Thursday Lovin': Shining Remix

I found this and thought to myself that it would be good example for my Intro to Viz Com class of how narrrative is constructed in film as the little movie shows how elements from the horror movie The Shining can be reworked into a faux-preview of a romantic comedy.

My colleague pointed out, more brillantly, that it'd be a good example of how media can be twisted and meaning extracted and replaced - in essence, how propaganda could be made by remixing story elements.

Regardless, it is very funny. Check it out.

(from Screenhead)

Question: Why don't you sketch the barn?

Answer: I prefer to drive with both hands on the wheel (har har har).

(see last post)

Shooting the Barn

On the short commute to work each day I pass through a stretch of wheatfields and basalt quarries. I've driven the road so many times that the car seems to drive itself while I work out the day's schedule in my mind or deal with my cowlicks in the rearview mirror. Anybody with even a modest amount of driving to do each day knows what I am talking about.

But it struck me the other day how much this little stretch of road is changing and that startled me out of my complacency. It is only a matter of time before the road is widened or businesses start popping up on cheap farmland. Of course, like most things rural change happens at a pre-global warming glacial pace. Anyway, what spurred this revelation was the site of a row of cars parked on the shoulder and a troop of photographers (from a university class perhaps?) taking pictures of the barn shown above.

I saw another photographer today and one yesterday. That barn is getting photographed more than Kate Moss these days, I thought. Why? Driving home tonight I looked closely and noticed that it is near collapse. The bent boards on its sides are straining under the weight of the structure and are about to give way any day.

Oddly enough the barn has always been there - at least for as long as I can remember. It is a metaphor for the agricultural history and the small scale lives that made up this community and thousands like it all over the west and the whole country for that matter.

Now I understand the need to capture it and to hold on to the moment before it is gone: it is not the barn that we will miss, after all there are hundreds dotting the roads and hills surrounding us, but instead it is the idea behind that metaphor - the idea of another time and place.

Deeper Light

As classes have hit full stride and I have a number of projects in the pipeline, Metasurface is suffering slightly.

Deeper, as you can see, is up in a skeletal state. Deeper will be an expanded portfolio section (the portfolio that is there now will transmogrify into something quite different) and a storehouse for my academic writing and ideas that may be too large for the average post.

In the meantime, Illustration Friday is providing a needed respite from the stresses of the week and, hopefully, some interesting alternative content for this site.

Illustration Friday: Fresh

(please click for larger and more legible version)

This week's project was again an experiment in mood and narrative. 'Fresh' always conjures up such happy things for me or, perhaps, the designer's term for anything new. I tried to get it to take on a contrary meaning.

Anyway, like the other recent pieces (escape and depth) I continued playing with an all digital process (usually I work in pencil, then ink, scan it in and only use the computer for coloring). I am not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. After a number of Photoshop freeze-ups in which I lost work, I decided to just get the thing done before heading back to work tomorrow.

Illustration Friday: Escape Part Deux

Illustration Friday: Escape

Wednesday Lovin': 5ives

A little like McSweeney's Lists, 5ives has some very funny lists.

Speak to Me Softly

37signals has an interesting review of Flickr's sign up page, the down-to-earth (non-technicalese) language it once had, and how the "feel" of that page was rendered much less pleasurable by Yahoo! after they purchased the photo-sharing site.

(My, that was a long sentence.)

Illustration Friday: Depth

While your attention was focused elsewhere...

Today's Guardian reports that 200 detainees at Guantanamo are on a hunger strike and intend to die.

Un/cool, daddy-o

In Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool you'll find a compelling story of a shift in advertising in the 1960s that began to use revolutionary language and satire to celebrate youthful hipness. The irony, as I've mentioned before, is that we are continually feed cold left-overs of rebellion. The desire to sell often falls back on notions of cool. Even the design professions themselves succumb to this archaic train of thought.

