Aught-eight to aught-nine

I've been lucky - I've had many great years (senior year of high school, graduation year from college, the year I got married, the year we moved to Austin, among many others). I've also had a couple of years which were not so good, dominated by uncertainty and anxiety (sophomore year at college was like this). 2008, though, fits under the middle category of "good" years.

Good mostly, it turns out, on the job front. Elle took a job on campus this past year; this means we can drive in (or ride the UT shuttle) together and have lunch together. As a bonus, our commuting expenses have dropped to almost nothing, because we live about three miles from the UT tower where we both work. We both received major promotions this year. I even have a staff now so I can concentrate on the web UI full-time.

As good as 2008 was, though, I'd like 2009 to be less about the job and more about creative pursuits - I've got artwork to make, websites to design (I own several domains which are waiting for content), writing and podcasting to do, a house to renovate - elle and I are even planning a recording project.

So my resolution is this: while the past year was about the career, I'll work in '09 on those things that are mine.

On the TV: The Twilight Zone marathon is playing my all-time favorite episode now - "The After Hours" with Anne Francis as a truant mannequin:


A lot of stuff on the reading table this vacation:
Einstein: His Life and Universe (Isaacson); Babylon's Burning (Heylin); Ranters and Crowd Pleasers (Marcus); Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album; The Best of LCD (WFMU); Big Star: The Story of Rock's Forgotten Band (Jovanovic); The Place of Houses (Moore); and Linotype Machine Principles (an obsolete book from 1940).

Thanks to William Burroughs

We mostly ignore the offensive christian implications of this week's holiday, but we do have three time-honored turkey-day traditions. One is a feast with family and friends. The second is listening to "Alice's Restaurant" (which can always be found playing on at least one Austin radio station on the holiday) . The third, though, is my favorite - I always listen to William Burroughs' A Thanksgiving Prayer, as I have every year since the late eighties.

on the hi-fi: TG24 - Throbbing Gristle
on the reading table: Striking Images, Chronicle Books

Billboard Liberation Front

I love the work of The Billboard Liberation Front as much as I hate the corporate criminals who ruin the landscape with huge slabs of advertising. The BLF's work is both thought provoking and subversive, forcing liars to tell the truth - at least until they can hire a crew to cover up the truth.

One of their latest works:
Here's the before--


And here's the same billboard after improvements by the BLF:


There's much more at their site linked above.

on the hi-fi: Joy Division, An Ideal for Living
on the reading table: House of Leaves (Danielewski)

Put the book down and look at the camera

Looking for "Mod" memorabilia of me and my old bandmates led me to these historical artifacts depicting the formative years of Weird's Last Stand. Travel back with me now, back to those golden days of yesteryear:

Me at eight years old, with my first guitar.

At 11 - Yuletide greetings from me and Santa Dog. It was about this time I started my first job working for my father in house renovation. You've never seen a more frail kid try to swing a hammer with his little stick arms in your life.


At 14, the boy with the most cake. I had yet to discover the evils of sugar. I'm still a few months away from giving it up to "The Piccolo Seductress" (see entry).


At 20 I was a member of a band called The Tickets (a great band name suggested by our drummer Tracye - it was, in fact, the only good name we ever had).


At 24. I think the person on the other end of the phone was The When Girl, so named because she always wanted to know when we were getting married.

I guess leaving him alone and minding our own business is not an option

the text:
India

Here is a man of India.
He is praying to his god.
His god cannot help him.
This man must know about Jesus.
Can you think of some ways to help him?

(from a christian coloring book)

Beuy's hare and the seven boxes

Joseph Beuys had a performance piece I've always considered a favorite: "How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare". In it, Beuys, his head covered in gold leaf, cradled a dead hare in his arms and whispered to it (presumably about art) for three hours. It's striking as a piece of both great beauty and great futility. I thought about that poor leoprid as I cradled the last of my boxes of pictures in my arms while organizing the garage studio over this past weekend.

How, I thought, would I explain my picture collection to either a dead hare or living sane person? Here goes nothing: I've been gathering pictures to use in my art since middle school, sifting through tons of old printed matter for photographs, illustrations, clip art, and interesting typography. The collection started slowly, but got an early boost when I found a huge stack of 1930's magazines in the attic of one of my father's rental houses. It really exploded, though, during the time I was head nighttime buyer at the flagship Half Price Books store in Dallas.

