My writing about papyrus had taken a break for a while simply because I couldn’t keep up with the volume. It’s everywhere. And I wish I was joking, but the sad thing is that lazy designers exist everywhere and due to the ubiquity of computers, so does fucking papyrus.
The most recent addition to the papyrus hall of shame is James Cameron’s Avatar, which looks infreakingcredible. And as much as the combination of Sigouney Weaver, James Cameron and giant blue creatures gets my heart aflutter, the sight of papyrus in the trailer was enough to make me wretch and STOP PAYING ATTENTION TO THE AWESOMENESS.
Joss, you signed the font crime
This isn’t the first time that papyrus has been used in otherwise awesome context. Joss Whedon’s Firefly used the font repeatedly and the sight of the Kaylee painting it on Serenity just validates the font for other people. Joss, you work so hard to overturn our narrative expectations, but then are victim of the most banal and offensive font crime possible.
Sweet Jesus, make it stop
Even my beloved Batman: The Animated Series used papyrus in the title card for the Tyger, Tyger episode. William Blake has never been so mangled before. And I’m not talking about the quality of the episode, I’m talking about fuglifying of one of the most beautiful poems in the English language by alluding to it with a font that has nothing to do with tigers and is really a slap in the face to Blake’s artistry:
The original plate of William Blake's The Tyger
Speaking of fuglyfied things, Richard sent me a link to what is the most awesome catalog of hideous design. The kind people at Your Logo Makes Me Barf have been posting fuglos (fucking ugly logos) for a while now and their inventory is eye gougingly amazing:
Beyond Words
Here’s a link to my growing papyrus flickr set that has photos from Vancouver, Portland, Seattle and Amsterdam.
sigh.
On Monday, September 25th, another rally was held outside the Liberals’ public finance committee meeting in Vancouver. The turnout was awesome and it was great to see so many people there to oppose the cuts and demand for Arts Minister Kevin Krueger’s resignation.
The rally made it into the Georgia Straight Blog and there was a picture of me!
Grey + empty frame = absence of arts
Lindsey Brown and Fiona Bowie were amongst the organizers and Lindsey had this to say:
Please participate in getting the BC liberal Government to reinstate the cuts!
Please read what people like Margaret Atwood have to say and add your voice to the fight!
http://www.stopbcartscuts.ca/speakout.html
Follow on Twitter: http://twitter.com/stopbcartscuts
http://thetyee.ca/News/2009/09/28/ArtsCuts/
Here’s an excellent article from The Province about how the cuts affect more than the arts
this year's barcamp T
I had the most amazing Saturday at Barcamp Vancouver with my friend Richard and a whole panopoly of Vancouver’s creative community. I’d never been to Barcamp before, so I really wan’t sure what to expect in terms of the organization or presentations, but like most user groups/conferences, there was waaaaay more amazing content than one could take in.
On the Friday night before the camp, there was a meet and greet at Ceili’s where you could pick up your t-shirt and a couple of pints and get to know people in more social setting. I managed to talk to an interesting range of people with really diverse and creative backgrounds ranging from coders/developers, sound and hardware. I was surprised to run into Chris Mathieson (@cognoscento) from the Vancouver Police Museum, who I had met earlier in the year through a mutual museum connection. But on second thought, Chris is kind of everywhere, so I really shouldn’t have been surprised.
The event itself was an amazing mix of presentations and collaboration that was really inspiring and challenging. I started my day by going to a presentation on the positive impact of choirs in students, followed by a creative jam on Charettes and the importance of brainstorming on solving big difficult problems with lots of variables like reducing accidents at known dangrous intersections. I’m definitely going to steal ideas learned from this session in my own workshops.
I also saw amazing presentations/workshops on:
- Working remotely as a contractor, telecommuting and the problems of collaboration
- Social media and educational institutions
- Open sourcing law
- Government data, the problem of access and applications like googlemap mashups. My favourite example was the Vancouver Garbage Reminders, simply because of the sheer usefulness of getting reminders about garbage collection day (you don’t want to see the pile of recycling currently in my apartment).
