Where In The World Is Atherton Bartelby?

Palma, Majorca - Many concerned friends, family members, and frequent readers of the blogger known as Atherton Bartelby, a graphic designer from Honolulu, Hawaii, have inquired of late as to the whereabouts of this usually consistently frequent blogger, whose last published piece was an unheard-of two weeks ago to this day.


“I talk to Atherton on the phone, like, every day,” said his little sister from her home in Southern California. “But I’ve absolutely no idea where he actually is.” His brother, of Chicago, Illinois, could not be reached for comment.


This morning, however, reports are flooding in from the tiny Spanish island of Majorca regarding sightings of Atherton Bartelby from around the island’s ancient environs. One report confirmed his arrival at Son Sant Joan Airport nearly a week ago; another placed him at La Taberna de Cicerón Tapas Bar in Palma two days later, feasting on sobrassada, arros brut, and ensaïmada with the abstract painter Miquel Barceló and several younger members of the Spanish Royal Family. Finally, just yesterday Bartelby was seen dashing suspiciously into Bellver Castle, a thick manuscript held under one arm.


When asked if she thought these reported sightings could be valid, Bartelby’s little sister sighed and replied, “Probably. That puta could literally be anywhere.”

HA HA HA J/K.

All apologies for my seemingly abandoned online presence these days, but suddenly living my life has made me too busy to sit down and actually write about it. In fact, if you really, really want to know what is going on with me at any given moment, it may behoove your interests right now to simply frequently check my Twitter archive, as I’ve apparently no time and / or inclination of late to write anything about my life that is longer than 140 characters at any given moment of my days.

In short, I have been literally running all over Honolulu from interview to interview to conference to interview (with breath-catching breaks of cocktails, lunches, and dinners in between all, of course), reading a lot, and capturing my experiences and thoughts between the covers of my notebook that will hopefully turn into writing projects within the next few weeks. These include several pieces for publication here, as well as an outline for a novel for (I would hope) publication by someone else at a later date.

I am also just this week on the verge of landing two very exciting, very important professional positions, but I do not want to write about them at length right now for fear of jinxing their outcomes before the final words have come down. Let us just suffice it to write, shall we, that any positive thoughts regarding my chances of being offered both of them that you would care to send out into the Cosmos from the Blogosphere would be highly, highly appreciated.

So, never fear: Atherton Bartelby is still here, and he will, eventually, and hopefully soon, return on a more regular basis. Until he does, however, why don’t you busy yourself with something else fun? Like, say, joining the Color War 2008? Or imagining your own self on the island of Majorca? Or (should you be as ancient enough, as am I, to remember it) simply taking an LSD-laced trip down Memory Lane and watching the following clip of Leonard Nimoy performing “The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins”?

Until then, bon souhaits, mes chers!

[Also, if you can remember actually seeing this piece when it first aired, you get a cookie.]

The Deplorable Trials Of Design

Three weeks ago, I interviewed with the General Manager of a local food service company who wanted to hire a graphic designer to completely re-design its various menus and reorganize and manage their currently embarrassingly inefficient system of updating them and managing their quarterly production. Not an insignificant task by any means, given the enormity of the project.

The General Manager explained to me that he was very interested in me and deeply impressed by my credentials, experience, and portfolio. He then went on to express concern regarding the “stunning” number of applications he had received, all from designers as qualified, or more, than was I. His concern involved the amount of compensation for taking on such a project, versus the caliber of the candidates he was considering.

I smiled. “Why?” I asked. “May I ask what the compensation is?”

Ten. Dollars. Per. Hour. No. Benefits.

I am rather certain that my mouth fell open in shock and awe. I felt like launching into an irrationally vehement diatribe along the lines of, “Are you kidding me? Are you seriously telling me that I could make only a paltry bit more than I made in my first job in retail after all of my subsequent years of experience and a B.A. and an M.F.A.?! Thank you so much for the opportunity! But, um, no thanks.”

But I didn’t. Because, well, because I need a job. So I laughed off the embarrassing compensation and managed to choke out something about the project sounding really interesting (lie), potentially very good for my experience and portfolio (lie), etc.

I was not offered the position. And I was actually kind of happy about that. Not to be egotistical about my own curriculum vitae (ok, I kind of am), but the position would not have been a wise addition to my track record of nearly twenty years with international companies and organizations.

