James Lord, My Queer War, p. 333:

“Too bad. And we have nothing to remember him by. Christ, he was that handsome! Do you realize there’s no extant photograph of him?”

“Yes. I know that. I know it. But I don’t know why.”

“He had something to hide, Hanno had. Maybe it was only himself hiding from himself. We’ll never know. Even his parents. The only photo they have was taken when he was 11.”

“Why is that?” I asked. “Why is it like this?”

“It’s because we’re queer, my dear.”

With 130 hours clocked in on the ultimately godforsaken task of watching captioned and audio-described movies, last night I was superexecutively Yarissed out to Mississauga, home to the sole cinema still running Scott Pilgrim vs. the World with MoPix.

I loved it! Especially the movie. As soon as the lights went up, though, it became obvious my esteemed colleagues were baffled and overwhelmed by the experience. That happens like clockwork – the whole thing is a bit too much stimulation for the neophyte. (And everyone’s a critic.) As with captioning, where you have to sit there watching TV for two weeks straight just to develop the neurological ability to assimilate all that information at once, your first experience of cinema audio description will probably be your worst. It’s certainly happened with other writers I’ve brought to MoPix movies.

I don’t know of any writer who’s tried it more than once, so first experiences become last experiences, which makes grand pronouncements tempting. Journos can’t help noticing the established conventions of audio description. (They’re word people, and description is fundamentally literary.) The pitfall to avoid is going gotcha! and acting like you spotted a mistake. It probably wasn’t a mistake; we aren’t debugging software and you haven’t isolated a regression. It’s just that the whole thing is new.

We can’t rewind the movie to explain why things are done that way, or why something might be an outright mistake, a judgement call you happen to disagree with, or a practice that dearly needs to be tested. Yet almost all respondents in the only credible survey of audio-description users claim they get just the right amount of information. (That means we are arguing over edge cases.)

I speak for a lot of us when I say we have a great deal of battle fatigue after fighting a ground war for decades just to make things like movies basically accessible to blind or deaf people. Generally they aren’t. On the rare occasion it actually happens, people think the job is done. But can’t we improve anything? What needs to be improved? Why can’t we study that? After years of frustration, there’s only so much explaining I can manage. It is too much for me to be advocate, critic (everyone is), and ambassador all at once.

In whatever story comes out of this, I would anticipate a tone of general bafflement and worldly dismissal, the latter of which, at least, is also a pitfall to avoid. Still, if the resulting DVD contains the description track, which rare Universal Studios discs do, one could have a very special kind of viewing party. Send the same people.

The Web is old enough that history can repeat itself. What’s happening now with E-books parallels what happened with Web sites in the early Aughties.

Then vs. now

• Back then, multinational consulting startups like Razorfish and MarchFirst saw the real Web, made up of text and graphics, and tried to make it like television by shoving Flash down our throats. Most of us were using analogue modems at the time and browsers crashed every day.

  Today, publishers see the book, even more solidly constituted of text with occasional graphics, and try to make it like television by shoving “multimedia” down our throats in the guise of “enhanced” E-books. Most of us are using E-readers that can’t even display a photograph adequately, let alone a video.

  Nobody wanted Flash Web sites (a sentiment in resurgence today) and nobody wants enhanced electronic books.

• Back then, the consultants pushing Flash were the same ones so incompetent at the basic underpinning of the Web, namely HTML, that everything surrounding the Flash content barely worked.

  Today, the consultants pushing enhanced E-books cannot turn out a valid, semantic ePub document (XHTML 1.1 in a highly specific zip container with a set of table-of-contents and index files).

• In hindsight, there was a reason why early Web sites sucked. We only barely began to know what we were doing. The concept of Web standards was just coming into being. It took a few years to establish fundamentals like separation of content, style, and behaviour. This was no excuse for misreading the Web as a kind of TV station, but it offers an explanation.

  E-book developers have no excuse. Except in Canada, there are no professional developers who churn out Web sites with “FONT tags” and IE6-era presentational markup. (Your in-house sinecurist who couldn’t get a job on the open market is not a “professional developer.”) Outside Canada, everybody who claims to know anything about the Web knows the fundamentals, even if their ability to deliver varies.

  None of this knowledge has spread to E-book developers. Apart from two artisanal shops I know of, exactly nobody knows how to create a real ePub. There is no coding ability in the field of E-books. (It’s much worse than Web developers’ skill level circa 2001.)

