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. 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.

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.

This is what I said at the funeral, basically:

Most of you know Dorothy as the fantastically unique, wonderful person that she was. But I must confess: for the first twenty years of my life, she was simply my mom. I was aware that she was unique, and wonderful, but she was also the person who told me to do my laundry and to make sure and be home by midnight.

This changed dramatically for me in the spring of 1998, when I saw Chasing Wild Geese. I knew my mom had been laboring painstakingly to produce this dance, but I wasn’t ready for what I saw, in a certain fashion. She had put her choreography on hold shortly before I became self-aware, and so I knew of it only through her stories, and from the many event posters we had in our photo albums.

My mom made her first appearance in Chasing Wild Geese about halfway through the performance. Her dancers were dressed primarily in a “basic” costume: black pants and a colored t-shirt. In one scene, they pranced around one another in an interlocking blend of nursery-rhyme allusions, while reciting mashed-up bits of Mother Goose rhymes. In the middle of this organized frenetecism, my mom erupted through the backstage curtain, dressed like a homeless woman and pushing a shopping cart. She had a perfectly tuned wild-eyed look to her as she mocked the other dancers, aping her own choreography with amazing ironic precision and panache.

It was then that I realized that this wasn’t just my mom. This was an artist of the highest caliber and consummate skill. In this instant, I realized that many, many of the facets of her personality — the things I considered part of fundamental “mom-ness” — were, in fact, powerful expressive forces to be reckoned with. It was an epiphany; like being unblinkered… so many things that I didn’t know were even there were now in sharp focus.

I wanted to share this because I know she has done this for many of you. We can see things much better, because of her. She taught us how to see, in many ways, and that is the most valuable and amazing lesson one can be taught.

Thank you.

Anyway. Hard one to talk about, to the internet at large. But I’ll say that my friends have been absolutely excellent and wonderful during this time. If I haven’t spoken to you personally, I do apologize… everything has been utterly fucking crazy, as you might perhaps think. Will be back later with more design stuff, probably. It’s hard, though, because I really miss my mom. She was the best there is, no hyperbole. Yes.

-fish

Whooooo. Yeah so I just put up my review of the Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Triennial up on Writing Design Criticism. I’m of the opinion, as are others, that the Triennial was rather wack. I mean, did anyone like it? All my designer friends have had rather unkind words for it thus far. Maybe those of you who are not all-encompassing design nerds? Do let me know, because I am curious.

I wanted to get into all sorts of other shit in the article, like about how it’s kind of odd that COMA did the book and the identity for the show AND were featured in it. That’s odd, amirite?? I mean, COMA is fantastic, really… they came up here for a visiting designers’ workshop last spring, and they were the guest critics for the thesis reviews, and they’re excellent critics and designers and all that, BUT… WTF?? I would like to know WTF. And also the heavily preemptively defensive tone the curators seem to be taking is also quite something. HRMMMM, INDEEEED!!

But I do recall hearing some guy on the radio, circa the year 2000, defending the Millenium Dome. This dome was the temporary home for a monstrous, all-singing, all-dancing show about humans and how generally awesome they are and will be in the future, which ran through the year 2000. People generally hated it, even when on drugs, and it’s pretty much been written off as a failure since. But so the guy on the radio was talking about how gigantic expos such as that are typically received poorly in their time, but remembered fondly, and that such would be the case with the dome.

After reading that Guardian precis, I dunno about the dome, but the radio guy’s thesis sounds rather believable… it’s easy to be like, “last triennial was SOO much better.” I myself can’t weigh in on that, as it’s the first I’ve been to, but hey yeah. Do let me know what you think, indeed.

But so yeah. Trying to finish all open writing projects, now. Got a few more. Some are typical grad-school pre-thesis nonsense, some are for my own shits and giggles, and some are bits I hope to actually get into print sometime in the possible future. That, I think, would be very nice. Even Jacek, from 2+3D, was like “yeah, it’d probably benefit your career to have something published in English,” and I agree with that… to which I would add “… and also in actual print and not on some sort of blog.” Indeed.

I do love me some blog, though, although I still find “blog” to be one of the most repulsive neologisms ever crafted. I’ve been writing blather on the web for about 10 years now, and the practice has thoroughly fucked up my editing techniques. In the case of that Triennial article, for example, I wrote the first draft in Word. I cleaned up my grammar and whatnot, and then moved it into InDesign, where I simultaneously typeset the article, wrote the footnotes, placed images, and re-edited the fucking text. After that, I went through the whole thing again in Movable Type. It is the act of publishing the stuff online, though, that lets me see the real gaping horrid errors. I’ll fix like one error, rebuild the whole page, and then look at it anew, and with each pass I’ll find all the stuff that eluded me when editing in any other program. I think the scrutiny comes from when I originally had an “online journal”, which I updated in Emacs over dialup; in such an environment, retyping and reediting is a royal fucking problem.

Not that my shit don’t stank, or nothin’. I am sure the piece is far from perfect. But hey.

Another thing I should mention is that I have been nerding out so thoroughly these days, to the point where my social life is basically done. It’s quite sad. Now that there’s more light in the day, though, I’ve had it with such nonsense. So you (yes YOU) should call me up and buy me drinks. I promise you all types of entertaining conversation and observations, really. In fact, there’s a party here at Mason (yes, the studio, but it’s the best I can do right now) this friday after Open Studios. You come by there, that’d be an excellent start. Yes. Word. Allrite. Talksoon.

Yeah!

-fish

went back to newton this weekend after kind of a crazy week. saw lynn. she’s good. power was out at her house, kind of nuts. lightning bolt had struck a transformer not 20ft away, like 15min before I got there. we smoked cigarettes in the dark after eating rich french food, talked about everything, really.

saw mom. she’s ok. by which I mean not so good but still somehow upbeat. welcome change, this upbeatness, from phone conversations the week prior. it was all still strange. but good. but fucking strange, can’t quite say how, right now.

saw brother. he’s good. just moved to a real house, quit smoking pot. looks good. funny guy. invited him to bklyn while I’m here, hopefully I will see him, yes.

saw dad. his usual self. he bought me pizza, told me about delivering his paper and panel discussion in princeton sometime this month. still would not specify date. will give me keys to his cape house at some point. always some time, in the future, not quite sure when. smiley. genial interactions. the pizza was fantastic.

went to south station at 615. 640 train was sold out. killed time, smoked cigarettes. walked down congress street, on a whim. saw old 369 congress building. they’ve replaced all the windows and whatnot. painted the outside, too. making it look nice. no trace of the horrid invasions of last fall. almost lost it, had to stop, sit down. didn’t cry but wanted to quite badly. couldn’t stop thinking about my friend, and all the people whose names I don’t really quite know but are beloved by me for like forever. wack. all very wack. sucked it up, kept walking.

went back to south station, got train at 945. home now in bklyn. kind of very sad about everything. don’t care how retarded/cheesy that sounds, cuz that’s how it is. yes. more to come.

-fish