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

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.

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

See, back when I wanted to do the double whammy of an architecture degree and a law degree, people would always be like, WTF?? To which I would respond, “Architecture is written in law. Like building codes and whatnot? And I like code, because I’m a geek, and so.” And still, the quizzical expressions of doubt would remain unabated. But look: Andrés Duany suggests suspending code in New Orleans, so that reconstruction can, you know, actually happen for reals. And this one Wes Janz has fantastically illustrated how most of the once-prosperous United States is now a complete hole, due initially to economic factors but now held in place by fucked legal situations.

If I were still an architecture student, I would use this stuff as a starting point for a thorough investigation of the International Building Code, and the cultural and economic normativities that lurk within. I can’t find the fucking link but a few days ago, I saw some article that offhandedly attributed the nature of all the new glass-box condo construction in Vancouver to a specific code exception about the tower’s core and egress stairways and that sort of thing. But I’m a graphic designer, so it’s in your court… All you architecture nerds better drop the bullshit archibabble and subscribe to Harvard Law Review if you know what’s good for you. Fuck yeah.

Blech. So MCAD was great. I saw lots of good shit and also got blisters on my hands from ripping staples out of a wall. We had a raging party in a luxury hotel room, too. All very good. Listened to Jose Gonzales and Girl Talk freakout mixes on loop. It was cold, but not unbearable. Need a real break, tho. Not sure what is going to go on for “spring break”, but you can bet considerable money on the fact that it will be AWESOME.

Also, in case you were curious, OFR was not so great. Or at least, it could have rocked considerably harder, most definately. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, because it would be much easier for me to say “it was awesome”, so that you would feel bad about missing THE EVENT OF THE SEASON and show up for sure at the next jammy jam. But no, rest assured that whatever you did then was an excellent use of your time, indeed.

Now I’m back in the studio. Because that’s what I do, right? It would appear to be the case. OK. Yes. Love you. Right.

-fish

When I get done with school, I am going to start a design firm. I am going to get a small business loan and rent out a bunch of space in one of those midtown office buildings, with the shitty hermann miller gray carpet and the drop ceilings. I will then hire a bunch of youthful unknowns from RISD, CalArts, MCAD, Van Eyck Academy, RCA, and whatever the fuck. The deal is going to be as follows: if you work for me, you can use a computer, but it has to be THE MAINFRAME. Cuz, see, I will buy a mainframe and install it, and as for computers, that will be it, in terms of what is allowed in the office. Powerbooks (or rather, excuse me, “mac book pros”) will get checked at the door, much like the bag-check arrangement at The Strand and other such commercial outlets. So if you are a guy, you will invariably look like this:

… and if you’re a girl, you’ll look like this:

… I should mention at this point that these images are not at all intended to suggest gender-normative role designations; sometimes, if you’re a guy, you’ll change the tapes, and sometimes girls will use the light pen to draw shit. The pursuit of such activities will be a product of what needs to get done in the workplace, rather than whether you have a dick or a pussy, essentially. Just so you know. Yes.

Anyway. By enforcing such constraints, I will conjure the eternal spirit of Paul Rand, who will fuse his undead powers with my own mortal body in exchange for avenging his disgrace and slaying the dickfaces responsible for the perversion of the UPS logo. After this, I will be unstoppable, and I will rule the design world with an iron fist, sitting atop my humming mainframe, cackling to myself in the dark.

Anyway that’s one career option. I might go to law school instead. Who knows.

-fish

good:

• rebuilding merce cunningham’s internal database
• frying hot dogs in butter (the only worthwile thing I got from the book “dry” by augusten burroughs, you axed me)
• the similarity of mcgorlick park with washington square park, not just in design (that sort of radial french-garden plan thing) but also in the way that each lane in the park seems to self-segregate into a micro-region based on foot traffic (e.g. in washington square, southwest corner = chess players, west middle corridor = nyu students going to class, center area = tourists watching breakdancers, etc… in mcgorlick park the distinctions are a mite more subtle, like polish dog walkers vs. new moms with bugaboos, but they’re still there).
• maybe maybe maybe selling a book, knock on wood, yes yes
• interviewing people and having them blab about design and language on tape for hours
• cupcakes from billy’s
• dancing with girls, all night long
• riding a bike from greenpoint to redhook with your friend on a summer day … normally I enjoy deriding “bike people” as hillarious fanatics, but I can sort of see where they’re coming from with that. weaving in and out of the little niches between cars at high speed gives you this total man-over-machine type buzz, and plus if you’re doing this in new york, your perspectival POV of the city is very similar to how the video game Grand Theft Auto looks, which is entertaining. the whole thing is further enhanced by stopping at grimaldi’s and/or swimming in a redhook swimming pool, indeed.
• doing laundry … just now in my laundry, I unexpectedly found an almost-new deerhoof shirt that I know is not mine, but is in my laundry and is my size. this never happens, but karmatically it makes sense considering the staggering quantities of my own clothing that has disappeared without warning or explaination into washing machines and dryers throughout my 27+ years of garbed existence
• cutting video again
• shakespeare in the park