• Razorfish and MarchFirst learned the hard way that consulting doesn’t scale. Those two artisanal shops are learning the same thing. But scale is a crushing issue given that tens of thousands of books have to be converted or created each year just in U.S. English.

Reasons

• Then as now, executives use Windows all day, not the Web or E-books. Who hired Razorfish? Who gives the order to OCR thousands of backlist titles in India and pass them off as E-books? Executives in their late 40s who don’t actually use the medium they manage. (Many wear bifocals, which make reading from any screen uncomfortable.)

  • In the early 2000s, managers didn’t use, let alone know or understand, the Web.

  • Today, they don’t use, know, or understand E-books.

  Executives refused and refuse to learn the rudimentary technical facts necessary to understand what a Web site or E-book is. (Fundamentally the same thing, as it turns out.)

  Working in Windows all day is, as I keep saying, a crucial factor. Lest you think “publishing” is a Macintosh bastion, note that only graphic designers use Macs in that field, with many book designers and nearly all front-office staff using Windows.

  • These systems cannot be said to be ugly anymore; Windows Vista and 7 may not be your personal taste, but they were thoroughly graphic-designed. But they are still user-hostile, they still train users to be afraid of their computers, and, via their default settings, they teach people the wrong way to do things: A “document” uses Times “New Roman” at “12” (really 14) point across a 6½″ measure with full justification and blank lines between paragraphs. (How do I put in page numbers again?)

    In a specific crippling detail, Microsoft Word perpetuates the notion that you write a document then “format” it, which fatally misrepresents what happens with the Web and with ePub books. Not a single one of the latter contains “formatting.” (Kindle E-books are also HTML and there is likewise no such thing as “Kindle formatting.”)

  • Windows systems have phenomenal Unicode support, but not one user in a million knows how to type an opening single quotation mark or a capital C with cedilla. You need a whole flowchart and a half-dozen keystrokes to manage that. (Then what do you do with the next “special” character? What if you’ve got a whole page of them, then 300 pages after that?)

  • Using Windows all day teaches you that not only can computers not be trusted, which you kind of suspected all along, they cannot be understood. Of course you aren’t going to bother taking eight minutes out of your life to learn what structured markup is. (That’s how long it takes me to teach Windows-using executives – or blind teenagers – the basics.)

• Related: Defaults are harmful. I have one example here and it remains make-or-break. If you don’t understand why full justification must never be turned on by default on any computer device, you aren’t qualified to call bingo at the old folks’ home, let alone manage electronic books.

• There is no culture of quality. At a conference I no longer talk about because people who initially claimed to love my presentation relentlessly attacked me later, I spent 45 minutes talking to Michael Tamblyn of Kobo (né Shortcovers). What we discussed isn’t for publication, but the fact we had a discussion is, and I can assure you they were well aware of my Shortcovers challenge. I surmise they have simply thrown up their hands at the task of producing legitimately coded (i.e., real) E-books. It is no coincidence that Kobo was founded in and is headquartered in Toronto, a city with three known qualified Web developers, the rest of them having long since left for Vancouver or been picked off by the Americans.

  I realize I have been fighting my entire life, even from childhood, against people who don’t give a shit. Apart from two artisanal developers, I see nobody who does. Hence I scoffed when I read that Random House will use agent Andrew Wylie’s “files,” but will begin “making changes… to have them soon mirror our… E-book standards.” What “standards”? These people think Track Changes in Word is mission-critical high tech.

• Tools let us down. There is no such thing as an automated process for producing or converting E-books that gets you even 80% of the way toward correct semantics. How much further you could ever get is open to dispute because a human being must decide, at one point or another, what’s a paragraph and what’s an H2, but let me tell you one thing right now: Not every single thing in your E-book is a DIV, as the Apple Pages export-to-ePub function claims.

  I posited the solution to this problem months ago – write everything in HTML. The fact that few authors will be able to do that remains unchanged. What also remains unchanged is the publishing industry’s refusal to hire and train editors who can mark up manuscripts properly.

  It gets worse: iBooks on iOS has access to a high-quality HTML-rendering engine but provably cannot lay out an E-book properly.

What happened in the early Aughties?

