Chicago

In Chicago, which is blowing my mind. A city thats an endless condensed strip mall… In a good way. Just endlessly extending into every direction, miles of drivable streeta tht are filled with 2 or 3 story buildings. Youre definitely meant to drive… Yet the scale of the buildings themselves is pedestrian oriented–walking is not unpleasant.

Also do you see the variety of building heights and styles in this one block? Its like this everywhere… Uniformity exists definitely but is memorable.. (I always remember driving to midway and being struck by the endless rows of houses though Im sure they were also individualized)

Why does NBC hate Brian Williams’ face?

What is it with this new campaign? I was riding in a subway car today which was plastered with these Brian Williams ads and I see that EVERY SINGLE AD CROPS HIS FACE ON THE (VIEWER’S) RIGHT. What is wrong with his face? Why couldn’t they possibly have some variation? Is this part of the joke?

I am truly mystified.

Flaneuring

[Sorry it's so dark: Call your mom! Ha. What a great piece of graffiti.]

In between projects now, hopefully starting to work again next week; if it comes through it will be great. Leaves me a lot of time to do all sorts of wandering both real and digital. A great mystery to me why I’ve become such a poor blogger in response to all that I see, despite my acquisition of an iphone which is supposed to make these things easier, and too bad, really, since I have many thoughts, some of them somewhat interesting, but as per the last post, one should try to force as little as possible of one’s life.

I came across The Death of the Cyberflâneur, wherein Morozov claims that Facebook and apps are killing the act of cyberflaneuring — browsing at random on the internet and stumbling upon random things. First of all, and this is probably embarrassing, is I’d never heard of the term cyberflaneuring, and of course I love it, since a good flaneuring is what I generally love in the physical world and also in the digital world, but just hadn’t thought to call it anything (except perhaps “fucking around on the internet”). (Naming, guys, naming. It can really salvage things!)

Incidentally, I’d just started following Morozov on Twitter, which I know dip into on my iphone in in-between moments, and am now starting to get Twitter — I do feel like Twitter allows cyberflaneuring in a really quite nice, guided, semi-productive way.

Love this sentence: “The whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about.” A sweet defense of not knowing, which I am always in favor of.

So Morozov posits himself on the cyberflaneur camp as against the social app camp, headed by Mark Zuckerberg. “ “Do you want to go to the movies by yourself or do you want to go to the movies with your friends?”  The funny thing here I realized is that Mark Zuckerberg  wants the internet to be more social because he himself needs help getting friends together to go to a movie. Evgeny Morozov probably doesn’t need much help getting together a group. You always want to be better at what you’re note. Zuckerberg, king of the digital natives, doesn’t need help cyberflaneuring; he needs help inviting friends out. Morozov probably has much less social issues, but craves time and opportunity to do both flaneuring and cyberflaneuring, random time alone where he can ingest the world.

Of course, I’m on the Morozov camp, even though I probably need loads of help inviting friends out somewhere….

 

 

It is interesting for a while…

Lovely  thing I saw at MOMA. Looked and looked but couldn’t find the artist. It drives me particularly nuts because I’m almost positive that this is by the same lady-artist who did a piece in the Atlanta Art Museum that is words inscribed on a bench, something along the lines of “Sometimes I wake up crying and I’m not sure if it means something or it’s just involuntary like sneezing.” Except she said it better, obvs. I’d actually been trying to find that piece for a while, with no luck, and here I stumble upon this piece, and here too, I can’t find the author. Send ideas if you know who it is.

Also. Really. I really just love this. Funny how being an artist allows you to say stuff like this and frame it and have it taken seriously than if your ma says it. I mean, that’s part of the point. If anything, this makes the case of why everyone should be an artist. (Though my mangling of Sometimes I Wake Up Crying shows how important it is to craft every single bit of it, how effortless a well-crafted sentence seems.)

 

Dealing with bikers is war

Barriers on Brooklyn side of the former bike side of the Manhattan Bridge (sides have switched for construction, I think). Perhaps a bit sensationalist, but I see them everyday and they make me laugh, they’re so intense! It’s like border patrol or the swirvy roads in the Golan Heights.

