Not entirely enthralled

Someone I follow on Twitter is a fan of the design site Inthralld. They often posit idealized or push-the-envelope interiors that take Architectural Digest to the max, and then three steps beyond.

The latest is this book igloo:

It’s an installation using salvaged books, and without any sort of adhesive; so at least no tomes were harmed during its production.

Here’s the thing, though: as with a lot of these Inthralld installations, this one just strikes me as wrong, all wrong. It would not be possible for me to walk into a room with this in it and not start browsing the titles. As soon as I saw one that looked interesting, I’d pull it out of the, uh, installation, and that would be all she wrote.

Know what I mean?

Here’s another: a “dome-shaped bookshelf suspended over home office space”.

It's probably the WYSIWYG in me, but why the hell would you put books in the most inaccessible part of the room, further out of reach than the African masks and antelope skulls? Are you expecting to use the skulls more often than the books? In that case, why even have the books?

And as for having to climb a ladder to get to them—that’s just a recipe for disaster. You find your book, pull it out, and of course you’re going to start reading it before you get to the floor. So, you miss a rung, and there you are, hanging from the damned ladder with a broken leg.

And you’ve probably lost your place in the book, too.

So, no, Inthralld. Just no.

Box of the past

I’ve begun sorting through a carton of photos, slides and negatives dating back to my first camera—a Nikon S3 rangefinder that was older than I.

(That camera accounts for the name of this blog, BTW—because before single lens reflex (SLR) cameras you looked through the viewfinder to compose your shot, but the lens took a slightly different picture than what you saw. That delta between viewfinder and picture is called the parallax view. Cute, no?)

I’m doing this exercise because I’m about to ship off the pictures I really want to maintain to a digitizing service, and it’s a lot of work. Back in the day of film, children, I would shoot a roll of film in hopes that I’d produce maybe six or seven interesting photos, and those would be the ones I’d print. But I’ve still got all the positives, negatives and slides.

Meaning photos from four continents, associated with a multitude of events and experiences, so it’s taking some time to go through it all.

(Plus, I need to find a light table to scope out the negs. I recall why I used to shoot slide film—including Kodachrome of beloved memory: there are people who can look at negatives and tell what’s a good shot and what isn’t. I’m not one of them. And for damn sure, without a light table I’m hosed.)

Well, you don’t care about all that. What I also do is take snaps of things I find interesting, or a commentary on my surroundings. (I’ve shared some of the scenery of the Silicon Valley right here in these blog pages.)

So here’s one I shot when I was living in LA, in the 80s. For some reason which now escapes me I’d gone to Glendale and was wandering around. I saw this store and immediately snapped off the shot. It’s not going to make the shades of Dorothea Lange or Lee Miller twitch in the least, but it tells you a lot about the great state of California.

As we say here—America, gonif!

Workers of the world

Today being International Labor Day, I’m going to tell you about a recent experience trying to get a logo designed for an organization I’m helping out.

It’s a really great group, dedicated to helping the unemployed find jobs by connecting them with people who know people in companies all over the Bay Area. I volunteered to be product manager and to lead the revamping of their website, because—although they call their connections concept Networking 3.0—their website harkens back to Web 0.5.

Maybe even Web 0.25.

I won’t even tell you their URL. It’s that bad.

(The current functionality isn’t much better, either, although the executive director keeps referring to the features as “apps”. They’re not “apps”; they’re lists of members, of companies and jobs, with some links you can click on.)

But I digress.

As part of actually making this outfit look what I call “web real”—like a viable, professional entity that has both gravitas and technological credibility—I created a full-on design specification, with positioning, organizational background, use cases, etc. I also finally persuaded the ED that we need a logo. We can’t get the site actually designed & built until we have some sort of brand around which to, you know, design it.

This being a non-profit, our original email blast for a pro bono designer didn’t net anyone. And we have two events to attend this weekend, so the production of a logo became a priority. The ED therefore opened an account on elance, posted an excerpt from my design spec and then handed it over to me to deal with.

