« More stuff

oracles

oracles, culture, graphic design
Passing the Buck
Comment?

Downloaded clip art from Microsoft Office.

I feel the world financial depression (which started in the U.S.) was caused by an ethical crisis more than anything else. We all say it at work: “not my problem.” But imagine millions of people saying it, over and over. And if everyone’s saying it, eventually it’s going to be everyone’s problem. The optimistic feel of clip art covers up the real complacency and haste of working in the. It’s not that people are inept or wasteful or ridiculous as portrayed on the TV show, The Office. Example: I worked as an in-house designer at a title company during the Exuberance, and the mortgage/loan officers were constantly pressuring the escrow officers and assistants to closethedeal, closethedeal, closethedeal, as fast as possible. And in truth, the problem wasn’t theirs, at the time. Now I work for a printing company, and it’s much more black and white. You either get the job done on time, or you don’t. Eventually I’d like to turn this into a massive piece, several feet wide/tall.
music, oracles
Harmonies
Comment?

Just as much as swirling guitars and Hammond organs, vocal harmonies were an integral part that defined the 60’s psychadelic pop sound. This flashed in my mind this as I watched this episode of I Dream of Jeannie a few days ago, featuring future girlfriend-killer Phil Spector. I had to watch it just ’cause of the title.

Aside: Don’t you just love that multi-colored scalloped dress? In another scene she wears a leopard print cap with a green dress - normally I hate animal prints, but it was nice to see one paired with a different color than the usual red, black or pink. and in the whole episode she wears a mannish wide-strapped watch along with her super-feminine outfits.I love the band’s clothes too. The peasant smock shirt that one dude is wearing is totally far-out!Anyways. Enough fashion-gushing. The psychadelic sound has never really gone out of style since the 90’s with The Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Dandy Warhols, Kula Shaker, and thousands of other non-top-40 bands all over the world - but the choral vocal tracks seem to have died in the 60’s along with Mama Cass. Now we have The Black Angels droning on a la Jim Morrisson. Well, I’ve always thought they’ve sounded more like The Doors than The Velvet Underground since I first saw them play a Fishcherspooner listening party with a very young band called Ghostland Observatory some years ago back when The Mohawk was The Caucus Club, or was it The Velevet Spade, or was it…? Not that there aren’t bands out there trying it out, but the idea of choral vocals now seems kind of is limited to The Polyphonic Spree shouting at the top of their lungs or the atmospheric glass-shattering cooing of Arcade Fire.

Then yesterday I was listening to Pig Radio when I heard a very pleasant and highly vocally-layered track called “Ships & Clouds” by U.K. singer and multi-instrumentalist Jim Noir, that really got the BeachBoysMamasPapasJeffersonAirplane sound right. “Don’t Worry” especially sounds like sucking on some groovy mj rock candy, and it’s a little more trippy Stereolab-esque. I look forward to more rock bands trying this out. Now if someone like Duffy or even Amy Flophouse could find a trio of killer ladysingers to be a singing group, and not a Girlicious striptease, that would add an interesting layer to the current pop Motown re-hash. Even though I don’t even pay attention to that kind of music. Just sayin’ is all.

P.S. I’ve added a music section to my Categories. Definitely not trying to turn this into a music blog, but it’s been a huge influence on my thoughts, art and clothing designs of late. I think I’ve downloaded more music in the last two months than I have in the last two years! It’s nice to finally have time to enjoy music, what with my studio and workplace all in my house and not having to waste time driving all over town to do the things I need to do. I missed it.
oracles, culture, style, critique, observations
Velvet Rebellion
Comment?

Prologue

1. Sametová Revoluce. The Velvet Revolution (Czech: sametová revoluce) (November 16- December 29, 1989) refers to a non-violent revolution in Czechoslovakia that saw the overthrow of the Communist government. On November 17, 1989, riot police suppressed a peaceful student demonstration in Prague. That event sparked a series of popular demonstrations from November 19 to late December. By November 20 the number of peaceful protesters assembled in Prague had swelled from 200,000 the previous day to an estimated half-million. A two-hour general strike, involving all citizens of Czechoslovakia, was held on November 27.

2. Tucson, Arizona. We drove past a couple wearing 6″ black platform boots, some sort of zippered pants-like skirt or skirt-like pants, black trenchcoats, flowing black tresses and inked-out eyes, lurching to the bus stop or corner store in the blazing summer sun. The sidewalk was otherwise desolate and treeless: a mundane concrete desert. It didn’t matter which one was male or female. I asked my husband, “What’s up with all the goth-y people here?”

