’03 til infinity

When I design (when I’m doing it right) I am taking a piece of content and finding a perspective on it that I can turn into an image. All I’m doing is writing a story. And I don’t understand how you can write a story without understanding your characters, their motivations and the world they occupy.

R.U.R. opens at The Soap Factory, Saturday, March 2nd. 

I was driving home tonight listening to the 2002 album Two Guns Twin Arrows by Abilene. I have no idea how many people have even heard of the long-defunct Abilene but I’m guessing its 5,000 at the absolute max. There’s probably about 3,000 of these CD’s in circulation and because the label that issued it went out of business I have a feeling there’s boxes of these in a warehouse or, more likely, a closet somewhere.* But that doesn’t really matter because I own this record and it means a great deal to me whether there’s 10 or 10 million of them. Two Guns Twin Arrows is the kind of record that just dredges shit up in me. Its this raw mixture of guitar-driven screaming post-hardcore (in that guitarist Alex Dunham used to be in hardcore bands not that its weird or goofy) with some kind of jazz element due to the trumpet and quasi-dub underpinnings. All of which sounds horrid when put down to paper but its sounds like no other record I have heard. And it gets to me. I start thinking of big F situations—failure, frustration, my dead father. It just dredges shit up in me. I can’t point to what exactly does it (as if you ever can with a great record) but its not content-based as the lyrics are so cryptic as to border on meaningless (but just bordering). It has to be the emotional space of the music. It basically goes from raw, noisy and angry to melodic and melancholic. Its definitely not a record with “a little something for everybody.” I can’t listen to Abilene all the time. They produced 2 records, neither of which I will ever part with but I take them out in measured doses (and always this time of year incidentally). I think they’re some kind of therapy and so, for the next week or so, I’ll listen to them until I can’t handle it any longer and they’ll go back on the CD shelf for another 8 months or a year or whatever. Abilene toured a little bit, they played shows and they sold CDs. And they probably never made a legitimate dime of profit off their efforts. Hopefully they made enough off of selling CDs and at the doors of clubs to get to the next city. They took time off of work to do the work of touring in a band but it was likely more of an expensive vacation. I doubt that they came home with more than a couple hundred dollars in each members pockets, if that. And while money is never the be all end all of creative endeavors it certainly helps to make things worth it. Abilene broke up sometime after Two Guns Twin Arrows and its no shocker. The members were in their 30’s, had been touring in different bands for 10 years plus and probably had to due the kind of “shit sorting out” that one needs to do in order to say, have kids or build a sustainable career. And while that’s sad, my point has nothing to do with the conundrum of aging work-horse punk musicians but with the value of their art. I have gotten something major emotionally out of Abilene’s music for 11 years. What are we really talking about? Two pieces of plastic that cost me a grand total of $25. How can something that bring so much value to my existence have cost me so little? What’s the real value of those discs? How much is it really worth to own something (or access it as the case may be) that can transport you to a wholly different emotional place; that can make you miss your father and cry in traffic? How did it come to be that the catalyst for that experience—a CD—cost me the price of lunch pro-rated 100 times across a decade? Music industry 1.0—the making and selling of plastic objects—set the expectation that music was a commodity with no real differentiation between artists, hence every CD had (and has) to cost the same. The punk scene set the expectation that paying someone for their art was bullshit and hence CDs had to priced in such a way as to recoup the production costs and not much else (if the entire print-run sold out). Music Industry 2.0—the making and selling of bits—has continued this folly to its extreme. Music is now either free or $.99 a song. We’ve officially decided that a Snickers bar is worth more than a piece of music. What the fuck is wrong with us? I don’t know how or if I can ever repay Abilene for what they’ve given me but I know its worth way more than the $12 I paid for a copy of Two Guns Twin Arrows and its definitely worth more than $2.28 that you can buy a new copy of it on Amazon.** On the one hand, its offensive to musicians that we find it reasonable that they’re creative output is worth less than a pizza but on the other hand, what is it that we’re constantly complaining about? The most compelling and affective art that we engage with in our daily lives is music. And we get it for nothing. We complained that CDs were pushing $20 a piece. Our complaint wasn’t that it was $20 and musicians were still getting screwed on royalties, no, we complained because we knew that it only cost $.95 to manufacture a CD (as if we really had a clue as to what it cost to manufacture anything) so therefore we were paying $19.05 too much. I don’t have an answer as to what a download of a song should cost but I know this, we should feel royally fucking blessed that right now it only costs $.99. There would be a gaping void in my life if Two Guns Twin Arrows, Life.Love.Regret., It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Paul’s Boutique, and every other transformative record were to be erased from existence. What if every $15 I ever spent managed to bring me so much repeated enjoyment for years to come? I should be so lucky.

