August 2003 Archives

You know you're growing up when you learn how to turn things off.

So the last couple of days have been a real maelstrom of activity 'round these parts. Lawn mowed! Leaves raked! Rooms swept, dusted, and tidied! Little things fixed after months' worth of "Yeah, I'll get to that sooner or later." This place is like a whole new house. I'm lovin' it. We should have guests drop by more often.

In getting-older news, it's my homeboy Hoser's birthday this weekend. Drop him a line, let him know you care.

In style news, there's a neat article this morning over on The New York Times (oh, just register already!) on Searching for a Defining Look on the Road to Ben and Jerry's, which examines what exactly "Vermont style" is, just in case Dean snags the White House. After reading the article, I'm liking the idea of President Dean more and more. There's something greatly amusing to me about the visual of a kayak with the Presidential seal.

Finally, in personal news, things are going well. I have a new client that I'm really excited about (she's an inventor, and I'm doing my first piece of honest-to-goodness product design), I have a friend in town this weekend whose company is extremely welcome (and entirely mexcellent), and the weather out here is slowly easing into September – which, 9/11 be damned, will probably always be my favorite month.

Oh, and keep those requests coming in for a spot on the Fray Day lineup! I've still got some spots to fill, and I'd love to have y'all join me on stage.

Oh, wow. Filming begins late next month on The Life Aquatic, the new film from Wes "The Royal Tenenbaums" Anderson and Henry "The Nightmare Before Christmas" Selick. I wish I could preorder my tickets right now.

Boy, if this won't make you swear off fast food forever... Kid orders a 20x20 at In-and-Out Burger – in other words, twenty patties and twenty pieces of cheese.

Boy, crap like this is exactly what Friday afternoons were invented for.

You're making me pretentious. You wouldn't like me when I'm pretentious.

Well, I finally did it. This evening I ran down to the Apple Store in Tyson's Corner and picked up my very own copy of Final Cut Pro 4. The reason? I need to do a very short "talking head" Dreamsbay commercial for some friends of mine. I'll see if I can post the final production somewhere – I have some ideas as to what I want to do, but I don't have a lot of time. Let's see what rabbits this beauty can pull out of its hat.

Surefire sign that this software is the real deal: its manual comes in four books. No wonder the box was so bloody heavy. Oh, and to any naysayers who wonder why I didn't just pick up Final Cut Express: Soundtrack. And besides, I want to have FCP on my resume. It never hurts to have more marketable skills. (Especially in this economy.)

While theatlantic.com is The Atlantic Monthly online, I am mindbendingly flattered by the comparison over at KevinSmokler.com. Thanks, man!

Courtesy of this morning's romp through k10k: the very smooth, elegant and fascinating web home of Working Title Films.

Which reminds me, I need to keep hammering on the flashier relaunch of dreamsbay.com. So much to do...

Courtesy of Jish, comic military hand signals. "This is what I think of your opinion." Heh.

This morning, the one and only Jeffrey Zeldman dropped a little bombshell on the Web World: he and Douglas Bowman will be working to redesign apple.com using web standards. Way to go, Zeldman! Beautiful wife, tiptop clients... Sounds like 2003 is shaping up to be a red-letter year for the stockingcapped wonder.

Gawd, 'Hydra' was such a better name than its new forced moniker. Lawyers. Sheesh. (Not you, Mike or Badger.)

Courtesy of the lovely Ms. Spritzer: Watsabi!

So stupid, but still so much fun. Yes, I'm one of those dorks that misses those commercials.

"Wharf yarns and spoon drift"!? Damn, I've got to go brush up on my Carousel.

Oops, almost forgot. One more link before bed. Yesterday afternoon I posted two old stories to my Writing Journal over at geoffreylong.com/writing for your perusal. When I say 'old stories', I mean it – Luna, a brief, moody piece about loneliness and religion, was written back in 1995, when I was 17. (It was a very good year.) The Love of the Library, meanwhile, was written in 1999, as a sort-of Valentine's Day card. Sort of.

I swear I'll start posting honest-to-goodness new writing over there soon. I swear.