The crazy thing is that I myself, back in August or whatever it was, went around them a couple of times to keep on biking on that side! Bikers are cwazy (+annoying like that). It wasn’t anti-rule following either — I think I was coming from the Manhattan side and it was totally not clear what was going on at first — I thought these were just to slow bikers down (also reasonable).

It’s a tricky pickle in America though: bikers have had it so tough for so long that it’s hard to get soft as the city makes things more comfortable and convenient. It’s like my mindset, when passing these those first few times, was just like — 2 roadblocks? Well, biking is super hard on a daily level –why the hell not? Just more shit the city is doing with some arbitrary consequences for bikers. So of course it’s hard to transition from that to immediately seeing yourself as a citizen who is now protected (and in return should follow rules and regulations, etc). It’s incredibly hard for me, but hopefully the next generation of NYC bikers will be like sheep in terms of biking rules. Everyone ‘s against people being sheep like, but when people are sheep like it means that they can _afford_ to be sheep like.

____________________________

Back to the roadblock analogy though. Just a few images to follow my thought through, although quite frankly, they’re not making my case as eloquently as they should. A few more hours of image search would really pay off right now.

Golan Heights (couldn’t find better image, weirdly enough)

Well, these aren’t the best images to support the case, but apparently googling for “borders block road” is really not paying off. But hopefully you get the idea.

Honestly, I should just be blogging about silly things of biking in NYC, as I am fully recommitted to the biking life and yet as skeptical as ever if not more so of the biking Kool-aid. I’m good like that.

Notes to self — possible project

Something along the lines of “Things that will be lost”, but less melodramatic just ephemera from our childhoods. Like:
–phonebooks
–supermarket flyers
–backs of newspapers

all of this stuff that is in itself pretty useless and ugly but our kids probably won’t end up seeing, so it’s kinda of cool

On failure : failing big (in which I curse oodles)

The big thing nowadays is why failing is good. Sure, whatever. I think anytime a meme catches fire and everyone who’s anyone is repeating it non-stop (if I cared more, I’d find you references, but I don’t, and honestly I hope you know what I’m talking about with, but every creativity blog loves interviewing prominent people about why failure is important nonwadays) I get a bit cranky. Basically I agree with the failure logic (which I see as essentially: you have to try shit. Sometimes you might not be good at it.) but as a person who’s failed many many times (though perhaps not yet catastrophically!), it’s not that great. It kinda gets you down and it’s only much much later, when you’ve had some success that you somehow make some narrative of your life about how this failure taught you the lessons you needed or whatever. But if you have a moderate success, you’re rarely thinking, man, I wish I’d failed harder last time so this success would be even more rocking? Or better yet, Wish I had failed instead of succeeded! Woulda really laid the groundwork for something big! Whatevs. Basically the point is, you gotta try shit, sometimes you’ll fail, so in that sense you better make your peace with failure. But I’m kinda over this culture of valorizing it and I hope my kids are mega-successful and never fail. Just sayin’. I’d wish the same for myself, but there’s not much hope for that.

ANYWAYS. That was sort of an irritated aside which was not really the point. The point is this Failure is Good Meme is hot right now, really hot. Which means that you, as the designer, or as the creative person might as well really shoot for the moon and fail hard.

I’m thinking about this with a project I’m working on right now. It’s ok, looks good, kinda makes sense. It won’t be crown jewel of my portfolio but I’m not scared to look anyone in the eye about it. (That’s what real failure really is, by the way, to all of you all who so valorize it*. Fuck disappointing yourself. I don’t give two shits about that anymore: it’s kinda non-stop and terrible, but also awesome and makes you self-critical like a hawk. It’s disappointing others that kills. Because design is a service profession, so when you fail big, there’s other people’s shit at stake: other people’s money and other people’s deadlines and other people’s projects. Real failure is failing on behalf of someone else so that it sucks to look them in the eye.) But there’s a lack of spectacularity about it. It’s neither here nor there. In some sense, it’s a failure — but not enough to get me the street cred for it! Better to have gone for the moon, either wildly succeeded and failed  –and then gotten the points for my super contemporary eagerness for the taste of failure.