I.
A Big-small City

Tucson is a mid-size city, not affluent. A little too big and not “cultured” enough to be called a college town. Like any other big-small American city, I would imagine artistically-inclined kids growing up here feel trapped in an unsophisticated society. Goth, a lifestyle that elevates music, art and fashion, offers a mode of connection with a larger artistic/cultural movement. And, one hopes, a sense of belonging. A sense of understanding and validation.

II.
Social Posturing

Trends are self-perpetuating. We are social creatures, even the goths who appear to wallow in misery and loneliness. Here, they are seen as the “cool,” artistic people, much like hipsters are in Austin. This starts in the adolescent years: say there’s a 6th or 7th grade kid who’s discovering he or she doesn’t fit in. Then, after summer, they come back to school all blacked-out and with a new, stronger sense of self. This happens every day in Austin, except the changelings are about 5-10 years older: young people arrive from across the country wearing American Apparel t-shirts and All-Stars; three months later they’ve latched on to giant sunglasses and neon.

In all trends/styles/communities, there is room for creativity and distinctions within the group, when you are part of it. But from an outsider’s perspective, everyone looks the same, the music sounds the same. I wonder if an outsider wrote this post on the Austin craigslist missed connections awhile back (paraphrased from memory):

m4w (Beauty Bar): You looked so hot in your skinny jeans, vintage shirt, pointy shoes and unusual haircut.

The description was lengthier and a bit more elaborate, but the tone was just as cutting. In Tucson, go to the craigslist musician category. Everyone wants to start a death metal/grindcore/punk band. To me, it all sounds the same. But then again, I can point out the subtleties between German trance and nu acid house, and why one is boring and the other is cool. For example, today I found a remix of Mondotek’s Alive (related to the TEPR remix of Yelle’s “A Cause des Garçons”) on an mp3 blog that primarily posted the type of *yawn* house played after 12am in Top 40 clubs.

The point is, here in Tucson, goth is a mainstream alternative lifestyle, like hipsterism is in Austin. For further analysis on this subject, I suggest Josh Aiello and Matthew Shultz’s brilliant A Field Guide To The Urban Hipster. It’s a bit dated (2003), certain groups have evolved, but it begs the question “How weird do you wanna be?” Are suburban soccer moms the Truly Weird? Are Nascar dads the Truly Weird? Are white male capitalist entreprenurs the Truly Weird? What about factory workers? How do they see themselves as a group? How do they see us? Today, the true artist (my definition: dedicated, driven, underground) no longer labors away in a decrepit urban warehouse or in the rustic elegance of a country barn, (s)he works out of his garage in a tract housing development or out of a corner of their living room in a nondescript apartment complex. Maybe the quality of their work isn’t that great, but that depends on what your definition of “good” and “quality” are.

III.
The Twilight Zone

I wish more research would be done on why, particularly in Mexican-American border regions, goth is the mainstream alternative, when in many other areas of the U.S., it died at the turn of the 21st century along with candy ravers. A few months ago, I watched a documentary about Latino hardcore Morrissey fans in the Los Angeles area called Is It Really So Strange? What could’ve been a great story shed little light on the reasons behind the obsession from this unexpected demographic because the narrator/producer was, like, the whitest, dryest most monotone guy. Ever. He just couldn’t connect with the people he was interviewing and not so much because he was not a part of their culture, but because he was just a walking social disaster. Naturally, his interview subjects were reticent about their fandom, which made for a total disappointment of a film.

I’ve asked my goth-leaning brother- and cousin-in-law about why they’re all into vampires and ornate silver crosses and black clothes. They grin and say, “I’m just in touch with the (or did they say my?)… Dark Side.” I’ve prodded further on one or two occasions: why? What’s so cool about the dark side? “Life is dark and pointless,” they intone. Nihlism. Emptiness. A daily drudgery between the next party or fuck, and even suffering and pain is a part of those experiences as you commiserate with your goth-y buddies.

But why Mexican-Americans? Is it a rebellion against the Old School ways of their families and elders? Is it a depressive facet of the ultra-complex experience of being bi-cultural (e.g. the Sad Clown)? Or, is it a rebellion against others of their own generation: the urban gangsters or the straight-edge traditional kids?