So I sat down this evening to post some more thoughts on my NYC trip, and wound up polishing the templates instead. Nothing major, just a reworking of the monthly archive pages, a retooling of the individual entry pages, the clarification of the permalink location on each post, the addition of a new friend to the Blogroll, a redesign for the comments and trackback screens...

OK, so maybe it was a little major. At least that justifies this horrific 4:30AM bedtime. Yeesh.

I'm still planning on posting more NYC thoughts. Look for something late tomorrow afternoon.

It's official – I'm the wrap-up guy on the Fray Cafe 3 CD. It's a full hour of storytelling from some of the web's top talent, including Inkblots alums Derek Powazek, Kevin Smokler, Dave Thomas and Ben Brown. They're a steal at $15. Pick one up now!

Oh, and don't forget to swing by Fray Day DC in October! I'm signing people up for slots already, so please shoot me an email if you're interested.

There's only one phrase that can describe my trip this weekend:

I wrote this one way back in 1995, while I was still in high school. It's kind of neat to go back and see embryonic versions of my favorite themes, moods and rhythms appearing in these old stories.

Like Auld Lang Syne, Luna is a mood piece, this one primarily about religion and friendship. It's awkward and clunky in places, but I still like it.

I wrote this short story for Valentine's Day in 1999, and published it in Inkblots shortly thereafter. It wasn't a Valentine's Day present for anyone, just another romantic little story about love, albeit considerably quirkier than Auld Lang Syne.

Oh, and one more thing. New Blogger = New Coke. Blecch. I have several friends who have all recently been ported over to New Blogger, and every single one of them came back to me saying, "Help!"

One by one, I'm migrating them over to Movable Type. (Ken, you're next – right after I get back from NYC, I promise.)

So I'm heading up to New York City today, on a noon Acela train to see my friends Talon and Jess in The New York International Fringe Festival. Talon's in a play called Poseidon! An Upsidedown Musical, and Jess is in one called This is a Newspaper. I'm so proud of both of 'em. I feel a standing ovation brewing already.

I'm also excited because this means I'll get a chance to see some of the New York stuff with my friends Laura and Ben, as well as get the local tour with my friend (and roommate) Nick Ferraro. This should be, as they say, a time.

I'm leaving today and I'll be back on Sunday. Updates are likely to be intermittent at best, but I'm hoping to have some cool pictures to share when I get back.

Last week, another small one-page design hit the Web: www.toddneumann.com, via Sound Advice. It's a very cool, calm design, an adaptation from Todd's original print campaign.

Hey, all. One of my personal initiatives these days is getting my writing back up and running. I've been posting every so often about the progress I've been making on my novel, but I've really been looking for a way to easily post new work over to my personal site.

Today I'm rolling out the first draft of my Writing Journal, a Movable Type-driven weblog of sorts over at geoffreylong.com/writing/. I'm going to try and post a new piece of work there every Monday, to solicit your feedback. If this works, I might post more often, and if it doesn't, it will probably wither and fade. But, hey, that's the nature of experimenting in public.

The first story, which I posted this afternoon, is called Auld Lang Syne, and is a short story about two old, old friends who meet up to quietly celebrate New Year's Eve. It's a little mood piece, nothing blowing up, just a small character piece. I hope you enjoy it. And, hey, if you don't, I might post something where stuff blows up next week, so stick around.

In keeping with my prior pledge to continue to add new works and experiments to this section, I'm adding in a Movable Type installation to serve as a light content management system. I may or may not transition each of the subsections here ('fiction', 'poetry', 'essays' and 'other') to the new system, but what I am planning on doing is posting a new piece of work here every week or so, in order to try and increase my creative output. My first piece, Auld Lang Syne, is just below. Thanks for reading, and feedback is greatly appreciated.

This short story was written a few years ago, as a study in mood. It's a quiet little story of two old, old friends who meet at a small restaraunt to celebrate New Year's Eve.

As always, feedback is appreciated.

