I’ve long been fascinated with the myth and reality of Los Angeles. I am reading an article about Helen Gurley Brown (author Sex and the Single Girl, cosmopolitan magazine), and I came across thus quote about the city of her maturation, “There is no better place on Earth to live (or die) by your wits than Los Angeles…”
Quote by Caitlin Flanagan
Based on my one visit, vicarous years through two friends, the writing of Bret Easton Ellis, and endless portrayals by Holywood; I say, “nicely put.”
Sat in my room in the afternoon watching Slacker. It made me nostalgic for Lexington, and Frankfort KY before it. Doesn’t make me want to move to Austin though. I’m sure Seattle was Austin-like at some point.
Where am I now, what am I doing now. I think I started working so that I could play, now i’ve worked my way into this dirty corner thinking that if I play, if I stay up all night, the next day the light-blue collar ghost might set my income into decay.
People find it funny when I make strange metaphors in meetings. They say, where do you get these thoughts, and I’m always struck by the experience that I’m made magical because what is outside of work for me is not simply dinner, friends, a family and home. Frankly i really have little of those anyway, but deep culture. Deep reference. I have a connection, however noological, to the deep shared experiences of my culture. My experience is that of a librarian of the flatlands. Life in the map.
The New York Times has a pretty cool interactive infographic on how people (Americans as presumed by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics) spend their time.
How Different Groups Spend Their Day
Notice that it doesn’t say anything like “Discussing today’s NPR topics” “Preparing locavore ethnic cuisines for 12,” “p-patching” or any of that “Stuff White People Like“ Getting to know the statistical reality of your home is way more important and interesting that practicing the clever navigation of your extremely like-minded social nest.
Reading is also nowhere to be found on this graph.
Design processes simply documented:
Today is Saturday. I’ve given blood, eaten a salad, had my first iced Americano, and am slogging through Jonah Lehrer’s pop-neuroscience-for-high-schoolers-essay-turned-hardback How We Decide.
Here are a few terms dropped in the last few pages that I need to learn a lot more about: asymmetric paternalism (a new political philosophy), loss aversion ( a psychological force), and the framing effect (closely related to loss aversion). If you know anything about these things, let me know.
I made the largest site map I’ve ever seen. Now I need to make a legend for it. 
If I don’t try, learn, love or hate, pontificate on, design for, complain about the design of, or otherwise have an informed opinion about the business or social value latest technology, will I still be marketable?
@potentialemployers – I do have one
@readership – read on:
I work to pay for my interests in food, wine and learning. I also like having something creative to do during the day.
But my industry has current. That current is a mixture of technology and media, and right now those two are sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. It seems like we’re still WAY into the more information faster thing, and I’m starting to believe that this approach has reached it’s ability to improve the quality of life for those of us who feel like we have enough stuff.
The question is, will I be invited to that second interview if I say something like, yeah i heard about it, but I just don’t care. I’m into designing for intimacy not immediacy, and I don’t mean dildoes. Yet.
I was trying to tell a friend of mine what book I’d like to read, and it turned into a rant. She got the first part of it, and here’s the rest of it:
See the kids these days have the 80′s all wrong. They seem to think it was just fun and neon recklessness. But they enjoy this recklessness from of a place of LOVE of life. Their’s is a hedonistic depravation that comes from being young and having too much life and energy you don’t know what to do with. That’s why it works so well with the other du-jour moda: neo-psychedalia. (You like the French and Italian mess I just made there?) Both of these little past-times are born out of the itchy weightlessness of an EXCESS of security, not fear. Not insecurity, but the 80′s were ALL about insecurity. And therefore the meaning of their neon is different.
The truth is the 80′s were one of the most desperate eras of the 20th century. The 70′s had just happened, and the 80′s were this kind of hangover/wake up because the excesses of the 70′s had really wrecked us. The 80s came out of a MAJOR recession. A stadium rock/drama/operatic bubble that burst. When something as huge and dickly as the 70′s blows it’s collective nut all over your decade, you have to do something else. You can’t riff on that, you can’t do a 2.0. You have to stop doing the math and start inventing fucking algebra.