bad:

• the G train
• hangovers
• when someone you love very much is in a bad way, such that it makes them seem mean and nasty when really they’re just tired and scared, so you have to repress your emotion when interfacing with them, which is not easy because you love them and seeing someone you love in pain makes you kind of emotional
• the total wasteland of despair that is typographic control in CSS
• dumping liquid into your new laptop, destroying the keyboard
• talking before thinking
• drinking too much
• forgetting recipes
• transcribing interview tapes where both parties are hyped on coffee and talking 400wpm or thereabouts
• money
• not being able to sleep because of hideous anxiety attacks concerning life decisions and whatnot

ugly:

• old polish men peering in your window at night and catching you dancing to really stupid shit
• thinking proudly to yourself, “wow, I haven’t seen a single cockroach in my apartment all summer”, because as soon as you have thought that, you have of course irrevocably jinxed yourself and you basically see a huge one crawling up the wall as soon as you’ve finished the thought
• rats that have been smooshed by cars
• the hipsters who have formed a kickball league (replete with un-funny ironic team t-shirts) and play relentlessly in mackerren park
• the blackouts currently plaguing brooklyn and the subway in general
• leaving a cabinet open, forgetting you have done so, and then smashing your temple on it when abruptly standing up

… basically, yeah.

so let me bring you up to speed. here is the deal: I am in greenpoint. I am in apartment #3F at 67 driggs, near mcgorlick park. I am subletting this spot from a chick I met on craigslist. I spent all my spare cash on the rent here, and on the rent in my PVD spot, and on a new computer I didn’t really need but kind of wanted anyway, and so no I am closer to broke than I’d like to be, which is why right now I am drinking miller genuine draft. I have an air conditioner and an enormous turbine-sized industrial fan so I am not too absurdly hot. I am trying to work on my book and so far ofer erenfeld, david reinfurt, stephan moore, and a few other kids have agreed to give me interviews, which will give me enough material to prevent the whole project from collasping under the weight of its own hideously self-referential footnotes.

I am doing some freelance work but it won’t pay me for a while. I went, the other night, to Hiro, to see VHS or Beta spin for the Hot Chip release party, and I danced like a complete utter retard, thanks to the unique combination of compounds and music I was subsequently exposed to. I have a fire escape here where I can watch the sun set over the park. I have sort of exposed my head and neck to enough sun to begin the tanning process, but the skin there is still kind of pinkish, and the rest of me is classic computer-geek pale white, so I literally look like a red-neck, which is very sad.

I couldn’t go to a party this weekend up in troy, which is also sad. I went to a party at the new O-R-G studio the other night, where many people including my ex-girlfriend had received summonses for drinking outside, like just before I got there, and they were selling a magazine called “tourette’s”, the mere presence of which in my personal space kind of bugged me out so I spent 10 bucks to acquire the two issues of it that they had for sale, and I was handed them by stuart bailey himself, which I did not realize until after the transaction, during which (thanks to the three or so hastily consumed warm heinekens) I made several comments that (in retrospect) made me sound like some sort of douche, and I will not reproduce them here, for your benefit.

I recently went through all my old fiction writing and found, unsurprisingly, that it was all utter garbage, but amusingly there are bits of it that are so amazingly bad that they successfully transcend and become bad in a fascinating way that catches and refracts all wavelengths of light all around you when you look at them, like a prism of horror sort of. I amused myself one morning by taking the best of the worst of it and typesetting it all neatly, with small-caps numbers and flourishes on the page numbers and hillariously ornate drop caps and shit like that. I will not show you this, again for your benefit.

I get headaches like all the time but I’m out of advill. I am trying hard not to start smoking again.

I’ll let you know more when I know more. yes.

-fish