The future is now

When I was visiting my friend Pier in New Jersey we road the train into the city and went to the Guggenheim.  This was areal treat for me as, being a confirmed "California Savage" it was my first time in New Yawk and I had never been.  There was a small exhibit of Frank Lloyd Writ that Pier wanted to see but the Major exhibition was THE ITALIAN FUTURISTS, a group who I had never heard of (except perhaps in passing) but whose work I found inspirational.

I have always had a "thing" for the 1930s, heck my son is sort of named for Nick Charles after all, so that put this exhibition right in my wheel house.  Additionally, I have always had a "thing" for Italian sensibilities (and women, but we will skip over that).  Finally I have always been a designer trapped in an animator's body.  Put them all together and man, you're in for a internal creative loveliest that is just short of Warhol's dreams.

The artists who stood out most to me was Fortunato Depero, his work just seemed to be animated even when it was stationary.  His ability to make solidly resolved graphic shapes seem to be in motion made me want to experiment with the same ideas in After Effects and MODO, perhaps with a sprinkling of Toonboom for seasoning?

Many of the Futurists stared out as "Turn of the Twentieth Century idealists" but eventually evolved into Mussolini Facists, sort of like starting out sharing a loft with Warhol and eventually becoming a lapdog for the Koch foundation.

I don't know the politics, despite knowing the history, because I never lived in their shoes.  What I do know is that I have always had a fascination for art that is intended to tell a story to influence the underclass and convince them that their despotic leaders really have their "best interests in mind.  From the German and Soviet schools to the "LIFE Magazine glazed doughnut School" this art who central precept, storytelling, has been twisted to a darker cause.  In the futurists though, as in all things Italian, the artists did what they intended but they did it with a style, grace and  sense of humor that was beyond their teutonic brethren.


Italian designers are like that.  At the start of the second world war the Teutonic geniuses from the Black Forrests had the ME-109 as their primary fighter.  Built on an assembly line with subsystems spread all over the Reich (to make sure that ALL the people had a vested interest in their manufacture).  The Italians had the Macchi C.202, whose immediate predecessor had been made of wood like a sailboat.  It was beautiful, agile, light and they could never make enough to keep up...manufacture apparently cut into the workers real lives too much.

At the same time Depero, with typical Italian Pragmatism, moved to New York. Fascism was not his thing but his brothers and sisters in the Futurist movement were becoming affiliated with it.  Depero, who had already been working for Capari (his design for their Soda Bottle is still in use today) and Cinzano.  Depero expanded his work to include Vogue, The New Yorker and Moviemaker magazines.  I think this is where I was originally exposed to his work as much many of his designs are still used to teach Graphic designers to this day.The irony I find in all this is that a designer from the beginnings of the last century, who draped himself in the banner a movement called "The Futurists" produced work a hundred years ago that is still fresh and inspiring today.

Additionally, the art itself seems to have the potential for a new life in the modern tools I use everyday.  For the next few days I am going to be working on a Fly Fishing web side for my pal/patron Wade Lady and I have my catalog of the Futurist exhibit on the bed next to me.  When it gets further along I will post a link.  My goal is to create a site that seems alive and in motion (and looks as far from anything made in WORDPRESS as is possible, I am going to be writing about WORDPRESS soon).

Oh and Pier never got to her Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit, but later that night she took me to Brooklyn and scared the crap outta me so that makes us even.

....notes from the attic (and thoughts on privacy in a Social Media World)

One of the more surprising things I have discovered since I came back to BLOGGER is that all of my original blogposts from all the BLOGS I started are still here, safe and sound. The very thing that drove the hubris that made me leave BLOGGER in the first place, the horrifying idea that all of the stuff I write is archived forever on Google's servers, is turned around.  Now I find that all the stuff I wrote for all those months/years are still on Google's servers...SAFE.  Since I am having to try and recover a lot of my WORDPRESS writing from damaged databases behind shoddy firewalls I appreciate this fact more and more.

