the trouble with Washington via Anna Wintour :

She’s talking about England. But she might as well be saying DC:

‘Washington is frightened of fashion. I think the British government has the same ... People in political office tend to get extremely nervous about fashion because they feel it's frivolous. And they don't want to look too elitist or too silly or whatever it may be. And, frankly, it makes me extremely angry, because it's such a huge industry for Britain and for every country, and I feel that politicians should embrace it, rather than step away from it. And I wish the British government would get more involved in fashion and turn up at some of the shows or have people to Downing Street. I know that Blair did that at the beginning and, I think, got criticised for having some people there who weren't considered serious, and I feel that is so insulting to the industry, because it does so much for Britain. There are all these huge talents coming out of the country; they ought to be celebrating it.’

Now imagine, if unlike London, the city’s raison d’etre was ONLY politics. And that, my friends, is DC. And pretty much why it sucks to be interested in or work in the arts and design and live in Washington.

homoerotic image of the day :

Naval Academy freshmen grapple with a 21-foot obelisk greased with lard. The first to the top will be the first class member to become an admiral, tradition holds.

A Slippery Climb From Freshman to 1st Admiral.

a moment of silence :

1974 has been quiet lately, I’ve been working on my portfolio site and updating both my resume and my CV. I have been sitting on a post about making art museums more accessible. And will have that up before too long.

In the meantime, I just read at Kottke that Jane Jacobs has passed to that great city in the sky.

Death and Life of Great American Cities is one of the most dog-eared books I own. It took me months to read it, just because each paragraph was revelatory. Although she spent her final years in Canada, she was as American as can be: a self taught sage.

May she rest in peace.

hiding :

Um. So I’m not dead. Yet.

Amongst other things: grandma died (eulogy post TK), crazy busy at work and updates to my personal site.

Check it out. Per an earlier suggestion the CMYK values link to various (TK) portions of the website. Right now that includes one video. Plus, the copy is cheekier. Since, if I stay in advertising I’t want to be in B2B and B2G forever. The consumer side likes cheeky, right? Right!? One video up, too, from a gerund piece (this one is Counting) perhaps I can at least do some art again.

More updates soon, I promise.

now this is a speaker line-up :

Jonathan Ive, Jeff Goodby, Claudia Kotchka, Isaac Mizrahi? If you are near Pasadena, go to this conference.

UPDATE: Jesus, somehow I missed the other bold faced names: Dan Neil, Stefan Sagmeister, Jimmy Wales, Dave Eggers. It’s like the guest list for the dinner party of my dreams.

Dammit. Perhaps Davey G. is right, I do need to be in L.A.

stock photos, looking classy :

Thanks to Core77 for pointing me in the direction of these stock photos of the latest in technology circa the Bay of Pigs.

Having spent the last few weeks doing in this order: 1.) looking at stock photos of people with servers for an AT&T campaign and 2.) spending a weekend looking through my family's bountiful collection of photo albums including my grandfather at auto shows in the 1960s — its nice to see these two worlds come crashing together in the best way possible.

(The worst way possible would have been a bountiful collection of stock photos of auto parts. Or something.)

comment spam, america is art edition :

Almost did it again. Got. To. Remember. To. Post. Comments. On. My. Blog. (Note to self.)

DCist writes about the America is Art project by “two graduate students from an art school in San Francisco”. Thinking perhaps it was my alma mater or the other equally well thought of school. I followed the link. Turns out it’s two graduate students at the Academy of Art University.

So what say me?

Let’s be clear. The Academy of Art is a for-profit insitution that is more than a little hacky. Its full of a lot of foreign kids who don’t understand the American system of higher education. And who saw “San Francisco” and “art” in the back of a magazine and thought “hey that would be cool”. It’s got as much cred as business school at Devry. Don’t expect to walk your way into that creative director job at a Fallon or Pentagram from their.

Just sayin’.

forget kids, this is a great idea for adult filmmakers :

I’ve always struggled with the virtual world of organizing information, especially when working with sound or digital video. My (admittedly inelegant) solutions have always, thusly, left something to be desired. I’ve taken to cutting up audio transcripts and moving them around. Attempted to use PowerPoint slides. And of course, writing scene descriptions on Post-Its or index cards.

