end-table, and a pile of what I thought were MOVIES I could WATCH. But no. The cases are all empty… presumably, my subletee took them to Argentina, which is where she went. C’est la guerre. Blech.
• Last Friday, back in Providence, I was driving the car that my dear associate Hannah lent me while she’s on the west coast. Hannah took a glass-blowing class last Wintersession, and she made this sculptural piece that involved very long strands of thin glass, maybe 1/8” in diameter, max. We had used the car to move this piece to the studio about three days prior to this Friday in question. I bring this up because on that Friday, I was heading to the dry cleaners’, or somesuch, and I casually went to flick some dirt off the passenger seat while at a stoplight. When I pulled my hand back I saw that my right ring finger had a three-inch long piece of 1/8”-diameter glass going RIGHT THROUGH THE TIP OF IT. I have been telling people that it looked like an olive in a martini… usually they don’t really wince until I throw that detail into the story. It really did, though, really, except with blood, and it was my finger and not an olive. Basically I freaked out and pulled off the road. My friends were awesome; they drove the car back for me and picked me up at the hospital, which I was taken to in an ambulance. So. If you see me and my finger is all bandaged up, that’s what happened. Yes.
• Also glass-related: I dropped a beer bottle in my kitchen this morning while barefoot. I didn’t suffer any further lacerations, or anything, but cleaning it up was (as the header denotes) fucking ugly.
• Saw two cockroaches in the bathroom already. Blech. WHYYYY??!?
• Sometimes you just don’t know what to say to someone, despite having a list of roughly 10 jillion things you want to express to them.
• The subway is already hotter than the core of the sun; I have had to start carrying around extra shirts already, so when I go to meetings and whatnot I won’t look like some sort of uncouth neanderthal ogre.

Hi. Still trying to unfuck my brain. Doing some work, at my dad’s house on Cape Cod. There was a totally awesome wifi signal for the first two days, but they must have smelled my thirst for internet from afar, cuz it got completely turned off right when my gmail inbox filled up for the first time, which screwed up my fone. This whole sequence of events was actually kind of awesome, cuz it made me throw myself in the ocean, which was cold enough to make me feel as though I was being burned alive.

Can’t deal with people, just yet… at least not in large numbers. One on one, one on two, okay sure fine. More than that and I start to act wack, a mode in which I would prefer not to operate. I do love you, though, I should add. I love you more than ever before. I just can’t think straight, is what it is. Yes.

But it’s nice to work, again. My dad’s house is not at all equipped for graphics design, so it has been a total MacGuyver adventure. I have done the following things in order to get shit done:

• disassembled three floor lamps and cobbled the components together for a photo shoot that thankfully did not burn the place down
• ripped up a rag and used it to tie off garbage bags which were wrapped around ungrounded extension cords and dragged through puddles
• drove across most of cape cod to go to a fucking mall, to get yet another USB cable, cuz I forgot mine
• smashed an epson magenta ink cartridge with a hammer, to get pictures of splatters
• concocted just the right mix of ketchup and balsamic vinegar to spill down a sheet of paper, in leu of ink
• chopped several ballpoint pens in half with a cleaver, before I figured out the ketchup/vinegar trick
• chopped up a forsythia (see above) but did not kill it

…. I can rightly claim to have done other nutso shit, but that’s the top of the design-related list. Now I’m going to try to write some shit. Writing is what I thought would be the easiest to kickstart, but — suprise, suprise — it’s the hardest. So. In leu of anything decent, here’s most of an email I sent to David Reinfurt, in which I explain what the deal is wi the the whole cavalcade of ripoffs. Mr. Reinfurt is teaching a studio I’m in this semester, and he is awesome. Yes.

We haven’t talked in a month or so (egads!) but so let me fill you in on what my intentions are in this project. It’s a large project, parts of which fulfill the requirements for some of my other classes. What I have been doing is producing a series of posters wherein I rip someone off. The attached zipfile contains several examples; they range from established designers, to more obscure practitioners, to well-known artists who work with type. The idea is simple: I choose a piece of work by one of these people and replicate it as faithfully as possible from scratch. That is to say, I don’t just open up their JPGs and fuck with them. But I substitute the text “I AM TOTALLY RIPPING YOU OFF” for their words. You’ll note that in some cases I have added ancillary text, when either the nature of the off-ripping or the target of the ripoff demands it.

