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Style reveals substance

Month: September 2017 (page 2 of 3)

I hate that I love WORTH IT

2017-09-20 / / 0 Comments

It’s Buzzfeed.

I hate that I love something produced by Buzzfeed.

But if we’re talking about interesting content, delightful comedic timing, and camerawork that is becoming quite beautiful…

…this is worth it.

(Shut up.)

Andrew is the perfect carmudgeonly foil to Steven’s enthusiasm, and Adam’s rare interjections provide both structure to the video (they tend to signal the end of a segment) and some additional heft. The contrast between Andrew’s knowledge (or his facade of knowledge) and Steven’s newbie energy can sometimes make it hard to tell what the actual outcome of a tasting is — especially with an over-the-top truffle-related or gold-plated food — so Adam’s verdict helps ground all the funny comments in reality.

In this episode, we can see production values getting better. There’s foreshadowing (cows and their ambient mooing) for the next video, a joke with a early-timestamp setup and mid-timestamp payoff, and some truly gorgeous cinematography. Good work, Adam.

Some of the expensive foods make me cringe, because they so clearly focus on price and ostentation instead of quality food. For example, in the NYC pizza episode, the mid-priced pizza was handmade by Mario Batali, who spoke about the history and metaphysics of why truly good food is so delicious. Meanwhile, the high-priced pizza looked like a flea market of flashy ingredients, designed as a honeypot to trick investment bankers out of their money.

Truly, this show demonstrates that quality is not always tied to price.

Quality is tied to love, to care, to skin in the game.

Military-inspired

2017-09-19 / / 0 Comments

Remember when I said that Melania looks better in harder-edged or military-inspired clothes?

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

QED.

For the Love of Pepe

2017-09-18 / / 0 Comments

This week, man.

Between the DACA debacle, the #contentemmys, and Gab.ai’s meltdown, I didn’t think much more craziness could happen in a week.

I was wrong. Of course!

Matt Furie, the original creator of our beloved Pepe the Frog, is suing and DMCAing (it’s like SWATing, but with DMCA takedown notices) alt-righters who have used Pepe.

From the article:

“[Furie] was very serious when he said that we wanted to make clear that Pepe was not the property of the alt-right and couldn’t be used by the alt-right,” Louis Tompros, one of Furie’s intellectual property lawyers, told me.

Gee, where have I heard that before?

Oh, right:

One would think that, if one were serious about influencing the popular consciousness (as one supposes that a person in the public eye doing something like comics or comedy does), one would be absolutely ecstatic for one’s meme (read: thought virus) going viral. Wiggling its way into the brains of people everywhere. Being plastered on every mobile phone, tablet, and computer from San Francisco to Barcelona.

But alas, this is not to be. These people are so petty and small-minded that they can’t even set their jokes free.

This is why the left can’t meme. You can’t direct a meme. You can’t centrally plan a meme. You can’t copyright a meme and then DMCA takedown everyone who doesn’t follow the rules.

Memes are wild, memes are free. And if a meme loves you, it’ll come back around.

In conclusion:

Also from the Motherboard article: the laughable idea that r/The_Donald is “one of the the alt-right’s most popular gathering places.”

The upside of upside-down world

2017-09-17 / / 0 Comments

Gather ’round, children, and let me tell you a story.

Many years ago, before universities passed out pacifiers and blankies at freshman orientation, I went to college. During that time, I majored in Old English Books and Visual Communication Design. English was administered through the traditional Harvard model. The VCD degree, while still 100% university accredited and therefore curriculum mapped within an inch of its life, was taught by people who actually worked in the real world. Instead of pretending we were all intellectuals and writing paper after paper, we put our work up on the wall and critiqued it.

It was in my VCD classes I learned that writings from real-world practitioners (like graphic designers) were eons more insightful than anything produced by the English Department Academics. Even when I read pieces by people with views I wildly disagreed with, like Michael Beirut, I could appreciate the insight honed by real-world experience. Reading non-academics was like climbing out of Plato’s cave.

Now, did I apply this experience and run screaming from academia? No I did not. But that is a story for another time.

Let’s talk about Paul Arden’s book WHATEVER YOU THINK, THINK THE OPPOSITE.

