I can exclusively confirm that for the first time ever the TTC took the advice of somebody outside the company.

Last weekend (2010.05.22–24), TTC did track maintenance at Bay station, meaning eastbound and westbound trains had to do a pit stop at Museum station. They tried this once before and it was a nightmare.

On the 19th, I attended a TTC media tour and preview of the diversion. We got on a special train and traced the path everyone else would follow. Adam Giambrone took his sweet time showing up, then did a photo op in clear view of handwritten sign reading PLEASE SHUT GATE. Just as he started talking, an entire classroom of noisy children drowned out his op. To this point, none of the three TTC publicists on staff had bothered to acknowledge me.

We went downstairs and “the lovely Jessica” nicely asked who I was. I introduced myself and handed her my card. Kevin Carrington soon came along and tried to bounce me from the event, but Jessica waved him off. He then picked up a discarded fast-food clamshell from the yellow safety line of the platform. Wouldn’t look good on camera. Realistic, but not good.

The train ride was no big deal, though the special keyhole that can open a door on certain train cars was in heavy use. (There’s also one on the exterior. I’ve seen it used.) “I’d heard of him, but I only got to meet him now” was what I heard Jessica saying to Carrington and Danny Nicholson, head publicist.

Upon arrival, we were reassured by Giambrone and everyone else that there would be plenty of “announcements” and “signage” to tell people which of three possible trains they could take (actually five). TTC was proving itself yet again unable to actually keep records, retain an institutional memory, or – of course – admit they screwed up. Nicholson told me to my face the diversion in 2007 went just fine. I told him to his face it didn’t, and explained why: The “signage” was so half-assed that people brought their own ink-jet-printed replacement signs from home. You couldn’t hear the announcements, because they were shouted through microphones in a noisy environment while trains thundered into an echo chamber with tiled walls.

Nicholson walked away from me halfway through our talk, then spent three-quarters of our remaining time in the station talking to Jessica or other TTC staff. In other words, he left not because he had work to do, but for some other reason. So I explained to Carrington what needed to happen: Staff would have to hold up signs – not handwritten ones – stating which incoming train goes where. Plus audible announcements, of course, which you still wouldn’t be able to hear unless you were standing right alongside.

Since everybody is functionally hearing-impaired in those conditions, actual deaf people and everyone who can see can figure out what train to get on. Blind people have to stand near the hailer to hear what train is coming in. My system is the only one that would work, short of elaborate digital displays and FM-loop systems.

I felt more or less listened to by Carrington, who must have been somewhat sympathetic to what I was saying due to his own visible discomfort with the noise level in the station.

I later sent off what is even by my standards a stern E-mail to Nicholson and Carrington and, whaddya know, TTC did exactly what I told them to do. (I didn’t “ask.”)

(Pictures.)

The trains I took to Museum station were always claiming to go somewhere they weren’t, but congrats to the TTC for finally, at long last, listening to outside advice. Obviously this was a one-shot deal and it’ll never happen again.

One other fun anecdote: The media-tour train back from Museum was supposed to drop us all off at Broadview. But obviously the train was actually heading back to the Greenwood Yard. So I could have gotten a ride as far as Donlands, which I asked for. The supervisor on board OKed it twice – but then Danny Nicholson, standing outside the train, yelled an order countermanding him – just to be a Little Shit™, it seemed.

I’m just reporting everything that happened, as opposed to everything TTC wants you to think happened.

As I have been correctly stating for years, nobody wants graphic-design criticism, if anyone ever did. Web sites have nullified design magazines’ reason for being. Graphic design is not conceptual art and cannot withstand the weight of academic criticism, a failed venture in any event. What might function adequately, and might survive, are two things: Personal work, which the Web has enabled for all graphic designers for the first time, and short analytical pieces on how design items work rather than what they “mean.”

Nonetheless, the man placed at greatest structural and career peril by Web criticism, Steven Heller (author, coauthor, or editor of 140 books), shepherded into existence an entire graduate program for graphic-design critics, whose services are completely unwanted and for whose work there is no paying market whatsoever. There too I’ve been the only one saying so (again correctly).