 

 

*I said I wasn’t going to look for links but I fucking broke down. I love all these people individually and, honestly, even what they’re saying here. It’s just the whole thing — is so fucking smug and simplistic. I kinda think Sagmeister should know better.

New Years Type Things

So this is going to be one of those long posts without any pictures in which I reveal too much (making it, perhaps, much more interesting for you, but much more stressful for me). I started the post the other day and then scrapped it, thinking it’d be too personal to post, but somehow I keep coming back to it. Maybe cause it’s helpful to declare your intentions publicly, to commit to keeping them. Let this be a Declaration of Intentions for 2012 then, or at least a search for the articulation thereof.

Perhaps out of nowhere for you, I need to mention the Etsy shop, which is currently under withandagainst but should probably or obviously be renamed Betsy on Etsy due to the wild popularity of that moniker. Right now it’s just selling the Brooklyn Notebook and is, I need to stress, completely not financially viable (confession number 1: due to inexperience and un-self confidence, I priced it way too low).  No matter. The point is, it’s a first tip-toe into the world of Etsy and though, like any great project, I cannot possibly foresee the amount of work it would take to get a substantial income off Etsy… I sort of see it as conceivable for me to go down that road. Which I am not saying I am going to do anytime soon.

Why is that important?

I really desire the ability to financially support myself . And ideally in a manner that could allow me to live , eventually, somewhat off the grid. In my head, this meant, obviously, freelancing.

Ok, ok, ok, this might reveal some faulty logic here. But what freelancing meant for me as well was learning how to design for the middle. Middle America. Which I love voraciously and probably, it would seem, as an exotic fruit. But let’s face it. I am not that good at doing Middle America. I love Middle America and Middle America loves me, but as visitors. I am not the designer who would be particularly good at designing a Target ad. I’ve known this always (obvs.) but didn’t want to reference it here, on my semi-job related blog, but who are we kidding. Nobody is going to hire me to design for Target so I can scream it from the heights of Varick St: it is not a surprise to anyone.

So basically I was sort of pushing myself in this Middle America path with interesting results, but a lot of the pushing was a bit unnatural. And a lot of the pushing was sort of just motivated by fear, in the most blunt way to put it, though I don’t think that bluntness does it justice. Because as I do stress, I have quite sincere love and respect for the middle and a part of me, of course, yearns to be more part of it. But there was that financial side, too.

Anywho, so I feel like Etsy releases that valve for me somehow. I can run away off the grid and not necessarily freelance but run my own Etsy shop.

I know, I know, but I shall admit and own up to my piles of irrationality where others will falter.

So letting that Middle America design aspect go a bit — or rather, channeling it into Etsy to make CASH MONEY for me — will perhaps allow the  design that I don’t do for Etsy to free up as well. To be wilder and crazier and chaoticer. I love all my projects, but thinking strategically, I think it’s my skills of making sense chaotically that seem to excite people. If that makes any sense. I am always drawn to minimalism, but I am actually not that great at it. I want peace and order but I think the orderly people are drawn to my chaos, especially when I somehow make sense of it. So let me pursue that more, see where it goes.

So I guess a design resolution for the New Year is to follow my gut more. Which may be every creative person’s resolution, but still, I shall embrace it like I am the first to have that brilliant idea.

___

I think there is a gloss here, a little bit. It’s tricky because I am drawn to order and clarity and concepts. But I see I do better when those elements naturally evolve in my work (or just instinctively) rather than foisted upon them. So it’s tricky, tricky. To follow my gut and to push my gut to speak loudly. And trust that it all makes sense in the end!

 

Cannot hide it any more, must share

Chocolate ice cream with grapefruit juice is really, truly exquisite.

Last Minute Wrapping Paper?

Used my old project as wrapping paper, which I think looks REALLY good….

Except it’s really a bit sloppy on the other side:

Oh well. A girl can dream that every project can be recycled with pizazz.