vacation / vocation!

Task at hand: design a vacation.

Is that like paint-a-pot?
Do I show up with three of my girlfriends on a Saturday afternoon and pick out a blank cruise ship, gossip about boys while selecting amenities (buffet, band, hot tub) and then squeal in excitement when the ship does a lap around the bay?

It appears that, like many things, it's much easier to describe how I wouldn't design a vacation. Assuming anything on a cruise ship is the first data point, let's go from there. I do not want to go camping. There it is. I don't really like camping. The outside is great, but seriously, camping is exhausting. First, you have to pull all the equipment out of whatever dank place you've been storing it since the last time someone else really wanted to go camping. Then, you need to make piles to get it all together, remember what you need, and forget your headlamp. At some point in the process you need to go food shopping, buy trail mix only because it has the word trail in the title, not because it's in any way more exciting than the few chocolate chips you can pick out, and select a box of bars that will taste even dryer when you're camping than they look in the box in the store. When you finally get everything packed you usually have to drive longer than you want to in a cramped car in order to get close to a destination that may or may not require walking. The walking doesn't bother me. In fact, I prefer it to sleeping on the ground next to my car, but it means that I have to carry all the gear, the food, and the synthetic clothing that will smell bad in ten minutes if it doesn't already to a different location before I can set up and get comfortable. Upon arrival, everything that I crammed into my bag gets pulled out: poles get pegged, tarps get stretched, mats get inflated, and I get hungry. I pull out the trail mix, eat the chocolate chips, take a swig of Nalgene-flavored water that mostly dribbles down my face and sit on the ground in a pike position in my Crazy Creek chair. Now I'm camping.




My designed vacation would likely involve international travel, something that allowed me to fly a posh, foreign carrier where the flight attendants look like porcelain and tuck me in and bring me bloody marys in the morning.

In fact, yesterday I received my new, renewed passport in the mail. Passports are something that you never think will expire, and even though you are given ten years of warning about your expiration date, you always put it off until the last minute and need to pay extra to have them rush you a little book with a version of your face inside. It strikes me that the new passport is very: America. I open the book and am bombarded with eagles and flags and monuments of past presidents. Every page is America America America. I wonder who designed the new US passport?



For the sake of getting this designed vacation underway, I'll wrap this up. My Airbus A380 lands and I head to the hotel in my poofy jacket before it's time to hit the slopes. The conditions are perfect and I finish my day down by the beach, catching some sun and playing in the gentle waves before a breezy, bug-free outdoor dinner. I sleep in a clean room, maybe it has a glass bottom so I can see the fish, and wake up for another great day of snowboarding. Dear vacation, do you exist?

Skip this and go listen to something by Ana Egge.

The sequence goes like this: watch YouTube video of Ana Egge performing > recall an absurd comment made by John Mayer about how great it is that, “girls get out up there and bang out a few chords” (paraphrased) > try to find the source article in Acoustic Guitar by way of Google > fail > end up on the Wikipedia entry for John Mayer and find… of all things… a subcategory describing Mayer’s apparent consideration of abandoning music entirely to pursue a career in… design. Where to begin? Clearly, at the end.

Design: who knows how credible the claim is that design was even a consideration? The overall point though is that the disposition is supported by examples of signature model guitars issued by Martin and Fender. Wow. It is delightful that Mayer had the opportunity to select the wood varieties and offer up some styling cues so winningly, but the fact is that he does not design guitars: at best he specified some features when prompted by legendary makers. Oh wait! Wiki says that Mayer also has designed t-shirts and shoes. I bet that he has even designed a method for sandwich construction whereby the mayonnaise is applied to one piece of bread while mustard is craftily placed on… the other piece of bread. It is like flavor in stereo. Design? How to even begin to describe what design thinking means to a room full of designers when the word design is even casually used in the context of some dolt who stencils a shirt? Clearly at the beginning. [The entirety of the shoe issue has been abandoned for even the slightest attempt at brevity.]

