1) i have a job interview today for an assistant graphic design position. i hope that if i get it, then at least i’ll have experience on my resume to make it more likely that i can get a not assistant job in the future.
2) i sent in my xeric grant application on saturday for the jeoffrey comic. i’ll find out june 15.
3) i’m starting comic artist rehab on the 2nd. i will be posting a new comic there every 4 days.
i often wondered when i was a kid why in the world someone would hide a needle in a haystack.
ok. so i’ve been going to this store called “Stinky Bklyn” that sells cheeses and cured meats and other sundries for a while now, and I keep forgetting what i’ve tried. since i think a few of you eat cheese/wine/stuff like that, and since i’m actually curious about cheeses and the differences/what they go with/etc., i thought i would occasionally update you with cheese i’ve tried just in case you see it around and are curious to try it, too
contado – sheep/goat/cow’s milk cheese. unfortunately, i’ve thrown away the package so i can’t remember/say where it’s from. it’s a nice creamy cheese with a white, edible rind. washed rind, i think. it’s a soft cheese, but not as creamy as room-temperature brie. it’s a little chewier/springier in texture than that. the flavor of this cheese is wonderful. no pungency. it’s just sour and creamy. the different milks are great. it has the sourness of the sheep and a bit of the tangy goat-ness, but not so much that it’s overwhelmingly goat-y. the cow’s milk gives it a nice full creaminess. i would recommend this as just a nice cheese to eat with some bread and maybe some sort of fruit. i thought the sausage i was eating it with overwhelmed the more subtle overtones of this cheese, but it still complemented it well.
roncal – “comes from the rich sheep’s milk of the legendary Lacha and Aragonesa breeds of oveja sheep” according to one website. so… a spanish cheese. the one i had was a raw sheep’s milk cheese. the texture is firm. rind is unwashed and probably shouldn’t be eaten. this cheese has a great flavor, nutty and tangy. piquant. it was recommended as a pair to this wild boar sausage, and i have to say, it was a good pairing. this cheese stands up well to a flavorful sausage but is also nice to eat on its own or with some bread.
oh man. what is it about a week or two of nice weather that makes me immeasurably happier than i was all winter? i also find that i just want to get so much done as soon as the first signs of spring show up! the sun! it’s the sun!
i keep having this craving for vegetables and fruits. i’m going to the farmer’s market now.
i hope the weather is this nice wherever you all are. (you know you’ve lived in the northeast too long when you think that 50 degrees is “warm”. back in louisiana, this was winter weather.)
my friend erik pointed out to me that David Rees is still writing Get Your War On, and they’re still really good. This reminded me that Rees was kind enough to send me the demo disc for his former band The Skeleton Killers, and i thought i’d share it with you all as i am enjoying relistening to it.
also equinox!
i want a black shirt that says save sacco and vanzetti.
this is just a quick note to say that the right kind of madmen are much better at talking about things like ART without sounding like a stoner college kid, as i tend to. in this case, a dialogue between errol morris and werner herzog.
you may (or may not!) recall that herzog ate his shoe on account of losing a bet to mister morris – herzog had said he’d eat his shoe should errol morris successfully complete his documentary on pet cemetaries, “gates of heaven.”
he also has a thing for chickens, which appear in a great many of his films. sez herzog: “you look into the eyes of a chicken and you lose yourself in a completely flat, frightening stupidity. they are like a great metaphor for me… i kind of love chickens, but they frighten me more than any other animal.” why, by contrast, errol morris looks almost respectable these days.
i’m sooo glad they moved daylight savings up to early march. tomorrow it’s going to be light until past seven, yay!