You’re left with new wave and punk as a way out of the giantness. Stripped down, bare, dirty poor, roots. What do we have to do now? Elect an actor as president? What a perfect wait to set the stage for the most clownish, throw-your-hands up, and yell fuck it decade we’ve seen yet. You want malaise? YOu want ennui? You want numbness that would make Roger Waters cry out of sympathy? Look at America between 1979 and 1991.
Did I mention the AIDS? The AIDS came and dominated most of the decade. I remember hearing commercials on the radio as a ten year old that made AIDS sound like a army of marching germs that were 60 miles outside of your home and killing everyone. I remember it sounding something like this, “AIDS is a an epidemic disease for which there is no cure and a 100% fatality rate. If you get it, you die, and the numbers of people getting it are growing.” I heard that for YEARS, not weeks like SARS, or Bird Flu, or Swine Flu. YEARS
Let’s take that fear and add sick, fucked up impossibly anal greed, horrible car design, awkward graspy fashion that was so space-age nobody could decide between puffed up shoulder pads, stiff collars and stillettos vs. the Bronxy acid-washed jeans and sweats (of every shape). Then let’s let Hall and Oates, Kenny Loggins, and some poorly saccharine bitter divorce pop dominate the airwaves.
The 80′s was nothing but people re-structuring. With no real ground to build on. which is why the 90′s came along and tore all the poorly, falsely, unredemptive fakery out again. And replaced with something infinitely worse. Intimate pseudo-sincerity.
Here’s what society HAD in the 80′s that it is definitely now missing: A real, palpable, scary-as-shit threat. Because of nuclear Russian, AIDS, crack cocaine, and the bursted bubble of the 60′s and 70′s that hadn’t redeemed them, people ran topspeed in two directions. 1. was a kind of super-selfishness that made the stiffness of the 50′s seem warm and yummy, and 2, complete abandonment of self.
Remember that the 80′s were nostalgic for the 50′s. There’s a lesson in that too. The teens living then were close enough to it to be curious about it, but too close to the 60′s and 70′s. That was the era for their parents and older siblings. I think we are always a little in love with the decade 1-2 decades before we were born.
I believe that the youth of the 80′s were genuinely disaffected, genuinely so scared one minute and hopeless the next that they really DIDN’T give a single or double shit about anything, and were infinitely liberated by that. Naturally their hearts and minds went towards desperate escape with cheap pot left over and watered down from the 60′s, and even cheaper sex, and most interestingly a new born love affair with extreme acts of human depravity. Murder junkies.
If I ever teach anything to anybody about IA, IXD, or UX, it will be to honor Anthony Colfelt. Anthony mentored me at Classmates.com and at Myfamily.com. He’s been a great friend, guide, teacher, ass kicker and secret weapon for me for a long time. I lean on his lessons daily, both personally and professionally.
I met Anthony at a party. He walked right up after I tried to impress his girlfriend with my fancy job title – Talk about the worst come-on ever. I mean, normally if I’d tried that in a bar, some meat-sock would have come up and just knocked me out. But the kind of guy Ant is, he made me his intellectual bitch for two years. I guess it could have been painful, but it’s hard to take seriously somebody who laughs like Knox Harrington from “The Big Lebowski”, combines Euro-trash and protein shakes, yet hails from the birthplace of Yahoo Serious. And I was always learning from him, so the medium never really compromised the message.
I have unending respect for the guy, for his work, for his discipline, and I hope to be able to return the favor. He works for some group called Different now. I’m sure their being transformed.
“Along the way, his writing will outstrip his reportage. And as his inability to come up with anything new to say about this country builds, his prose will grow more complex, emotive, gothic, desperate, overheated and nebulous until finally, about two-thirds of the way through, there will be a prose-poem of pure meaninglessness as his brilliance finally breaks loose from the tethers of observation and oozes across the page in a great, gopping goo of pure pretension.” -DB from NYT