The Wake's Progress

You may recall: I wrote a rather scathing assessment of the new National Harbor complex recently (evidence here). There was really nothing "wrong" with the place; my skin naturally crawls with paranoid terror when faced with glitzy "place-making" developments like that.

Instant city-center: poof! Now be happy and go shopping...

It's a matter of taste. To me, the place stank of artificial life; of manufactured opulence and cufflinks and hair-plugs and expense accounts. Classless and gaudy and overdone, like a child's sci-fi exaggerated vision of corporate success. Perhaps I've read too many J.G. Ballard novels (Super-Cannes for instance).

Then, Mr. T posted a comment which reminded me that The Awakening had been moved out to the new Harbor complex. Aahh, I must have missed it when I was out there looking at the conference halls.

For the unaware: The Awakening is a sculpture of a bearded man, some 100 feet in length, partially embedded in the earth as if he's crawling up from a premature burial; a foot, a leg, pair of arms, and a tremendous head with nostrils flaring and mouth gaping in what could be a yawn. Or a scream. It was originally installed at the end of Hains Point in Washington DC's East Potomac Park, and was to be a temporary fixture there.

My mother took me to see it in 1980 when it was brand new (uh, that would make me.... twelve years old at the time). And it was awesome. The vision of that sculpture stayed with me throughout my years of living in New York, Arizona, and Maine, and when I finally returned to DC, it was one of my top five places to re-visit.

And it seems many folks my age had a similar relationship with that silver psychotic dude in the ground. He was like a pagan deity; raw and intense and he ignited a child's imagination simply by being there.


After reading Mr. T's comment, I had to return to the National Harbor and this time, go directly to the harbor itself. Avoid all that conference-hall insanity at the Gaylord and visit the Old Silver Man in his new digs on the wrong side of the Potomac. And being the sentimental fool I am, I didn't approve of what I saw.

Of course the Hains Point site was temporary, but we were rather used to seeing him where he was. He was mighty like a grandfather oak tree, a witness to the creation of the world. Seeing him plopped in the middle of this wretched Disneyland of corporate hotels and cafes was like a violation of nature. For those of us who grew up around here in the '70s and '80s, The Awakening was almost a rite of passage; EVERY 12 year-old boy had to go crawling around the dude's mouth.


Look at him. He's clearly unhappy about it and just wants to get back to sleep. I'm turning forty in a few weeks, which gives me the right (nay, the imperative!) to be a sentimental dweeb about these things. And dweeb I shall.

AIPAC of wolves in the halls of power

M and 9th Streets NW, Washington DC: Big-head war-criminal Bushie and a Code Pink activist duke it out like champions outside the Washington Convention Center during this morning's bit of the AIPAC conference.

As I was strolling past on my way to work, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and House minority leader John Boehner were inside the Convention Center doing.... whatever it was they were doing in there.

AIPAC? That's what this was?

Living in DC encourages news-junkie behavior, and I'm as guilty as anyone. But I need to detox once in a while, and go into a self-imposed current-events exile. It's like a purification ceremony.

Thus, I've been in total news-blackout mode for a while, and I had no idea the big American/Israeli dry-humping fest was going down. All I knew was, for the past three days, there have been an UNGODLY amount of chartered buses traveling in police-escorted convoys across downtown, to and from the Convention Center.


I hop off the 79 bus at 9th and M for work, so that puts me in the thick of the action in the morning. Yesterday, I finally looked past the dozen or so idling buses at the fluttering banner and saw it was the annual American/Israel policy conference.

Ah. Okay, so that explains it.

But still, I don't care who you are: Congress-folk, executive branch, visiting foreign heads of state: Ain't NOBODY important enough to warrant all that noise and gridlock.

These are supposed to be the leaders of democratic nations, right? So how the hell can they be expected to sensibly govern the "free world" if they're carted around like emperors? Sends the wrong message, says I.

If you're a high-ranking diplomat and you're due to attend or speak at a conference of global importance, just book a room at a decent hotel somewhat close to the venue and get there early, like any of us normal peons would. Jesus Christ, y'all, you'd think there was an air-strike on Capitol Hill or something.


And that's another thing: seems like it's wasting the DC Police Department's time, putting too many officers on duty guarding empty buses while they idle outside the convention center.

At least Code Pink was there to lighten the mood this morning.

Gomez Explains Binary Code

Gomez Explains Binary Code: A humble boxer demonstrates his grasp of computer arithmetic with zen-like precision.

In other news:

Dunkin Donuts has pulled a web ad featuring a photo of Rachael Ray, because it offends Fox News pundits. Michelle Malkin said Ray's paisley scarf resembles a Keffiyeh (middle-eastern headdress), and Fox News was quick to "educate" the American public that these scarves are the fingerprint of Palestinian terrorism.

That's right: Donut-eaters are now supporting worldwide terrorism. I'm lookin' at YOU, mister jelly-filled! You're in league with RACHAEL RAY! That giggling pixie is Guantanamo bound, and not a moment too soon!

Christ on a crapper, people!

Is it any wonder why Americans are seen as the over-privileged idiots of the world? If THIS is worthy of outrage, it would be fair to sack the talking heads of Fox News because they "could be mistaken" for actual journalists.

And finally:

Head over to Prince of Petworth, where my latest guest post went up yesterday: a brief examination (with some selfish navel-gazing) about the McMillan Reservoir, and its place in the neighborhood. Good stuff.

You gonna finish that donut? I didn't bring lunch today...

Five Easy Pieces

1. The street memorial at Sherman & Colombia is still with us (photo). Now it sports a random black t-shirt, hung like a shroud on the head of the largest Care Bear in the galaxy. It's been almost five months since the reckless accident which inspired the memorial.

2. I actually witnessed one of DC's "Pothole Killer" trucks on Irving this morning. It's a triumph of engineering: All functions are controlled from the cab, as the patch is sprayed from a remote arm that extends over the front of the vehicle, making it resemble a robot scorpion from Monster Island. One of these trucks can patch the average pothole in 45-60 seconds, has onboard GPS navigation, and can "kill" over 100 potholes in a shift. Bravo.

3. There must be a special place in HELL for the people who, years ago, ran the cardboard punch machines that rendered otherwise intact vinyl LP sleeves into "cut-outs". Damaged goods. Blemished like violated waifs.

4. Ziff Davis announced last week they're filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Probably a good thing, therefore, that the Art Director job with their embedded design vendor didn't work out for me a few years ago. Plus, it would've meant a move to NYC: the ultimate mix of blessing and curse. AND to add punch to the whole thing, that vendor company was sold recently and seems to be doing very little print anymore. These days, the publishing world seems a little more paranoid than usual. I can smell the layout and resume PDFs distilling as designers and Art Directors everywhere quietly prepare for...... something.....

5. Please, in the name of GOD, Billy Mays, stop yellin' at me.

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]

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...