*Hopefully, I’m wrong about this and there’s 10,000 copies all of which have found a happy and loving home. **But, I see that you can buy a new copy for as little as $2.28 on Amazon so I think my instincts are correct on this one.

Related Links:

Buy Two Guns, Twin Arrows on Amazon

A long feature at Hardcore for Nerds

If you visit the website of the largest sailing event in the world Kieler Woche, you are not going to be struck by the quality of design. But the festival does have a legacy of commissioning great modernist design by the likes of Wim Crouwel, Anton Stankowski, Otto Treumann, Jean Widmer, Ruedi Baur, Ben Bos, Siegfried Odermatt, Rosemarie Tissi, and Bernd Kuchenbeiser.

Some personal favorites:

1954, designed by Achim Bargatzki

1962, designed by Anton Stankowski

1964, designed by Hans Hillman

1972, designed by Rolf Müller

1995, designed by Barbara and Gerd Baumann

Girl & Chocolate Trailer from Crailtap on Vimeo.

Is it really called Girl Skateboards Chocolate Skateboards Video? Or, from Girl Films & Chocolate Cinema? I really hope so. Untitled Video from Girl Films & Chocolate Cinema would also be pretty great.

It’s cool that a lot of the makes are from ads—Alex Olson’s picnic table ollie and Gino’s kickflip-pivot-to-fakie stand out.

Is there going to be legit Pops footage? He actually flips his board in here.

I’m psyched on a new Devine Calloway part.

Finally there’s video of Mike Mo’s late-pressure flips (even if its on flat)! I’ve been dying to see this since one of the mags ran a Chocolate southern U.S. tour feature and Mo was doing a late-pressure flip over a double-set.

There’s 2 540° ollies in here. I think that’s significant.

Cory Kennedy has been blowing minds for awhile but his 2 clips in the trailer are amazing. A full-part with Ty Evans at the helm seems like it has the potential to go curtains.

Unless, of course, MJ continues his Fully Flared tear. Which seems extremely likely.

Where’s Carroll? Did I miss him in there or has he been sticking exclusively to to filming in parking lots (of which I would gladly watch 3 minutes of)?

Guy Mariano. 2 parts in a 5-year period. Yes.

I will be really down with a full part of just doubles.

Am I correct that the Elijah Berle banked wall clip is on the waterfront in Chicago?

Is this going to be really, really long video?

I can’t even imagine how you edit this trailer, there’s so many names in line-up. 26 of ’em to be exact.

20 of these is going to be hard.

This might not be a popular opinion but I was kind of happy about the over-all lack of skits in the last Girl/Crailtap production Fully Flared and I would be just fine if this video is basically wall-to-wall skating.

But, then again, all the skits in Yeah Right were pretty great.

Are we going to see a lot of transition? Its weird that Chocolate would be the team to bring it back.*

Ty Evans, Corey Weincheque, and Spike Jonze are the dream team. Seriously, how do you make a trailer for a skate video seem so epic with such a low ratio of people-doing-tricks to people-falling-in-a-not-particulary-gnarly-way-and-dudes-faces-looking-emotional?

Best video since Fully Flared? All signs point to yes.**

Bonus: Number 16 has been redacted in light of re-viewing the items linked to in Number 17.

Some interesting UI stuff—Namdev

5by5.tv has a button you can turn on so that links open in a new window. (I love this because I open everything in a new tab with the goal of making it take about 30 minutes for Firefox to start up.)

Top: The search field at apple.com when you load the page. Bottom: The search field once you insert the cursor.

It was in 2006 when I first noticed that I was going to used bookstores and purposefully looking for books with black sentence-case (only the first letter of the first work is capitalized) sans serif type on a white spine. This method of selecting books to browse through actually turned out to be fairly productive in that I ended up with a couple of books that I absolutely love. Later as I was teaching at MCAD I blew many lunch breaks just browsing the stacks randomly picking up books and judging them by their spines. It was a long-running joke that I was going to make a book called Boring Typography and it would just be a thousand pages of architecture and engineering books from the 1960s with left-justified Helvetica on the cover.

Well, I finally did it. Except its a blog. We set up a copy stand in the studio. I’ve been checking out books by the dozens from the MCAD Library. I’ve spent hours driving around the Twin Cities tracking down every last remaining International Style sign. And I’ve been posting images daily for the last few weeks.

So, to celebrate the launch of Boring Typography, here’s the MVA crew with their favorite covers.

Namdev with Ad Reinhardt (1966)

Kim with Signs in Action (1965)

Our daughter Patience with Creative Playgrounds and Recreation Centers (1969)

Project Projects principal, design educator and writer Rob Giampietro interviewed by Justin Kropp. A fantastic and short read on work of all kinds.