In Praise Of The Pixel Pushers

Design by Hannah Ljung - Grafisk Utbildningsfonden - Uppsala Sweden

I first became aware of the significant importance of visual communication the day I helped banish all art on my college campus.

It was during my sophomore year of my undergraduate schooling, when, as a member of both the lesbian, gay, and bisexual student group, as well as the AIDS awareness student group, I assisted in the implementation of Visual AIDS‘ Day Without Art, in observance of World AIDS Day. Launched on the first day of December in 1989, the observance (since renamed “Day With(out) Art”) was intended to make the public aware that AIDS can touch everyone, and in order to inspire positive action, some 800 art and AIDS groups in the United States participated, shutting down museums, sending staff to volunteer at AIDS services, and sponsoring special exhibitions of work about AIDS. On my college’s campus, we raided the theatre department’s stash of black fabric, and covered nearly the entire campus with it, draping every sculpture, every art installation, and every painting (even the portraits that were displayed in the administration building of our college’s founder and of his wife, our school’s namesake) in the heavy black cloth.

On a campus such as ours, noted for its art and artists, it was a visually arresting display of how much a part of our daily lives art actually was; it was profoundly compelling, to see all of those expansive swatches of black fabric obfuscating the art that was all around us.

Years later, having graduated from college and fallen rather unexpectedly into a career of graphic design, the importance of visual communication was made abundantly clear to me once again, upon my first reading of what is still one of my most treasured essays on the practice of graphic design, by designer Jessica Helfand. Although excerpts from this essay appear in many places throughout this blog, it seems fitting to repeat them here, again, today, on the anniversary of the founding of Icograda, the International Council of Graphic Design Associations, and on the 15th annual observance of World Graphics Day.

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.

Now, as a jaded designer who has practiced the craft of graphic design for nearly fifteen years, this passage may read like a no-brainer. Of course graphic design is everywhere, all around us, communicating its messages to us either explicitly or, if it is done very well, implicitly. However, as a designer who was relatively new to his field when he first read this essay, its message was one of awesome importance; it is not every day that one realizes what a profoundly privileged place one inhabits, when their career is entirely about the effective communication of messages, both textually and visually.

This realization was almost as powerful for me, if not more, than the realization of how profoundly important art was in my everyday life, on that first Day Without Art of years before.

Graphic design is the most ubiquitous of all the arts. It responds to needs at once personal and public, embraces concerns both economic and ergonomic, and is informed by numerous disciplines, including art and architecture, philosophy and ethics, literature and language, politics and performance.

It is this power, this special, ubiquitous nature of graphic design and visual communication, and its ability to effect change in the world around us, that Icograda’s World Graphics Day celebrates. Informed by and informing countless disciplines and practices, design and its designers wield the power to effect change in equally countless arenas of daily life. We see this power in TEDTalks that link design to technology and innovation; in the branding and rebranding of corporations, products, and services; in the efforts of designers to practice their crafts with gazes toward the future, and sustainability; and in the work of experience designers, designing to effect change in the way in which an audience interacts with content on the Internet.

Graphic design is a popular art, a practical art, an applied art, and an ancient art. Simply put, it is the visualization of ideas.

Ideas that, when executed effectively, may facilitate real change. Everywhere. And all around us.

I am aware, on a nearly daily basis, of how fortunate I am, and of how proud I feel, to be able to call myself a designer, and to practice the art that I practice.

But it is on this day, every year since I first became aware of this design “holiday,” that my pride swells just a little bit more than usual.

Happy World Graphics Day!

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NOTE: The above-quoted passages are excerpted from Jessica Helfand’s stellar essay, “Paul Rand: The Modern Designer,” which appears in Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture.