My husband and I say after we get south of San Antonio on IH-37 that we are entering The Twilight Zone. It’s a gradient that runs all the way to The Valley, growing stronger when we veer onto Hwy. 77 in Robstown, on through Raymondville and Harlingen, and finally coming to a delta in his family’s home of Brownsville, at the southernmost tip of Texas, the Mexican border; nothing beyond it but the mouth of the Rio Grande, endless flatlands, coastal marshes, and then the open Gulf. Everything “American” is tinged with Mexican culture and perspective. The clerks working in the chain stores in Sunrise Mall (warning: don’t go the the homepage, some really blaring Broadway-style music turns on) give you your total in Spanish before switching to English. The hot food focus in convenience stores is tacos and tamales, not hot dogs and fried chicken. And everything Mexican is infused with the crass commercialism of American society, creating a veneer of quaintness over the commercialism, or the crushing thumb of consumerism blunting what is unique and traditional.

IV.
Drug of Choice

César posed the goth question to his Tucson host when he came out to take a look around prior to our move. His tour guide said, “It’s because there’s a lot of meth around here.”

Let’s think about this. I’ve seen plenty of bleary-eyed redneck meth heads driving beat-up old pick-up trucks back in Texas, particularly in impoverished rural Colorado County where my mom commutes to teach middle school. The town’s water tower proclaims it’s “The White-Tailed Deer Capital of Texas” (read: hunting). My dad jokes that it should really say, “The White Trash Capital of Texas.”

So what does a style of dress have to do with a drug of choice? Not all hippies are potheads; not all potheads are hippies. Not all hipsters are cokeheads; not all cokeheads are hipsters. Not all crackwhores are urban; not urban females are crackwhores. Etc., etc.

Drugs are most certainly not a reason.

V.
Relative to… What?

This has inadvertently gone from a cultural sketch and self-analysis of my mild annoyance with goths. I personally thought they were more silly than anything else, like on Chris Kattan and Molly Shannon’s sketch “Goth Talk” on Saturday Night Live in the 1990’s.

A few weeks ago, I went to a dance party night at one of the cooler bars here in hopes of hearing something comforting, something familiar, something that reminded me of home: hipster blog music. But many people used it as an excuse to showcase their full-on fetishwear (and I use the term “on” loosely). I could barely stop staring as a girl in a light pink bikini top, matching hot pants, feather boa and Christmas pageant angel wings danced by herself till her friends got there: a dude sporting a kilt and mohawk and his girlfriend, fully stockinged and corseted. And they were, shall we say, not attractive in a conventional sense that would’ve made this display, um, nice to look at.

Now I find myself questioning my own style in clothes, taste in music, art and home décor, diction, inflection and body language as an outsider to the mainstream alternative lifestyle here. I wonder, what to non-hipsters think of hipsters in Austin? Do they look at our equally outlandish 80’s outfits with the same mild annoyance? The wrinkled nose? The curled lip?

One of the reasons I was not too keen on moving away from Austin was that I felt I’d found my place there. A place where many a nerdy, artsy, goofy-looking middle school pariahs could find community, a sense of belonging. A place to love and be loved. Maybe I would’ve grown tired of belonging eventually. “Once a rebel…” Or perhaps it was too late; I was sucked in. On the other hand, my husband had been rebelling against what he considers to be an oppressive atmosphere for a number of years, and I think his reasoning is the catalyst: our generation is not rebelling against the older generation like our parents did when they were young. That tie has already been broken. Our rebellion is against one another, our peers; but it is a Velvet Rebellion, an oxymoron. “Rebellion” implies hostility, anger, violence. Yet we do it through our clothes. It is soft, expressive, joyful - Velvet. Why? Are our differences with each other so negligible that they’re not worth fighting for? Have we grown so distant that we don’t know any other way to communicate? Do we not know how to fight? Are we afraid? Are we too selfish to abandon the system we are products of?

Epilogue

A newish writer-friend mused over drinks the other night, “I wonder when people are just going to rise up and say, ‘Fuck the system.’ ” I wondered to myself what he meant by “people.”
oracles
RGB: future classic
Comment?

Acid neon and neutral colors will be completely out by the middle of next year (in the States – it’s on it’s way out in most other countries) and primary colors will make a comeback. What will be unusual about this trend is that it won’t just be in ephemera like fashion and graphic design, but will stretch into lasting monuments like logo design and architecture – everywhere. Actually I think primary colors are already back are in the more pioneering parts of the planet. I read a piece in a random Domino at the gym a couple of months ago showing residential and office buildings created by cutting-edge architects in Asia, some exteriors of which were covered entirely in bright primary colors. Wouldn’t a shiny red or blue building be much more exciting than brown or steel gray?
oracles, culture, advertising, style, critique
Vogueing Out
Comment?