For Those Needing 32 More Bits is a NYT article briefly describing the advantages of 64-bit processors over 32-bit processors. The case is definitely being made for upgrading. I am, however, hesitant to rush out and purchase one before Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) ships, as Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2) is only a 32-bit system. Apple has apparently included a slightly modified version of Jaguar on the new G5s in order to take at least some advantage of the new processors, but it remains the case that I'm unwilling to shell out another $130 in a few months for a basic system upgrade. I wonder how many other people will be reluctant to purchase one for the same reasons.

There are other things I would really like to have in a new computer as well. A wireless mouse and keyboard, for instance, or some new monitors from Apple that might be cheaper with much, much thinner bezels around the outside, to accommodate multi-headed systems. These things are not really necessary, however. (Of course, the necessity of my buying a new machine at all is debatable, but that's a different point altogether.)

The sad part is that at the tip-top of my list of reasons for buying a new machine is, well, games. New games always drive hardware components to their absolute limits, and some of the games I want to play with my friends could really use some more video RAM. But, if I buy a new desktop machine, well, it's not as easy to lug to a LAN party. Oy. No obvious solutions to these problems.

I grew up an only child in a big old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, Ohio. I had parents that liked to read, and our house was always littered with books and magazines. Figuring out where my love for books came from isn't exactly rocket science.

Influences

I still remember vividly some of the books that really made an impact on me when I was kid. Franklin W. Dixon's Hardy Boys Mysteries were huge for me, as were The Three Investigators books and the wonderfully moody The House with the Clock in Its Walls, although whether I was more impressed by John Bellairs' text or Edward Gorey's amazing illustrations is a tough call. I was also an absolute fiend when it came to mythology, ghost stories and cryptozoology. I was the kind of dork who was more than happy to stay in from recess and read, or work on the school newspaper.

Like many writer-designers, I've also enjoyed comics for years. Not so much the Superman/X-Men scene (although there's been a little of that), but more the Sandman/Transmetropolitan/Bone scene. I'm a sucker for stories about old gods stumbling around lost in the here and now.

I'm also a huge sucker for magical realism. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Jonathan Carroll, Italo Calvino, Louis de Bernieres... Any time a truly excellent writer uses fantastic elements to illustrate either sweeping concepts or the nuances of life, I'm interested.

Literary versus enjoyable

My attitude towards literature is simple: make it good, and make it fun. In my opinion, "literary" writing that isn't any fun to read is, nine times out of ten, a waste of the reader's time. If you want to write it for yourself, that's great – here's your diary. Just don't expect me to be interested.

I created Inkblots in late 1994 for several reasons. First, my high school didn't have a literary magazine, and the principal balked when he found out my proposal was very firmly against censorship. Second, I wanted to create a literary magazine that would contain more vibrant, interesting stuff than what the literary snobs were cranking out. I wanted to do a magazine about literature, culture, and even technology. I wanted to do the Rolling Stone of literary magazines, something that your average not-a-moron would actually enjoy reading. The formula worked: by the time I retired the magazine when I graduated in 1996, we were shipping copies overseas. It was great.

When I entered Kenyon College in the fall of '96, I did so with one goal in mind: to study writing. I struggled with a lot of people whose attitude towards writing differed greatly from my own, but I also found a lot of allies. Even better, while at Kenyon I also discovered digital storytelling.

Since then, I've been studying different ways to use new technology to tell stories. This website is an extension of those studies, as is the online version of Inkblots. I'm planning to keep adding new experiments and works to this site as often as I can, so please stay tuned.

There is no better way to spend a Sunday than sitting by a pool, sipping strawberry margaritas, and playing Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast with two of your best friends. I even got a new self-portrait (there to the left) as a momento. :)

Won't you look down upon me Jesus,
you gotta help me make a stand,
just got to see me through another day.
My body's aching and my time is at hand,
I won't make it any other way.

Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain,
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end,
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend,
but I always thought that I'd see you again.

God bless James Taylor.

I found out this morning that the story I told at Fray Cafe 3 at SXSW this year has been picked to be included on a CD. I'm keeping my fingers crossed – I know how sometimes things get cut at the last minute for space. One way or the other, I'm downright tickled.