All in the hopes of creating something more 3D. Something that I could hold in my hand and move around and not worry about waiting for my computer to save something. Or creating several different versions of a file all with different version numbers. Sketching works nice, but then you get involved with dealing with how detailed the sketches should be and other roadblocks.

The best named blog ever, we make money not art, has found a simpler solution from two Japanese media artists (of course).

It’s for kids. Allegedly. But since when does toy-and-cartoon-obsessed Japan worry about what is age-appropriate?

comment spam, moco county edition :

So instead of, you know, updating this site regularly, I’m always leaving comments out there at other people’s sites. Like, all the time.

Well, no more.

Today, starts a new “feature” wherein I take what would have been a comment somewhere else and leave it here. It’s not like I was going to engage in the lengthy discussions at Washington Monthly or DCist anyway.

In today’s Morning Roundup DCist links to a story about how Montgomery County (MoCo) is banning MySpace access from school.

In the Comments someone called “Reid” says this:

It's funny that MoCo is getting accused of invading someone's privacy for BLOCKING MySpace. That generation is growing up without a clue what privacy even means ("Like, OMG, check out how boring my social security number is..."). If anything MoCo is trying to teach them something about privacy.

Couldn't they ban it just on the good old fashion "ban any trend" trick they used to pull when I was a kid with flash in the pan trends like yo-yos or those snap bracelet things.

What say me? How about:

What if losing our fixation on privacy might be a good thing.

Right now there is a lot of money to be made in keeping things private and revealing the private things that people don’t want made public. I’m looking at you gossip rags and newspaper columns. And at you data security firms and political advocates that use ’right to privacy’ as nothing more than a fundraising tool. Scaring the base about everything from Universal Healthcare to the Right to Abortion. Perhaps, we spend a little bit too much effort and time on separating the personal and the public.

Just sayin’.

and the bonus is he’s cute :

Nussbaum tipped me (and his readers, I am not as of yet, in his address book) to the fact that Malcolm Gladwell (of The Tipping Point, Blink fame) is blogging.

The bonus is he’s cute. In that geeky New Yorker way. (Jew ‘fro and all!)

Yum.

whiter whites, brighter brights :

So Partner of 1974 has a thing for the phrase “bleached out” to mean, basically, bourgeois. Being the aryan one of the duo, this has previously bothered me. It seemed, well, a little prejudiced against us of the fairer skin. Like all us honkey’s were all bleached out mofo’s or something. (And yes, that is possibly the most bleached out string of words I could come up with. You should have heard me actually say it.)

Then this morning I saw this in the Post. And I began to understand why bleached out is the only phrase that will do.

some blogs have a theme :

Themes are so focused.

again, Dan Savage hero-worship :

I love this man.

And if I were his type, I’d totally move to Seattle and throw myself at his feet. (Sorry, Partner of 1974.)

From a recent column:

“This is not really a question about sex, but I couldn't think of any other gay person who could give me a reasonable answer: Am I a homophobe if I make certain jokes regarding gayness? For instance, if I say, "The Olympics are gay," or ask, "Why are you so gay?" I don't feel as though I'm a homophobe. I know and like gay people, and I'm for gay civil rights and gay marriage. Also, if I hear somebody call a homosexual person names in an angry or blatantly derogatory manner, I get upset. So can I call my buddy gay if he tells me he uploaded a Phil Collins CD onto his computer, or should I just call him a dumbshit instead? —Fine With Fags, Really

“Officially, FWFR? It's so not okay to use "gay" as a synonym for lame. When you use "gay" like that, you're reinforcing a cultural prejudice against gay people—I mean duh, right? You may not be a homophobe, but using that expression is homophobic, and when you use it, you're helping to sustain the prejudice that deprives your gay friends of their civil rights and marriage rights.

“Unofficially, FWFR? I don't care what you do. Most of the gay people I know use "that's so gay" the same way you do, and the few times I've overheard strangers using the expression, people who may or may not have been gay, I had to concede the point: The thing they were tagging as so gay was, in fact, so gay.

“Finally, FWFR, a buddy who uploads a Phil Collins CD onto his computer isn't a dumbshit, he's a douchebag. Please make a note of it.”

