Sonic Circuits benefit this sunday

AN EVENT NOT TO BE MISSED! This will be a special gig to benefit this year's Sonic Circuits festival of experimental music. As you can imagine, putting on these festivals is an expensive affair, with securing the venues and taking care of performers traveling from distant lands... So yes, it's a benefit. And a blitz of crucial music it shall be as well.

More on the actual festival as it approaches (late sept to early oct), but for now, the goods on Sunday's show:

PINKO COMMUNOIDS create a dynamic improvised sound between its three members, using everything from guitars and accordions to found items and bent electronics. The result is an unpredictable bath of sound which covers a wide dynamic range: everything from tickled silence to drones soaked in warm feedback. It's curious music, full of brain vitamins.

TL0741 is the solo electronic project of Pat Gillis. His sound offers a satisfying mix of the playful, the surreal, and the harsh; it never stays still for long. Over a substrate of bubbling sonic ooze (robotic magma?) you might find blasts of static, high-pitched synthetic wind, capsules of vertigo, croaking strangeness... billowing sheets of sound with an edge of menace. Good stuff.

VLT_BLK is a live collaboration between VIOLET and BLK w/ BEAR. The music of VIOLET is often harsh yet precise and delicate, using unusual items (dry ice, autoharp, turntables, aluminum foil) to build layers of monumental and very satisfying noise. Meanwhile, BLK w/ BEAR uses turntables, cello, bass, and effects to create deep drones and heavy trances that can be beautiful or saturated with paranoia. Or ideally, both.

It seems that the VLT_BLK collaboration might be a duelling-turntables situation, which could be pretty devastating.

So get yourself to the Pyramid Atlantic in Silver Spring on Sunday night. Support the future of Sonic Circuits and get a taste of what you'll be in for, when the festival is unleashed later this year. Check the artists' links for audio samples. Other details on the flyer.

Speaking of which, flyer design by IntangibleArts. Click the image for higher-resolution version (or here for an even higher-higher-res version), and distribute at will.

Filters

Geese may come and go, but you may not: A view along the barbed wire fence separating the McMillan Reservoir from Howard University.

The perimeter of the fence makes an ideal dog-walking route. It's a groovy thing to have around, and Gomez adores the Canada Geese that socialize in the water. I'm sure they would adore him as well, if they'd ever get within pouncing range...

Not much else to declare. It's been mad busy around here.

Attended a great seminar-class-session-thing today with the great Edward Tufte, on the philosophy of information design: I'm hoping to inject a little fresh energy into my brain for the magazine's ongoing need for infographics and Dense Financial-Analysis Chart Thingies (or DFACTs, for short).

As always, the challenge is to come up with genius designs on the fly with very little time. Even as a monthly publication, the pages always get to the art dept. with less than a week before it's all due to the printer. So the key is to pre-load the brain with Wicked Awesome Ideas (WIAs) and be ready to boogie when the writers and editors finally deliver the goods.

And it seems Tufte is some kind of GOD in the info-design scene. It was a good class, anyway. Praise Allah for reimbursements.

Also judging a pretty major category for this year's ASBPE publication design awards. It's been a few years since I've judged, so it's good to dive in again. It's always a devious pleasure to see what all the other adorable little Art Directors are up to. We're such dreadful monsters.

So forget I said anything about the Reservoir. More on that subject coming soon.

Lunchtime

Today's high in downtown DC was 72. Now that's damned peculiar.

But it did enable me to have a most enjoyable lunch-break. The kind I love the most, but never actually do:

A brief walk to Julia's, score a bottle of water and a vegetarian empanada (wacky choice for me: normally it's the saltenas or nothing), and saunter up to the benches in Dupont Circle. And feast happily while reading a book.

It was t-shirt weather, for crissakes.

The sky was deliciously gray (I'm no fan of direct sunlight, no idea why) and the wind blustered through the crowd like a hoarde of invisible hooligans: ghosts of a mad mob of Arsenal fans rushing the "visitor" seats during the match with Derby County in February of 1972...

Ah. No, that was the book, not reality.

But for once, it was nice to walk away from the melodramatic horseshit of magazine art-direction (where an attempted photo assignment involving two CEOs and their teams, to be shot in two cities by the same photographer in 24 hours, became a single shoot with just the one CEO because his team pissed off the whole thing with no notice and the other company got The Fear, as if they were about to be invaded by a barbarian army from 60 Minutes, forcing a complete artistic re-think for a cover story within 30 minutes)........

......to leave all that behind for an hour, and simply sit with the blustery gray ghosts, with good food and the air pregnant with the threat of afternoon storms, and read for a bit.

Not a profound experience, but as lunchbreaks go, I'd give it three and a half stars.

Dreaming of a Wet Christmas

26dec07: Rain-soaked commuters scurry under the Chinatown arch at 7th and H Streets NW in Washington DC.

Not much to report. My mind is being stretched in new and dangerous directions. Suffice it to say that, uh, how shall I put this....

[warning: publishing/design industry-geek rant follows]

Going from the wacky, carefree days of magazine design in Quark to a fully packaged workflow using the InDesign/InCopy/K4 bundle (complete with meta-tagging the shit outta everything for the new CMS to feed the pub's website) is rather like going from an anarchist commune to fascist Italy in one move.