Full of ideas that you could write down on a blank page

This is a book written by a designer. An ad man. Someone who played long and hard in the marketplace of ideas. It’s a clever little book full of advice. (And full of visual puns.)

I grabbed it off my bookshelf for a re-read after AJA Cortes tweeted another fount of advice on how to dig yourself out of a 10 year hole today.

You know why? It’s a lot of the same timeless advice.

The premise is this: you are where you are in life because of how you think. If you’re thinking the same things as everybody else, you end up like everybody else (even if your idol is Hunter S Thompson). To be great, think for yourself, develop your own point of view, and start doing the opposite of what you think you should do.

From page 20:

It’s not because you are making the wrong decisions, it’s because you are making the right ones.

We try to make sensible decisions based on the facts in front of us.

The problem with making sensible decisions is that so is everyone else.

Fear not, Paul Arden designed a beautifully bold spread to persuade you to make bad decisions. (Or as Jordan B Peterson would say, “do it badly.”) If you start to think differently, your life will start to take a different direction.

 

Arden also delivers some advice on ideas:

The effort of coming to terms with things you do not understand makes them all more valuable when you do grasp them.

This is given in the context of art appreciation, but it can apply to just about anything in life, from fitness to creativity to developing business ideas. Guess what? You have to do the work. But the work is important.

So is your ego and how you present yourself.

The design of this book is just as much visual as it is written. Arden mixes the ideas, the visuals, how the visuals are presented, and all the text takes form in short, punchy sentences. Advertising sentences. Twitter sentences.

It’s practical, motivational advice that’s fun to read, makes you think, and readable in 30 minutes or less.

Highly recommend.

Oh, and university? Arden says stay far, far away. Too bad this book was published when I was already walking that dark path.

Go read Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite.

EXO and NCT Dream on KBS Music Bank

2017-09-16 / / 0 Comments

SM Entertainment’s team of stylists remain <<<hashtag GOALS>>> on my mental list of all things stye-related. Once again, they concocted another set of outfits that are simultaneously group-oriented, classic, individual, and insane. So many contradictory ideas go into making K-pop group styles. Oh, and each one reflects its group’s current overall concept.

To quote Rachel Zoe circa 2006, I die.

First up, we have NCT Dream promoting “We Young” with a Peter Pan theme. From what I can tell, SM’s idea of Peter Pan is half traditional schoolboy, half found objects with a pseudo-island theme. There are a lot of belts.

 

Each member is wearing the same silhouette, with different details. We have a bold version of the schoolboy jacket, long shorts all the same length, but three boys in white and three in khaki, and the same red socks, but different shoes for each. Each boy is also wearing some variation a vintage-inspired rhinestone pin. Again we have a cohesive color palette, blue, white, and red.

Renjun has a small red bandana tie and is relatively accessory-free. I feel like he and Doyoung (of NCT 127) get similar treatment as the “smart” ones of their respective groups — relatively simpler outfits, plus glasses and a more preppy overall vibe.

Haechan is wearing three (3!) bolo ties, and of course his red hair brings together the various red ties and socks of the group. He has turned aegyo up to 11 in the performance, and it’s kind of adorable.

Mark gets a striped collarless shirt, beads (?) and a raccoon tail hanging from his belt loops. He also has a fringed grass belt (again: ???). I think they throw absolutely incomprehensible outfits at Mark sometimes to toughen him up. If he can pull off a grass skirt and a raccoon tail, he can pull off anything.

Chenle’s shirt has a face on it, and he gets a full red bandana. His shirt is the most off-palette — everyone else has a white or light blue shirt — probably because he still has fantasy purple hair. Can’t let that hair float out on its own, it has to get drawn in to the whole somehow.

Jeno appears to have a mop hanging from his belt. I like his contrasting collar. He continues to absolutely SLAY this comeback. The platinum hair suits him, and he comes across as more fluid, comfortable, and fun. He’s a great dancer, which I didn’t always notice in past comebacks because he was so stiff.

And Jisung! Jisung with his bright blue hair and his incomprehensible shirt that appears to be a cluster of Union Jacks. He has a lipstick pin and his necklace appears to be tennis rackets (or maybe waffles?).

Just when I think I start to understand the logic behind k-pop styling, it escapes me again. It’s a little like the visual version of “Engrish.” (Which of course is partially why I like it.)