Now a member of the design intelligentsia has backed me up, only guess what? If you’re a “design critic,” your fate is much worse than I’d thought. Important design intellectual John Thackara (author, coauthor, or editor of a dozen books) took time out of his busy day to condemn design critics to penury. (Where else can you read his analysis? At Design Observer, of course.)

[S]elling 350-word stories online is not a replacement for fat ad-filled newspapers. The New York Times Web site generates about $15 million or so a month, which translates to about a dollar a unique visitor. But its fixed costs are so high that it can’t make profit on that. Huffington Post, as a comparison, makes about 12¢ a unique visitor per month. And it’s finding it hard to make a profit, too.

Now think of your own position. No huge office building to pay for, no executive suite, no accounts department, no human resources, no private jet, no lobbyists. In fact, if you decided to squat rather than rent or buy a space to live in — if you were aggressively to share, rather than own, the tools and resources you need for daily life — your fixed costs could be as near as dammit to zero. Zero is a good place to start. Try to stay right there. When your costs are zero, how many multiples of 12¢ a month do you actually need to survive? Or, when you get established, how many single dollars do you really need?

Indeed. Really, how much payment for your work do you “need”? Why can’t you live like a monk, or in a Bruce Sterling–style digital favela? (How much payment for his work does John Thackara “need”?)

Of course you knew your left-wing academic discipline wouldn’t pay well, but now you know just how little you deserve to be paid, and that you deserve to be homeless.

Thackara sits only a few increments above that income level, he claims, but the power-law effect ensures he will always have more gigs, more fame, and more money than any pure-digital design critic, all of whom were unlucky enough to be born after the age in which design credentials could be established via the editors of a tiny stable of printed magazines and an elite superstructure of design-book publishers.

Did you know your education bought you nothing but a hand-to-mouth existence as a walking contradiction – the intellectual squatter?

I wrote this on 2009.12.30:

RyeHigh J-school – the faculty that hires its friends despite an avalanche of applications; hired one such friend for a substitute-teaching assignment after a ten-minute chat; and offers precisely two courses in online journalism (about which one of whose students complained to me in person) – now needs a new chairperson.

Of course it’ll be somebody you’ve heard of. This will end quite a bit worse than that lecture Michael Schudson of Columbia gave that one time recently.

On 2010.05.18, Daniel Doz, dean, Faculty of Communication & Design, issued a memo stating:

Unfortunately[,] the search initiated during this academic year… failed to produce a successful outcome for the position of Chair, School of Journalism. Therefore… I am hereby requesting suggestions as to possible candidates for a one-year interim position.

Note that he didn’t say they couldn’t find a suitable candidate. What he also didn’t say is that they even had candidates to begin with. I suspect nobody applied. But of course, I can’t confirm that because I’m not an insider; I can’t just call up my friends in the department to ask, or wait till the next dinner party to do the same.

But what I can do is mail Doz directly, asking him the following:

Please tell me which of the following is correct:

• Candidates applied and none were found suitable by Ryerson.

• Candidates applied. Ryerson found one of them suitable. That candidate turned down the job, or a deal could otherwise not be reached.

• No candidates applied.

If something else happened, do tell.

He refused to respond.

Who could possibly want this job, let alone make it work? By now I am not the only person who knows that RyeHigh J-school is training millennials for the jobs of the 1980s, none of which exist. We’ve been through this before. Doz knows this, too; I wrote him a letter on 2010.01.19 stating as much, assuring him that “[y]ou’ll eventually find a bifocal-wearing computerphobe to run the department. Whoever you hire will be a nice reassuring choice – somebody all of us have heard of. That would be your problem right there.”