A couple of things caught my eye as I cracked open the March 2008 issue of VOGUE yesterday.

1) Is high fashion trying to angle itself with high art? Art has been what I would call “street hip” for a couple of years now, but for me, the deer heads, power lines and raindrops are all blurring together. D&G, Prada and Nordstrom ads (and that’s just in the first 20 pages) showed models posed in completely painted scenes or art studios, taking a more high art direction. The merit of the art itself isn’t the issue and a critical person could say it’s insipid to hijack art to sell clothes, but it seems to me that the message is that art is still elevated above the clothes. Art is absolute, fashion is mutable, both are visual cousins and the weaker, more changeable entity aligning itself with the stronger can only serve to build its brand. If you see fashion as fantasy, these ads could be a prediction of our fantasies to come. While 99% of people probably won’t wear anything from a runway in their lifetime, the culture of fashion can serve as a compass to where larger popular culture might go.

On a side note, it’s always interesting to me how fashion ads rely almost exclusively on photography, and what little effort is made towards incorporating graphic design is often badly handled. I usually don’t care for the photography in Marc Jacobs ads, it is one of the exceptions where the design is well-executed and not overbearing. And I don’t think there should be more graphic design in fashion branding necessarily, when you have outstanding photography, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, it’s just interesting to not to see it used more often, especially with younger designers up against the grand old fashion houses.

2) Older celebrities trying to look 19, growing old very un-gracefully. Highly disturbing.
oracles, logos, critique
Sweet vs Shameful: Art Logos
2 Comments

The Diva’s kickin’ it old school, going back to my pithy early days of blogging focused on graphic design critique.

Women & Their Work

I heard about an opening at Women & Their Work tonight and went to their website for more information. The show, featuring terrifying yet cute fabric sculptures by Katy Heinlein, looked very interesting. “I’m so there!” I thought. Suddenly my eyes shot up to the bright yellow sun at the top of the webpage. “What is that - ah! A new logo!” And a good one, but I’ll get to that later. The old one never bothered me that much. In fact, I respected W&TW for choosing to stick with the campy, geometric face after all these years. It seemed to be one of the few identities I’d seen still in use incorporating everything that was good/bad about 80’s design. But the new one I like a lot too. For one, it’s much simpler. Zeroing in on the “W” not only gives eyes an strong, fun shape to linger on, it also helps to shorten the idea of the long-sounding name “Women & Their Work.” The yellow is also a bold choice, continuing the unique, standout impression their previous logo put forth. And this is exactly what a good logo does: it not only makes a visual statement, it connotes what the entity behind it does. Now, if they could just make their website cleaner, easier to navigate and not Flash-based!

Art Alliance Austin

I’ve been holding my tongue on it ever since I saw it unveiled last year, but I can’t think of a more apt opportunity to critique the Art Alliance Austin logo. It’s a lower-case “a” with the counter filled in, in “baby-puke green” (not my coinage, a real estate client once let that one loose on me about a logo I designed for him). While I don’t think it necessarily has to relay anything about Austin, art, or some kind of alliance, it should be at least interesting to look at. I’m well-aware the Pump Project logo I designed doesn’t convey anything about a pump or a project, but there’s at least some depth to it, and I constantly get complimented on it. The Art Alliance logo is a tragic fashion victim of the pseudo-cosmpolitan trendiness inherent in everything from the condos to ritzy franchises overtaking downtown. Who knows which way the market will go with these lofts in 5 years? The same goes for this logo - leaf green may be a hot color now (actually, I forsee color trends brightening to primary red, yellow, and blue, none this washed-out pansy brown, blue and green crap we’ve been seeing the last 3-4 years). It’s very flat in both appearance and concept. And when all one has to go on is appearances, all I have to say to that is, “Looks fade, honey.”
oracles, culture, critique
Corporate Art takes on a new form
1 Comment

I packed in with scores of my closest fellow hipster doofi at the opening of the Scion Installation 4: It’s A Beautiful World at Gallery Lombardi on Saturday. The whole event rubbed me horribly wrong (not the gallery’s fault).

1. Why have an opening in an 18′ x 30′ gallery where hundreds of people are expected to come out? Surely Scion has enough money to rent or create a venue that will accommodate an crowd that size. It was the main reason I left after 15 minutes. It wasn’t quaint or charming, as can sometimes happen when a certain magic in the air brings a lot of people to a show. It was a logistical nightmare.