Overall barcamp was an amazing day full of incredible ideas and passionate, intelligent people that make me proud to be a Vancouverite involved in technology and information. The willignness to share knowledge and be open to ideas was like the university seminar that I always longed for. A huge thanks has to go out to the organizers and sponsors for doing an incredible job of making such an amazing day possible!
Go to the barcamp vancouver site:
http://barcampvancouver2009.eventbrite.com/
See pictures from the event:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/barcampvancouver/
Last Thursday I went to Blim to make buttons for Claudia’s Sports Day birthday extravaganza. Before Claudia had told me to put a beagle on the badge I had already made up a couple of different versions that included her face. The following image was Michelle’s favourite:
Claudia loves the stabbin's
I designed the buttons based on the Canada fitness awards from the eighties. I’m not sure why I have such fond memories of those badges since I never managed to get anything above “Participant.” However, I recall really liking the design even as a kid.
Sports day went off without a hitch and due to my ankle injury, I was able to ref the different events that included an egg and spoon race, a clothing race and a softball game. The only event that misfired was MadMenton since there were technical difficulties with the net. MadMenton is basically badminton, but the rules stipulate that you hold a drink/cocktail in one hand while playing. Oh Mad Men, what don’t you inspire. And there was a bouncy castle thanks to Liz B’s organizational savvy:
Bouncy Bouncy, oh such a good time
I’m known to be a verbose person, but the cuts to BC arts funding have left me rather speechless because I don’t know what to say to the slew of people that are going to be losing their jobs immediately or in the near future. I’ve been out of work since May and can only offer a sympathetic shoulder and advice on how to reduce spending in order to get by. I’ll stand in solidarity with my fellow artists, but the reality is that we’re also now being pitted against each other in an increasingly tight job market. Those of us working artists that used day jobs to fund our art practices are going to face serious decisions about our futures since we will no longer be able to rely on teaching, community organization and art exhibition to get by. Some of us will move on and continue, while others will have to find new fields or new places to live. But in the end it’s BC youth that will suffer the most, because they’ll face growing up in communities that are cultural wastelands because they are devoid of teachers and mentors.
I used to make my living from working in software and teaching children about historical fiction and animation. But the software job dried up in May and the animation program is being scaled back severely, even after a very successful 2008/2009 school year. So, I’ve looked for work as a graphic designer and in the arts community to little avail. For now, I’m left scrambling to minimize the amount of debt that I hope doesn’t bury me since student loans, taxes and credit cards all have interest rates that tick at a rate faster than I can calculate. I’m educated (multiple degrees), I volunteer, and participate in local events whenever possible, but I’m facing financial ruin and the latest rounds of cuts mean that there will be fewer opportunities and even more people looking for work. It also means I can’t support other artists or the facilities that make some of our work possible, which leads to further loss to our communities as the dominoes start to fall.
The thing I find most appalling is that artists actually tend to be amongst the hardest working people in our communities because most of them do their work out of passion and devotion to their crafts. The cuts are also a slap in the face to a province-wide arts community that puts up significant financial numbers:
- For every $1 into arts a $1.36 comes back to the province
- The arts generates 5 billion dollars for BC every year
While the cuts that the arts community is desperate to keep is only 1/20 of 1% of the provincial government’s budget.
Please get involved and find more information at these and other sources:
Join the Facebook group: Organizing against Campbell’s cuts to the arts
http://decimatingtheartsincanada.blogspot.com/
Gillian Burnett’s article in The Province
The BBQ goes into the evening
Back in early August, I had a chance to catch up with Amber Mortensen of the supremely cool fashion blog Painfully Hip at Aaron’s rooftop BBQ party where everyone got also got to meet her adorable beagle, Buckley, who is the source of the current wave of beaglemania sweeping the nation. Well, ok, sweeping over Claudia. But look at this face:
Buckley, up close
Try to resist that face. Exactly, you can’t.