But I began paying more attention to compensation mentioned in non-agency advertisements for graphic designers (my agency experience thus far is a vastly different yet equally as frustrating a rant best saved for another piece). And each mention I found increased my rage ever further. They roughly translated to: “low pay, but fun environment!” and “low pay, but give us a complete re-branding and your work will be seen by everyone!” and (my favorite) “low pay, but free food!” And I couldn’t help but laugh, really, even through my rage, at the ridiculousness of it all. To expect highly-trained and talented professionals to do for you what agencies would bill you tens of thousands of dollars for visibility, a fun environment, and free food? That is a slap in the face to the entire industry of professional graphic designers.

I also couldn’t help but wonder exactly how many of those talented, vastly overqualified designers who competed with me for the $10/hour position were also now shamelessly clamoring for these.

It brought me back to how I felt a few years ago, when my previous firm was launching its third (and my second) visual re-branding, and I was working with a committee of amazing AIGA designers on making local companies recognize the value of good design to good business. I tried to bring my firm on board as a corporate sponsor of AIGA Honolulu, and even designed and conducted several internal office seminars that were constructed not only to explain the aesthetics of our new visual identity, but also to explain the importance of, well, of good design to good business.

And there was just…no interest. No interest from my firm, no interest from my office, and certainly no interest from my office’s CEO, whose favorite catch-phrase to me was always, “What’s so hard? It’s just pushing a button.” (A phrase to which I continually refrained from replying, “You think it’s so easy? Then you push the fucking button…if you know which button it is.”) No interest in admitting the importance of, and in properly compensating the talent of, good designers. And all of these frustrations just fled back when I saw that the only compensation for all of the time, the effort, and the money that good designers put into perfecting their craft is, well, free food.

Perhaps if good designers were paid a proper base salary in the first place, they wouldn’t need the free food.

My point is not to imply that graphic designers are goddesses and gods (ok, it kind of is), but to state that our talents and skills are as valuable as those of any other trained professional, and should be compensated as such. And while I’m quite sure this is an issue experienced by designers all over the country, I limit my critique to Honolulu because that has been my experience for the past ten years.

But also because the gap between compensation offered to designers in other U.S. metropolitan areas in recent searches I’ve performed online, and that offered to Honolulu designers is…well…shockingly large. There is no reason why the amazing talents who emerge from the admirable design programs at the University of Hawai`i or Honolulu Community College, every year, should not be compensated in a manner commensurate with their skills and vision.

And I think that businesses, and, particularly, businesses here, need to begin recognizing that.

As Jessica Helfand once so eloquently wrote:

Graphic design is everywhere, touching everything we do, everything we see, everything we buy: we see it on billboards and bibles, on taxi receipts and on websites, on birth certificates and on gift certificates, on the folded circulars tucked inside jars of aspirin and on the thick pages of children’s chubby board books.


Graphic design is the boldly directional arrows on street signs and the blurred, frenetic typography on the title sequence to “E.R.” It is the bright green logo for the New York Jets and the monochromatic front page of The Wall Street Journal. It is hang-tags in clothing stores, playbills in theaters, timetables in train stations, postage stamps and cereal box packaging, fascist propaganda posters, and junk mail. It is complex combinations of words and pictures, numbers and charts, photographs and illustrations that, in order to succeed, demand the clear thinking of a particularly thoughtful individual who can orchestrate these elements so that they all add up to something distinctive, or useful, or playful, or surprising, or subversive, or in some way truly memorable.

And we are the ones who provide that.

Even, and perhaps especially, the designer who finally “landed” that $10/hour project of which I first wrote.

+ + +

[Helfand passage from "Paul Rand: The Modern Designer," an essay included in Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture.]

A Far Away Voice

I spent most of this past Saturday evening curled up on my bed and writhing in pain (when not running frequently to my bathroom to, well, you know), stricken with some sort of sudden and thankfully quickly-lived illness of as yet undetermined origin. I, of course, was convinced that it was The Bubonic Plague; as I am so rarely ill, I loathe it when it happens. (Possibly the only thing I abhor more is the act of vomiting.) The Painter had already assured me that it was not, in fact, The Bubonic Plague, an assertion I only truly believed when the illness receded sometime late Sunday afternoon. As one may imagine, it was quite a glamorous and sexy Saturday evening Chez Bartelby.

