Ink Studies, refinement of

OK, after hitting the books on this all weekend, things look a little different. The front rank, the schools that appear to have both a strong liberal arts college nature and a very strong (for a liberal arts school) art department (or functional equivalent), are Brown, Hampshire, Sarah Lawrence, and Bard. Macalester and Wesleyan appear to be equally strong as liberal arts colleges but do not quite appear to be in the same class in respect of their art departments. Carleton appears to trail those two by a little bit, again only in the art department. There seems to be a noticeable gap between it and Reed, Grinnell, and Vassar in that category, which I am afraid are definitely in the third rank on that basis.

More disturbingly, it appears that there is no way to get a BFA without being a somewhat-accomplished artist at college-application time, and that the BFA level is where one obtains a real design education (see RISD, Parsons, etc). This is a great injustice, if not a violation of my human rights. I think this will have to be resolved by calling up people in the art department at these schools and asking "how do I become a graphic designer or some such thing if I go to your school?"

Brown has a misnamed Resumed Undergraduate Education program, which applies even to old fogies like myself who are not resuming any undergraduate education but beginning it, just a little later than everybody else. It sounds perfect and wonderful, except that it sends its admission notifications approximately May 1. What happens on May 1? Let's see. It is International Worker's Day for one thing. Anything else? Oh yeah, it's the day when all of the other schools require you to tell them whether you are accepting their admission offers. Does a college application plan consisting of "stake everything on Brown" strike anyone else as, um, brave?

P.S. In the spring of 2005, Bard offered a Foundations: Constructivism class. That is just unspeakably cool.

Ink Studies

I've been starting to go over my college list again, this time with art firmly in mind. I don't know whether I want to major in it, but I certainly want to get much more into the visual arts than I have before. And having some kind of letterpress / book arts facilities and courses would be very cool, too. A brief check, starting from my existing list, shows a few that clearly have this: Bard, Bowdoin, Carleton, Macalester, and Sarah Lawrence for sure, possibly the Amherst colleges via Smith. Still need to find out if us menfolk are allowed to take Smith classes or what. Interesting, though, that Reed, Oberlin, and Grinnell don't seem to, although Reed at least has a wonky, specifically "nontraditional" book-arts class or two. Probably not the decisive factor, but it does keep Bard and Sarah Lawrence high on my list, for sure. A little disappointing about Oberlin. [Update: Reed does have a Reprex letterpress. Missed it the first couple of times. Google to the rescue, naturally.] I'll have to look at the others I mentioned in more depth.

Also, a number of these (have to go back and look again, but Bowdoin, Grinnell, Hampshire, and Oberlin for sure) have preparatory programs for students intending to go into architecture and urban planning. Perhaps not essential, but very helpful, to be sure. And... oh... I have to remember what that one school was that offered a sort of one-year post-undergrad urban-planning prep program. I think it was in New York, for some reason, but NYU doesn't sound quite right. Hmm.

Time to get moving on this, no doubt about it.

Creativity, visual and otherwise

My working hypothesis about the pain and difficulty of this whole broadside-design process is that creating visual stuff is a structured creative process kind of like writing, where you need to learn—or be trained in—the techniques and modes of thought involved to get to the point where you can effectively just turn your brain on and start making something. I can write tolerably well, but I clearly remember just how hard it was to learn, how many hours my dad spent working with me on it, and how noticeably my skills developed through endless revisions for school. Hopefully there is a similar process ahead of me here.

I really wish I had had any meaningful involvement with art before, so I could at least have an idea whether this is true. It certainly could be that it's more like programming, where if you don't have the true aptitude you're wasting your time, and if you do have it you realize that pretty quickly. I hope not, though.

An interesting linguistic note

I was reading Neil a funny article at work today, and while I was only lightly paraphrasing it, without even really meaning to I transformed "it's trivially easy to wire up one of these yourself" to "it's trivially easy to wire one of these up yourself". It wasn't that I misread it, I was just rephrasing it in the most natural way to say it, but it was a striking difference even as I said it. Logically, I think the way jwz wrote it ("wire up one of these") makes more sense than "wire one of these up", but I wonder whether it's a regional usage difference or what. It reminds me of this, where asking Australian shopkeepers "how late are you open until?" drew blank looks, but "when do you close" worked just fine. In both cases it seems to have to do with the preposition wandering off by itself.

A linocut at last

I've finally got a concept I'm fairly happy with for my broadside. I found a great design, basically a silhouette of two men, one pointing up at the sky (implicitly, an airplane overhead) and one looking up at it with binoculars. Even though they are shown in silhouette, the figures are clear enough, their poses are striking, and the vertical focus of it is just wonderful. It sort of squares with the "dream in color, dream in volume" thing... sort of... I'm calling it close enough.

