Difficult and frightening.

My best friend gave me this book, How To Be A Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, by Adrian Shaughnessy, and reading it has made me... unsettled, I guess you could say. I've never been over-confident about whether I'd get a job in design once school was out. I thought that perhaps I wouldn't knock it out of the park on the first go, but that I would end up somewhere cool... after a while, at least.

But in this book, I wind up just reading over and over again that the design field is just super-crowded and competitive and that it's incredibly difficult just to get an interview with studios. It's not helping me out, really.

Did I mention?

Did I mention I'm in a band?

I am.

Investing in myself as guitarist and musician in general has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. And spending a lot of time with the same musicians has also been rewarding in the extreme. It's so great to feel them evolve with the music, read my body language and know exactly what it is that I'm trying to do with the music, where I'm trying to take it.

We have a show coming up soon, a very rare occurrence, unfortunately. It's a thrill to prepare a full set list and rehearse in the span of an hour and a half and be confident enough to let it lie until showtime.

This is really just a typical update.

It really is very hard for me to believe that Christmas is happening again. This event hurtles toward me, and I feel like a deer in headlights, watching it come, not understanding. It's not that I don't like Christmas, it's just that I have apparently fallen through some sort of time warp and I find myself completely unprepared for it this year.

Graduation also speeds toward me, taking the same road as Christmas, it would seem. This, too, seems like a dream; over and over again I try to imagine what it's like to never have to go back to school again unless I really want to... and I fail.

My break so far has been about work and Christmas shopping. Hopefully after that I'll do all these other, more nifty things I've been meaning to do.

I spent a couple hours in garage band tonight and came out with something I'm incredibly happy with. I suppose I have to mention that every time I post in this blog. I really need to start up that website of mine.

It's raining hard outside now. It's delightful.

My truck is trying to die on me, and I don't know if it's in my power this time to stop it.

REEEEEEMIIIIIIXXXXX

Interrupting your day to bring you a random fact:

I love remixes. Even if it's not a great remix, and even if the original song isn't so great, I love covers and I love remixes. I can't yet explain why.

History and Consumerism

I think in both high school and college history when I was lectured on the years immediately following World War Two, and on how the US finally pulled itself out of the Great Depression, and prevented another one from happening immediately after the war, my instructors always phrased it this way, "Factories began building consumer goods instead of tanks and war planes."

This is indeed true, but what is left unsaid is what drove them to make that switch. This phrasing suggests that the factories and companies acted alone, as if they were answering a demand that they knew was already there, that had just sprung up since the war had finished. That's seriously how it was taught to me.

Perhaps it would have been considered "too liberal" or too "down on America" if they had phrased it a little more accurately:

The government had an enormous stake in the factories that had been producing weapons of war by the thousands, and it was the government who had essentially paid all the workers in those factories. What were they to do once those factories weren't needed for the war effort any longer? The nation would sink back once again into depression. To prevent this, someone awfully high up suggested we change our entire economy from one based on agriculture, to one based on consumer goods. And that's just what happened, by God. And it's been just that way for 60 years. The consumer culture was pushed upon the American citizen by its own leaders. Washing machines and cars and refrigerators. Microwaves and televisions.

The consumer culture was sold to, nearly forced upon, the average American. And, it can't be sugarcoated: the fact is, Design shares some of that blame.

donuts on repeat.

Saw a guy in his little honda doing... I guess you call them donuts? Like when a large parking lot is slick with rain and you go speeding through in your car and make a sharp turn and spin around as much as you can? he was doing that. It was neat to watch for a minute or two, but the thing was, this guy did it for something close to fifteen minutes.

About the seventy-first time he makes a lap from one end of the lot to the other, a police car rushes in with lights and siren blaring. I felt bad for him, but man, you gotta know when to fold em.

Leonardo Drew: Existed

I went and saw Leonardo Drew: Existed. This was weeks ago.

It's an interesting juxtaposition of ruined objects arranged on a grid. A few of them evoke something like file cabinets that have been torn into; mangled contents spilling out. Everything is torn and/or rusty; everything is aged. It evokes time and memory, especially when objects—recognizable objects—appear in the form of paper moldings, tangled in the mess. 

It's a bit like memories having a sort of filing system, one that perhaps began as simple and neat, but over time things decay and fall apart, and perhaps memories erode, become obfuscated or confused with other memories. Drew creates very nice visual textures and some good installation pieces. At one point I wondered if perhaps all of the work was too similar; I wondered if there was perhaps two too many pieces, but then the work that was upstairs sort of changed in tone and all was well again. Some objects were encased in glass, as if they might be perfectly preserved, but closer inspection revealed more ruined paper casts, torn and stained and crumpled.

I think it was one of the better exhibits I've seen at the Blaffer.

Mr. Thompson Never Writes Back.

I've written a thing or two in physical journals that I haven't gotten around to putting in here.

But while I have the opportunity, I have to say this:

I just wrote my favorite song ever.

I've been into Garage Band in a big way for over a year now, and it just keeps getting better.

Mr. Thompson Never Writes Back.

Maybe I can figure someway of adding songs on here?

Shrug.

School Tuesday. Argh.