Within 12 hours we had 16 proposals, and here’s where the issue of international labor came in.

I already had issues with the idea of crowdsourcing, because it essentially reduces every commission to a freefall to the lowest bid. For a while I was part of Guru, a similar site; but I realized that if I put forth a bid that was fair compensation for the talent and level of expertise I bring to the job, I’d always be underbid.  I wasn’t being outrageous, either; I was estimating the amount of time a job would take and what I would get if I worked at an agency to do it.

Sites like these pit creative vendors against competitors in third-world countries who will always underbid. And for many, many “clients”, getting something for next-to-nothing is the most important consideration. (Like people buying air travel tickets who’ll go with the carrier that’s $5 less. The result being that airlines compete for the lowest airfare and the lousiest service. Or the entire Wal-Mart business model.)

Keep in mind that, by my estimate, designing a logo will take a minimum of four hours of work: absorbing what the client’s business is all about, their market, their ethos, their competitors, etc., developing appropriate colors (in our case, since we don’t already have them), designing several possibilities; getting client feedback; editing the designs; and finalizing. It took me eight hours to go through the 16 vendors’ listings, look at the work they’ve done before, start sifting them out and supplying the winners with information about our organization.

We got bids from designers in the US, Pakistan, Mexico, Yemen, Colombia, Argentina, Trinidad/Tobago, Bulgaria and the UK. The highest was $383.56; the lowest, $45.

This is our global economy in a nutshell—corporations are doing this on a grand scale, offshoring jobs (and tax payments) to places where they can pay workers a pittance and not worry their heads about safe working conditions and extraneous stuff like that. And I was essentially being asked to participate in this in a very personal way.

Made me very, very uneasy. And not just because on something like this I prefer to sit down across a table from someone to tell the story and answer questions.

In the end, I chose two designers, one with a bid of $170 and the other at $80. Both from the USA. I filled out detailed questionnaires about our organization Friday morning; both replied that they had enough information to produce designs. I’ll get initial output from one today, from the other tomorrow.

I worry, though. I worry that without the actual human contact (not even a phone call—strenglich verboten in the elance model) my questionnaire answers don’t give the full idea of what this organization does so it can be represented in a logo. I worry that I’ve helped support a system that turns everything into a sweatshop. I worry that I’ll get useless designs back and we won’t have anything for the two job fairs this weekend—so I’ll have a crappy web site and no logo to give job seekers any confidence in our ability to help them.

I worry that the Internet, instead of opening real opportunity, just reduces everything to the lowest common denominator.

Bookish broad

As some of you may know, I have books. I don’t seem to be able to go anywhere without picking up one or two…or twenty.

There’ve been trips to London where I went up and down Charing Cross Road buying books—to the point that my luggage had to be hand searched at Heathrow because the X-rays wouldn’t penetrate the dense layer of literature. Once I had to buy a gym bag at a London street market to accommodate all my additions.

And then there was the trip to Paris, when I bought so many at museums and bookstores I had to take a taxi to the Gare du Nord because I knew that even with wheeled bags I wouldn’t be able to get across the correspondance of the Métro (where there are beaucoup de stairs). The guy who helped lift my bags onto the Eurostar is probably still walking funny.

Or the jaunt across the Channel to Normandy. On my return the boot of my car was filled with equal weights of books and Champagne.

When my London household was being moved back to the US, one of the packers commented that he’d never seen so many books. (Or shoes, but that’s a different matter entirely.) I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was only packing three bookcases and I had five more at home.

Luckily my Virginia house had two stair landings large enough to accommodate two bookcases each, and I was able to put six cases in the office upstairs for history and reference; three downstairs for fiction, poetry and psychology; two on the upper landing for arts and children’s lit; and two on the lower landing for travel, literature, classics, drama, etc. Oh—and one on the main floor by the kitchen for cookbooks.

The books were the prime challenge when it came to finding a permanent home here. Once I liked a place I had to start imagining where the cases would go, and one by one the prospects got crossed off the list. With some people it's the grand piano; with me it's the books. (At least 70% of them and all but five of the cases spent the last ten months in storage, so getting them out where I can read them is a major endorphin rush.)