The other day, Richard Buchanan came to risd and gave a mostly rambling talk about design methodology and design frameworks (more on this later), but what he really came to do was pick a fight to see how people responded like that scene in fight club. Here’s what he said.Point one: everyone is a designer. the kid that makes his own blog is a designer and so is his buddy that just laid out the cd booklet that goes with the mixtape he made for his friends. myspace makes everyone a designer and in doing so, the work of real designers is devalued and marginalized.Point two: Furthermore, design is not systematic: it is not a process that is easily articulated, followed, managed, organized or even understood by others. Designers practice their trade and yet appear to have no idea what they are doing oftentimes making their work inconsistent and inefficient.Point three: because of the resistance of designers to overintellectualize, they neglect talking about the design of design itself — the methods we use are inarticulate, spotty, nonexistent, or arbitrary. We do not understand our own process, nor can we easily abstract it towards non-standard problems where form is irrelevant and where instead design becomes a way of attacking, dissecting and understanding a problem.[edit:] Here’s what I’ve noticed after the past semester at risd. [/edit] Graphic designers are touchy: is it art or advertising? how come fine artists call designers sell-outs? what is design? do posters and book covers always exist as second class citizens to the more progressive artistic and architectural establishment? is the purpose of design to obliterate and obsolete prior design, implicitly making design a consumer driven field? all this and more.Perennially the issue of xxxxxx obsoleting the graphic designer comes up: will desktop publishing eliminate the graphic designer? no, it hasn’t. will the web eliminate the need for book designers? doesn’t seem that way. Will blogs end the need for professional web designers? hasn’t happened yet. Perpetually on the attack and on the defensive, designers appear to hold on to the secrets of their craft like ancient masonic guilds.At MIT, i always felt that i was not being trained as a practitioner, but instead as a designer. I am always reminded of hal abelson or erik grimson’s statement that computer science is neither about computers nor science, instead, the focus in 6.001 for example was really just to understand design through abstraction.And all of this is to say that buchanan has a point even if he comes off as a douche: everyone is a designer, finding ways to tackle problems, visually, conceptually or otherwise. Everyone does this already. all people are creative, from people in the moba to kids sharing ipod playlists. For buchanan, what makes up design and what he is interested in is the ability to come up with ways to formalize creative methods used to approach existing problems, which arguably has little to do with graphic design.
My Alba
Now that I’ve wasted
five years in Manhattan
life decaying
talent a blank
talking disconnected
patient and mental
sliderule and number
machine on a desk
autographed triplicate
synopsis and taxes
obedient prompt
poorly paid
stayed on the market
youth of my twenties
fainted in offices
wept on typewriters
deceived multitudes
in vast conspiracies
deodorant battleships
serious business industry
every six weeks whoever
drank my blood bank
innocent evil now
part of my system
five years unhappy labor
22 to 27 working
not a dime in the bank
to show for it anyway
dawn breaks it’s only the sun
the East smokes O my bedroom
I am damned to Hell what
alarmclock is ringing
Moving is such a love-hate thing for me. I absolutely love the huge change but I absolutely hate the piles of boxes and piles of things to sort into stacks of donations, keep for possible future projects… etc. This all becomes so much harder with an extremely energetic 3 year old jumping and running all day long. I’m moving, again. Packing up the kids and cats and heading to a very isolated place. In this place I will have a new “career” that will be anything but a 9-5… and in a way it’s kind of been shoved at me. I think it’s for the better. I will finally have the space I’ve always wished for; a space that is quiet, a space where I can make an enormous mess in the creative process that may or may not ever turn into art, a space where I can splat my brains out in any way shape or form that I want, a place to nurture and accept my soul and possibly share it in new forms with others. I should be thankful and feel lucky that this has been presented to me. Leap Day sucked ass. It was a horrible terrible day. But so bad in the way that you feel like it’s the worst it can ever get so when it’s done… well, the worst has actually passed and everything is now painted in a new light. It’s near Mt. Shasta. I’m really psyched about Mt. Shasta. There is a monastery there that I am really looking forward to visiting with Diamond. I feel like a new person. I am not a new person. I am the same person. I just feel like I got a new coat of shiny.
first, a quick note: found a bootleg of the velvet underground playing right after the release of their first album, along with the first live performance of “sister ray.” fresh off the intarwebs, kids, and and full of heroin and amphetamines and even a new song (”i’m not a young man anymore,” certainly true today.) only a handful of people will listen to those mp3s, but each will go on to make their own mp3s…
anyway, can’t say i’ve been to many loft parties of late (i’m not even sure if munich _has_ lofts. beyond the cluster of artsy bastards living – well, now working only, since january 1 – in old barracks at domagkstraße [which i still can't pronounce], everyone else living on the cheap gets picturesque decaying altbau buildings.) history lies heavy here. munich’s celebrating it’s 850th birthday this year, which makes it at best middle-aged for a european city.
cities have such vivid personalities, sometimes (the lack thereof can be equally vivid.) the bits of berlin i saw were a contrast: ragged bits of real city mixed with something more anonymous built of sheet steel and plate glass. munich’s gentler and older, more personal and more forgotten. a boston to new york comparison would not be inappropriate: munich’s motto is “münchen mag dich” (munich likes you) as compared to new york’s “i [heart] nyc”. although there’s this electric eels quote that’s been bouncing around my head for aeons: “there is no better city to sharpen your skills than a city on the edge of failure,” and sometimes that seems like the right answer…
eh, but that’s all a lot of claptrap. someday, the cities will awaken, and what then?
image: detail of installation by Bronwyn Lace