In the same show, EXO performed their newest comeback song “Power.” Please take a moment to appreciate the thumbnail of Xiumin and his fantastic hair before you click play on this video.

EXO is a more group-oriented…group…so their costumes also tend toward cohesion more than individuality-within-a-theme. Each member gets his own version of the sporty jacket, and they all have different undershirts that underline their individual looks, but they look much more like a team and it would be much harder for a newbie to tell the members apart simply by clothing (unlike NCT Dream up above where you could pick out a member based on accessories).

The wizardry in this costuming choice is the SM stylists managed to make pinstripe pants that somehow don’t automatically make their wearers look like bankers or baseball players. I repeat: PINSTRIPE PANTS THAT DON’T SUCK.

Plus, they’re paired with Member’s Only style jackets with pulled-up ankle socks and don’t look like they were ripped straight from the 80s. It’s that vaporwave influence creeping in again. Wizardry.

It probably helps that EXO are now next-level clothes wearers and performers. With that in mind, I can’t wait to see what kinds of batshit outfits the NCT subgroups will get in five years when their members have climbed to EXO’s level.

If you want to see the two groups in action together, NCT Dream stayed out onstage during EXO’s encore. Adorable.

Ways I can prove to myself that I can be my own boss

2017-09-15 / / 0 Comments

I feel like there’s a new genre of writing that has taken off in the past few years. It’s nonfiction, and yet the reward it provides is almost the same as a fairy tale.

I’m talking about all the self-employed, entrepreneur-ish books. I read a lot of them. You probably do too. Tim Ferriss. James Altucher. Tony Robbins. Even smaller names like Mike Cernovich.

It’s not even books–this type of content pops up on social media and youtube as well. All the vloggers and youtubers who support themselves off of their youtube income streams, or who showcase how they run their own lives through freelance work, direct sales, and youtube or patreon revenue. I’m thinking about the Casey Neistats and Frannerds of the world here–not just people who support themselves on youtube, but people who vlog about supporting themselves on youtube.

The subtext of all of these things is: you can too!

And maybe you can. Probably you can. You and I have just as much potential as most of these people. They’ve taken risks and figured out how to leverage the internets in a way that works for them (instead of destructive ways like crippling youtube addictions).

At the end of the day, though, these people make money selling the dream to you and me. They show us how they live the lives that they live. On the one hand, hey–it’s an instruction manual or guidebook or map or whatever. Showing us the way.

On the other, it can be all too easy to fall into the trap of voyeurism, of sitting back and watching these people out on the playing field. Maybe we should start a fantasy entrepreneur tournament.

I say “these people” like a pejorative, but I don’t mean it that way. I admire them, and envy them a little bit, and know that I could potentially maybe be one of them, but also equally know that the way I’m living my life right now will never get me there.

AJA Cortes reminded me of that tonight on twitter, with some cut-to-the-bone truth. He put into words a lot of my own feelings of being “stuck” along with exactly what I’ve done that’s gotten me to this place: lack of risk, seeking comfort, choosing a college degree that feels good and hoping that everything will work out.

Hope is NEVER a plan,

Assuming things will “just work out” is NOT a plan

“Something will come along” is NOT a plan

This is loser talk

The reliance on happenstance and fate and destiny somehow swinging in your favor,

Total bullshit.

Fortune favors PLANNING

Your degree is not a fucking plan,

“I’m sure it will work out” isn’t a plan

“I’ve got a good feeling about it” is NOT a plan

Why aren’t these things plans?

Because you are not taking ACTION on ANYTHING

Where’s the momentum? Where is the forward drive to create?

Hell, where’s the hustle and grind and all that cliched shit?

What’s the big picture you are actually working to create every day?

There isn’t one?

You’re relying on half luck and half mediocre skill and wishful thinking?

Stop bullshitting yourself.

I’ve reached the point where I can’t bullshit myself anymore. I am all too aware of the situation that I’ve gotten myself into (complacent job, no marriage prospects, very little creativity in my life, etc etc etc). This is not the life I dreamed for myself when I was a starry-eyed 12 year old.

And reading books about how “You can too!” doesn’t help the fact. Until I take action, it’s just more bullshit.