Okay, so on this last move, distributing my collection over the three floors, it occurred to me that perhaps it’s time to cull the collection some. I mean—I did give away a couple of cartons worth when I left Virginia, things that were really tatty or duplicates. And I got the collection down to around 2700. But I thought maybe I could cut back some more.

So I went through with a machete—I mean, I was utterly ruthless, hacking left and right on three floors. (The landings here aren’t big enough for bookcases.) and I’ve pulled out a grand total of…twelve books.

I refuse to confess to being pathetic. Maybe it's a Bas Bleu thing.

What I learned at CES

Thoughts inspired by CES 2009 in Las Vegas:

There are some conditions under which it makes sense to have nothing but a drink for lunch. Walking seven miles on tradeshow floors before noon is one of them.

The days of cool giveaways appear to be over. Gone are the tee-shirts, water bottles, sports bags, even key-chains. (I got ten years’ worth of tees to wear to the gym from one Comdex show; and a bag to schlep them in from an InterOp.) These days you’re lucky to find a piece of hard candy or even a cheap pen. Times are officially, definitely hard.

Wolfgang Puck’s pizza crust isn’t a patch on my neighbor Heather’s.

Having a “name” company on your convention badge is an invitation for people to vent or to hit you up for free advice/help. For the guy at the SilversSummit whose mother wants to create a brain-fitness website but needs a tech company to help her develop and host it—I’m not your conduit to success. No amount of following me around the room asking for my business card or email is going to change that. (If I’d had the name of my last employer on the badge, no one would have noticed I exist.)

I hate being indoors where people are smoking.

I’m not that wild about being outdoors where people are smoking.

What is it with Glaswegians’ aversion to personal hygiene? I was talking with the CEO of a company that’s bringing to market a seemingly cool device (although the $1000 price point is problematic), and his breath about to melted the titanium frames to my glasses. And I wasn’t in that close proximity to him.

I so definitely need to lose weight—this was grueling. But there were people there with a good 100+ pounds on me, and people in their 70s (from the looks of them) cruising the floor. How do they do that?

Playing piano at Nordstrom is not the most demeaning job in the music world. Singing arias in Renaissance dress as part of the “Streetosphere” isn’t even the worst. Poling a gondola for tourons on an indoor fake “Grand Canal” and singing truncated arias is the worst.

After a day on the trade show floor, the only thing that keeps me from total crippling is a bath with Japanese mineral salts. If those of the male persuasion think that's too girly, well, I guess you have to suffer for your machismo.

When you are a waiter in a jumped-up, grotesquely overpriced Mexican restaurant within a closed hotel ecosystem serving mediocre food to captive tourists and conventioneers, attitude is a tip-limiting move. It’s also ludicrous.

Eating in any restaurant that caters to tourists and conventioneers is a crap shoot: they for sure don’t care about repeat business. (Corollary, learned while at William & Mary: never eat at a restaurant that has parking for tourist coaches. Food will be bad and service surly.)

Never fly coach out of Vegas on a Sunday morning. Too close to people who obviously spent every waking moment of the previous two days in town drinking (and also none bathing). That stale distillate stench oozing out of them is hard to take. (I thought my seat-mate was going to hurl at one point, but he managed to keep it in.)

Vegas—so not my kind of place. It’s entirely dedicated to pandering to the worst instincts of humanity: greed, irresponsibility, excess, stupidity, selfishness, lust; if I’ve left anything out, them, too. Vegas doesn’t just encourage bad and self-destructive behavior; it depends on it.

These mega hotels are so huge it requires a big effort just to get outside—if you can find your way. All that relentless fantasy carefully calculated to over-stimulate your activities: no rest, keep moving, keep spending, until they’ve shaken the last nickel out of your pockets. Then buh-bye—make way for another coach- or plane-load of suckers.

Sometimes coming home is the best part of the journey. Even if it’s Seattle.