I listened to the edit job Derek and Scott Andrew did on my story, and they did a fabulous job. They tightened it up by slicing out the obvious 'ums' and 'ahs', and lopped off a meandering coda at the end that, when I'd relistened to the live recording later, made me wince. The result is a very neat little performance that I'm proud to call mine. (I was, however, mildly astonished at the obvious influence Henry Rollins has had upon my storytelling style. Wow.)

I'm also gearing up my personal publicity engine to promote Fray Day DC. All y'all that are interested, now's the time to let me know!

So there's this huge client project I've been working on part-time for over two years now, which has finally been handed off to a proofreader. I printed the whole thing late last night and dropped it off to her this morning in a big fat box. Keeping in mind that I'm using CSS to turn off almost all the navigation elements and extraneous images whenever a page in this site is printed, thinking of that box makes me feel better about the sheer amount of time I've spent on this baby.

The site, when printed, clocked in at somewhere over seven hundred and fifty pages.

That's over a ream and a half of paper, and a ton of toner. Dang.

Wow. I've gotta throw some link-love over to Sarah McAuley, a friend of my good man Kevin. Sarah's design style is totally up my alley – complete with faint double-hairline boxes and soft colors. Wow. Makes me want to redesign.

Nah.

I am contemplating doing a palette shift here this fall, though, migrating the colors for our autumn edition over to cranberry and cream. You know, good warm fall colors. Hm.

I think I've just found the cornerstone for my new diet. Check it out.

From last Friday's Guardian, Nick Park on Hayao Miyazaki. Neat.

Hm. Maybe I should pop over to the Best Buy and pick up some more Miyazaki for tonight's media diet. Hm.

I am always on the lookout for new media, be it books, music, movies, whatever. Somehow, the last few months have been a regular mediastorm – I've picked up a whole stack of new books, stumbled over some great new bands, and, as the great and almighty Jish has recently done, I now post my summer movie consumption. This ain't gonna be pretty.

Seen:

• X2 (X-Men 2)


• Matrix Reloaded


• Hulk


• The Italian Job


• Finding Nemo


• Alex and Emma


• T3: Rise of the Machines


• Pirates of the Caribbean


• Charlie's Angels 2


• Lara Croft: Tomb Raider 2: Yadda Yadda Yadda


• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen


• L'Auberge Espagnole

To Be Seen:

• Bad Boys II


• Dirty Pretty Things


• S.W.A.T.

And ya know, not too many on the 'seen' list are really making onto my 'gotta own' list. More proof positive that I need to either look into more foreign and indie flicks or start making my own, dagnabbit.

This afternoon I took a break from all the stuff I've been working on this weekend to see L'Auberge Espagnole, a really touching little film about a French economics student studying abroad in Barcelona. It was the perfect movie for me to see right now, as it totally tapped into both my own European experiences and my current 25-year-old confusions. The only thing that bugged me about the film is the way Audrey "Amelie" Toutou was used as a draw, when she was only a tertiary character in the film. She did a good job, sure, but she wasn't on screen for very long at all, and her performance was just okay. I'm planning on catching Dirty Pretty Things when I get a chance, for a serious Toutou experience. L'Auberge, though, was just a great movie, one of those nifty films you add to your DVD collection so you can foist the "What!? You've never seen..." bit on your friends later.

As a Creative Person, I have been blessed/cursed with mild manic depression. There's a real joy in making something cool, and an equally depressing sensation when I've been in a rut for a while. Yesterday I got to experience the high of making stuff again, which was, as always, amplified by showing it to a client who loved it.

The project started earlier this week as something supremely simple: an 8.5x11 four-to-six page dealie with maybe some color. Which was what I created, dutifully, making a very simple, elegant, straightforward little piece of work. It was good. It was okay. It was acceptable.

However, as I was working, I started thinking about their content, and more importantly, their intent. The client wanted to show their investors that what they had was something they had spent a great deal of time on, something important, something real and not just a nebulous, pie-in-the-sky idea. And then came the little "a-ha moment", as we used to say back at The Advisory Board. What if...? And then I got a little Alan Moore, so to speak.