There is always a hip-pocket example to counter the quick dismissal of talent: Mayer’s trivialization of women getting started in the singer-songwriter racket implicitly suggests that women cannot play the guitar like he does… which, I guess, is well. [Though, secretly I am thrilled that there are no heroines-apparent taking up his slack.] The number of brilliant women guitarists is overwhelming, to the point that consideration in light of the comment is moot. Let the mystery be, yes? Not just yet. The fact that there is even discussion of Mayer as a designer to be taken seriously brings me right back to the point of this whole thing: Ana Egge. Her talents are immense vocally, lyrically, and dexterously. The cap though is the fact that she IS a designer. The guitar that she plays is an Egge/Musser original: she made it. Her efforts did not begin and end with style choices. She built it. Further, she plays the hell out of it on a daily basis.

In the world of retail sales of vintage instruments, belt buckle “rash” is an interesting phenomenon: it is the collective distress due to wear from belt buckles, keys, buttons, snaps, and the like that accumulates from the physical contact between instrument and player. Only in particular cases (e.g. celebrity instruments or VERY old instruments) does this kind of wear exist without impact on value. Admittedly, there is a certain bravado in beating up a guitar in more than one way. Patina is cool: designers and musicians agree.



The “honest” wear that I see on Mayer’s instruments I suppose is a trophy of his skill, craft, and lifestyle: hard-charging designer on the road belting out the Grammy winning Wonderbread. Sucks to your asthma,I say! I am compelled to cry foul and pull from my hip pocket video proof of something I have seen in person, as well: the skewed buckle. Aha! Now THAT is a legitimate metric of a designer. That’s right John: she BUILT her guitar; she is designerly enough to understand what that means. Now I know that there are lots of guys getting up on stage with pristine Martins buckling their belts on the hip, but it seems like the world deserves at least one good example of a woman doing the same. That is all: long, boring, and needlessly bitter based on a vaguely remembered quote from an article that cannot be located—interspersed with too many colons.

Love Letters of the Future

This is a report on my books: they are sitting in a large pile that I anticipate getting larger within the next few days as some Tintin comics travel from somewhere, here. The stack includes, among others: a travel book on Scotland; The Tempest; Kingsley Amis’, Lucky Jim (no idea why that is taking so long); Slaugtherhouse Five (Homer Simpson has a brilliant interpretation of this, yes?); Thompson’s, Blankets; The Adventures of Tintin: The Black Island; and Chabon’s, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Really I cannot get enough: I need more. Letters to the editor, blogs, instruction sheets, liner notes, and, not lastly, magazines.

The episodic nature of magazine is one of the most compelling and satisfying things about them. Formatted, yes, but each issue has an identity: a new gamble at a satisfying meal. Right? I straddled the recent annual odometer change with two publications that cemented a beautiful year gone and offered particularly inspired direction toward the future.

The cover story of Fretboard Journal (Winter 2008) is Bill Frisell’s interview of Jim Hall. Brief introduction if necessary: Frisell is an exquisite musician and a student of Jim Hall, whose commensurate talents were shifted back in time so as to influence directly and indirectly students of guitar. The cover story itself is a nearly perfect example of the successful transfer of knowledge with the serendipitous effect of broadening the pools in which everyone swims, rather than diminishing a single source of food. Within that piece is a lovely detailing by Jason Verlinde on Gary Larson’s experience as Jim Hall’s student. Larson, creator of the quintessential single-frame comic, The Far Side, is an excellent player, and as Verlinde conveys, also a fine synthesizer of jazz. What are the odds of Larson being a guitarist capable of playing with Hall and Frisell? Evidently about the same as Woody Allen being a professional clarinetist.

Last month’s issue of National Geographic included the eerily beautiful glimpses of Mars conveyed from the Rovers and friends. John Updike authored this piece. John Updike. John Updike. He proffered a tantalizing historical account of the Mars exploration and spun it his own way to make it the fact people take conversationally. William Buckley (R.I.P.) once responded to the suggestion that he was master of words with the following paraphrase: “you know who has a good vocabulary? John Updike.” (I think that this was on the Charlie Rose Show, though I cannot recall exactly.) I would like to imagine a similar moment in history where Bo Jackson and Michael Jordan sat down to talk about who was better at playing baseball. The idea that John Updike can, not only, be an authority on astronomical proceedings, but can also shrug perceptions of expertise to deliver the goods is nothing short of amazing. This is the future and it is being offered by the past.