I diligently wrote the NUblog (for an audience of dozens) decrying the rank stupidity of management, executives, and Web consultancies, all of whom have made out famously from the Web. I was right all along, of course, but this is hardly news or the sort of thing that helps me at all.

The question is: Can publishing executives count on failing upward the way Web executives did? Is the fact that last decade’s Web executives failed to kill off the Web proof positive that today’s publishing executives won’t kill off publishing?

Clippy thinks you’re formatting an E-book. Would you like help?

It’s in the most overrated book of the year, The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, a man with no sense of flow or dialogue. The cause is concisely revealed in Rachman’s condensed bio – “born in London and raised in Vancouver.” Nobody’s more dogmatic about proper British English, but less able to produce it, than a Canadian Brit from B.C. (Pop quiz: Pronounce “water.”)

Our young anglophile even weaves in a zinger in the form of a character named Menzies. So very few people know how that’s pronounced. (Kind of like “zinger.”) Mostly people who wouldn’t pronounce a postvocalic R if a gun were pressed against their temple.

If this thing is a bastardization of British English written by a Canadian who in turn is a traitor to his dialect, why is the whole book rendered in American spelling? The type, more or less competently handled for a change (designer: Barbara M. Bachman), uses a face that works only in a printing technology from two centuries back. (That era is about right for the book’s subject, newspapers.) But the typesetting interferes all by itself from time to time, as in the book’s opening words: LLOYD SHOVES. Is that like orange groves?

Isn’t it the role of editors to compensate for authorial failings? Sure, if we still had editors, or if anyone at all knew what line-editing was and why it’s important, or, at the very least, if we had editors with a legitimate ear for dialogue and an eye for repetition. (Another pop quiz: What are Kathleen and Dario busy eating? Could it be olives? Is it possible what they’re doing is eating olives?)

Who, then, was the editor or editrix? Rachman credits Susan Kamil, clearly old enough to know better, for a “wisdom and deft touch” – complete hands-off approach? hitting Print on the delivered manuscript? – that “helped make The Imperfectionists that much less imperfect.” Not much less enough.

There’s only one winner in this muddled “competition” to design the landscaping around the TTC LRV yard. It’s Brown & Storey. But this entire “consultation” process was set up to make a single winner as unlikely as possible – through the design of the consultation process and its the open invitation to locals to voice their ignorance.

As a design-review panel made up of qualified and informed people, you are the last hope in a failed process. You are urged to ignore unschooled “public opinion” and recommend the only design that actually relates to the site, Brown & Storey’s.

A failed “competition” that never should have been

This whole process turned out even worse than I would have expected from the TTC, a design-hostile organization dominated by engineer lifers. The sole correct way to decide how to landscape a public square is as follows:

1. Hire one design firm (can be done by a qualified advisory panel).
2. Ask and pay for one solution.
3. Take it or leave it.

There are any number of wrong ways to run this process, but the one we got stuck with is probably the worst. Allowing options to intrude into the process – that is, allowing for more than one candidate solution – tempts the unschooled and ignorant to do two things:

1. Demand a bit from item one, a little from item two, and a smidgen from item three.
2. Declare “I don’t like it” as though that meant something, which it doesn’t.

This process involved three companies providing two designs each. That’s six possibilities right there, sextuple the number we actually need.

Then, to make matters worse, comment cards handed out at the two public consultations explicitly asked respondents to take a little from Brown & Storey, a little from FRP, and a little from GH3: The cards asked you to list what you liked about each of the three designs. We’re not done yet: Then we were asked to rank the designs in order.

This isn’t the Olympics. There aren’t gold, silver, and bronze medals. There’s only one winner. It isn’t a popularity contest, a public vote, or a Frankenstinian kit of parts.

Unschooled opinions are worthless at best

Under the guise of “consultation,” a vacant bureaucratic buzzword, locals with no design or architectural knowledge, and usually with an open hostility to the entire project, were invited to provide “feedback.” I know from talking to people at one of the sessions that such feedback amounts to “I don’t like it,” which means precisely nothing and is actively harmful in this context.

We don’t care what you “like”; all we care about is a reasoned argument why one design works. Design is functional, not artistic; we aren’t creating public art that exists only for itself. If you can’t articulate why the option you like actually works, your opinion is useless. Your opinion is harmful if you can’t explain why you dislike one of the options.