It remain surprising to me that this deep into the new information age we still have so many luddites and ignorant boobs who have no clue of the way the world works.  They continue to thunk that they can log into websites, click on adverts on said websites, chat in web forums and still have some form of privacy.  The way I see it is that from the first time you logged into any website anywhere you tacitly gave the world approval to have access to your wallet.  You cannot post about every facet of your everyday life on FACEBOOK and then scream because the NSA, or WALMART is tracking your every move.

Now I know a couple of people who attempt to keep up with internet security and I wish them well.  At the same time though I see that as they lay down more and more layers of protection they are building higher and higher walls around themselves.  Seem a lonely life to me but then I am still recovering from being hacked.

Getting back to all those old posts, I have been reading some of them and I am finding interesting in sites into my life over the last few years so I think I will start posting them here on occasion.  In the past I spread myself too thin to actually accomplish anything creatively and now I am actively trying to reverse that trend.  Why did I have so many BLOGs to start with?  Well that is something for another posting...

Why I have come back to BLOOGER

So I started with BLORRGER in 2002 and had a pretty good run of it, thank you very much.  Before it was purchased by GOOGLE in fact I was right up there on the front page as a "BLOG go Note", meaning the editors of BLOGGER read my stuff at that time and liked it so much they thought they would tell others about it.  In a time before adverts and click through I saw my hit counter go from lassie to spinning like the dials of THE TIME MACHINE.

Then I discovered WORDPRESS and I decided that I could DO IT BETTER and BE MY OWN GUY, nobody owns MY STUFF (well except Facebook and any other nameless website that I chose to enter information on for whatever reason).  So I went it on my own and it was good for a couple of years.

Working with WORDPRESS I started any number of BLOGS on any number of subjects.  So many in fact that I went from posting everyday to not posting because of the sheer weight of the possibilities.  Add to that that I acquired someone who was my most loyal fan, read everything that I wrote and often took comments I made as personal affronts. An endless stream of fiery e-mails and texts (yes this person has my phone number) is enough to stifle anyone's desire to open up and share.

The final straw came when I got hacked.  My ISP says my passwords were sloppy and they got in that way.  I scanned my MAC for key loggers and trojan horses and the only ones to be found were in files I got from that same ISP.  WORDPRESS's community was unhelpful and at times insulting.

"If you don't use 128 bit key encrypted NSA style Passwords then you DESERVE to be hacked!"


I won't equate that sort of crap to rape as that is inappropriate but the behavior you must admit was pretty damn similar.

Additionally, despite it being the backbone of an entire web design industry WORDPRESS remains OPEN SOURCE.  That is great for both developer AND spotty-little-bastards-who-like-to-mess-with-other-peoples-stuff.  I call them that because I am attempting to avoid using the term "hacker" and, by extension "hacking".  The mindless Golem that is the media has lionized those terms so much that they have stopped being the description of thieves and avaricious telemarketers and started being seen as "rebels" and "heroes".  That sort of "brand recognition" is heady stuff in a society where social norms do their very best to, as gently as possible, pound the living individuality out of every child before they go to middle school.

So since WORDPRESS is "Open Source" there is no tech support, other than web board full of anti social proles who love to prove they are smarter than everyone else by describing things that only...well people like themselves can understand. Because it is "Open Source" the people who profit most from it's existence can thrown up their cheeto stained fingers and say:

"Your problem dude, not ours...!"

So here I am, no great fan of what Google is rapidly becoming but also SICK TO DEATH of cleaning out infected php files and resetting passwords.  I know it is a dangerous thing to assume ANYTHING anymore about ANYTHING.  I have also had to deal with Google's "tech support" but at least they have one.  Additionally if I am blogging on BLOGGER my stuff is resident on firewalls that THEY have to tend to.

So welcome back BLOGGER, you have gone from being the enemy to the lesser of two evils.