The obvious aviation angle makes me want to dig through Wind, Sand, and Stars again, but when I picked it up a week or two ago I was really surprised how bombastic it seemed. Perhaps bombastic is not quite the word, but unsubtle? Direct? Certainly not the captivating and romantic impression I remember from the first umpteen times I read and reread it. Maybe I need to just sit down and read it properly, not skim it in a tearing hurry. But that worries me, all the same. Maybe it's the first stage of Postmodern Disease.

That aside, I think I have a good enough concept to move forward and start pulling proofs of various bits of text in different fonts and experimenting with layout, font combinations, and all that. The "words like gods" broadside hanging up in the print shop is still inspiring; I especially like how the lines in large type form are reasonably coherent all by themselves, even though they are just isolated bits of what Shakespeare wrote. I wonder if there isn't some potential with that, perhaps "all of us... dream in color... dream in volume... fabricate" or something. The shop is open in the evening tomorrow, and I intend to get down there as early as I can and start experimenting.

Finally some headway

I've been treading water horribly on my project, which is to make a broadside for my letterpress class. I think, though, that I'm starting to make a little progress. I'm pretty sure I'm going with the middle Coupland quote there (didn't find any more in Microserfs, on which more later):

I get this little feeling that we can all of us speed up the dream, dream in color, dream in volume, and dream together down south. We can, and will, fabricate the waking dream.

Which is certainly the most poetic thing anyone has said about software. The wrinkle here is that I need to put in some kind of linocut. My current thoughts are to find perhaps some kind of Socialist Realist hammering-man type of thing for the "fabricate" concept, or perhaps Athena. I like the Athena concept more and more as I think about it. Easier to find material, for sure--apparently Socialist Realism isn't considered to rate the same representation in the library as, say, Constructivism or any other ism you might name. Which is about right in my opinion, except it would be convenient right now.

Pynchon

In a moment of weakness, when I had to buy a copy of Gravity's Rainbow for reasons of Art, I was unable to resist taking V. off the shelf too. (A brand-new edition, even!) I don't know how long my self-control will hold out against subterranean alligator hunts or checking whether Seaman Bodine shows up in there also.

I was contemplating using the Kenosha Kid sequence from Gravity's Rainbow for my letterpress project, but once I counted the words even for a minimal presentation of it, just three or four construals, it was pretty clear that it wasn't going to work. I'm not sure it would have the desired impact anyway without at least most of the construals. Besides, I definitely need something about an order of magnitude shorter and less subtle for a broadside.

Microserfs quotes, part 1

I've discovered a few remarkable quotes from Microserfs, along with the "SF coffee bar circa the Dawn of Multimedia" one. (And doesn't that just pin down its time period? A couple of years later and we forgot all about multimedia...)

pp. 28

On the Campus today at sunset, people were stopping on the grass watching the sun turn stove-filament orange through the rain clouds.
It's just something I noticed. It made me realize that the sun is really built of fire. It made me feel like an animal, not a human.

pp. 89

I get this little feeling that we can all of us speed up the dream, dream in color, dream in volume, and dream together down south. We can, and will, fabricate the waking dream.

pp. 115

Should some future historian ever feel the need to duplicate an SF
coffee bar circa the Dawn of Multimedia, they will require the following:

• thrashed PowerBooks covered with snowboarding and Chiquita banana stickers
  
• a bad early 1980s stereo (the owner's old system, after he upgraded his own personal system)
  
• used mismatched furniture
  
• bad oil paintings (vaginal imagery/exploding eyes/nails protruding from raw paint)
  
• a cork bulletin board (paper messages!)
  
• sullen, most likely stoned, undergrads
  
• multi-pierced bodies
  
• a few weird, leftover 1980s people in black leather coats and black-dyed hair
  
• nightclub flyers
  

[come on, this is 2005 and I have to leave off the closing tags on my list items? - Ed.]

Microserfs

Last night I started reading Microserfs again. The first couple of times I read it, I enjoyed it enormously. This time, I picked it up and started leafing through randomly, and I had to put it down several times, saying "oh God, I can't read this." It is frighteningly precise, like a prophecy of my own life. A terrifying thing to hold in one's hand.

At least it gives me hope and inspiration too. And to think I only picked it up in the first place to mine it for quotes for a letterpress project. (Coupland is as quotable as anyone, that's for sure. On which more later.)

Hello World!

I think this will make me the last Internet person to enter the blogosphere. To begin with, I'm going to write about interesting things I am reading. I'll probably throw in the odd piece about letterpress or Seattle or tech stuff or something, but I think I'll mostly let other people handle the tech blogging.