No more flowers for me! I'll have the Browning .50 caliber machine gun instead. With the fixed mount for use on lightweight rigid warships. Thanks! Damned flowers. Quark Xpress....
.......What was I saying?

But then, that's the devil's bargain of database-publishing workflows, yeh? Sure it's efficient (so they say), but at what cost? A designer's mortal soul? Will truly brilliant, last-minute, spontaneous layout solutions be possible in this Brave New World?

To be fair, I'm still learning the evil thing, but the K4 evangelists have yet to prove its worth to me. And honestly, the value seems tremendous to the Managing Editors of the world, for workflow tracking and whatnot. InDesign has its faults but I could learn to love it...on its own terms. It's the full K4/InCopy package that looms over my creative process like some Orwellian vampire robot with killer laser-beam fungus eyeballs.

I mean, jeepers... Mussolini made the trains run on time, right? So maybe fascism isn't all that bad.

They say even Jim Jones' monkey drank the Kool-Aid. I think his name was Mr. Muggs. Poor little bastard. [ed note: alas, it looks like Muggs went out with a bullet. So much for bitter monkey irony.]

[publishing/design industry-geek rant ends]

The return of 9353

It was an honor to have a hand in the new 9353 flyer, currently being ripped to shreds off walls across Montgomery County. Those uncooth Maryland bastards.

I do believe this will be a gig of the ages.

Paul (also of The Muffins and Thee Maximalists) is the new drummer for 9353 this time around, and he's a perfect fit for the band: Paul's style is jazzy, spontaneous, and INSANELY STRONG; he's the mad yeti in the room, and his brief association with Magma is clear; who else could beat the hell out of things next to a madman like Vander?

Anyway. Rumor has it the new 9353 has been practicing like beasts in a secret, subterranean laboratory in Baltimore for quite a while, and the result, to quote an insider, is F*CKED.....UP! ...in a good way, of course.

I'm expecting a magical show this Friday. Opening are King Giant and Rustbuckit. Friday, 7sept07 at the 9:30 club.

Every dog has his day.

It's been a while since last post. No time, no time. There has been no time.

It often goes down like that, when we near printer deadlines, and there's still a 5-page feature on the way, because the author is still tracking down another subject for a CRITICAL interview, because THIS GUY will be the one with all the money-quotes, but he's been on vacation, or he hasn't been answering his calls, or his press handler is an agoraphobic Nazi who claims to understand publishing but insists on sending low-resolution head-shots, but it doesn't matter because supposedly I could have designed the feature ahead of time with no raw material and only the faintest notion of what to expect, based on a conversation at a meeting two weeks ago, where the format of the feature was described in some loose-and-fruity brainstorm manner, which means I somehow magically should have had The Big Idea in my head, and can design a perfectly balanced skeleton for the feature with no live copy, no working headline, and an estimated wordcount based on some random, insane spasm experienced during a meeting that happened even EARLIER than the other meeting, where I magically got The Big Idea injected into my bloodstream like Philip K. Dick getting signals from the Supreme Being in VALIS..........

What was I saying?

Oh yes. Every dog has his day.

In this case, Gomez has his day. Or he had it yesterday, when DCist picked the shot above for their coveted Photo Of The Day slot. We had gone to Glen Echo Park in Maryland for a change of scenery last weekend, and much to Gomez's delight, we found a water-fountain with super powers.

Oh, and that feature? It did finally come in, but needless to say it won't be the portfolio trophy piece it could've been...

It Azbee A Very Good Year

And now, a little ego-dance from the graphic design dept.

Above: two of my babies that were recognized this year at the national ASBPE (or "azbee") awards in NYC. A bittersweet honor, since the publisher was sold after these issues were done, and I didn't make the final cut with the new company. Thus, I heard about the winners from some loyal ex-coworkers. Publishing is a brutal gig sometimes. Maybe I shoulda joined the Marines.

But the DHS cover was a blast to do. I wanted to symbolize the newly restructured Homeland Security Department as a hatchling eagle, complete with DHS logo tattooed on the eggshell. Lots of negative space, big type, full-bleed. Simple.

As it turns out, baby vultures look more identifiable as "bald eagles" than proper bald eagles. So, my metaphor for the new Homeland Security Department ended up being buzzard.

...Read into that what you will.

Somehow it worked on the cover, and it won a National Gold (front cover design/news tabloid/80,000+ circ).

The Windows Vista cover was not one of my favorites. Seemed like all the tech magazines were doing cover-stories on Vista, and they all looked the same. Desperate for a new angle, I decided the windows logo looked like a piece of stale sushi, and took off from there. That would've been fine, but the cover ended up being over-thought and bloated with too many puns.

Anyway. It won the National Bronze (front cover/computer generated). I have no idea why...maybe that category was thin on entries or something. Many business-news tabloids end up cramming five story-starts on the cover, so GCN stood out by giving good space for a lead story with art.

Eh, enough about that. I was happy with the vulture/Homeland Security cover, though. The little hatchling guy does resemble DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff a bit, dontcha think?