Basel: Reduction vs. complexity

I just had the pleasure of sitting in on a lecture about identity design by Michael Renner, currently Head of the Visual Communication Institute at The Basel School of Design. His review of the creation of marks and systems was very well thought-out and inspiring, but of particular interest to me was the student work he showed at the end of his lecture-- work that explores the signs and symbols people choose to communicate their individuality--their identity. This work is quite unlike anything I had ever seen come out of Basel. The idea of exploring the meanings expressed in complexity is certainly not an idea I naturally associate with Swiss design education, the long-time champion of boiled-down-to-the-essence, ever-simplified reduction. Neither the individual nor the individuality of subjects and objects was high on the list of values in former Basel eras. This exploration of identity and complexity in the layering of meaning represents a sea-change in the way design education is being examined and redefined at Basel. I tip my hat to Michael Renner for balancing reduction and complexity in the current equation.

My Old Island

I hadn't been to New York in a while because I had been avoiding my literary agent who expected a manuscript. So going from my island, land of orcas, trees and fog, to my old island, land of traffic, people and big buildings, was a reentry into contemporary life. A few observations on cultural changes since 2007:

1. More beeping, less chatting:
Many more single beeps around, signaling the turn of lights or the readiness of a bagel, but far less public chatting on cell phones. A great thing about texting! All those teeth-meltingly tiresome overheard conversations on the bus now relegated to the keyboard. Lovely.

2. Anyone who thinks he is in the fashion business is actually in the jeans business and must accept his fate.

3. The nasal labial fold is a thing of the past. In the last two years, the usage of facial fillers has hit my business contacts.

4. Light blue is the new white for teeth. Scary when you don't expect it.

5. Bookstores have more tables and fewer books. Hardcover books sport newsprint pages. Vampires rule the racks. And books about green eating. And about how not to look old.

6. A lot of old people are going around with chopped bangs and low-rise jeans and big belts, squinting to see the tiny type on their ipod touch and looking pathetic. Luckily, their corns keep them from sporting gladiator sandals.

I did not write "Drosophila Retrotransposons."

Oddly, I am not the author of "Polymorphism of canonical and noncanonical gypsy sequences in different species of Drosophila melanogaster subgroup: possible evolutionary relations."

I know I seem like the type to be in there with my tweezers figuring out a fruit fly's genetic code, but sadly I am not. The genetic authorship can pretty much be attributed to one Natalia V Lyubomirskaya and one Yuriy V Ilyin. Somehow, not all web crawlers can see the difference between those two names and mine. If one more person emails me wondering about my views on whether mobile genetic elements constitute a substantial part of the eukaryotic genome I am going to go out and kick a dog.

Rilke on Criticism

Here, now, the birds start up early. The first sleepy chirp sounds at 3:30. A real chirpfest by four am. Head under pillows, what’s left but to push back the percale and stumble out and make coffee and sit watching the light come. The white sky deepens to clear blue--the green of new leaves, the climbing rose spilling yellow blossoms over the balcony.

People have their favorites, but when sleep is not an option I read Rilke. I go back to Letters to a Young Poet. It's not just for the young. In the face of these clear words, everyone is young.

Here’s something from Rilke about criticism. It may seem strange coming from me, since I write criticism. But I agree with him.

“… And let me here promptly make a request: read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism— such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite. Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just to them.

Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation, discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights. Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as in creating.”

"Heresy," a poem by Boris Ilyin

Yesterday I got an envelope in the mail and in it was a poem from my father. He's edging up on ninety-one, just to give you some context. But no wimped-out guy, he. Still painting, writing, calling me on his cell phone to make sure I'm eating. Here's the poem:

Heresy

They say now that the Dialogue in Heaven
Of whose stark end we are the flying grit,
Was won by Satan, whose triumphant hordes
Unfurled red banners and with furious zeal
Plunged outward into space to spread his power.

He left the Loser dead upon a cross,
To live again, but now to be confined
In silvered ikons glinting in the light
Of true lampadas and of sleeping children--
Or now to be displayed on penthouse walls
With other accent pieces-- yet to bless
Alike the infant and the gracious liver
And the director of the KGB
And the most distant, barren galaxies
Forever hurtling on their outward course
Since Satan's victory on that mighty day.

Boris Ilyin

Perils of Design Writing

I come from a family of writers. Growing up, it sometimes felt as though writing was the family business. It was discussed around the dinner table, the way a family discusses its generational practice in dentistry, or its general store. My Russian grandmother, Olga Ilyin, my father’s mother, wrote memoirs and novels about her youth, and spent months with us every year, “in ze country,” which was actually in ze suburbs. She, with her Chekhovian mindset, didn’t choose to see the white rocks, the tract houses, the cheap stucco.

I grew up with her routine: breakfast at eight; writing from nine to twelve; lunch; a reading of what she had just written for critique by my father, who had spent the same time in his studio, painting; afternoon tea, then friends over for dinner and conversation in the evening. Sadly, growing up with this going on in the house, I missed the fact that most people were not retired, not painting and writing, not critiquing over the Earl Grey but in fact working for a living.

