One of the most striking book covers I’ve come across in my many hours of obedient blog-trolling. This one somehow splits the difference between surprise and appropriateness and lands right in that sweet spot I’m always preaching to my students.
The palette cleanser
In 31 Songs, Nick Hornby writes about catchy songs that get stuck in our heads:
Dave Eggers has a theory that we play songs over and over, those of us who do, because we have to ‘solve’ them, and it’s true that in our early relationship with, and courtship of, a new song, there is a state which is akin to a sort of emotional puzzlement.
This is a nice analogy, and nicely stated. Still, I’m more inclined to think about this phenomenon of songs getting stuck in our head in sensationalized medical terms: the song is like a alien body that infects us (albeit pleasantly, though maddeningly at times) with curiosity. Over time, the mind develops a resistance or tolerance (boredom, basically) to the alien body as we become accustomed to it that eventually forces it out.
So what, then, to make of the situations where this comparison is more accurate than we’d like and the song that gets stuck in our head is really something unwanted and annoying, and how do we get rid of it? Until a few years ago, I would turn in desperation to the Meow Mix song (‘meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow’), confident that it would blot out anything that was running through my head. Of course, the Meow Mix song then has a strong chance of getting lodged in your head instead, which is basically like trading heroin for methadone. Then, a few years ago, someone introduced me to the magical properties of the Mennen deodorant tagline jingle, ‘Byyyyy …. MEN-NEN,’ which somehow acts as a palette cleanser: it manages to clear out whatever is stuck in your head without getting rooted there itself. In the medicine analogy, it’s like Ambien or one of those other wonder drugs that makes you sleepy but politely packs up and clears out of your brain when you want to be alert again.
When design isn't sexy
One thing about design is that it’s a lot easier to make a logo for a film production company, an architecture firm or some cool record label than it is for an insurance group, a box manufacturer, or Hypercompuglobalmegamart. As a result, we’re always showcasing work we’ve done for more interesting clients, whereas the work we’ve done in the trenches- to salvage something visually interesting out of something conceptually barren- is generally glossed over, even when it often involves more creativity and persistence.
This is one of my favorite things I’ve done for a boring project. It was a proposed logo for a tax training program run by one of the major international accounting firms (I won’t say which one because I’d rather that the client not accidently Google this post, but I think you can guess who it is if you have any familiarity with the brand). What could be less promising than that?
The old apartment rule
This evening I had dinner with a friend who just bought a new car and consequently sold his former car, a dilapidated old second-hand BWM that had become totally unreliable. He described poignantly how sad it was to part with the old car, despite how much he’s enjoying having a new one. The sense of finality, of parting with an old friend, etc. I compared it to the dislocating feeling when you move out of a flat you’ve lived in for a few years, hand over the keys and just walk away.
I think it would be nice if there was an agreed-upon social convention whereupon you could show up at an apartment you had lived in before, explain that you were a previous resident and reasonably expect to be shown around for a few quick minutes. Not as some strange favor, but simply as a quirk of agreed-upon social convention.
Clarion Alley, San Francisco. This was the back exit of my old apartment on Sycamore Alley.
4 recent favorite quotes
1. “My poems may offend the dead, but the dead belong to me.” (Unknown)
2. “Everything ends badly, or it wouldn’t end at all” – Tom Cruise movie Cocktail
3. “In the war between the grasses and the trees, humans have greatly helped out on the side of the grasses.” (Unknown)
4. “There’s no I in ‘team’… but there is one in ‘win’.” – Michael Jordan
Edit: reader SP points out that quote 3 is Michael Pollan. And she should know, as I nicked the quote from her.
Robot Doubles
Spring is always the most listless semester in my teaching gig. Energy is low, weather is good, and class attendance basically collapses once the beer gardens open in mid-April. One weeknight not long ago, I was feeling uninspired to teach one of my more droopy classes, and remembered my robot doubles concept from many years ago:
Let’s say that everyone had (or could easily purchase, at least) a robot double that looks almost exactly like you and has about 70% of your mental capabilities. You could send your Robo off to take care of minor errands for you (say, picking up a package from the post office) and be pretty confident that he/she would be up for the task. There would probably be legalese written into many social transactions that forbid people from sending their Robos on their behalf and maybe even ‘No Robos’ stickers on certain storefronts (the DMV, for instance), but for the most part you could be confident that nobody would notice the switch.
But the question would be whether you would dare to send your Robo off to deal with more complex and critical tasks. I imagine people getting busted periodically for sending their Robo to work for them while they stayed home and slept in. In extreme cases, faltering marriages would collapse when one already-jaded partner detected that their husband or wife had sent their Robo home to deal with them so they could sit in a bar or have an affair. The Robo problem would crop up especially in school– I can almost imagine certain students of mine trying to pass off deficient robotic doubles of themselves if they had the chance. But then again, they also might notice that the person teaching them was, in fact, a Robo. The real question would be whether our Robos would be capable of detecting other Robos, and if so whether they would inform their Humans, or whether they would instead form a tacit alliance to keep it a secret among themselves.