My thoughts upon finishing these two pieces drifted to the state of design, the state of the world, and the states of America, in particular. In one regard, it was reassuring to read of music being an unowned resource from which anyone can draw, both in difficult and easy times. More contextually, I felt validated by the power of shunning expectations in favor of charging forward in embrace and defiance of challenge. The people I know and those I know who will change their worlds can speak as easily with drawings as with songs, with bridges as with glances. It is a delightful club that can delightfully, by example, include everyone.

What's your post-apocalyptic vocation?

Green design.
Sustainable design.
Climate change.
Design for change.
Design for impact.
etc.

It's all the buzz: "Stop THIS from happening." "Do this or THIS will happen." "We have to figure out how to convince everyone to do THIS." Everyone is talking about design for prevention.

Why don't we jump ahead, assume a mass-scale world tragedy will happen, and design for the post-apocalyptic world. After a conversation with Jean, Joe, and Andreas on Thursday, I'm convinced that the designers with real foresight will start tackling post-apocalyptic problems now.

We don't know the tragedy that will ultimately push us over the tipping point, but it's likely that one event will lead to another. Rapid sea level rise will lead to mass inland migration, shortages in food, and civil war. An earthquake through the Nevada desert (yes, there is a fault that runs right through Yucca Mountain) will lead to radioactive contamination that spreads from local areas to the greater watershed, and eventually the ocean, effectively destroying marine life much like DDT did, increasing in concentration up the food chain. Rising carbon emissions will cause a runaway greenhouse effect, warming 80% of the earth to intolerable levels, causing mass human extinction, and spawning new habitat for wildly proliferating insect populations. Maybe the magnetic poles of the Earth will swap, ie. North becomes South. It's happened continuously in Earth history, we don't know why, but the rock record tells us we're overdue for a magnetic flip. Or, our demise could come through lack of differentiation in our food. The world currently supports only twelve major crops. TWELVE. The world corn crop could fail if attacked by a resilient pest, and lack of crop diversity will cause the whole crop to fail, not just a localized area. Food shortage will lead to failure of the world economy, civil, and international strife.

No matter which way we end up pushing our planet over the brink, one thing is for certain: we'll need new jobs. Specifically, folks with jobs that fufill needs at the top of Maslow's heirarchy, the self-actualization jobs, are going to be out of work. Wedding planners, hairdressers, divorce lawyers, plastic surgeons and fashion models should start thinking ahead. Personally, I'm already trying to determine my post-apocalyptic vocation (PAV).

How will my skills transfer? Will I be a leader or a worker? Will I become nomadic, migrating with the new seasons, or will I work in an established new colony? Will I abandon Earth like those in the scarily psychic movie, Wall-E, and sit in a chair, not knowing that there are other people around me?



I re-watched Wall-E yesterday, and this time, without nature's call beckoning me away before the very end of the credits, I stayed to watch them through. Mort Grosser tipped me off over the summer that if I watched the movie to completion, the very very last thing would blow me away. It did. I'll let you watch for yourself and have your own private moment of fear, but I will say that it offers up yet another mode to drive world catastrophe.



So, what's your PAV?

Postal piracy

There is a strong perception (entirely defensible, as far as I know) that Americans are essentially wimps with regard to happy endings and the cinema. Those who I know who are in the know—the people whose opinions I trust for supporting extremist posturing at cocktail parties—tell me that Chinese cinema (and fiction) relies heavily on the fact that everyone dies at the end of the story or at least walks away entirely ruined, if walking. I recently saw the British film “Happy Go Lucky”, and though that film ends delightfully, I recalled a comment my high school English teacher made summarizing Shakespeare’s work, “the only difference between the comedies and the tragedies is that at the end of a tragedy, everyone dies.” Nice point, though I cannot say where that leaves the typical disposition of film goers and filmmakers.

I know that I watch certain movies for certain reasons, and I am often affected by unexpected stories. "No Country for Old Men"comes to mind. I am curious though about the extension of the expectation of happiness beyond film. Pirates, in particular have recently risen as mysteries. I was curious about the recent hijacking of a tanker by pirates who, as cnn.com reports, headed for a known pirate haven of Eyl, Somalia. Wow! A known pirate haven. Pirates murder, rape, and steal. When was the last time a fast food restaurant selected a rapist as one of a band of merry characters selling burgers, other than today at McDonalds? Hmm, never. As much as I would like to see Barney teaming up with a murderer on an early morning broadcast to kids, or perhaps falling victim on said broadcast, shockingly the cast is relatively safe. This is a real puzzler given the fact that on a certain holiday, parents all over the place dress up kids as pirates. So cute! Not so much. I am not sure if this augments or diminishes the American disposition toward the saccharine. No we do not like rapists, murderers, or thieves, but at the drop of the hat, we will disguise our treasured toddlers in swarthy garb and call it cute. Bizarre.