I left a rushed voicemail on my client's phone, telling them that I'd be back in an hour or two, I had an idea and I needed to go get some supplies. I hopped in my car, popped some Ben Taylor Band and Keller Williams into my CD player (great stuff, I'm telling you, especially Keller's "Freeker by the Speaker") and roared down to The Art Store in Georgetown, where I spent way too much on supplies. A Kolo photo album. Some Kolo paper. Some glossy photo paper. Some ivory light cardstock. Some 28-pound high gloss HP printer paper. Some vellum. A hole punch. I grabbed up all this stuff and headed beck to the house, the whole time waging a war in my head between the gibbering creative half and the morose practical beancounting half, which was whining, "Yeah, but this is so much more expensive..." The creative half won out, because, fuck, if the client didn't like it, I liked it, and I'd just not bill them for the experimenting time and I'd use the supplies making something similar for myself. (So there.)

For the next two hours or so, I worked furiously to turn the presentation 90 degrees sideways, so it was no longer 8.5x11 tall but 8.5x11 wide, used a chisel as a makeshift screwdriver to dismantle the photo album, and did some impossibly neat magic tricks using Photoshop and our printer. When I was done, I'd made a book. A very elegant, beautiful little book. And I was high as a whole flock of kites. I was also nervous as all get out. What if the client didn't like it? I needn't have worried. Later that evening, I met the client at a coffeeshop right by his house, where I handed him a small drawstring bag. He opened the bag, drew out the book (complete with a glossy print of his logo square on the cover), and proceeded to love it. As he was flipping the pages, he grinned and said, "You have such a cool job."

He was right. I do. And I'm lucky to have very cool clients. I'll post pictures of it to my portfolio when it gets done-done. :)

Michael Sippey: "I don't miss Wired... I miss the idea of Wired." Me too. I miss the days when a fat bundle of overcaffeinated optimism showed up in my mailbox. I've even kept clippings from old issues of The Industry Standard, like old love letters, to remind me of what life used to be like. All of us are in a rough spot right now – economically, politically, and quite often romantically. When I get a chance, I'll probably pick up a copy of Gary Wolf's Wired: A Romance, a bottle of whiskey and sit alone in a lonely room.

Play it, Sam.

My friend Kevin Smokler turned 30 today. So far the guy has done a kick-ass job on a lit zine (the now-sadly-closed Central Booking), has been rocking the proverbial block on the lecture circuit, launched the wicked cool Virtual Book Tour, and is about to publish his first book. Talk about inspiring. Way to go, man. I hope I'm that cool in five years.

There's an absolutely beautiful little snippet of a Frederico Garcia Lorca poem over at Caterina.net. Spectacular.

What a great idea -- Gnooks asks for three authors whom you like, and then gives you a list of other authors you might like based on your list. It's like the Amazon recommended list, only cooler. Neat!

I could have told you that.

Ladies and gentlemen, your Moment of Zen.

Somewhere out there, George Washington is doing 4500 RPM in his grave.

Oh, man. First Arnold, then Gallagher, and now Gary Coleman will be on the ballot. I so wish I lived in California.

Let the mock "Clash of the Arnolds" campaign posters begin...

A dinky little one-pager, but another Geoffrey Long design project just hit the Net: bighouseaudio.com. Whee!

Damn, that girl has a way with words.

Oh, this is too much fun. Apparently my true name is Black Harry Read. Quit yer snickering.

As promised, here's my big announcement: on Friday, October 3rd, I'll be hosting Fray Day 7 DC at Common Grounds in Arlington! I'm really honored to be a part of this, and I hope all y'all around the DC area will join me for an evening of personal storytelling!

If you'd like to see the venue, I've posted two photocollages to the event weblog. Check 'em out!

Spent a couple of hours tonight rereading my novel from the beginning. Instead of adding words, I wound up chopping stuff out, pruning out unnecessary little phrases, and more or less tightening it up. I now have a lower word count than I had yesterday, but a little stronger story. I can't afford to do this too many times if I'm to make my self-imposed deadline on this baby, but I'd say the work is a little better off for it.

