September 18, 2008

RE: Not With a Bang, But a Whimper

Dear Ryan Boudinot,

I concede that my sources, Jason Epstein writing for the New York Times and the National Endowment For the Arts are probably flawed due to the vagaries of low-paid fact checkers and overworked analysts. We've all been there.

The details of our exchange have become too complex to deal with in the confines of a Web forum.

It has come down to this. You and me. The future of the Seattle writing community clearly, certainly, depends on us and our ideas about outreach programs at Richard Hugo House.

I concede, too, that perhaps a business minded approach is appropriate considering we are talking about an arts organization with a budget and employees and things.

In this spirit, I suggest we resolve our difference in the time honored traditional of all business minded people: dueling PowerPoint presentations outlining the potential futures of Richard Hugo House. In the yawning vacuum of Lyall Bush's mysterious departure, sense must be made, preferably in three word bullet points.

I suggest we meet in appropriate corporate or edgy marketing attire at a suitable location -- a whiteboard perhaps, an AV projector.

Go ahead present your vision of the future in a succinct, and sizzly deck.

I will also have a nice PowerPoint presentation prepared.

20 minutes each. 20 minutes to blow people's minds.

And then, the people can decide provided they are still awake.

Mr. Boudinot, author of The Littlest Hitler and soon to be released novel Egg and Sperm, I am calling you out. I challenge you to a PowerPoint-off. I demand this, or I demand your immediate concession to my generally sensible and cogent explanations and thoughts about the future of Richard Hugo House.

Name your time. Name you place. Check my Outlook calendar and schedule a rumble.

Thank You,

Matt Briggs

August 7, 2008

This came across the tubes and cables of the Internet, "I don't get this one----it is offensive... WHAT A DISGRACE!!! AND HE IS ALL AMERICAN????" -- Denise Emch. Emch is presumably offended by the fact that previous campaigns have used the logo of the American flag. Obama, though, is using his own sunrise/flag "O" logo. The transgressions here is somehow an affront to the fixed iconography of American principles.

Snopes noted "given the length and breadth of modern presidential campaigns, it has become de rigueur for most major-party candidates to have their own airplanes for ferrying themselves and staffers, press, security, and other personnel from stop to stop along the campaign trail." Typically the candidate will have the plane marked to identify themselves a presidential candidate. In Obama's case, his campaign replaced the color scheme of the plane he had been leading with the Obama campaign slogan ("Change We Can Believe In"), the BARACKOBAMA.COM domain name, and Obama campaign logo.

I received the note about from someone who asked the oddly leading question, "[Is] removing the flag and creating his own representation of patriotism. Ok, not ok?"

Eh?

Put aside the first problem that the flag isn't even a real flag, but an icon of a flag plastered to the wing of a jet plane. Such an icon has it's own problems of representation. Should it be a rectangular flag (like the one worn by astronauts) or should it be the icon of a flag "in motion?" I'm not aware of federal branding guidelines for the appropriate display of national iconography.

The idea here is that is some kind of agreed on value system behind patriotism. It isn't even whether Obama is patriotic, but rather how he expresses his patriotism. There are it seems guidelines, somewhere. This harkens back, it seems, to an odd nostalgia for a time that never was, the same kind of conservatism romanticisms that has fueled national movements throughout the 20th century -- and these movements have a very ugly history.

One of the intriguing and to me interesting things about Obama is that he signifies to me America's investment and involvement in a global and digital culture ... he belongs to the 21 century. I do not doubt there are Republican or Conservatives who are also part of the 21st century, but McCain isn't one of them. Instead this entire argument harkens to the kind of out of touch, and vaguely dangerous nationalism that has done the United States no favors.

I never was into the American Flag thing. I've personally always been irked that the United States is the only country on the entire planet that doesn't lower its flag at the Olympics. It seems kind of uncivil in a global sense - arrogant even.

I also find the mandatory pledge of allegiance I find odious -- and it's only function to remind student bodies daily they live in a country that is willing to build prisons, advanced weapon systems, but hasn't updated the fundamental structure of the school system since it was lifted from the Prussians in the 1860s where the system prepare illiterate serfs for factory work or conquering people oversees.

Flag burning laws and the required pledge are all kind of fascists statues designed to enforce the authority of the federal government. Flag burning laws came after the Civil War. The pledge of allegiance came around the turn of last century -- a time of nationalism internationality that fueled the US conquest of Cuba and the Philippines, imperial conquests and jockeying in the Middle East and Asia, and finally the Great War.

In the beginning of the Cold War, The Knights of Columbus successfully campaigned to have "under God" added to a pledge that was compulsory in all federally funded schools. Factories and Armies. This seems a striking violation of the separation of church and state, but then we've never had an atheist president or even a non-Christian church going president.