In a quasi-unrelated connection, I recently came across a sheet of the commemorative Charles and Ray Eames postage stamps sitting on a counter. My first inclination was to take the money and run, but I opted to act closer to my age and ask if anyone belonged to these stamps. It turns out that the purchaser very kindly gave them to me based on my interest. I was thrilled because I have for a long time had an unchecked lust for the low-slung LCM and LCW molded plywood chairs. So sexy. In a somewhat distant past, I was part of an endeavour in which several of such chairs were permanently borrowed from a Midwestern institution of learning. My stake in the booty is still essentially buried, but I have recently confirmed directions on a map: my cut, consisting of one chair, is safely stashed in a barn deep in the woods. I am fairly pleased that, in an instinctive defense of the American disposition, the woods of which I speak are analogous to those unfolded by Dickey in his heavy, not-so-happy masterpiece.

Double Vision

I was sitting at LAX once, having just taken a shower; you can schedule showers in the Admiral’s Club there. This was quite a kick because the shower alone was bigger than my entire apartment at the time, I was actually covered in mud from working that day, and I was in fact not a member of the Admiral’s Club.

Once clean, I was sitting, trying to read 'The Dead' from Joyce’s The Dubliners while being continually distracted by this guy and his valet who were both sitting across from me. The pair were tended by “Special Personnel” who tend to such pairs in LA, only in LA. This guy was dressed in a white suit of another era and possibly another dimension. His valet was handling their drinks.

With nothing better to do, I eavesdropped to decode who was this man—deciphering celebrity identities has only recently been overtaken in popularity by Sudoku. I wrote down all sorts of notes in the margins of 'The Dead', ultimately abandoning the story all together. I heard, “Sony,” “Arista,” and “Aerosmith.” Once home, I hit HotBot and uncovered the identity: John Kalodner:John Kalodner. That bit of punctuation is no mistake: he ran with it after Foreigner credited him as such on the seminal album, Double Vision. Kalodner is (was—retired) an A&R guy and huge career builder for many bands, mostly including those that are hard on my point-of-view. His vibe was intriguing as was his embrace of punctuation: an active move toward calling out your own doppelganger.

Friends have told me many times that I have stunt doubles. I have been thrown out of a Wal-Mart in Flagstaff for looking like a guy who apparently had a history of nail theft at that location. Once, only once, I saw a guy who I thought looked like me. It was a weird deal… kind of like seeing a picture of yourself asleep: who took that picture? Odd.

The poet, Rives, spoke today at the Liu Lecture Series at Stanford: it was an experience as close to meeting my own doppelganger as I have ever encountered. We do not really look alike, and professionally, we slightly are misaligned. Yet, the works that I saw were spot on with justifications, motivations, explanations, and fascinations as those I have. It was a very strange experience in getting to know myself as friends turned to me with eyes asking if I was seeing this. Possibly they were checking to see if I was in fact sitting in the audience while presenting to… myself. I have to admit: I frequently feel that way. When you become interested in the obliterations of Japanese postal workers stationed in Manchuria, China in the late 1800s, this is the sort of thing you have to expect. Ditto with braille text messages in bottles. But, no longer! Rives dropped a bomb at the dead center of the paradigm shift from Design to design. His associative exposition and experience of craft, crafted an experience exposing associations inseparable between art and design. Sing it Leonard, sing it Jeff: Hallelujah! Today I awoke to find myself and to see myself validated, pared with a lovely burrito at lunch, too.

Kalodner’s website discusses his suits at length and in color: white. It is even noted what his undergarments are on any given day of the week. As an observationalist, a brilliant word I have stolen from Rives, I noted that on the day in question in the lounge at LAX, John appeared to be wearing boxer shorts, though his website dossier would purport otherwise. I alerted the webmistress of the disparity. She later replied that she got that comment with some regularity though in fact the confusion was due to the trouser lining showing through white suit cloth. Ha! At the time I felt odd to be among those who noticed. Today it feels brilliant.