I don't believe I mentioned this before, as the site wasn't entirely ready for prime time, but I wanted to direct your eyes over to The Black Sea Trading Company, a website I designed a little while back for my friend Collin Klamper. Please note the elegant, subtle flavor of the design, not unlike an elegant, subtle wine.

Seriously, I love these guys. If you'd like to try some nice, intriguing wines you probably won't find anywhere else, these are the folks to talk to.

Oh, great.

Man, I don't know if it was the result of kicking my creative brain into overdrive yesterday for all that writing or what, but my dreams last night were whacked. I can usually remember parts of my dreams, but there were two big ones last night that were just weird. Both of them dealt with things that are easily translated into my anxieties these days, with very little analysis required. Both were quietly disturbing.

For someone who places such heavy stock in dreams, my subconscious has been really annoying pretty much all year. Sometimes I wish it would just leave me alone. I mean, really. Either help, or sit down and shut up. Dang subconscious.

Yeah, I think this picture pretty much sums it up.

For those of you keeping track, today I spent a couple hours working on my novel, Bones of the Angel. I'm up to 96 pages, or 25,442 words, which is a little more than 1/3 of the way through it. (For those of you who really want to tapdance on the graves of my failed experiments, I'm also just over halfway to where I'd hoped to be by the end of November 2002. For future reference, never try to use a project you care about for NaNoWriMo.)

Today was definitely a good day, though. I've managed to pen 3,830 words, or 17 pages. I've also managed to finish Act One (titled The Angel in the Rock, at least for now) and lay down a few important expository pages at the beginning of Act Two (titled l'Histoire Secrète des Anges, again, at least for now). I've also managed to sort-of-clear a hurdle that I'd been worried about for a while now, which deals with an issue that arose while I was doing research. The book will be odd, and funny, and adventuresome; Act One ended with a scene that I think would have fit decently well in a John Woo film, assuming said film wasn't The Hulk Mission: Impossible 2. (Thanks, Bill!)

I also have a mildly decent-sized announcement to make here very soon. Stay tuned.

Nicked this off k10k – Gabe Kean, art director at the ever-fabulous Second Story and one of my favorite designers on the planet, has just launched his personal site. It's a bummer that he's leaving Second Story, but according to Zeldman, he's "leaving for love", so I suppose that's a good sign.

I wish Gabe the best of luck in whatever he winds up doing next. As should be obvious to anyone, my personal taste in design is much closer to his classic, elegant style than the new hip urbanites that are supersaturating the web with 45-degree angles, blown-out colors and 70s/80s retro-ironic-pop-nonsensibility. (Not that it isn't a perfectly valid form of design style, it's just not my cup of tea.) You can imagine how much I'm enjoying touring his portfolio – his "StoryCards" are beautiful.

In his August column for MIT's Technology Review, the director of the Comparative Media Studies program examines the idea of Videogame Virtue – namely, that children raised with videogames are better equipped to deal with our current culture of continuous partial attention. He certainly has me pegged.

What I'm looking for these days are statistics that show the value-to-speed ratio of said condition; since I've been working from home, I've relied on IM and e-mail for the kind of daily social interactions I used to get in a few seconds at the office, but sometimes you just need to focus to get things done. What's the speed and quality of a worker's output who isn't constantly plugged in? What's the value of social interaction, or instant notification if something changes?

One of the reasons I've been tinkering around with the blueprints for Magellan, my personal command center (yes, I've already named it; yes, I know this means I'm both sunk and a dweeb) is my desire to be more simultaneously aware, utilizing more of my peripheral vision in order to get work done. The truth of the matter though is that I just don't know if I'm going to use Magellan for most of my daily work. Right now I've worn the silver paint off of Kerouac, my PowerBook, because I use it so much in any given day. I can't imagine going back to being chained to a chair – but I certainly can imagine sitting down at least once every morning to a command center that's giving me all my morning's data at once in one customized environment. When it comes time to write, design, animate, or anything else of that nature, I'll probably unplug with Kerouac and go curl up in a chair. Therefore, is it worth something like $5000 to build a state-of-the-art command center? Ah, now there's the rub.

Hey, who am I to pass up a little good luck?