Filed under: Art, Books, Design, Editorials, Events, Personal , defining moments, egreetings, history, Icograda, Jessica Helfand, linkage, memories, needful reminders, World Graphics Day

Everything Is Science Fiction

James Graham Ballard - 15 November 1930 to 19 April 2009

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that is my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again…the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul. — J. G. Ballard

I was a latecomer to the J. G. Ballard fan base. This did not stop me, however, from being quickly, deeply affected by his work, and from thinking, for the first time in years when discovering a “new” writer, as I had when one of my editors at HarperCollins first introduced me to the work of Thomas Bernhard in the mid-1990s, “How had I not already read this writer’s work?!” This is precisely how I felt upon reading Ballard’s Millennium People for the first time (of three times; I read it again, twice, immediately upon completion) early last year. So today, in the middle of only my second reading of Ballard’s Super-Cannes: A Novel, I find myself deeply saddened by the death of such a brilliant, visionary writer.

His work focused on, as Tomorrow Museum’s Joanne McNeil notes in her thorough, excellent retrospective of Ballard’s life and work, “a distrust of technology and human nature […] a sense of the absurdity of shopping malls and an intuitive understanding how architecture, especially in its most banal forms, affects our emotions. Ballard shunned email and Internet, it was irrelevant to his obsessions. His concern was space, the body, travel, the dark underbelly of a suburban tract housing development.” And I think it is precisely Ballard’s distrust of technology vis-à-vis human nature that drew me so strongly into his work, much as Bernhard’s distrust of society vis-à-vis human nature drew me so strongly into his own.

And I think it is this quintessentially Ballardian wariness of technology, and the future, the very things about which he wrote passionately and prolifically, that will be missed the most.

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RELATED SITES

• For fellow latecomers to J. G. Ballard’s work, the above-referenced article at Tomorrow Museum, JG Ballard, Our Greatest Living Novelist Is No Longer, is an excellent starting point, as are the Museum’s J. G. Ballard archives.
• Ballardian.com, “a very unofficial site exploring tropes and motifs found in the work of J. G. Ballard,” edited and published by Simon Sellars, also provides an astonishingly thorough compendium of the novelist’s work, life, and thought. Sellars’ Ballard obituary is a great place to begin.

Filed under: Architecture, Books, Technology , Ballardian.com, J. G. Ballard, linkage, science fiction, Thomas Bernhard, Tomorrow Museum, urban appreciation

Blue Light

In this morning’s installment of “Brunch with Bartelby” over at Justin Plus One, I served up some smut for brunch. There are, however, still some leftovers in the warming oven.

Go read “Don’t Just Suck My Cock” right now!

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FUN FACT! In the above-referenced piece, I mention an anthology of women’s erotica that includes a piece written by Graze Zabriskie (yes, David Lynch’s Grace Zabriskie). After doing a bit more online digging, I discovered that the anthology is Pleasures: Women Write Erotica (ed. Lonnie Barbach, Ph.D.), and the title of the piece is “Screaming Julians” copyright © 1984 by Grace Zabriskie. If you can, find it and read it; it’s an awesome piece.

Filed under: Blogging, Books, Writing , a-list, aaron travis, being servicey, blue light, celebrities, erotica, grace zabriskie, linkage, memories, pimpage

Don’t Just Suck My Cock

“What makes good erotica?” my best friend AV Flox inquired of me a few evenings ago, during a sort of mini-interview for her latest BlogHer article on whether or not gender determines how good your erotica is.

It took me only a drag from my Marlboro Red to reply to her query. “Well, obviously being a good writer, and using language well,” I said. “Also being able to fully explore all elements of fantasy. Also I think that old fiction workshop saying of ‘write what you know’ is doubly true for erotica. Write what you know, or, write what you fantasize about, and I think if you do, it becomes a much better piece, more involved, more engaging.”

But I couldn’t help but continue to wonder, long after our mini-interview was concluded, what does make good erotica? Simply being a good writer does not always mean that one’s turns of literary phrases can successfully produce a tumescent cock or a wet cunt. In fact, upon reflection, I realized that quite a lot of the really amazingly hot erotica I had read throughout my life was written by non-writers.

My introduction to erotica came at what for some would be an embarrassingly early age, but I love that I discovered it at age eleven, while fetching my mother’s painkillers from one of her night tables during one of her migraines. Thankfully, my mother was a discriminating woman of letters, so the anthologies of erotica that I found were amazing, and I spirited them away to read in our attic while my mother was sleeping on a chaise lounge in our parlor. They were fabulous, these explorations of desire and pleasure, by women named Erica Jong and even Grace Zabriskie, full of lush descriptions and…well, far more erotic to me than the V.C. Andrews sex scenes with which I had heretofore been obsessed! And the pieces I liked the best, the pieces that turned me on the most, even though I was only eleven and wouldn’t experience anything close to what I was reading for, oh, at least another year, all seemed to share one thing.