The New Moscow Philosophy
Here’s the other book cover I’ve made for Twisted Spoon in the past year (first one is here): Vyachelsav Pyetsukh’s The New Moscow Philosophy. This one should be going to print some time over the summer.
A bunch of Moscovites live crammed together in a flat originally intended for a single family during more prosperous times. When one elderly tenant mysteriously disappears, the residents start jockeying over her living space. The apartment itself is presented as the the dominant character of the story in a sense (the author introduces you to it before any of the characters, and its crowded conditions define the experience of most of the characters), so it seemed to make sense to feature it on the cover as the ‘protagonist’. The disappearance of the elderly tenant, moreover, is turned into a kind of meta-absurdist whodunnit, with conscious literary references to Crime and Punishment. So, hence, the ‘Colonel Mustard did it in the study with the revolver’ aspect of the design.
I’ve always had a fetish of sorts for floorplans, so it was fun to do a design around one. I only hope that I got the layout of the flat more or less correct– it was difficult to figure out on paper, nonwithstanding the author’s meticulous descriptions of which room is where.
World Series of Poker
I traveled to Las Vegas this past weekend and played in a World Series of Poker tournament. One hears a lot about the “Main Event,” but they have fifty-odd other smaller tournaments, and the whole production turns the convention center annex to the Rio Hotel and Casino into a sort of Poker Nirvana for almost two solid months in June and July. Or, to put it another way, a “degenerates’ convention.” The scene was truly surreal: multiple airport hanger-sized rooms, all filled with hundreds of poker tables, and, incessantly, the eerie clatter of a million poker chips in thousands of anxious hands, occasionally punctuated by triumphant/enraged shouts. The prize money for each of these tournaments is significant: in the one I played in, first place won $650,000, so life-altering consequences await at the turn of a card. (Of course, the vast majority of the entrants get nothing other than the thrill of participation.)I had expected to see a much more subdued scene than in recent years given the economic climate, but there is apparently still no shortage of people willing and able to put down $1500 or more for a chance at big winnings and celebrity. At my table, there was a Midwestern gentleman with a beard and Cardinals’ hat who, I quickly realized, had come in third in last year’s Main Event, winning $4.5 million. Others at the table were huge fans of his, so I got to listen in as they quizzed him. “Did you quit your job?” they asked. “No, I bought the company.” He explained that in the past year since his victory, he had signed on with some poker web site (whose logo was emblazoned all over his body), which had flown him from world capital to world capital (more than 150,000 miles in the air) and paid his buy-in to all the major tournaments. And all this happened because he won a minor satellite tournament in St. Louis and hit the big money in Vegas one weekend.
I went with three friends from work, and we all gave one another a 4% stake, so that if even one of us made a serious run, we’d all come out on top. And that’s exactly what happened: while two of us (myself included) lasted about 9 hours into the first day before busting out, and a third made back his buy-in with a small payoff, the fourth was still in it late on the second day. We (and an increasing group of others who were interested in his fate) were tracking his progress on the internet, as poker blogs posted updates about developments on the felt.
By Monday afternoon, he was one of the final 25 players, already guaranteed a significant prize, and within shouting distance of the big money. At this point, of course, he had played about 24 hours of poker in the past 48 hours, and endurance became a significant factor. People like to joke about poker as a couch potato’s “sport,” but it is no joke to keep your mind sharp, observing your opponents’ every move, recalling the intricate details of betting patterns (“What happened before the flop? Has he done anything to suggest that he’s capable of laying down a hand?” etc.) for hour after hour on end. Our hero combined excellent and disciplined play with some incredible lucky breaks, and by late afternoon on Monday he had made the final table and was in second place in chips. Visions of a $20,000 payout for me were dancing through my head.
He finally busted out, in seventh place, on an aggressive move that backfired, for a payout of $93,000. Not life-changing, perhaps, but eye-opening for sure. And the three of us got all of our expenses paid and then some. I have a feeling I’ll be back next year.
William Eggleston and Big Star
Speaking of flying lounges, here’s William Eggleston’s beautiful ode to in-flight beverage service:
Eggleston’s red ceiling photograph was used by Big Star for the cover of their Radio City album.
Given that Eggleston and Big Star were both from Memphis and both broke through around ’73/’74, it’s little wonder that Big Star basically sounds just like how Eggleston’s photos look. Still, I can’t think of another example of musician and visual artist who remind me so clearly of one another.
More Eggleston here.
More on flying lounges
Compare this photo with the swinging social atmosphere shown in Purephazed’s Pan Am post directly below.
I’ll take the Pan Am party, thank you very much. The above photo is, of course, the grueling Amtrak lounge, a sort of airborne version of the bar scene in Star Wars.
What’s interesting nowadays about Amtrak from a self-parodic perspective is that their spokesman and key lobbyist is none other than Michael Dukakis.
There’s something poetic about two failed, lefty, Northeast institutions that are held in wide contempt by most of the country coming together like this.