The current president and particularly VP Cheney said when they were elected that they sought to reestablish the authority of the executive branch. This went hand in hand with clearly defining the iconography of the executive branch and the Federal Government. Among other things they were concerned with the things such as the presentation of the flag, the presidential colors, and executive seal. When it comes to flags and "branding" this all seems pretty innocuous. If the presidential seal has to be shown before the president appears on TV, fine. He should be in control of his presentation. It's his (or her) show. However these same icons have also signified the executive branch performing acts few previous presidents have done. They they haven't been done before, particularly by the liberal version of our current president, Roosevelt whose presidency was also marked by imperial trappings, stark violations of civil rights, and immense destruction of enemy civil populations. When the executive branch suspends habeas corpus, opens international secret prisons, begins to actively eavesdrop, and works at policies that violate the Geneva Convention -- issues of branding become intermingled with authoritarian rule.

Check the beginning of 1984 where the branding of Big Brother is nearly comically pervasive.

A recent review of 'Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State' opens:
How did a practice as vile as branding become so valued, indeed, the very mark of value? Officials in the past have branded slaves and criminals -- remember Milady's fleur-de-lis in "The Three Musketeers"? Samuel Maverick didn't brand his cattle, but dictionaries are vague about whether he was the first maverick or his cows were. Today, cities and colleges have joined toothpastes and soft drinks in the battle for "brand loyalty."

So Obama brand-jamming the US Flag seems radical and happy to me. His campaign is kind of making the US flag their own in the way Abbie Hoffman made a shirt out of it. It is how we should deal with the silliness and nostalgia of the flag. It does signify our communal values, sure, but we should we be able to do with our stuff whatever we like.

I'm not sure if I want to live in a country where people can hide behind icons and flags. I'd much rather live in a place where people can make diapers out of the American Flag. I guess that is how I feel about Obama's O on his jet plane.

February 6, 2007

I was wondering if I could put together a suite of software applications for producing professional documents FOR FREE that functioned pretty much as well as a combination of Microsoft Office and Adobe CS. Yep.

• Office (Word-processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation) No need to purchase any office productivity software. Just sign up and in seconds get working on those word processing files, spreadsheets or presentations. http://www.thinkfree.com

• PDF
  Foxit Reader 2.0 is a free PDF document viewer and printer.
  http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/

• Photo Editor
  GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. The terms of usage and rules about copying are clearly listed in the GNU General Public License.
  http://www.gimp.org

• Drawing
  Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.
  http://www.inkscape.org

• Diagramming
  Dia is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program 'Visio', though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.
  It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format (gzipped by default, to save space), can export diagrams to a number of formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and can print diagrams (including ones that span multiple pages).
  http://live.gnome.org/Dia

• Layout Software
  cribus is a Page Layout program for GNU/Linux®, similar to Adobe® PageMaker, QuarkXPress or Adobe® InDesign, except that it is published under the GNU GPL.
  http://web2.altmuehlnet.de/fschmid/doc.html

• Phone
  Free phone calls to other users of Skype.
  http://www.skype.com
  
  Posted by mattbriggs at 3:25 PM

October 25, 2006

I found this note in a description of a children's book:
"It is something of a shock to discover in the d'Aulaire's fine picture-book life of George Washington (1936) for the youngest children the repellent phrase, "He learned to be good and honest and never tell a lie."
-- Children and Books, May Hill Arbuthnot

July 28, 2006

-- The crocodile almost ate me.
-- That's okay. If he ate you, you'd be a legend.

May 22, 2006

My daughter at three had an unwavering addiction to cute that has matured now that she is five into a kind of cynical consumption of “cute.” We spent a painful hour for me (joyful hour for her) browsing a Web site with hundreds of adorable pictures of kittens and puppies. There is a Japanese sensibility (kawaii) for this kind of cuteness, and cuteness it seems is not merely cute in a kind of purely innocent way but cute in a way that camouflage looks natural, cute as a deliberate confusion of signifiers. At three my daughter bought cuteness; at five she is fluent in cute. I am merely confused by cute. I did, however, find an The Aesthetics of Cute.

March 30, 2006

Finding a motive is important to reassure the public -- Capt. Tag Gleason, head of the violent-crimes unit, quoted in today's Seattle Times.

December 20, 2005

I also saw Chewbacca in Narnia. This has been a widely observed phenomena. Weird. I forget who was saying* that Santa Claus is part of a training myth for the post-modern mind and our belief in a monetary system based on faith. 1) Santa Claus [leaves presents] 2) Easter Bunny [leaves chocolate] 3) Tooth Fairy. [leaves American currency with the words "in god we trust".] And the gradual de-masking of each of these myths is also important. At the center of dialogue is the question "is santa claus/god/money real?" undercut with the understanding, "I don't want to question it too deeply because I don't want to destroy the value added by faith." This is post-mod deconstruction at its height. There has also been a recent argument put forward by The Republican War on Science that post-modern theory has been embraced by right wing think tanks and that the kind of dialectic explored by post-mod theorists is central to the practical blinding of the american public.