They pushed the envelope.

They weren’t stories that were just about staccato breathing, baritone moaning, and cocks in cunts. They were stories that were about sex, yes, but bizarre, almost other-worldly, definitely full of inventive fantasy. They, as all good literature should, erotic or not, told stories, and told them well, pulling their readers out of themselves and into the minds, into the flesh, of their characters. I remembered them well when, several years and many occasions of group sex in a Swiss boarding school later, I picked up my first anthology of gay erotica, in the Rizzoli on 57th Street. Curious to see if gay erotica was any different from the straight erotica I had read years before, I bought it, read it, and was astonishingly disappointed nearly from the very beginning. Surely, I thought to myself, these writers can formulate sex stories that involve more than cocks in mouths and asses in filthy roadside rest stop men’s rooms? (Although that story, in hindsight, actually was kind of hot, now that I think about it more.) None of the stories seemed to pull me in, to communicate their fantasies in a way that would sufficiently engage me enough so that I wanted to be in their characters’ flesh.

Until “Blue Light.”

About halfway through the anthology, I stumbled across Aaron Travis‘ “Blue Light”: a paranormal, nearly epic erotic tale of submission, domination, and sexual witchcraft. I was breathless nearly the entire way through it, as the story built, as the psychologies of its main characters became more clearly defined and pulled me into them, and, of course, as the epic evening of sex unfolded in a Texas attic between two muscular doms, as one forces the other to submit to him with a variety of…arguably quite disturbing tricks. It was, and is, precisely what I think good erotica is, i.e., a story that not only makes its readers turned on, want to masturbate, and come, but, through its evocative use of language and seductive creation of fantasy, of pushing that fantasy to its very limits, that’s what good erotica is.

In a recent piece published on her personal blog, Laura Roberts, founder of (and my editor at) Black Heart Magazine, a web magazine of “the dirtiest minds in literature,” pondered the question, “Is erotica dead?” Her piece concludes with the following insightful, and, I think, rather true, thoughts.

We need more than pumping and thrusting. We desire more than mere male-takes-female fucks. We are interested as much in our lovers’ brains as we are in their genitalia, and making their naughty bits tingle with frenzied longing. We want to caress our lover’s brains as much as their parts. It is at least as much the anticipation that turns us on as the act itself. And the waiting is the most delicious part of any game. Don’t you think?

And I think that pretty much fills out and completes my definition of what makes good erotica.

It’s not just about sucking cock. It’s about fucking the mind, as well.

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A Note From The Plus One: For those of you interested in Aaron Travis’ “Blue Light,” I highly recommend looking it up. It is currently available in The Best Of Best American Erotica 2008: 15th Anniversary Edition (ed. Susie Bright) and Homosex: Sixty Years Of Gay Erotica (by Simon Sheppard). I promise you will not be disappointed.

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Note: Originally published at Justin Plus One on 19 March 2009.

Filed under: Books, Editorials, Writing , a-list, aaron travis, alucina, bdsm, being a gay, being servicey, blue light, dick lit, erotica, family, fantasy, justin plus one, linkage, memories, pimpage, sex

Revisiting Lexi Featherston

“The Secret Life Of Lexi Featherston” is one of the top ten visited pieces of all time in my blog’s archives. This is largely unsurprising, given that it borrows heavily from the “Splat!” episode of the final season of “Sex And The City.” It appears to be a favorite destination via Google for fans of the HBO series who are up late having girls’ nights in, drinking too many Cosmopolitans although they’re now considered gauche, eating pints of Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby after ordering in Chinese (again!), or, you know, listening to Sade’s “By Your Side” on repeat and crying at their laptops because they’re depressed / they’ve been dumped / they feel they will be alone forever, etc. (Not that I’ve ever done any of those things!) Sometimes I roll my eyes when I check my site stats for the week and see 23 additional hits for this entry and feel pity for whomever was searching for quotes from that episode. Sometimes, however, my curiosity is piqued, and I click through to revisit my own ruminations on the fictional notorious, bed-hopping, Page-Six-featured party girl.