Beagle aside, Amber asked me to do some fashion photography for her blog meetup with the lovely Gen and Zoe of Loaded Bow at Chill Winston, a restaurant and lounge in Vancouver’s historic gastown. The shoot was a complete pleasure as the kind folks at Chill Winston let us push furniture around and take over a small corner at the front and Amber brought a small treasure trove of clothes for Gen and Zoe to try out. Here are some of the shots and here’s the link to my flickr set:
Gen and Zoe in their first outfits
Amber getting Gen ready, like a hummingbird she is.
Amber gets Zoe ready while Gen lurks.
Amber and Painfully Hip was recently profiled in the current issue of N.E.E.T. Magazine which also has a feature on the Autum 2009 Dear Creatures collection that’s pretty freaking awesome. I love the vintage girl scout approach which manages to be cute while retaining a sense of adventure and camp fire sing-a-longs:
so, so pretty.
As a tech nerd, Apple fanboy and media historian, I’ve been following the Apple tablet rumors for the past couple of years and fawning over the possibilities every time a new patent is released or news piece pops out and tweaks the whiskers of nerds around the world who then flood news sites, tech blogs and their message boards with their hopes, fears, and sarcastic opposition.
Gizmodo's Jesus Diaz' wet dream. On the table, not Bettie Page.
Now, I should stop here and say that I’m not about to out some new evidence, or have some inside source that points to some magical mythical product. My interest purely lies with the responses that people have had and how persistent and attractive this rumor continues to be. Just recently a new set of rumors have come out from Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz about how there might not just be one tablet, but a couple. The persistence of these rumors for about 7 years has taught the fanboys like me to keep the hype at arm’s reach, but yet, I can’t help myself from pouring through whatever the rumor mill spits out.
I have two reasons for wanting this mythical device to exist:
1) To validate that it’s possible to make a tablet computer that doesn’t totally suck.
I’ve used some in relation to work and they’ve been less than impressive: Slow response, weird interaction like HP’s magnetic stylus and brutally short battery lives. Now a major culprit in this is Windows. While I don’t have a lot of love for Microsoft products I have to say that XP was ok as an operating system, it just wasn’t designed with touch in mind. This results in products that don’t take advantage of their inherent tabletiness and end up feeling…Microsofty. In other words, the absence of design is obvious and painful enough to make the whole venture not worth it.
The Panel Fly Comic Reader, different than the Kamikaze reader used for A Contract With God
The iPhone is a major step in this direction as it’s touch based and the accelerometer takes advantage of being an object in space. And it’s given me the thing that I’ve longed for all these years: the ability to read web content in a comfortable position on the couch. Now, before you shout “laptop” I want to say that there’s a serious difference between having a laptop actually on your lap and reading web articles or the appified version of Will Eisner’s Contract with God like a book. The key phrase being “like a book.” For me, the iPhone was instantly attractive because of the gestures. When I saw people swiping to unlock their iPhones a primal voice went off in my head and screamed WANT. The gestures on the iPhone are quite glorious because they emulate the way we interact with books and scrolls where you page over by swiping from left to right or vice versa or rolling up or down. Most recently, I’ve found myself amazed by the shake to undo typing simply because it draws from the Etch-A-Sketch’s shake to erase. And really, that’s why the iPhone works on a deeper level than other smart phones: it draws from the actions that you’re already familiar with from analog training and presents them in a slick new interface that’s actually fun to use. The Blackberry is a different beast, but the pearl/mouse relationship is quite ingenious, you can pat yourselves on the back RIM. However, take the physical keyboard away….
2) I believe we’re all waiting for Apple to get it right.
Tablet computers have existed for the better part of this decade and the majority of them suck. I said majority since I clearly haven’t tried them all and I’m sure someone other than Bill Gates has enjoyed using them. However, they didn’t go as gangbusters as Bill Gates thought they would way back in 2001 and I’d be willing to bet all my student loan debt that clunky Windows and meh hardware were the problem.
Ive in one of his labs, in front of the curtain.