Consequently, I have spent my life trying to resolve these two ways of living, mixing tea and writing one day with hunkering down and hammering out work with clients the next. It’s been Dreams of my Russian Summers meets Marketing For the Small Design Firm every day of my adult life, and for this reason I now offer up a nugget of advice to those who would be design writers: be born wealthy, marry well, or invent something early on, because the bifurcation of spending time in the total concentration of writing-- the other world of it-- followed by the slam of reality that is business is one of the hardest things I negotiate.

The transition is akin to the grinding of gears, and it is a transition I make every day. When I look around at other design writers, it is only lately that I notice that a good deal of family money is floating around backing up the career choice. Heed my wise words. or the grey hair you see at my temples shall be yours at my august age.

Toes in recovery

Well, to make a long story short, it was fabulous. Country Capers got the music going early as people arrived in full regalia-- I have to say that men, always nice to have around, really look especially good in evening clothes. Fleece, although it has many merits, does not hold a candle to a cut-away.
In flowed women in ball dresses and we got a full look at everyone's ensemble during the Grand March, which dissolved into a bit of a Conga line at the end.
King of the Ball: Eight Fingered Dick, (normally a very nice guy who runs the local art store, but something quite appealing happens to him when he lets his hair down and wears all black and little tiny dark glasses.) Queen of the Ball: one Kate Ebert, whose bustled gown of chartreuse green mattress ticking combined with orange silk collar, red and white striped stockings and bloomers made her costume not only amazing, but, darn it, flattering as heck.
Even though this is the recession of all recessions, we made almost twice what we made the last time we did this party. And all of that money goes to microgrants for Burmese living on the Thai Border. Double success-- double happiness. Pictures to follow.

Surrounded by Acres of Taffeta

Three days left until the Old Settlers' Ball, and because I have an unrealistic view of my powers, I have said yes once again to making too many other people's ball dresses. So here I sit, thinking thoughts about what I am going to teach next Fall in terms of design history and criticism, and sewing the bejeebers out of yards and yards of taffeta. The balanced life is the life we strive for. Histories and hierarchies, who did what when-- that's one side of the story. The other-- that unheralded long stitch of repeated experience that snicks through life like a machine needle, the continuing tale that folds in upon itself, that starts over and ends and starts over-- the sea swell of the unconscious upon which we plant yardsticks and measuring tapes and wonder why they never reach far enough, why they sink down out of sight. How shall I teach that?

Bus Glasses

For years my students have given me a bad time about my reading glasses and not without reason. I have a pair that I found on the bus. The perfect strength! Really nice ground lenses! I was thrilled when they showed up. But there’s a downside. They are old. Not old enough to be vintage or hipster or retro. No, just old and big and, well, to be frank, perhaps not that flattering. I have suffered through their gentle remarks for years. But today I am relieved of the burden of my insistence: today I happened upon a wonderful picture of Jane Jacobs. A fabulous picture. A brilliant woman. And something I had never noticed before. My exact bus glasses. I knew I liked her.

My technological breakthrough

I dreamed last night that I had patented a software program that aged photographic portraits in real time. This invention solved the problem of my photograph looking far better than I do in real life. This is a common problem for writers, whose publishers get fabulous photographers to take their pictures, and for well-known designers, who tend to look boyish and craggy or waif-like and arty in pictures but stringy and tough in person.

No need for these glaring gaps between image and reality! With my new PhotoDorian add-on, no one ever need be surprised again by the unretouched youness of you.

No need to thank me. Your appreciation is enough.

Debbie Millman: goddess

In my years of doing radio interviews-- and the machine of book publishing requires that a writer do a ton--I have never in my life met a host as gracious, well-prepared, incisive and just downright bright as Debbie Millman.

Mostly, when you go on someone's show, they've just gotten a brief bullet-point memo from a staff member about the three things that will make you interesting to people driving home from work. They ask you questions that are just off the mark, and you find yourself treating the host like a small child, explaining things, and making dumb questions seem interesting. This is not the case with Debbie Millman.

After her opening, during which she read from my book-- what writer could withstand that kind of blandishment?-- she dove in with a question about mathematics and whether we humans had invented or discovered it. Well, that strained the old grey cells. All I remember after that is fielding acute question after acute question. It was a heck of an experience, talking to someone I had never met before who had really read my work. Even the man who called in was clear, intelligent and thoughtful. It was Radio Nirvana.

I had listened to her show before, when people I knew were on. But now I'm a convert. Every Friday 12-1 PST , 3 EST, you know where I'll be.

Night Vision

Last night Rem Koolhaas's building burned in Beijing. Pictures of bystanders watching the new building burn put me in mind of this poem by Robert Burmer, a poet and musician here on the Island.

NIGHT VISION

Some nights, certain nights
a frightening clarity descends.

When roads and faces,
remembered - reflected,
arc as neutrinos
through each turn of the eye.

Where the heron walks on ice
as its cry leaves a track on the moon.

When our bets are called in
but cannot be covered,

And lovers appear,
hair streaming
down desert back roads
no longer imagined.

Flesh or dream,
it does not matter.