I did that this morning.

One of the great things about guest blogging is that you are constantly looking at your material, or considering your content, through the eyes of a new audience, so that even if you have written about, say, relationships, before, you gain a new perspective from writing about that topic for people who have never before read your ruminations on such. This kind of attention to your content (well, you know, if you’re me) also inspires you to take a fearless inventory of self. It’s what I did yesterday, and all last evening, and all this morning, following publishing my inaugural post here at Justin Plus One.

Bothered by the fact that I could not place an analogy for the “scorched dick” phenom I wrote about yesterday, that I was sure I had read somewhere before, I pondered and searched both my brain and the internet until it struck me, and quite literally took my breath away. The analogy appears in the final paragraph of Elizabeth McNeill’s novella, Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair. For those unfamiliar with the work, it is the book upon which the 1986 film “9 1/2 Weeks,” directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke, was based. Far better and infinitely more emotionally and psychologically compelling than the film, the book chronicles the female protagonist’s descent into a sadomasochistic relationship with a man, by the end of which she has relinquished all control over her body and her mind.

When my skin had gone back to its even tone I slept with another man and discovered, my hands lying awkwardly on the sheet at either side of me, that I had forgotten what to do with them. I’m responsible and an adult again, full time. What remains is that my sensation thermostat has been thrown out of whack: it’s been years and sometimes I wonder whether my body will ever again register above lukewarm. – Elizabeth McNeill, Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair

Upon further reflection on this passage, and also on a comment in response to Justin’s thoughts on my “Scorched Dick” entry, in which I had, with no reservations whatsoever, proclaimed that I think monogamy in any sense is antithetical to human nature, I began to wonder to myself, around midnight (which is usually when these thoughts begin), is my sensation thermostat out of whack? Am I so damaged by my previous failed relationships that my capacity to love someone, to be in a relationship, will never again register above lukewarm?

A four in the morning phone call from one of my oldest and dearest friends in San Francisco, during which he told me of his own new and promising relationship, representing the last of my closest friends potentially hooking up and seriously settling down, did little to comfort me. “I am,” I thought, borrowing a line from still another episode of “Sex And The City,” “going to be that sad old spinster who dies alone in his apartment and becomes food for his eight cats because he is all alone!”

Then I checked my site stats, and chose, just shortly before beginning this piece, at around six this morning, to revisit Lexi Featherston.

At nearly four years old, it’s a dated piece, in terms of both personal and cultural references. But it speaks to who I was at the time: a lonely, semi-whorish homosexual who claimed to everyone who would listen and the internet that he adored being single…but secretly wanted to be with someone else.

I have lived Lexi’s life, and I have loved it, embraced it, clung to it, carrying it with me, flailing behind me, from one lounge, from one man, from one bed (public or private), to another. But the events of the past weeks, and particularly of last evening, have made me yearn for something else, and have made me realize just how much…just how much I purport to love being single.

And how so much of that is simply empty bravado.

Suddenly, right there at my desk, I furrowed my brow, smiled a wry smile, and thought to myself, in shock, “Huh. That’s actually not simply empty bravado anymore. I actually do love being single.”

And just like that, I remembered why I loved Lexi Featherston.

My worries about my maybe-out-of-whack sensation thermostat vanished. Because who can say if my capacity to love someone else, to be in a relationship, as I once did, will ever again register above lukewarm? And who cares? When what’s really important is my unabashed happiness for my close friends who are pairing off. My memories of all of us partying at Tunnel when we were, like, five. Manolo stilettos. Living in the most exciting city in the world. And yes, smoking, next to a fucking open window.

Just as long as it’s not on the 18th floor.

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Note: Originally published at Justin Plus One on 17 March 2009.

Filed under: Books, Personal, Relationships, Writing , a-list, defining moments, dick lit, humor, justin plus one, linkage, memories, needful reminders, television