This is an object lesson in intellectual property and the rather contentious and ill-resolved idea that one can “own” an idea. This has been a hot-button issue in software (e.g. open-source, DRM, proprietary interoperation protocols, etc) as well as elsewhere in all fields related to cultural production… if you have not already read the attached essay by Jonathan Lethem, it’s a good read on the topic (amusingly, I would have simply linked that article on harpers’ website, but they made the whole thing “available to subscribers only”, sort of proving my point, in a way).

The manner it relates to our class is in what I am doing with this stuff. In the “art world”, recent innovations have forced the uptake of intellectual property pragma that relates to some of the nonsense with software. It is one thing to make a masterwork painting that is a completely unique physical object; it is quite another to make a digital piece of “art”, using the same production tools as designers, film-makers, et al, and then artificially limit the works’ distribution by only producing a limited number of, say, DVDs, or digital prints.

Works like these rely on constructs like “certificates of authenticity”, which are analagous to software license certificates and the like. In theory, you can make infinite copies of the data that comprises the Ubuntu open-source operating system, or of Microsoft Windows, or of Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster Cycle”. Duplicating the latter two, however, is illegal, even though both of these things have been produced with the same sort of toolchains that enable distribution of an unlimited scope (they’re both bits and bytes, at the end of the day, after all). Intrestingly, “certificates of authenticity” serve as a currency of sorts… an apt comparison as art collection is often compared to a futures market.

It is a touchier subject with artists and designers. In the attached article by Simon Doonan, he humorously details a situation that arose where the artist Jack Pierson claimed eminent domain, as it were, over Doonan’s aesthetic. Pierson tried to suggest that he had some sort of exclusive right to use found junk signage in his artwork. This argument implies that Pierson’s identity as an artist was solely based on style and technique.

My response to this mess is to rip a wide range of people off, and tell them about it. My poster series thus far includes Karel Martens, Jenny Holzer, Laura Dapito, Wim Crouwel, Ed Ruschia, John Baldessari, Experimental Jet Set, and Erika Nishizato, among others. I have already been given clearance to hang these posters in the Mason lobby, and they’ll be up there for 2 weeks starting around the first. Here is the current plan for the wall:

http://objectsinspaceandtime.com/~/fish/_for_david/_masonwall_mockup03.pdf

The distribution aspect of the project is such: I will also mail a copy of each of these posters to the person who has been ripped off. Enclosed will be in intellectual property receipt, and a complaint form, replete with an obnoxiously impersonal cover letter. I designed the receipts to mimic the simple laser-print transaction receipts from the local 7-11 (see the attachment ipreceipts.pdf for some examples) and I have printed them out at the right size, taking care to rip the bottom edge of the page so they appear as authentic as possible. (to that end, I have a friend in digital media who has several actual receipt printers that I can get access to, so that’ll appear as real as possible).

How people react, both to the posters as displayed in an “art gallery” style context and to having their own work egregiously aped, will draw forth my currency design. I see the project as a dipstick, with which I might assess peoples’ prevailing sentiments on intellectual property issues in design. I have already sent out a few posters, and I will do another round.

But so. As I mentioned, I am in a rather poor mental state, these days. (it took me about four days to write this). I think I need to be away from class for a little while. I am planning to go down to my dad’s house on cape cod for a few days. I’ll bring my laptop and work there, but I need peace and solitude. If I stay here I fear I won’t be able to get out of bed, most days.

What I would like to do is to finish this project up, and work with you individually to design my currency. I really don’t want to ask for this this kind of “special treatment”, quite frankly. Most everyone has offered me an opinion on what I should do, and they all range from “jump back into your work!” to “take all the time that you need!”… personally, I hate to claim any sort of extenuating circumstances for myself. I want to ultimately be treated like anyone else. But I must take exception in this case. I am fine one minute, and a mess the next.

Please let me know if this is agreeable, or what I might clarify. I hope you’re well. Thanks for reading.