Our birth cries form
as ashes on the waves,
bending the light
of a younger star.

Robert H. Burmer

Flowering Around

Bad news on the home front. Flowering Around, the flower shop right across the street, formerly known for flowers, has suddenly gone into the organic latte business. This may sound like a boon, what with my having only to roll up the old pj pants and throw on a coat and walk across the street to score the perfect split shot 2%. But already it's spelling trouble.

Unlike most people, I work at home a couple days of the week. This I count as one of the great perks of Pam and my running our own business. Some days I work on the business and some days I write on my current manuscript. But now there's Flowering Around, with its espresso bar, right across the street.

The proprietor is, unfortunately, charming, smart and friendly. Dennis. Known for his dreadlocks here on an island of Norwegians. Massage therapist and shop manager. And then there's my friend Art the Writer, known for his love of coffee and thinking-talk, who's found the new place. But, of course. I introduced him to it.

Fool, I. At my desk in my house, working, I know Art might just be sitting over there at Flowering Around, ready to look up from his book with a smile to offer me a chair. Ready to talk about crafting-the-narrative or what-makes-good-prose-sing or some other topic that can burn more time than almost any other vice. A veritable siren song, this smell of coffee wafting in my window. Right across the street.... So near, yet so far.... Art and coffee: my Scylla and Charybdis.

The Final Adopter

Living out here on the Island, we don't exactly stand on the whetted cutting edge of fashion, unless it's fleece-related. However, I have a secret weapon. (The key to Island life is the acquiring of secret weapons having to do with cultural change.) On the fashion front, which I quitted in about 1992 due to unforseen aging, I have my niece. She's 15. She knows.

Every now and again I get bowled over by an accessory or something but I always check it with her first just to make sure that it didn't come around in 2004 and die a painful death in the halls of high schools around the country before I found it.

This time I ran into a lovely woven bag that was a certain familiar pearlescent grey reminiscent of, well, the fog lifting off Venice. At closer inspection this bag turned out to be made of seatbelts. I was enchanted. Never saw such a thing before. Called niece. She didn't exactly let me down easy.
"They came and went with gum wrapper purses," she said.

But they're so well made-- so strong, so silent, with such nice findings! Is there not an argument here for classic? I weep that fashion has passed them by! Tell me it's not true. Or I will sob into my pashmina.
http://www.seatbeltbags.com/

Satisfying the Gerrit Noordzij

Abi and I decided that we'd use a quote about Tobias from my book,
Chasing the Perfect. Proving that some designers are born, not made:

"When Tobias was nine years old, his family flew to England to spend
some time with his grandmother in Kent. In the morning, his mother came
downstairs to find the small Tobias sitting at the kitchen table, staring
at a tin of biscuits. The rest of the children were outside yelling and
climbing trees, and there sat Tobias, staring at a tin.

After several moments of watching this, she woke him, as from a trance. He told her that he didn’t understand what made the tin feel so “British” to him, and that he was thinking it through.

At this, she receded. And, after a while, he figured out that he only saw
letters like these on things that his mother brought back from visits to
his grandmother. It was the letters than made the tin feel British. Gill
Sans brought the idea of Britain into Tobias’s ken, the notion of
Britain being a separate entity, a separate consciousness, a separate way
of being from that of America. He sat at his grandmother’s kitchen table
for a long time, contemplating the wideness of the world."

All this and the Gerrit Noordzij

So the dishwasher broke in the morning and that meant the whole time I was working I knew I would come home to the pile-up. I spent much of the day in a long meeting, convincing a client that, in order to create a marketing plan, it might good to first create a brand story--you know-- something to market. After that my red blood cell count was down to nil.

On the ferry home I thought thoughts about the book manuscript I owe that is not done. And as I walked home, clad in too many layers for the weather, I felt a pang about Upstairs Pete's pet rat and my role in its demise. See yesterday.

After bumbling in with my large bag of things, I looked at the dish pile-up, decided against it, and went to read a little email. There it was:
Would I be so kind, the email from an unknown party read, as to share an interesting personal anecdote about Tobias Frere-Jones that can be included in the book and exhibition for the Tobias Frere-Jones, Gerrit Noordzij Prize exhibit/event which is coming right up? Immediately if not sooner? No time at all until the deadline!

Now. I am a woman with a broken dishwasher, a book manuscript that is not in, and a rat on my conscience. Is this a time to be asking me to contribute to a laudatory document about one of the foremost type designers of our era? If said type designer had a broken dishwasher and an unfinished manuscript and a rat on his conscience, how would he feel if, say, he browsed his email to find, "We're just putting the finishing touches on a book and exhibit about Natalia Ilyin, to go along with her being awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and, well, she mentioned you and so we're trying to squeeze you in at the last moment, though we have no idea who you are."

I'll tell you how he'd feel. He'd be pleased as punch. He'd send a lovely note to them about student days and about how I did something or other that endangered life and limb and he'd write it in twenty seconds with no rewrites and charmingly, too. He is the kind of person for whom rats do not die and dishwashers do not break. Or maybe he's just quieter about it.