It was very revealing recently to hear people bring up the "War on Christmas," as in "Merry Christmams" vs "Happy Holidays," as a way of obstificating any sense behind 1) the president breaking the law and 2) the fact that the US has declared war on the rest of the planet. While the poeple I was with knew it was a frivilous topic, these lab tech liberals I work with, they were also completely absorbed about talking about it because it became a kind of interplay between various value systems. In the same way, I think to have cross references in movies like Narnia and Star Wars develops a kind of mythological dense cloud that displaces a real engagement with the world. Narnia's director created Shrek and Shrek II which I think are the most overt offenders in this regard. These movies would be almost completely incomprehensible if we didn't live in a world crowded with Chewbaccas. It's kind of like a game of Three Card Monte with objective reality beind the thing being carted around.

A review of the movie: I thought The White Witch was scary, and the movie a kind of crusader-in-training movie for the kindergartner set. Very weird to see children in combat. I hope it becomes even more odd and not the way things are in the future. The movie confirms once again that the root of the fantasy genre is always a tale of genocide. C++ (B- with extra credit)

* Ah. It was Chuck Palahniuk. Always a source of thoughtful and reliable theories.

December 1, 2005

"This abatement kills a couple of birds and sends a message to the birds to not come here," said Freyda Stephens, general manager of the center. "It's not intended to kill everything."

I wondered on reading this, how do birds recieve this "message?" Do they publish news? Smoke signals? How?

-- From The Seattle Times

November 21, 2004

Jack, don’t touch that.

But Jack, never one to listen to the rules, put his hand right into the blazing fire. His hand burned right to the bone. His sleeves caught on fire. He jumped and hollered and cried, “I shouldn’t touch that.”

Jack don’t touch that.

Did Jack listen? No. He grabbed the cactus. A hundred and twenty-three needles pierced the soft skin on his palm and the inside of his fingers. He jumped and hollered and cried, “I shouldn’t touch that.”

Jack don’t touch that.

But Jack never one to listen, didn’t put his hand on the soft blanket. He didn’t lie down on the bed and instead fell asleep standing up, refusing to touch that. He learned his lesson.

July 8, 2004

New York City has a typeface, and several foundaries. In this case the Hoefler Typefoundaries face, Gotham, could be said to be a New York face. London has Times New Roman. California has a typeface and the foundary, Emigre. Perhaps Modua could be a said to be a Californian face, although I think the entire Emigre set would be better representation. Does Seattle, with Adobe (aka Aldus) have a typeface?

Gov. George E. Pataki said in his Fourth of July cornerstone speech that the 20-ton block came from the Adirondacks, "the bedrock of our state." He did not note that its 26 words were set in a typeface steeped in local origin, developed four years ago at the Hoefler Type Foundry in the Cable Building, at Broadway and Houston Street, by Tobias Frere-Jones, a native New Yorker.

The typeface, Gotham, deliberately evokes the blocky, no-nonsense, unselfconscious architectural lettering that dominated the streetscape from the 1930's through the 1960's in building names, neon signs, hand-lettered advertisements and lithographed posters.

From the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/08/nyregion/08blocks.html?8hpib

Gotham
http://www.typography.com/catalog/gotham/index.html

New York, then, has a typeface.

California has a typeface. I think the range of faces produced by Émigré [http://www.emigre.com] make sense, reflecting a mix of Californian things, the digital aesthetics (fonts designed to suite bit map production), embracing faddish fashion, the infusion of Hispanic culutre, and also the influx of high modernism that came as a result of getting a buch of German professors before World War II.

Modula (early font to fit bit maps)
http://www.emigre.com/dp/getfontpage.php?PModR.html

Fairplex (based on strip mall hand painted signage)
http://www.emigre.com/dp/getfontpage.php?SFaiNMed.html

I wonder if Seattle has a typeface? We've had Aldus and then Adobe, so we must have civic minded typedesigners in the city. Maybe Warnock Pro?

Designed by Robert Slimbach, Warnock Pro is a new Adobe Originals type composition family named after John Warnock, the co-founder of Adobe Systems, whose visionary spirit has led to major advances in desktop publishing and graphic arts software.

http://store.adobe.com/type/browser/P/P_1709.jhtml

May 28, 2004

Knock Knock
Who’s There
Racoon.
Racoon who?
Racoon pushing a shopping cart.

I read a book of knock knock jokes to my daughter. I told her knock knock jokes. And she learned them. Almost.

Explaining knock knock jokes is no fun:

1. Find a sucker.

2. Say “Knock Knock,” to your sucker.

3. The sucker says, “Who’s there?”

5. Reply with the setup. Example, “Orange.”

6. The sucker repeats the setup as a question followed by, “who?” Example, “Orange, who?”

7. Reply with the punch line. In general this will be a pun based on step 5, or a response based on the sucker’s question (step 6). Example, “Orange you glad to see me?”

Explaining the deconstructed knock knock joke is less fun than no fun, so here’s an example:

Say: Knock knock.

Sucker: Who's there?

Say: Maggie the interrupting cow.

Suicker: Maggie the int--

Say: --Moo!

April 23, 2003

The abc game - learning the alphabet in 123

March 12, 2003

Sometimes, the news beat the police.
Hands and feet had been found in a canyon,
or bones had been discovered in the desert.