I've always maintained that people are delusional, and my years of buying books proved it (Elle had similar proof driven home to her during the years she bought records from the general public). Someone was always trying to sell us stuff which was in no condition to be re-sold. Normally, my co-workers would just absent-mindedly recycle the paper, but I could never bring myself to condemn an old book to pulp before flipping through it for salvageable pictures. After so many years of this, I found myself sharing living space with seven full boxes, each containing from 4000-5000 hysterical/historical images.

The sources have been all kinds of printed matter from the period of about 1900 to 1960 - magazines, textbooks, catalogs, encyclopedia; medical, technical and scientific books; along with illustrated paper ephemera of all types. It was a time when illustrators could actually draw and photographers really had an eye - and all of it carefully graphic-designed to convey knowledge which is now obsolete, discredited, or politically incorrect - as dead as Beuy's hare.

I recall that Elle asked how many of these images I had, while we were preparing to make good our escape to Austin. After some ciphering, I said, "about 30,000". Last week, however, alone in the garage with those heavy boxes, it seemed like much more, as it has every time we moved them to a new house. I silently asked that lifeless yet art-appreciating bunny for his estimate, and could swear I heard him reply very faintly, but with a certainty which could only come from one who's seen the other side: "More than you'll live to use."

What's on for autumn

So if I list the projects, my twisted thinking goes, I'll be more apt to stay rapt and see them wrapped. Here, then, is what's on for autumn:

1. The Hallowe'en card. I'm now finalizing the choice of images. This one must have all the Photoshop and InDesign work done in time to have it printed and mailed by 12 October.

2. Elle and I are going to spend about a week's worth of evenings finishing up the redesign of her Yardbirds site. The URL will change to one I reserved for her a year ago: yardbirdsphotos.com

3. The podcast. Details withheld for now, but the code phrase is "Thrifty Listening".

4. Hiring my assistant. We've winnowed the resumes from 147 down to 50, then to 14. I need to get it down to the 5 we'll interview.

5. Finishing the garage studio.

6. And as always, there are plenty of things to read - mostly software and coding stuff this time: The iLife suite, the Adobe CS3 suite, Dreamweaver, SQL/PHP, the CSS Missing Manual, and the one I'm most excited about now: Logic Studio.

on the hi-fi: The Finders, The Razzles
on the reading table: See #6.

2 September

Good news this time, no kidding and (almost) no cynicism. The new fiscal year begins at UT on 2 September, and my promotion kicks in - a new job at a new pay grade. Which means basically I'm doing my old job, but they're calling it something different and throwing more money at me to do it. I lobbied for the title "Webbastard", but since there's no such title on the reclassification list, I'll probably settle for something more serious. I'll also be hiring an assistant to take over some parts of my current job, so I can concentrate on the web UI full time.

on the hi-fi: Stronger Than Dirt, the special Power Pop edition.
on the reading table: Tutorials on Apple's Logic Studio.

Wish your picture was you

You know how several things can happen to you almost at once and all of them seem to illustrate a common theme? At worst, they can seem to comprise a miniature cloud which follows you around, raining on you alone. At best, they can combine to form a kind of individualized zeitgeist (and hey, I've got a name for it - a Personal Pan Zeitgeist, which calls to mind both the slightly sad "dine alone" pizza and lusty Greek god, root of the word "panic"), the component parts of which seem to have been designed to mesh with whatever abstraction you're most taken with at the moment.

Max Wertheimer, one of the fathers of Gestalt Theory, spoke of "our innate tendency to constellate" things which have similarity, proximity and economy of structure. Example: Your car dies on the road, you get out to look under the hood and accidentally lock the keys in it; you set out to walk and it starts to rain. The similarity (bad) and proximity (in time) of these events lead you to to connect dots and make a (fallacious in this case) gestalt conclusion: "I'm cursed".

Which brings me to yesterday. I was driving, running errands and listening to a great radio program called "Twine Time" on the public radio station here in Austin. The night before, Elle and I had rented the 1928 silent film "The Man Who Laughs" with Conrad Veidt as Gwynplaine, a carnival performer who was surgically mutilated as a child, his mouth carved into a permanent, hideous grin. His picture has served as my icon on some communities.

The thought process while driving is desultory and tangential, so in addition to the film, I was also thinking about appearance vs. reality and simulation, having recently re-read Baudrillard's essay "The Precession of the Simulacra", which I didn't pay enough attention to in art theory class when it was assigned reading. Suddenly, my mini-trance was broken by Paul Ray on the radio as he cued up the 1953 Lloyd Price song "I Wish Your Picture Was You". And I thought to myself as I parked at the post office, "of course". Constellation complete.

on the hi-fi: The Flashing Lights - Where The Change Is
on the reading table: "Art, Design, and Gestalt Theory" - Roy Behrens.