From May 3 to 5, the Ontario College of Art (or as it now insists on being called, “& Design”) held its annual graduates’ show. I somehow missed last year’s show and that of the year before, but in ’07 the experience was marked by constant harassment by ill-informed docents making the false claim that I couldn’t shoot pictures. I expected the same problem this year, but OCA publicistrix Sarah Mulholland dissuaded those fears with James Bondian smoothness: “OCAD does not have a no-photography policy at the graduate exhibition or otherwise. Our students are briefed on the rights provided within the Copyright Act.”

I managed to get there in the last three hours of the last day when everybody was fed up and tired. While there was occasional C-calibre work I won’t bother talking about, I was stunned at the quality of presentations – and the prevailing trend. And nobody hassled me for taking pictures.

Photos

I have about 80 pictures up on Flickr (also from 2007).

Escape from Flatland

None of the students knew the phrase, but most of them had Escaped from Flatland in one way or another: They had not limited themselves to two-dimensional “graphic design” laid out on a page or screen, but had used graphic design as the kernel around which to crystallize things in the real world, from apparel lines to an educational product to jewelry to beer to a museum in a geodesic dome.

We usually associate this kind of “entrepreneurialism” with Jeff Jarvis’s indoctrinated journalism students, who can’t just write stories but have to start entire businesses surrounding those stories, an arrangement that inverts the roles of shark and remora.

I have to be fair here and note that the School of Visual Arts Designer as Author program, which I pilloried after its announcement, has actually churned out exactly what the OCA kids did this year – designers with real-world products. (Videos; they’re also on iTunes.)

In the absence of prompting or encouragement from their teachers (according to all but one of them), these OCA students used graphic design as a conduit to the creation of physical objects.

This is a startling and welcome development, even if it is accompanied by a near-complete ignorance of graphic-design history. Only two of the students I talked to knew any of my historical references or indeed appeared to know anything about design history. (Even the gold-medal winner couldn’t see the antecedents in his own work.)

So these kids will surely plunge headlong into the marketplace of designed ideas with no hesitation or bashfulness. They just won’t know the first thing about what came before them. While they have bright prospects, on the latter count alone I adjudge their education a failure. You don’t need a design education to start your own product line. If you sign up for a design education and leave the place uneducated, your professors have failed you. [continue with: OCAD grad show 2010 →]

This thought occurred to me last week out of nowhere: “Unsolicited mental image: Backed by the full cast, Artie on Glee performs ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer.’ ” Days later, it almost happened for real.

While the producers of Glee were happy to hire a gay actor for a gay role, we now know why they also hired a nondisabled actor for a disabled role: So he could hate himself and dream of not being crippled someday. Almost like how the producers felt growing up gay.

We were endlessly told by the gay braintrust behind Glee (I mean Ryan Murphy, but in truth the quotes come from his casting director) that the show turned over every rock to fill the role of Artie, the guitarist/crooner/filmmaker in a wheelchair. Kevin McHale was simply the best actor they could find.

After the episode from last week (2010.05.18), we now know this was false all along, or the writers and producers used the fact that McHale can actually walk to alter the story of Artie in a way they’d already tried and discarded with Kurt. [continue with: Gay producers make the lame walk →]

I’m the guy who really likes the new London 2010 mascots, Mandeville and Wenlock. Yes, I’m the one!

I liked them on sight. This is not a post-facto rationalization. I actually like these mascots; I do not “get” them, which is all one can do for the London 2012 logo. That design is the most advanced and recherché “logo” in human history. It was never meant to be “liked,” only used and reused and decomposed and recontextualized. It has abstract function intentionally decoupled from emotional connotation. You have to have an interest in graphic design to appreciate it, which suggests that Wolff Olins must have carried out the best client presentation in the history of advertising just to sell the London Olympics on the logo.

I was delighted the Paralympics got their own mascot. I understood the reference right away – Stoke-Mandeville is the birthplace of what later became the Paralympic games. So Mandeville is the perfect name for the little christer. (Wenlock’s name I had to look up. So did you.) The origin-story video for the two characters is actually kind of touching. Mandeville pops on a couple of wheels to race with, but the video kind of dodges the question of whether or not he’d run with a limp in the amputee race. Oddly, Wenlock is the one who seems to be missing feet.