Right now, I know that I cannot work for myself or be my own boss or choose myself or anything like that. I know this because I know how lazy I am on my own, away from an employer with expectations of me. If I want to move toward any sort of second income stream or self-employment or freelance work or publishing my own novel, I need to learn how to manage myself.

So I’ve decided to draft a list of things I can do (ACTION) to prove to myself that I’m ready to strike out on my own.

  • Set up a (big) project, plan it out, and complete it within a deadline
  • Clean my room, Jordan B Peterson style
  • Address my resentment of tracking time, and start using time to my advantage
  • Stick to a consistent sleep time and wake time
  • Continue to publish a blog post every day until we hit a year
  • Work out consistently
  • Get out of bed immediately upon rising, instead of languishing in the half-asleep/half-awake stage that I love so much (this will legit be a sacrifice)
  • Design a daily schedule for myself that incorporates all the projects that I plan to complete, along with the self-care that my chronic illness demands, and stick to it
  • Finish the Self-Authoring suite
  • Complete a plan for my future, with action steps and deadlines
  • Sell a product online that people buy on a consistent basis while still employed full time by someone else
  • Tackle the reading list that I’ve had in my mind for years
  • Define what success means to me

Now, all of these things will not happen overnight. Tackling this list will take time, and self-discipline. A plan. Some of the very same things on this list that I feel I lack already. However, the things on this list create compound interest–once I’ve completed and/or maintain a substantial amount of them, I imagine that I’ll already be on the road to being more antifragile and self-sufficient.

The thing is, I must begin. Take action. DO IT.

I take comfort in the fact that doing it badly is better than doing it not at all. Doing it badly is the first step toward doing it well. Doing it badly is, frankly, still DOING.

One day at a time. One step at a time. One minute at a time.

Forward, into a brighter future.

Don’t listen to the media, Melania

2017-09-14 / / 0 Comments

Dear Melania,

I realize that you’ve undergone quite a bit of scrutiny in the past few weeks for the clothes that you choose to wear. While I don’t know what it’s like to be that lambasted in the public spotlight, I imagine that there’s immense pressure to change.

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Given that your favored style falls somewhere in the category of “elegant former fashion model” rather than “sporty everywoman” or “uppercrust GOP” like other first ladies, it would be difficult picking out outfits that are suitable and appropriate for disaster situations.

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However, that doesn’t mean you have to dress like a 70-year-old lady. This temporary media storm is going to blow over no matter what you do. Making a u-turn into khaki pants, Chanel flats (ugh!), billowy shirts and 1970s cape dresses is not going to make the media love you.

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You still look pulled together, but you don’t really look like your normal self. Your normal style elements are there — a restricted color palette, tailoring, bold sunglasses — but there’s a restraint, almost a staleness around your choices. (Like that pale dusty green, so like a wallflower, which you are not.)

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Despite what the media says, it’s okay to be yourself. The people who voted your husband into office don’t mind the fact that you once posed for a photo in a fur and metal bikini and have a fondness for stiletto heels. We appreciate you for it, just like we appreciate your husband’s affinity for gold-plated everything

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Please continue being your elegant self. Disaster or no, the media will always find something to complain about.

This too shall pass. In the meantime, wear more stilettos.

Sincerely,

Trump Supporters

I still don’t believe that What Happened is a real book

2017-09-13 / / 0 Comments

When I first saw images of Hillary Clinton’s new(est) memoir, What Happened, floating around on twitter, I thought they were fake.

Between the galley-proof style presentation (easily faked), the simple cover, and the bold, obvious statement-style title, I assumed it was one big fat joke put together by some Trump supporter as an answer to the RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA thing.

The whole setup (including the “look at me I’m working so hard with my pleb-tier Staples notebook and everything” photo aesthetic) reads as a meme to me.

 

Alas, that was not the case.

This is a real book, printed on real paper and read by real people (not just Russian bots, lol).

Visually, I can’t decide if I like the cover or not. It’s refreshing to see a political book that doesn’t follow the basic formula of pundit’s face + terrible typography. (Yes, this even goes for Ann Coulter’s books.)

Normally, a blue/yellow color palette would make me twitch, but this one contains such a lovely creamy shade of blue and enough white that the execution is spot-on.