Previously: Dan Savage is my hero

embiggening

What is often derisively referred to as the “Super-sizing of America” (because we Americans are also stupid and can’t remember our cultural references or how to pronounce fancy words) should actually be derisively referred to as the “embiggening of America”.

Since as an American, I am stupid and can’t remember how to spell, I had to look this word up. Which led me to possibly the best Google find I’ve made since at least yesterday: The List of neologisms on the The Simpsons at Wikipedia.

Check it out yourself. And revel in car holes and 40 rods to the hogshead.

he’s so best :

The septuagenarian Edgar S. Woolard Jr., a former board-member at Apple, explains how Steve Jobs works and how he won’t change much at Disney.

And sounds a little like a 14-year-old valley girl.

The best example from the “old-money, patrician” and former CEO of DuPont:

So the comparison is so nonvalid.

Oh my god, Steve Jobs is the best CEO ever!!! Ah, how the patrician have fallen.

portfolio updates :

I’ve been working on updating my online portfolio (and generally thinking about what I want from a career and how I want my work to be presented).

The first round of changes are is viewable here. I haven’t yet added some of my most recent work, yet, nor have I figured out if I want to include some of my writing and video pieces.

UPDATE: Verb agreement. Who knew.

separated at birth :

This post at Jalopnik got me thinking that I haven’t done a separated at birth, well, since I started getting plagiarized by Autoblog.

As for the Chevy Malibu Maxx, well inspiration comes from odd places, but an Austin Ambassador? No wonder GM is in trouble.

the SUV, officially over :

Forget high gas prices and rollover rates. Or even crossovers.

The new release of Hoover’s new Sport Utility Vacuum marks the official end of the of the SUV.

From the official PR statement:

“This new addition answers the call of consumers looking for seamless cleaning without interruption,” said Dave Baker, vice president and general manager, Hoover. “The Hoover Z bagless upright allows users to move from cleaning hard floors to carpet, and then vacuum draperies and extend to the top of a flight of stairs, all without the need to switch to different vacuums or stop the cleaning process . . .”

Wow, that's more off-roading than the Hoover owner gets in his/her Jeep Commander.

happy pills indeed :

Bristol-Myers Squibb and Gilead Sciences today announced that a once-a-day pill could be ready soon. They have been working to combine the most popular AIDS (or Aids, if your British) drugs into a single pill. These are the very drugs that I am on. I recently switched to Gilead’s Viread and Emtriva combination pill (which cut my co-pay by $30 a month). The other drug in combination therapy was Brisol-Myers’ Sustiva (oh, you of the fabulous dreams). That will be ready soon. This will cut my co-payments to $240 a year total from $480. SInce I’m scrounging around now to pay for this months’ pills, the thought of saving $20 a month is very happy one indeed.

safari feeds :

I haven’t yet explored combining my two blogs and looking at a different host. I don’t even feel like I’ve even finished my Christmas holiday.

As a space holder: my thoughts on RSS feed integration in Apple’s Safari web browser.

At home, I use NetNewsWire Lite to aggregate the sites with RSS feeds that I regularly check for updates. For something different, and to keep from installing unauthorized software at work, I thought I’d give the feed integration in Safari a spin.

(I’m not all that honest an employee. Afterall, I’m writing this quote on work time. Oh, and I recently embezzled $3M. j/k.)

So far, I’m impressed.

I especially like the ability to expand views in multiple ways: just a headline or a whole paragraph; one day, one week or one month; etc. And to sort by title, source, or new.

My one quibble is bookmarking. I have to either have a separate folder for all my RSS feeds, or keep the RSS feeds in the same folders as the main sites.

This means that, for instance, in the toolbar folder entitled “Mac/Design News” I have a list that includes two listings for Core77.com, two for Design Observer, two for NussbaumOnDesign, two for Kottke, etc.

If I don’t want to look at the RSS feed I now I have to sort through a menu that is almost twice as long.

Since Safari automatically detects a syndicate feed when visiting an HTML site. It seems like Safari should be able to do the same from the bookmarks. Or otherwise combine them.

This would allow both the web browser to be truly integrated with RSS reader.

As it stands right now, it just makes a mess.