So now if you want to root just for the Paralympics, and some of us do, well, hey: You’ve got your own critter. You can just ignore the other one.

Mandeville is actually better drawn than Wenlock, whose Olympic bangles make him look like a transgenderist hippie. (Why do the Paralympics have only three yins instead of five, you may be wondering? Because Dick Pound threatened to pull the IOC’s funding unless the Paralympics changed its logo from five yins arranged like the Olympic rings to something else, as Andrew Jennings documented from original Paralympic meeting minutes.)

They’re made of metal and they can bend to any shape, which I guess would only apply if they were still molten, but these are magical creatures. Like cuttlefish or squid, they can adopt any surface appearance they wish.

Now: Why do I like them? After the initial blush, what makes them work? They’re a beautiful amalgam of references. That doesn’t make them derivative; original art always starts from somewhere. There are so many references everybody is bound to latch on to one, which any psychologist will tell you triggers a process of “identification.” Just for starters:

• Kodos and Kang (yes! and that’s a plus!)
• Gumby
• London taxis (I got that reference right away) and iconic payphone callboxes
• Teletubbies and televisions (Mandeville’s eye is a true 4:3 television)
• Cyclops
• Daleks
• Pokémon

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, a sure sign of triumph. They just look like mascots. Mascots are the only thing they “look like.”

Tremendous work by Iris. Tremendous. And if the London 2010 logo is secretly showing Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob, whom do I have to blow to get my hands on a trophy?

I’ll only be needing the one.

Fundamentally effeminate gay actors like Sean P. Hayes (who may actually just have an exuberant, lively personality and an unsuppressable lifeforce, but the two are hard to distinguish) do in fact have a hard time being taken seriously playing heterosexualist roles. True, it’s a question of acting skill – but only to some degree, because you can’t overcome your own animal impulses. What else distinguishes stars from actors? It isn’t just charisma; it’s something ineffable and unchangeable but quite detectable. Straight-guy charisma is nothing like gay-guy charisma. (Ask a gay guy who pines and yearns for straight guys.)

I note that we never discuss, at all, which obviously heterosexualist actors are just too manly to play any identifiable form of gay character. The phenomenon is exactly parallel. But scaredy-cat effeminate gays, and their liberal apologists and faghag girlfriends in the press, never want to admit that gay males fall into certain types and straight males into different types. It will take nothing short of a miracle for the man with the perfect life, Mr. MATT DAMON, to convincingly portray Liberace’s spurned boytoy.

The topic is actually 50 years old and has nothing to do with outing gay actors. Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, “America’s Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine” by Henry E. Scott describes the juicy, ruthlessly fact-checked behind-the-scenes stories that midcentury scandal sheet published on name-brand actors, including the gay ones. The lessons (from pp. 117–118) are applicable today:

The fan magazines, long supported and encouraged by the studios, also felt pressured by Confidential. “You can see the fix they were in,” wrote [Jack] Olson…. “They would come out with an article entitled ‘the Happy Homelife of Peter Screenstar,’ and on the same newsstand would appear an ‘exposé’ magazine whose cover screamed ‘Peter Screenstar’s Other Woman.’ ”

…Olson spelled out the dangers to Hollywood, and made it clear that [Confidential editor Robert] Harrison knew what he was doing. “Overnight, some of Hollywood’s biggest stars have been tagged as deviates, rakes, nymphomaniacs, lunatics, drunks, and hopheads,” Olson wrote. “Theat[re] bookings have been cancelled because of certain ‘exposés’… [An] actress, heretofore cast as a sweet-young-thing type, will never again play such a role because of ‘exposé’ publicity about her nighttime escapades. Other actors, similarly tarbrushed, have silently slipped away.”

Mr. QUENTIN CRISP wrote at length of the urgent need for movie stars per se to maintain their so-called private lives as state secrets lest their superhuman value be tarnished. Perhaps our error all along was pretending that ordinary journeyman actors should maintain the same kind of secrets. Effeminate actors really should never even bother attempting to play masculine roles, which end up as unintended reënactments of La cage aux folles.