Anyway, this piece is not about projectile vomiting (I know, thank Hera, right?!), but about a dream I had while ill, about a special voice from very, very far away.

As usually occurs when I am this fantastically ill, I drifted in and out of the most profoundly vivid dreams, specific down to the smallest of details. Thankfully, my very patient friend in the SFO was always willing to take my Trans-Pacific calls throughout the evening, and attempting to distract me with conversation. One such conversation concerned our impending purchases of unlocked GSM world cell phones, and I passed into sleep while hearing him compare the features and prices of three such phones.

Which would explain why I emerged into a dream being handed an alarmingly large, very chic, but frighteningly complicated-looking device by whom was apparently my new boss at a (still nonexistent, by the way) new agency. I was expected to use this monstrosity because my position involved a plethora of presentations, extensive travel to Asian markets, you know, the usual. My new boss watched me stare at the thing in trepidation.

“But…” I stammered, “…I like my phone.”

“Nonsense,” she chirped. “These are the latest models and you’ll have everything you need for anything.”

I gasped and jumped in abject horror as a button I had innocently fingered revealed a flip-out mini-CD/DVD player. The thing was an electronic Victorinox!

“Who uses these things anymore?!” I queried regarding the mini-CD/DVD player, becoming increasingly annoyed. “Aren’t my laptop and jump drives enough?!”

“You never know!” she chirped again, calling over her shoulder as she traipsed away from me, “your service is already live and I’ve synched it to the agency’s contact database so you may begin using it immediately. Don’t forget you have that seven o’clock red eye to Hong Kong!”

I stared warily back at the “phone.” The only thing I could think of to do was dial my little sister. When she answered, “Hi, puta!” all I could do was whine, “I need coffee and five cigarettes like now. Meet me at The Standard.”

The next thing I knew I was at The Standard, chugging an Americano and fingering the thing in my hand. All I could do was glare at each feature as I touched the different buttons, each one clicking, whirring out, and lighting up: the phone; the mini-CD/DVD player with LCD screen; the web browser; the camera; the keyboard. I felt a hand on my shoulder and a breathless, “Oh my God, what’s wrong?!”

I shoved my open palm at her, each gadget splayed out for her to see. “This!” I exclaimed melodramatically.

She immediately inhaled in awe and whispered, “Oh my God, Darling! I can’t believe your new agency gave you one of these! Why are you so upset about it?! It’s the latest in communication devices! According to an article I read yesterday on the interwebs, you can contact, like, anyone!”

I stared at her in shock, jaw slack.

“Oh my God!” she hissed at me. “I am so jealous that you have one of these before I have one! I have to dash out to buy one right now! Ciao, puta!” And she was gone.

Suddenly, I was in Hong Kong. I stood at a railing in a park on a high hill overlooking the buildings of the city. It was twilight, and a light mist was falling that was beginning to grow harder as the lights began to come up in the city below. I remember the way the rain smelled, the way the wind felt as it separated the long strands of my hair.

I was still holding my “latest in communication devices,” at which I sneered down derisively.

It began bleeping at me.

I sighed and touched the button that activated the phone feature, immediately answering the call, and tried to sound cheerful as I said into the piece, “Atherton Bartelby.”

“Atherton, Darling?”

I inhaled sharply through my mouth and got a sudden splitting headache.

“I just realized that it’s been so long since our last chat, my Dear, and I wanted to give you a call to catch up and just…just to hear your voice.”

It was my mother.

Down to the last specific inflections in her voice: the pauses; the accents; the way she lilted upward at the end to turn “Atherton, Darling?” into a question.

Everything was so real, in fact, that it took me over thirty seconds to realize that the call was an impossible one, as her memorial service had been five years ago this weekend.

I awoke in tears to my own completely normal yet devastatingly thin Samsung ringing. It took me several seconds to answer it, afraid of what or whom I might hear when I did, until I looked at the caller ID to read “The Painter.” I answered and immediately rushed to describe the dream through sniffles, including the real, impossibly true, sound of her voice.

When I had finished, he said, “You’ve been thinking about her a lot, lately. Any guess as to why?”

I sighed, indelicately blowing my nose. “I don’t know,” I said. “This time of year? My life? I don’t know.”

“Well,” he said softly, a smile in his voice, “for whatever reason, I’m sure that this dream was a very good omen.”