Yo. It’s, erm, 2008. Back at school, trying to wrap it all up and get it out the fucking door — “it” being the entirety of my graduate education, of course. You can sort of see what it looks like here; at the moment, there are a billion little unraveling minutiae to be dealt with: bureaucratic, social, financial, emotional, physiological… and of course my struggle to contend with all of them is wonderfully enriched by the overbearing fact that the genesis of each of these dumb little things, originally, was a fuck-up or oversight on my part. Like forgetting to fill out a super-important form, or sleeping through my alarm when I had an important meeting… Blech. It sucks. The whole mess simply will not die quietly, much like a zombie, or the Cloverfield monster. It’s been a rough two months or so.

See why I’ve been keeping my blog-mouth shut?? So. Anyway I will spare you the worst of the retarded gripes. But so, what I have for you is this: last night, I had to do a bunch of writing excercises, and to distract myself late at night, I concocted the following design-music-cosmology system. I’ll dish up more stuff soon, now that classes have started again and I am therefore less droolingly antisocial. Fuck yes.

…

So. LET:

architecture = 80’s pop-rock,
graphic design = hip hop,

THEN:

type design = turntablism,
interior architecture = late 80’s alt-rock,
(… e.g. Atelier van Lieshout = The Pixies)
book design = the Wu-Tang Clan,
poster design = Tupac,
news/editorial design = Biggie,
web design = 50 Cent,
info design = the Ultramagnetic MC’s,
letterpress poster art = Snoop Dogg,

THEREFORE:

Design*Sponge = Russell Simmons.

AND:

urban design and urban planning = 90’s crybaby alt-rock,
contemporary art = American Idol,
furniture design = jazz,
textile design = The cross-genre continuum consisting of everyone ever cited or otherwise referenced by LCD Soundsystem, Mr. Murphy et al and his close associates, and all those who will come after them and rip them off,
apparel design = electroclash.

SO THEN:

package design = the Fugees,
contemporary calligraphy = the Digable Planets,
Felice Varini = Autechre,
exhibit design = Licensed to Ill by the Beastie Boys,

BUT THEN, LET:

structural engineers = rock drummers,
(… e.g. Cecil Balmond = Lars Ulrich, etc)
CAD = MIDI,
O-CAD = MAX/MSP,
BIM and parametric systems = Ableton Live,

THEREFORE:

Frank Gehry = the Postal Service,

AND:

Hektor = Atom and his Package.

FURTHERMORE:

critical theory = reggae,

THEN:

digital ethnography = Shaggy,
contemporary video art = Buju (or maybe Anthony B),
net.art (quote-unquote) = Bob Marley,
architectural theory = Rusted Root (or Dave Matthews, or maybe even 311, or some shit like that),
media theory = Hootie and the Blowfish,
Fluxus = the T-Connection (circa the reign of Kool Herc).

AND THEN:

motion graphics = the Black-Eyed Peas,
just video and film editing = just Fergie,
database design = the Game,
web-nerd non-design stuff = the rest of G-Unit in general,

THUS IT FOLLOWS:

industrial design = delta blues,
magazine design = Octagon-era Kool Keith,
contemporary painting = Will Smith,
contemporary sculpture = Eminem,
Bio-art = Rihanna.

IN CONCLUSION:

DADA = Run-DMC,
surrealism = Check Your Head by the Beastie Boys,
Andy Warhol = Robert Smith,
Marcel Duchamp = Kraftwerk,
Le Corbusier = Paul McCartney,
Robert Moses = John Lennon,
Jane Jacobs = Yoko Ono,
Robert Irwin = Sun-Ra,
Robert Venturi = Led Zeppelin,
Tibor Kalman = Sean Combs,
Benjamin Franklin = Elvis Presley.

Yo. Before I forget, there are many miscellaneous things you should know. I will now list them.

• Bryan and I were up very late indeed making and installing the SPACE ROCKS! poster (as you see above), and it would be great if you came! It’s next Saturday at the GSD, and a bunch of graphic designers and artists, etc, will be speaking about SPACE. And how it ROCKS, no doubt… the full info is here. Indeed!
• In the course of the making of this poster, I paired Johnston ITC with Mr. Barnbrook’s Bastard Fat, which I am like rilly pleased with in some perverse way. I can’t explain that shit. Rilly, you tell me:

• The day after that, though, I got totally busted by the Mason building’s sysadmin for circumventing the school’s print system. He had documentation of how much ink I had (allegedly!) used, down to the microliter or somesuch. So I am now in some serious trouble. Whoops.
• I love ffffound. My paean to it has been up on SpeakUp for a little while, so maybe you knew that, but still. It’s fucking awesome. Yeah.
• My show went up. I call it “my show”, which is wrong, really; I was one of many many participants in what was the graphic design graduate show, which I curated along with Jerlyn and Hoon. So not at all entirely mine (although I did do the identity posters for it) but in my mind I still call it “my show”, however erroneous that might be. Erm. It was a blast, I’ll have you know, yis.
• Through all of these things, I took copious notes on tumblr, where I post both thesis-related and non-thesis-related miscellaneous shit. In the course of our space rocks work bender, Bryan asked me what the value-add of tumblr was, and I described it much as I described ffffound’s allure: more of a value-subtract, really; the lack of control over minutia that you have with most bloggy things (tags, comments, RSS, APIs, etc) make it kind of a pleasure to use. Many of my friends have been using them, because who cares about most blog features? I, for one, could give less of a shit, for the most part, and so yeah hey.
• I got the thirty-inch monitor, like finally, and the ipod touch, on an impulse. Laura pointed out that these are exactly the things I’d throw out my window, if I wanted to make a Yaz record… but frankly I like “Situation” and its ilk as they are, for the moment. The one thing I will always go gaga for is a bigger fucking monitor, and I think I can safely say with this one that I’m good for a little while w/r/t monitor envy and whatnot. Ok. Yes!
• Looking for thesis advisors. Need to find them, like this week. Can’t I summon my recently graduated friends???? Argh.
• Sleep cycle is pretty fucking abnormal. As such I will kill this list now, cuz bleah. But yeah I have to churn out the writing for thesis, so there will be more drivel here soon, I will warn you. Yis!

love ya

-fish

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!

Hi. Been making some type. Here’s the ridiculous face I made, just so I could make something and relearn fontlab. Free for you:

• OpenType
• Mac PostScript
• Windows TrueType

… I do welcome your feedback. Of course, I know it’s ridiculous, so refrain from saying “it’s ridiculous”… more awesome would be comments along the lines of “your kerning tables are fucked under OS 10.3” (or what have you). But hey.

Gusset is released under the BigShot License Version 1.0, which is exactly like the MIT license, except that whenever a graphic design bigshot sees something you did with the font, you have to tell me about it. It’s all there in the file, including a list of bigshots. Yes.

Ok. Non-ridiculous stuff (as perhaps this one will be when done) is coming SOON, I swear to jeezus. Yeah!

-fish

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

wow I’m tired. been up for a looooong time. made two 11x17 books, which maybe I will post pictures of if I can remember to charge my camera, which is generally something I hate doing because it reminds me that the camera in question is an utter piece of shit and that I am simply stuck with it because I stand completely terrified before the hideously impenitrable wall of nonsense, jargon, and model numbers that is the photographic equipment industry, the fact of which is doubly befowling cuz I am usually quite at home with technology-oriented bullshit, but in this particular instance the whole thing makes me want to hide under my bed and not even think about taking pictures ever.

anyway yeah. so. made two books. in a few hours they will go to entirely separate and distinct teachers. I was going to silkscreen their respective titles onto their covers but I forgot to by diazo activator last time I was at the fucking art store, which was stupid. but so they’re identical, coverwise, which I think I like better (but of course I’ll never know cuz I have no real empirical data/experience to compare that shit to, riiiight? right.)

yeah. in leu of pics, you can d/l the mammoth pdfs if you are so inclined here and here, respectively. these are probably about as interesting as “jack shit” to you, cuz they are just the book fillings, w/o the actual book casings, which are the good bit as far as I can ascertain. the pdfs, therefore, are like the oreo filling w/o the actual oreo, which although it sometimes seems like a good idea, you don’t see nabisco selling that shit in tubes, do you? no. so no.

I am sorry, I’m tired. anyway yeah. my house is a mess but I’m too lamely exahusted to deal with it now. so: rest, then clean, then turn in the books maybe after photographing them happily together. then… who knows?? maybe someone will offer to buy me beers and be my friend. we shall see.

yeah!

-fish

so, yeah. haven’t really written on the internet for some time. I used to, with varying degrees of regularity… I have an old MT export file that I’ll put up, to prove this point of fact, but first I have to figure out a way to clean all the spam out of it. blech. yeah. the internet. it’s there… FOR YOU.

anyway I am trying also to kickstart another bloog, for my writing design criticism class. that one actually will hopefully have some life after the class is dead. I’ll fill it with my old articles from classes from the past, and whatnot. I actually like that blog’s template way better than this one, cuz I worked in this completely gratuitous color change thing at the last minute, so the tone of the page in question slowly changes as more posts or comments fills it up. at least in theory. in practice it looks like a typical fucking web page, so BOO.

I am not in a position to be assessing anything, aesthetically or otherwise… I’ve been up all night and I just sucked down the last of a “dunkin donuts” iced coffee. you know that last sip of that shit, which invariably contains a blast of undissolved granulated sugar? that’s what’s in my mouth, right now. indeedy.

anyway so yeah. if you’re so inclined, have a go at talking shit about what I wrote about renzo piano’s revisions to the morgan library, or, alternatively, antenna design’s recent cute lil’ gallery show. do this for me, and I promise you untold riches. yes.

yes!

-fish