While I’m sure that Microsoft has great engineers and the hardware manufacturers have great industrial designers, the combination of them don’t even come close to what Jon Ive brings to Apple and it’s not even fair comparing OS X to any Windows product because of fundamentally different approaches. This is where I show my stripes: I believe that the marriage of hardware and software is critical. Nintendo also gets it and so should you. Now this does not hold true for the upper percentile of nerds who can customize the bejesus out of their OS of choice and stuff computers into anything, like a Millenium Falcon. However, for a tablet device to work and be a game changer, someone has to sit there and make serious design decisions and actually craft the hardware and software from the ground up while looking hard at human behaviour to reduce conceptual hurdles.
I believe the Apple tablet rumors are so persistent because this is THE HARDEST form factor for computers to date because the inherent flaws and if anyone might get close to making it real and stick it’s Jobs, Ive and Apple. Sorry Techcrunch, I know you’ve been working hard, but you’ve never generated the same level of noise and you probably won’t be the defining product that other designers will crib from and that consumers will see as the next evolution of the computer that gets us closer to the fantasy of the less-paper office, reading web content comfortably on a couch or in bed, and being able to carry an English lit degree’s worth of books without breaking your back (Riverside Chaucer, I’m looking at you). And that’s really why I believe the rumors are so persistent and so alluring: the idea that the great and all powerful Apple has something behind the curtain and won’t let us see or even admit to. This tells me that the rumors are as powerful as the device itself may ever be and that Apple holds a far bigger sway over all of us than most people would like to admit. Except possibly for Jesus “spanky” Diaz who publishes his lust regularly.
click here to see Mashable’s collection of mockups
click here to see Gizmodo’s touchscreen tablet contest winner and gallery
Zombies looooove the Red Cross
I spent a good chunk of last weekend on the set of a short zombie movie called Hell of a Wedding as the stills photographer and backup boom mic operator. The filming went well and it was really fun hanging out with a pack of zombies for hours on end. I was amazed at the skills of the makeup artists who did an incredible job of bloodying up the actors and kept them looking like they were freshly rotting.
zombies raid the craft table
As a photographer, it was a great opportunity to photograph a lot of people in makeup and all the actors were great models. There’s something about the zombie makeup that makes the most mundane things expressive or at least contradictory and each person brought something different and awesome.
There's an app for that
I posted all of the original photos to my flickr account and separated out the ones that I processed. Which meant that I didn’t have time to process any photos from the actual wedding I photographed for Melissa Gobby and Richard Perron back on August 15th. It’s so like zombies to get in the way. Hell of a Wedding was written and directed by George Somerwill with Knesha Yu on camera and produced by Liz Cairns.
Nachos & beer at Bloor and Christie
July 19 was a hot and humid day in Toronto, the heatwave was supposed to have partially broken by the lightning storm that was suppose to have happened the day before. The night was clear though and the late afternoon sun shone brightly, illuminating the new concrete and glass condos that encircle the area around the Skydrome, Rogers be damned.
Michelle, Cam and I arrived late to the diamond because we’d been drinking at her house and eating Mexican food at the corner of Christie and Bloor thanks to CiTR Station Manager and one time Torontonian Brenda Grunau’s suggestion. Bellies full of deliciousness and 3 beers to the wind we made our way past the teams of scalpers that dotted the concourse from the subway to the stadium. Once we arrived, I stood in line waiting to use the automated ticketing kiosk that Michelle was occupying when a voice came from my side. Initially I assumed that the voice was trying to sell me a ticket, when in fact, it was giving me a ticket.
Stunned, I looked up at the person and then down at the ticket in my hand.
“Really?”
Apparently the person they were waiting for didn’t show up and I became the lucky recipient of an infield ticket, which was a huge upgrade from the nosebleed seat that I was about to buy. I parted ways with Michelle and Cam, leaving them with $25 for a couple of beers since the 1st round was supposed to be on me.
Daniel and Co.
