Yo. Portfolio is up, more or less, in BETA MODE. Indeed, I do think Google’s greatest innovation was cementing the term BETA in popular parlance, providing us as such with a far more palatable term than “unfinished”.

Blech. But so more to come with that. Need to find someone who will photograph all my physical design objects (books, posters, etc) for cheap. Need to unfuck that header typeface, need to pull some entries, need to add a few more thingees. Need to rewrite the javascript with jQuery and all that. Blah blah blah, yes yes. But so yeah, watch that space. Yes.

Anyway. Went back to Providence for the 4th this week. After a month of bklyn living, the “I need to get the fuck out of the city” feeling had been percolating, despite the fact that bklyn is supremely awesome in every measureable way. So it turned out ot be serendipidously nice to leave. I went for a walk on the cliffs by the Providence bay, which is something I first did like two years ago. Indeed.

Of course, I have no pictures of that, or of the gorgeous sunset that followed… you will have to make do with this ratty flashed-out pic of my home studio wall. As I said previously: blech! Ok yeah. more later. Yes.

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

Hi! Back at my mom’s house. The semester almost killed me, it had be against the wall and my energy bar was down to a mere 3%, but I have returned and I am roughly ten thousand times more powerful as a result. Ditto all my friends; it was true trial by fire for reals.

But anyway yeah, I got some sleep at my mom’s and whatnot; I’m headed to New York for the requisite New Years’ nonsense. I keep meaning to synopsize it all meaningfully here, writing little summaries in my head while I walk around here getting coffee and feeding the cats, etcetera, but I can’t remember any of it. So until I get my shit together, here’s my rework of “losing my edge” from like a year and a half ago, and now it’s dedicated to all those entering Doug Scott’s “History of Graphic Design” class this spring. Fuck yes. Happy chanukkah, motherfuckers!

-fish

yeah I’m losing my edge
I’m losing my edge
the kids
are coming up from behind

I’m losing my edge
I’m losing my edge
to the kids
from yale
and from sciarch

but I was there

I was there in 1898
I was there at the first punchcutting of aksidenz-grotesk

I’m losing my edge
I’m losing my edge
to the kids
whose footsteps I hear
when they pin up their work

I’m losing my edge
to the internet seekers
who can tell me
every draftsman
from every good firm
from 1962 to 1978

I’m losing my edge
I’m losing my edge
to all the kids
in tokyo and berlin
to the art school brooklynites
with little moleskines
and borrowed nostalgia for unbuilt saint petersburg

I’m losing my edge
I’m losing my edge

but I was there

I was there
I was there

I’m losing my edge
I’m losing my edge

I can hear the footsteps
every night at the computer

but I was there
I was there in 1975 at the first publication of the push pin graphic
I was working on the kerning, with much patience
I was there when martin venezky started up his first firm
I said “don’t do it that way, you’ll never make a dime”
I was there
I was the first guy showing lot/ek
to the deconstructivists
I showed ‘em at cooper union
everybody thought it was crazy
we all know, I was there

I was there

I’ve never been wrong
I used to work at phaidon
I saw everything before everyone
I was there at weimar with johannes itten
I was there at the GSD during great debate between christopher alexander and peter eisenman
I woke up face on the keyboard after final GSAPP crits in 1997

but I’m losing my edge
to bettter looking people
with better ideas
and more talent
who are actually really really nice

I’m losing my edge

I heard you have a bookshelf with every good book
every great poster by tschischold
all the modernist hits
all of the archigram maquettes
I heard you have a test print of every mike cina poster on epson semimatte
I heard you have an autographed copy of every koolhaas book from 75, 89, 98
I heard you have an online scan archive of every good art nouveau lithograph
and another flat file from de stijl

I hear you are buying a drafting table
and a bone folder
and throwing your computer out the window
because you want to make something real
you want to make a gehry coffetable book

I hear that you and your firm have sold your CAD workstations and bought powerbooks
I hear that you and your firm have sold your powerbooks and bought CAD workstations

I hear that everybody that you know is more relevant that everybody that I know

max bill, griffo, jenson, OMA, louis sullivan, HHR, milt glaiser, cecil balmond and arup, SOM, kusama, bonnard, gordon matta-clark, widen and kennedy, superbad, didot, ogilvy, paul rand, richard neutra, agfa monotype, josef albers, herzog and demuron, skolos/wedell, bucky fuller, taki 183, jeremy bernstien, john maeda, banksy, bodoni, richard meier, jessica helfland, designers republic, dave eggers, moholy-nagy, mies van der rohe (LESS IS MORE!), rafael vinoly, sanford kwinter, fontshop, LARS MUELLER PUBLISHERS!! gregor schneider, mutabor, mariko mori, die gestalen verlag
font bureau
art deco
karel martens
karel martens
karel martens
karel martens

we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want

what is that?

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

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

bleah. got most of this shit working. ok. hi. my name is fish. I hate “blogs”, yet I am writing one, how perverse. ok more later when I’m not super busy. in the meantime go here and click on shit. yeah.

-fish