(hypo) critic

One of my favorite hobbies is hating on design. I'm a designer, and I love design, but any human being who spends so much of their lives making, looking at, talking about and agonizing over what's basically an abstract byproduct of our primitively evolved brains, can get a little self-hating.

There aren't really a lot of places to do this online besides Brand New. Total props to Armin of course, for his vision of a global design community, but its asinine comments and windbaggery can fill me with hate like not many other sites can, and I'm including things like youtube comments in my mind. I can ignore stupid shit: racists, other citizens of the seedier side of the internet, dumb videos and bad ads and made up "news" articles. But I guess I take design kind of personally.

I argued with other industry friends today about this corporate redesign of some place I've never heard of that sounds about as windbaggy as its design. Most of my friends liked it. I like the type I guess. As design goes, it's fine. There's certainly worse out there, but worse doesn't bother me as much as something that's "technically" appropriate and "well-done" but just feels heartless and empty and just shy of powerful in any way. I hate the idea. At least they didn't use Gotham. (Although they did use my other least favorite bullshit device in the world, QR codes.) It feels like a giant example of the sameness, the easy way out, and the risk-averse in our industry. Nobody wants anything new anymore, because new things are too scary and risky and not quantifiably profitable. And the last thing I want as a designer is to be expected to do something over, and over, and over again like a facsimile where you can't tell what the original was anymore.

But maybe I'm conflating something personal with the professional. Lately I've come to realize that most of what I expected to get out of work in the past ten years, I can't, or else it happens so rarely as to be hardly worth the pain. I'm really on the fence about if I can be totally justified in being disappointed by something as benign as this, or if I should seek some kind of religion.

Lurpak ad by W+K

Lurpak - Lightest from Blink on Vimeo.

Friends have been circulating this Danish ad for Lurpak. The art direction and editing are just phenomenal, and I know some people will make some snarky critique about food porn, but so what. There's nothing wrong with food porn!

I was super excited to see this and watched it like five times. I feel like lately it's so rare to see such sensitivity to visuals and the power they can have. I actually wanted to eat some vegetables after this.

Fuji Instax

Sonya got a new camera, the Fuji Instax. It's basically an expensive, analog Instagram. But it's real! So, if you'd like to spend a few bucks on each red-eyed shot of your besties, and who doesn't, you should check it out.

Opera

My friend Kat plays the clarinet in the Brooklyn Symphony orchestra, and last Saturday some of us went to go see them play with singers from the NY Opera Exchange at St. Ann and the Holy Trinity church in Brooklyn Heights.

They played a medley of what I guess are some of opera's greatest hits, my favorite by far being Der Hölle Rache Kocht in Meinem Herze (Hell's Vengeance Boils in my Heart, ha), from Die Zauberflöte (the Magic Flute) by Mozart. It's a technically impressive piece to see performed. I cannot imagine how opera singer becomes the career of choice for young people today, but it's kind of amazing that it still does. I hope someone makes a movie about it like Black Swan. I get incredible stage fright, but besides that, the traveling around the world and dressing like you're going to a ball all the time seems pretty cool.

I also have a terrible voice, the kind that nobody can ever hear and has no presence, so in bars or other noisy places I end up yelling till I get hoarse. Sonya keeps trying to get me to do an improv class with her, but I think I'd die from embarrassment. Maybe a singing class? Or at least a class on how to talk properly using your abdomen? I'd probably fail it. I thought I was super smart choosing a career in the visual arts, but now I'm expected to present, so I can't really escape the stage fright anyway.

Gimme by Donnis

Gimme feat. BSBD by DONNIS

via Sonya

One Bicycle

When we moved into our place, neighbors who share our hall space came over and kindly introduced themselves. They were a couple, and super nice and friendly. They had a ton of shit in the hall, which everyone seemed to think was some kind of bad neighbor etiquette, but which neither of us really cared about. I would see the guy once in awhile when we both came home at the same time and we'd say hi, but we never spoke or bonded beyond that.

Then recently, I noticed our hall was a lot emptier. There was only one bicycle now, instead of two. And then the other night, I bumped into him again coming into our apartment, while Andy stopped at the store to get cigarettes.

We talked a little more than usual, comparing apartments and rent and gossiping about our mafia landlord, and he mentioned that his girlfriend and he had broken up. Which I should have realized when the bicycle disappeared, but for some reason never did. There's that weird thing that happens when you meet a person as part of a couple, and you always think of them as a single, indestructible entity.

I feel like everyone I know lately is either getting married or breaking up. Which could possibly be because of the impending apocalypse, but I'm more inclined to feel like it's because we are just getting to that age. Ultimatums, the what-am-I-doing-with-my-life phase where you finally have some money or achievements but feel the same as ever. I like to pretend I'm impervious to influence about things like that, but obviously I'm not. I know we're different from everyone else and shouldn't compare ourselves. But are we really that different? Is there something really strange about feeling happy with someone but not wanting to get married, and not wanting to break up? Sometimes it starts to feel like there is.

Peso by A$AP Rocky

ASAP Rocky - Peso by Artifice Culture

While I'm usually furiously opposed to symbols and/or punctuation stupidly used to replace letters, I can't help but like this song. 

Year One

Last week was my niece's first birthday. I cannot believe it's been a year since I was so traumatized by a hospital room. And, only a year and a half since I cried for the first (and last!) time ever in an office I've worked in.

For a Hlivkova, she had a pretty Korean blowout. There was a bar with awful wine and a delicious full Korean buffet with random, un-Korean things like lasagna. The place was minutely organized to the millimeter, and the workers there had the precision of baby-related Navy SEALS. Although, the woman assigned to feed and care for my niece seemed to make her hysterical by being within ten inches of her, which did made us feel bad.

She did this traditional Korean thing where they put a bunch of objects in front of the baby, who chooses one (babies like to grab things after all), which determines his or her future. She grabbed a bowl of rice, but nobody really understood what it meant because it means something like money – which is confusing when one of the other things is actual money. There's also a pencil and other things I can't remember. Oh actually, they did let her pick a second thing, which was a golf ball. We understood that one even less. 

I think my parents forgot to do this ordeal for me, or else they would have saved up a little more for art school.

A Creepy New Year's 2012

For New Year's, we ended up going up to the Catskills to stay in a friend's relative's hunting house. We like to joke about this being our last New Year's Eve (2012 and all), but for such a beautiful area, it turned out to be pretty creepy.

The area seemed deserted. We hardly saw any other people or cars, although we did hear a lot of random gunshots from hunters. Maybe we watch too much Walking Dead, but it felt like the perfect setting for a zombiepocalypse.

Many of the barns we saw were complete wrecks, which added to the mysteriousness. I have photos of an apparently newly dead deer with its bloody ribcage exposed that I decided against sharing, since it was pretty gruesome. The best part were these trees that were planted in what looked like infinite rows for hundreds of yards. All the branches were cut off except for the very top, which shaded the underneath enough so that if you looked down any of the tree aisles it would fade to black and you couldn't see how far they went. We couldn't get close to some of the coolest spots because of all the giant NO TRESPASSING signs.

All in all it was a good time though. And now we know where to go next year when the inevitable cataclysmic apocalypse comes, to get away from all the future zombies.