The typography is bold and commands attention, but has just enough variation in the H that it doesn’t look too commanding (which would be extra-disingenuous, because she lost — not commanding anything). The extended cross-bar of the H is a nice callback to Hillary’s campaign logo, which extended the H into a forward arrow. This version is going backwards.

I don’t like the attempt to paint the book as an authoritative-yet-unbiased antrhopological exploration of the election by the use of the National Geographic visual trop of a yellow border. This is clearly a biased book (and I don’t fault it for being so — it’s her “side” of the story) but to suggest, even visually, that it’s not is verging into the territory of lies.

I’m also still on the fence about the title itself. On the one hand, it’s the bold statement of a seasoned political candidate. On the other hand, read it in a querulous tone of voice and it’s the plaintive question of an old lady with neurological problems.

Which, when you think about it, is pretty indicative of the state of Hillary Clinton over the past year.

OK, the title can stay.

On putting things in boxes

2017-09-12 / / 0 Comments

Lately I’ve been feeling like all I do is put things into boxes, both physical objects or conceptual entities.

My day job involves administration and people — lots of administration, lots of people — and yet it still feels like most of what I do is classifying information, sorting things, and putting stuff in boxes. Or if I’m lucky, lists.

Data goes in little spreadsheet boxes.

Event RSVPs go into their lists (numbered, of course).

Responses from an investigative interview get sorted and categorized.

Planning ideas get dissected nine ways from Sunday and assigned dates and executors, flayed out like butterflies held down with pins.

And even when I get home, I’m looking to move soon, which means packing up my physical belongings and putting them in literal boxes.

It’s exhausting.

I’m the type of person who likes to make connections. I like music that crosses genres, and things that are hard to describe. I’m very comfortable with things NOT fitting in boxes, with the ambiguity of unclassified data.

(There’s a reason I like Beethoven so much more than Mozart.)

It’s good to classify things. Classification is necessary to guide communication and clarify thoughts and ideas. But sometimes ideas need to breath and run free.

When my own instinct is to run free, it’s exhausting for me to toil at chasing those things down and put them in boxes. I’d rather be out there with them.

But a society can’t function when everything is running free. Sometimes we need boxes — like, say, a wall — to create order and delineate concepts.

There’s a balance. I suspect that balance leans more toward “things in boxes” than “things running free,” but that is part of the price we pay for a civilized society where everyone uses the same language and the same social conventions.

We have to save running free for our own time.

So getting paid to put things in boxes is probably just good practice on how to be a good citizen. We sacrifice a little of our personal freedom to use the same types of boxes our fellow citizens use, so that we can have common ground.

That’s the ideal, at least.

Videoshopping the Steven Bannon Interview

2017-09-11 / / 0 Comments

Usually, when we think of retouching an image, we think of a photographer or retouch artist using photoshop to alter a still image. Turns out video isn’t exempt.

Peter Duke explains how the 60 Minutes crew altered footage of Steve Bannon:

I noticed the red eyes when I was watching clips of the interview last night, and figured something like this was going on. I don’t know much about color correction, but the way that Peter can estimate the amount of correction that’s happening based of the shade of Charlie Rose’s shirt is impressive. Makes me want to learn more about color.

Once I was talking with my brother about fake news, and his philosophy is now “show me the video.” Not the talking heads, not an article reporting on it, but the honest-to-gosh raw footage.

That’s a good start, but as we can clearly see here, video footage is also really easy to alter. There are structural alterations through editing, selective start and end times to cut off certain events from the feed. There are sonic edits, where you drop-in or dub in the wrong words, or splice together a new phrase from different phonetic sounds. And then there are visual spins like this one, where the editor goes out of his way to misrepresent the subject with bad lighting, color correction, or what have you. Frankly, with a sit-down interview, you could also achieve similar results with hot lights (done to Alex Jones), a mic too close, bad makeup, horrible clothing choices, or similar tricks.

This simple explanation by Peter Duke has me starting to think about critically evaluating all the video I watch, not just the photos I look at or the news stories I read. Every piece of information must be run through the bias-filter.

Video alone isn’t enough to get us at the truth of a matter. It’s certainly better than the written word or a still image for some things — like bare, on the ground reporting — but video cannot address ideas or abstract thoughts as well as the written word. Nor can it be as iconic as that perfect still image that visually encapsulates the ideas in a scene. And it’s just as susceptible to bias as other types of media.

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