A few years ago, HOW magazine (a graphic design periodical) ran an article about creative vision. On the cover was a designer-type decked out in a goatee and funky glasses:


It made me wonder if designers are calling up such worn notions of "creativity" and the creative individual. If so, we are in trouble. And it is not just HOW. I visited a successful product designer friend of mine in the summer. The first thing I noticed about him was his textbook hipster appearance. It made me wonder if his design work also followed such stereotypical and, frankly, uncreative fifty year-old ideas. The hipster aesthetic borrows much from the Beatniks and the stereotypical image (see my illustration above). The Beatniks, along with the rebel ab ex artists like Pollock and writers like Kerouac and Ginsberg, sort of set the stage for marketable concept of rebellion. There is no coincidence that their rise to notoriety coalesces completely with Frank's timeline.

We are often sold this notion about designers being super creative but the need to find the next cool thing, to me, seems a recipe for disaster as the cooptation leads to a rapid death spiral into what or an endless loop of historical references. Will design follow art? If so, what happens when graphic design, for instance, is pure concept (no form)?

I predict that the next few years will be interesting. Will we rehash the past forever and keep buying the ideas of the radical? OR will design become more shock oriented? OR quiet? OR...

Whatever happens, let me know when the hipster is dead so I can shave my beard down to a goatee.

Brutal Incompetence

Dennis send this frightening account of the struggle to survive and the law enforcement response in New Orleans last week.

Wednesday Lovin': The Real Looters

Jeff Sellen, at Washington State University, puts things into perspective with this set of figures.

When a Photo Op won't do - criticism from around the world

The NY Times reports that Bush and the Republicans are worried about growing American resentment over, gee, what is it? Oh, yeah:

- the Iraq war
- gas prices
- health care prices
- the state of our environment

and, of course:

- the government's mishandling of the Katrina relief.

The usual approach, gloss it up with a photo op and vapid promises, is wearing thin.

At a party last night, someone made an announcement about where to send relief dollars. A friend from Bangladesh interrupted and asked, "Is America no longer the richest country in the world?"

There was silence. He continued, "It makes sense for Americans and the world to support relief efforts in Sri Lanka or Indonesia where they might need more money. But here?"

I got what he was saying. I have felt it too. In the richest country in the world the government should've been down in the delta on Tuesday. Heck, they should've spent the money to pay for the levee repair. It would've been insurance. Now, we are expected to pay for this administration's muck ups.

Someone remarked that a relative in Canada (who happens to study the oil industry) cannot understand why the price of oil in his country rose with disaster in Gulf coast. That is a sentiment mirrored in some European countries as well.

I figure Bush now has to balance giving gifts to oil buddies, molding his legacy, and laying the ground for another republican administration. But the state of the war, the price of gasoline and health care, the inaction on Katrina relief are all things that have already happened. The latest news, the growing frustration across the country (feelings felt across the world for some time) are exposing what us on the left have always known: this president and the neo-con right need to go so that we can heal and start planning for a future that is more inclusive, egalitarian, nurturing, and forward-thinking. Sure, these things can be mimicked in a photo op. But New Orleans has now ripped open the facade. Hopefully, Americans are taking a good look inside.

Illustration Friday: Roots

roots_small.gif

Interesting

There's been a lot about the flickr set that supposedly showed bias in reporting of the looting in New Orleans. When African-Americans were shown in images, certain news agencies called it 'looting' and with whites it was 'finding'.

It doesn't take a genius to see that many of the people left behind in New Orleans were the poor and many, of course, were African-American.

In regards to my last post, this is an interesting article about the imbalance of gender in tsunami deaths from Wikipedia in March.

Trumping Disasters

While the images of the destruction caused by Katrina are pretty remarkable and sobering, I think that comparison with the tsunami is a little off. I think the blow to New Orleans' levee system (and subsequent flooding) and its impact on oil production will make it a very expensive, if not the most expensive natural disaster in this country's history. It seems like Americans sort of want a bigger disaster.

But in terms of scale and death, the tsunami was really something quite awful. Well over 200,000 dead if not more. It is ridiculous, however, to compare misery. I remember the cover of Newsweek with the woman crying over a dead family member - an image burned into my brain. Today it's the woman mourning her husband, his body wrapped in a blanket. She couldn't get him oxygen in time. Death is death.