What stands to be lost in the inevitable trend of never-closeted gay actors is the delicious retrospective reinterpretation of a decloseted actor’s work from before he was outed. Who can really take Rock Hudson/Doris Day movies seriously even as light comedy? Now we know he knew what he was doing.

If anything, Sean P. Hayes’ tour de force is his role as an almost-masculine gay male in Billy’s, an oft-maligned signature piece of ’90s gay cinema that only benefits from its intertextuality with the core text of that genre, Parting Glances.

Joseph Christian, or J.C. or “Joe,” Leyendecker (1874–1951) was an émigré illustrator who indisputably altered the American self-image. He illustrated dozens of Saturday Evening Post covers, for which Normal Rockwell is actually more famous. But J.C. Leyendecker by Laurence Cutler and Judy Goffman Cutler clearly states that Rockwell copied Leyendecker.

Also ingrained in the American popular psyche was the Arrow Collar Man, a strong, upstanding gentleman who epitomized the term “white collar.” The model for Arrow Collar Man was Leyendecker’s homosexualist lover unit Charles Beach, who was born “in Ontario, Canada” in 1886.

Observing Leyendecker’s illustrations brings me back to an era I never lived in – where actually gay artists seemingly saw no difficulty spending their days illustrating cherubs, mothers, and related touchstones of nuclear families from which they were excluded or estranged. I lack that kind of imagination, not to mention any soft-focus memories of such nuclear families. Relatedly, I cannot understand how gay screenwriters and novelists manage to write so effectively and accurately and even lovingly about families they don’t fit into, even if they think they do. The explanation seems to be that there have always been female-identified homosexualists, and sellouts.

Leyendecker viewed his own life as a secret, maintaining a public persona that would later become the midcentury norm with dashing Hollywood actors. But what of Charles Beach? He would conclude his life the way Bill Tilden did.

The Cutlers describe the perils of being a kept man. At Leyendecker’s funeral,

Charles Beach then spoke, muttering that his lifelong companion was “top notch, few could touch him, his skills were beyond any competition.” […] A few days later, in a newspaper article entitled “Leyendecker as Perfectionist; Cover Designer Preferred Art for the Masses,” Beach mused that “Joe focused on magazine art, posters and advertising while other artists focused on portraits, vignettes, and religious- or otherwise-inspired works for small audiences.” […]

The New York Times ran a short article on the inheritance, “ ‘Model’ Inherits $30,000,” and referred to Beach as “a friend who posed for the original Arrow Collar portraits and other paintings… he had been associated with Mr. Leyendecker for 48 years as his secretary and aide.” […]

After the funeral and mourning period, a deeply shaken and despondent Charles Beach stood alone for the first time in half a century. Anguished by the loss of his lover, there were no friends to lean on [and] no servants, and his impending fate was obvious. On August 28, 1952, Charles Beach died alone at age 70, without objects to remind him of his past, only foggy memories of the glory days…. The location of his gravesite is a mystery, for he had no people in the United States and few friends left; he had only Joe nearly his whole life.

While Joe kept Charles a secret, he spent all day elucidating Middle America to itself. Gay artists have a duty to refrain from lying in plain sight.

Scott Boms and I are talking about design and typography of E-books at BookCamp 2010. Our blurb:

E-Books: From Structure to Typography

E-books look terrible. But why? Scott Boms shows some landmark examples of Canadian print books that are a challenge at best to convert to electronic format. There the issue is complexity of graphic design. But Joe Clark shows that even the simplest text gets hacked and mangled in E-format. Why? It’s the ever-present problem of retraining authors, publishers, and designers to think in terms of structure –which, paradoxically, is the best way to ensure good design.

Although the conference is overrun with industry hacks and mandarins, our session is guaranteed not to be as atrocious as anything you sat through last year.

There will be a handout that will never appear online and never will see the light of day again, plus some really very nice show ’n’ tell for fans of Canadiana.