Facts about the site

Two of the design proponents, and every civilian I talked to, were in denial of the facts about the site, which runs along Leslie from Lake Shore (not “Lakeshore”) to Commissioners. Everyone acted like we were dealing with some kind of parkette in Forest Hill. In truth:

• The site is at the intersection of a divided highway and a six-lane street overrun with truck traffic.
• The LRV carhouse will be built on previously ignored and generally contaminated land. It will not be situated on “parkland” or “greenspace,” hence we are not losing either of those things.
• What’s the star attraction of this so-called greenspace? A sewage-treatment plant.
• The giant berm that locals suddenly discovered (and then purported, in a Damascene conversion, to cherish and value) is actually a mound of contaminated soil intended to shield the city from a possible train derailment.
• There’s a recreational trail on Lake Shore used, for seconds at a time, by cyclists; for a few longer seconds at a time by rare joggers; and, once in a blue moon and only in fair weather, by a pedestrian or two. No one visits the streetcorner as though it were a legitimate park or similar attraction. The site is not a destination that needs to be protected; the only thing that will make it a destination is this project.
• At the foot of Leslie St. is a nature preserve created out of rubble left over from the city’s construction projects.
• Across the street is a suburban-style strip mall anchored by the Canadian Tire. It’s never going away. Kitty-corner to that is the parking lot for an even uglier strip mall whose sole viable tenant is an aging Loblaws that isn’t going away either. But the northwest corner is by far the most important, because it features the pediments left over after the Gardiner Expressway was dismantled in 2001.

The site uses monumental scale

Ruins are part of the local context in more than one way. The LRV site is surrounded by antihuman traffic and, despite being two blocks down from a main drag, is hard to get to in anything but a motor vehicle. The site is manmade, yet it dwarfs a person. It’s dinosaur-sized, Louis Kahn–scaled, Stonehenge-like. It is a place where we observe what human construction hath wrought – usually with awe, but, in the case of the strip malls and highway, with distaste.

Above all, the site is not a genteel Toronto neighbourhood that’s a good place to raise children and let your purebred puppy run off-leash. It is not a cute, livable neighbourhood compatible with flânerie by ascotted urban theorists. The site is not “natural”; it’s artificial in ways that are, as the leftover pediments indicate, increasingly intentional. The site is a massive exurban toybox more suited to T. Rex than a mom pushing a stroller.

Only one design acknowledges these facts – Brown & Storey’s, which reacts to what Leslie and Lake Shore is really like and builds accordingly. We get a constructed park at the corner dotted by half-ruined totems that, like everything in the neighbourhood, are the size of a truck. Brown & Storey also has the honesty to show us a winter rendering, even if it is inaccurate (perfect squares of grass will not sit uncovered by snow).

Rival designs are worse than insulting

Not only do GH3’s and FRP’s designs fail to acknowledge the actual site, they’re so badly conceived they actually insult the neighbourhood.

GH3

• All proponents’ presentation panels are horrifically written, designed, typeset, and copy-edited, but GH3’s has the added demerit of a title – “a modern day walks and gardens >> a protected green path through the city” – that wouldn’t make sense even to its writer.
• The site is on the fringe of the city and in no way calls for a path; Leslie and Lake Shore is not the High Line.
• What they’re offering us is a prison camp. It’s the Arizona border wall, except what it’s keeping out is the carhouse itself, not Mexicans. (GH3’s design conceals and apologizes for the carhouse, but can’t even get that right, since the carhouse sits higher up than its prison walls.)
• The broken-up walls act exactly like unbroken walls and the only rational way to experience them is to drive past at top legal speed.
• The walls pen the site in. That’s bad enough. But the stone walls aren’t actually stone walls – they’re prisons within prisons, chicken-wire cages filled with rocks. (Presumably not rocks broken up by concentration-camp internees, then moved from one side of the yard and back again.)

The whole design is offensive because, during the G20, Leslieville had a real prison camp five blocks away at the old Toronto Film Studios. Prisoner cages inside this Guantánamo by the Lake Shore were in fact made of chicken wire.

The only thing missing from the GH3 design is a panopticon.

FRP

There’s no design here whatsoever. There’s nothing on the site. No landscape architecture has been proposed. It’s an empty lot – in one rendering, terra-cotta-coloured, as though this were the American Southwest. (Where’s the Arizona-style wall?)

This forbidding, inhospitable wasteland is more amenable to a parking lot, which it resembles. The retro-kitsch TTC artwork on the acoustic wall is juvenile on a good day.