2. The message wasn’t “Hey, Scion is sponsoring this show to help inspire the community that art is an important part of our culture.” It was, “Hey, Scion just wants to affirm that you are indeed hip and cool by coming to this event, and giving away lots of logoed schwag telling you that our cars will make you look hip and cool.”

3. The illustration/graphic design/assemblages I could kinda make out over all the nappy heads was not that impressive.

4 . Most of all, it bothered me that Scion was using art as “experience marketing,” but that seems to be the way things are going. I heard somewhere that in the 21st century economy in America will not be the leader in manufacturing goods or even providing services, instead we will lead the globe in designing experiences. That is, creating a comfort world of smoke and mirrors for the individual. As a result, the trend will continue grow for art (creating art, going to an opening, even collecting) to be a po-mo unbalancing act that affirms a sense of self and massages the ego. The problem I have is that it’s detrimental to one’s culture when those choices are presented (and thus controlled) by large corporations. I think we may even see the definition of art get narrower and narrower again. Although I don’t suppose it’s any different from the Post-Renaissance Venetians. The Church and the aristocracy had the market cornered on artistic freedom since they both had a societal agenda to perpetuate, and it seemed to keep everyone in their place for a good long time.
books, oracles, culture, observations
Historical Correlations
Comment?

I finally found what I was looking for in Culture and Society in Venice 1470-1790: the connection between the Postmodern and the Post-Renaissance (may be my own coinage). The Counter-Reformation was a conservative backlash against the Humanists and the Protestants in which the Church machine sought to regain control of the people through art, music and intellectual life. It could be that we are entering a similar phase now after the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s through the 1990s. A bloody time of religious strife (100 Years War, anyone?), a time of ornate insignificance (palazzos:altarpieces; McMansions:myspace pages).

Within this context, read this passage regarding the educational schism in the Post-Renaissance. I feel it strongly correlates to today’s academic environment and art world.

The Counter-Reformation influence did perhaps have the effect of pushing classical studies in the direction of compendious accumulation of knowledge devoid of ultimate philosophical or ethical purpose. Precisely because of this, however, it may hae stimulated the direction of scholarly energies into other fields of enquiry such as antiquarian studies, historiography and even science. At the same time, the climate of intellectual caution which it engendered probably tended to canalise these energies into the patient accumulation of facts; while enquiry was restricted, erudition burgeoned.

It has become common to refer to an “erudite” movement in seventeenth-century scholarship, the roots of which can be seen in Renaissance humanism… Those men of the eighteenth century, especially in France, who rejoiced in the title of philosophes and who believed that their own age was one of “enlightenment,” were to counterpose their own “philosophical history,” which had a strong polemical and didactic purpose, to the “erudite” historiography and antiquarianism of the preceding age, which was essentially concerned with the accumulation of facts…

The ethos of “erudition” can be characterized a belief that facts were in themselves things of value, worthy of being collected, and this did in fact contain certain creative possibilities… Vera historia–”true history”–had a certain literary form, usually based on classical models, it was selective, it dealt essentially with “great events,” which basically meant political and military one, it examined the causes of events… It was distinguished from “annals,” the unadorned record, and again from “antiquities,” the study of “fragments,” whether archaeological remains or isolated documents. The essence of the study of “antiquities” was that it dealt with the fragmentary…

By this time, the intellectual interests of Venetians were, it seems, becoming increasingly encyclopaedic… For instance, there was a tradition of vernacular historiography, basically independent of classical models, which followed annal form or synthesised it with that of vera historia… [B]y the end of the century [1500’s], the passion for accumulating antique sculptures, coins and medals was becoming a veritable mania…

[I]t was the Venetians who…took the lead in raising the claims of the volgare [vernacular] as a literary language… With regard to the visual arts, it was perhaps through interest in antique literature no less than in antique art that the influence of classical scholarship made itself felt in painting in the first instance. By the mid-sixteenth century, the effects of antiquarianism were to be seen with particular clarity in architecture and sculpture…

I think what the Venetians were inspired by is close to the perpetuation of retro imagery in art, design and fashion and the nerding-out about everything old school from comic books to knitting. The acceptance of casual, informal, deeplly first person-based language in everyday use such as email, text messages, and general etiquette as well as in literature does not necessarily stem from the Internet. Rather, the Internet is the vehicle of this language that is educated so it can merely regurgitate, driven away from the philosophical basis of the act of learning as a path to find meaning in life.

But as with any cultural movement, the backlash has already begun from Day 1. Something is bubbling under the surface, we are having the conversations already. I don’t know if I’ll be around to see it, but perhaps a new Enlightenment is coming that will break away from all this.