“That’s way too much”
Not in the majors, my friend. I took my golden ticket and decided to sit one row in front of my seat because it was easier to get to. I sat down and immediately started taking pictures of the field, sippin’ on my $10 beer and turning around to thank Daniel Monehin for the wicked seat.
Since I arrived late and Big Papi had already tatered to put the Bo Sox ahead 2-0, I wasn’t paying close attention to the innings, and was just happy to take in a hot summer night at the ballpark. Roy Halladay finally put the Sox to bed for the inning and the Jays were coming up to bat, so I got my camera at the ready in case Clay Buchholz started to slip with his 90+ mph fastball. However, the thing I wasn’t prepared for was a foul ball. The batter popped one up directly over my head.
Hello, Skydome...
“That’ll go into the deck above” I thought. Nope. It bounced off the face of the deck and came straight down. Now, as a life long baseball fan, I have seen hundreds of foul ball skirmishes, but had never actually been in a situation in which I could catch a game authentic souvenir. I felt my body rise as my arms pulled me skyward, but then I halted. The camera. I looked down. There was no way I was about to leap up and leave Mr. Canon 5D Mark II to chance since the camera was sitting in my lap, the strap tangled in itself. And then I heard it. The sound of a bunch of celery being hit by a baseball bat. Hard. This was no foley effect, this was a human taking a well hit baseball to the face. I whipped around to see the guy that I should have been sitting next to with blood starting to pour out of his nose.
Again, my arms started to raise on instinct. This time to use the camera and capture the moment. But I froze. The sight of his blood was too much, it was a graphic reminder about getting moments of privacy in a society too riddled with cameras. So I put my camera in my bag and followed the lead of (I assume to be) Mrs. Monehin who had already handed over napkins and started to dig through her purse to hand the guy something to deal with the blood. I looked through my bag (I’m a napkin hoarder) and heard people offering advice, “keep your head down!” When I realized I didn’t have napkins I looked around to see if medical staff were on their way, but the guy and his friend got up and quickly left the section.
Aftermath.
The urge to capture the evidence of a dramatic moment overwhelmed me and I moved to snap a picture of the blood on the ground. The woman in the seat next to me offered to remove the napkin she had dropped over the blood on the ground, but I said no since I preferred it to be how it was. I noticed that the woman’s seat next to me had some blood on it too. Then the shift dawned on me. A subtle tension about the presence of blood slowly rippled through me when I realized that we now had a biohazard on our hands. For the rest of the game you could feel the section’s stomach turn whenever a foul ball came anywhere near us. And while none did, the price of spectatorship was never made more clear.
PS Torontonians are very nice and friendly, regardless of what Coors Light ads might say. And check out the work of artist, musician, and Blue Jays fan Keith Vander Wees.
Thanks to First Weekend Club, I was able to go with Rich & Claudia to go see Rip! A Remix Manifesto at the gorgeous District 319 on Main Street. I was blown away at the venue which is an adult’s dream movie theatre: nice comfy chairs and they even let you bring wine in. Civilized!
I loved how Brett Gaylor, the director, has worked to make the documentary as much a part of remix culture as it is about it. Through his site, opensourcecinema.org he’s posted all his raw footage and made it available for the public to remix the content. Furthermore, this manifesto does a stellar job of laying bare how copyright laws in the 20th century have gone against the historical tide through corporate manipulation that seeks to limit what people can do with cultural objects. Gaynor primarily uses mash upster Girl Talk as an example of how remix culture is already upon us, how it’s really, really fun and how corporations are trying to control the future of culture by limiting access to the past.
I hesitate to simply call Rip! a documentary because it functions more like a textbook about copyright and remix culture that has emerged thanks to personal computers and the internet. But I find the word “textbook” to be inappropriate because it feels too tied to a specific medium. Maybe documentary is supposed to cover this, but I feel it’s too limited a term also. The section on Brazil was astounding to me and indicative how an audio/visual lingua franca is starting to emerge around the world. I personally, love that more people are now participating in culture and creating media that is responsive. Blog, cough, cough.
So, if you’re in Vancouver go check it out at The Ridge
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