FRP’s “design” cunningly conforms to expected Toronto mediocrity. So bereft of ideas is the FRP proposal that its eight pages are actually two near-identical sets of four pages; these people can’t even come up with two different ideas. As such, FRP’s submission is by far the most dangerous. There’s so little to it that it will seem like just what the doctor ordered for the fearful “public” that never wanted a carhouse here in the first place. With no content whatsoever, it’s the perfect crowd-pleaser for Toronto in general and for Leslieville’s special breed of educated ignoramuses in particular.

This is a “competition” with one clear winner

But only in Toronto would that all but guarantee it loses.

The process stinks and “public consultation” seems a lot like angry shouting from a mob. A qualified design-review panel knows perfectly well that only one proposal makes any sense in the local context. In a sea of options, there’s really only one.

The question is: Do you have the courage of your convictions? Are you brave enough to say there’s only one winner, Brown & Storey?

Neologisms in Super Sad True Love Story, whose äpp sücks.

1. äppärät (pl. äppäräti)
2. alkalinized water
3. AlliedWaste, AlliedWasteCVSCitigroup; ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandsViacomCredit; LandO’LakesGMFordCredit; UnitedContinentalDeltamerican
4. American Medicle Response
5. AmericanMorning portfolio
6. ARA (American Restoration Authority)
7. armo[u]red Fung Wah bus
8. ass hookah
9. ass-plug (v.)
10. AssLuxury
11. Bipartisan Party
12. Boston-Nanjing Metallurgy College
13. bound, printed, nonstreaming Media artifact
14. BRIC [Brazil, Russian, India, China]-A-BRAC High-Performing Nations Fund
15. Brownstone Brooklyn
16. Cervix (“the newly hip bar in newly hip Staten Island”)
17. Cetaphil Gentle Skin Cleanser
18. Child Abuse Multimedia
19. China South Airlines
20. China-Worldwide
21. Community Parameters
22. Credit; Media; Retail
23. Credit Pole
24. CrisisNet
25. Debt Bombing (v.)
26. dechronification
27. Desking Ceremony
28. durability (health)
29. EmotePad
30. extro (adj.)
31. FAC (Form a Community)
32. five-jiao men
33. fuckability index
34. FoxLiberty-Prime; FoxLiberty-Ultra
35. GlobalTeens; teen (v.)
36. GlobalTrace
37. H-Mart (or H-mart)
38. Harm Reduction (displacing the poor)
39. HNWI; LNWI
40. HolyPetroRussia
41. Hyundai Town Car; Hyundai Persimmon
42. Infinite Sadness Endurance Test
43. ITP (impossible to preserve); Fallacy of Merely Existing
44. JuicyPussy summer dress; JuicyPussy4Men
45. Lacy Twaät, starlet
46. Lao Wai foreigner passport
47. LIBOR rate
48. Life Lovers
49. Mediastud; MediaWhore
50. NORC (Naturally Occurring Retirement Community)
51. New York Lifestyle Times
52. Onionskin jeans
53. Oslo Delight sandwiches
54. Parakkeet blazer
55. Patterson-Clay-Schwartz Language Cognition Test
56. Pine-Sol Wild Flower Blast
57. RAG (rapidly-aging geezer)
58. RateMe, RateMePlus
59. the Rupture
60. Saaami nippleless bras
61. Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency
62. Secure Screening Facilities
63. “security shed”
64. SecurityState Israel
65. SmartBlood
66. Soft Policy
67. Staatling-Wapachung; Wapachung Contingency; Wapachung Intelligence; Staatling Property Relocation Services
68. Stability(-Canada)
69. StatoilHydro (Norwegian state oil company)
70. SUSTAINABILIT¥ score
71. whorefuckrevu (magazine)
72. TeenyBopper
73. ThaiSnak franchises
74. TotalSurrender (or Total Surrender)
75. UGuangdong-Riverside
76. UNRC (United Nations Retail Corridor)
77. verbal (v.)
78. yuan-pegged dollar
79. Zoo York Basic Cracker hoodies

Design Is History is the new site that perpetuates the misapprehension, convincingly diagnosed as harmful by Natalia Ilyin in Chasing the Perfect, that “design history” is a sequence of discrete jumps from A to Z with stops at every letter in between.