Because if we used Flyer or Futura or even Gill Kayo, it would mean “this movie sucks.”

It takes a while for the trend of ballpoint-pen illustration that was talked about on design blogs 18 months ago to trickle its way into “the mainstream,” to the extent anything Dave Eggers and his wife with the name one cannot take seriously (Coldplay album title? “hasta la Vida”?) actually are mainstream. And of course Juno authorized it, and now it’s everywhere. I fear Steven Heller will have colonized and assimilated this trend under the catchphrase “cult of the squiggly.”

1. New Yorker, April 27: “How not dumb is Gaga?”
2. Slate, June 16: “How smart is Lady Gaga?”

Can “genius” be next?

How are you getting by without Speak Up?

Are you just barely managing it?

Or did you even notice it closed?

Armin Vit’s design-crit blog – isn’t that the problem right there? – pulled a Karen Kain and announced last April it would self-shitcan. (“This is our third-to-last post”!) Weren’t you devastated by the news? What were you going to do without the daily insights of Armin Vit, who used Speak Up as lever with which to wedge himself into the New York design demimonde? (It worked: Michael Bierut hired him. For a while.)

I read encomiums to the deathly overserious, ill-coded critics’ blog on innumerable other overserious, ill-coded crit blogs. Kottke picked it up, so you know it’s important. Stars lined up to write overweening, logrolling eulogies. Design podcasts – not always an oxymoron; RbTL is quite good – ran interviews over dropout-laden Skype connections.

But Vit’s design insights keep comin’. Speak Up was but one of several Armin Vit blogs covering the world of design (official Vit pronunciation: [ˌdɛˈsaɪn]); for designers ([ˌdɛˈsaɪnəɹs]). Just the other day Vit scored big with a 271-word post (including headline) decrying the Bing logotype. (“Designed” by? Who else – Microsoft.) All the kool kidz picked that one up and ran with it.

We haven’t heard the last of Armin Vit! For that was never the plan. The plan was to nurse the closure of his superannuated design-crit blog so as to maximize attention on his remaining design-crit blogs. (And raise a child. I do sympathize with cutting back and getting the hell out of New York.)

There will be a point at which people stop pretending to read design-crit blog posts longer than 271 words. Sort of like people pretending to read Rick Poynor, or 79 entirely unillustrated essays about design. At that point, people will begin to recognize that design criticism, as a great-grandchild of art criticism and poststructuralism, has been a corpse floating in the Ganges for half a decade.

Design blogs will, however, continue to faithfully serve their subsidiary purpose – securing book contracts and, when such are desirable or necessary for cashflow, day jobs. (If Bierut quit Pentagram tomorrow, he’d be snowed under with job offers from the four corners of the earth. People know him not from his design work but from his blogging.) The path Vit once trod Surtees now follows, for example, all the way down to tag soup. (Though Michael is way nicer to look at.)

I know this system works because I did something like it myself. The difference is nothing I wrote was linkbait or some kind of Trojan horse. I wrote what I wanted to write and people came to me anyway. Design critics write to get noticed. What they haven’t noticed is that their long crits, the Poynor-compliant thinkpieces, aren’t being read, because nobody really wants to read actual design criticism. Design can’t carry that kind of weight in the first place. It’s functional, not artistic.

In other news, Vit et al.’s Women of Design is on its way to me from the library. I flipped through it at Swipe and it looks fantastic. Further, I have always been a fan of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville.

1. It cannot manage to locate the preferences file from its previous versions, meaning it presents me with a bog-standard interface even after I had spent untold days altering such interface, very much including its insane default handling of closed tabs. (This is what happens when you let Linux apologists design Macintosh software.)
2. It cannot autolocate Firefox, Safari, or even Opera bookmarks. You have to hunt for them yourself. And at that point, it doesn’t even list the bookmark files as readable. To say the same thing another way, Opera 10 doesn’t know even where its own bookmarks are, let alone other programs’, and even if you do manage to find them Opera can’t import them.
3. Opera functions in every language under the sun, except of course for Canadian English. Surely the multinational occupying force in Norway must realise this lapse colors Canadians’ attitudes toward the also-ran browser. (Besides, there’s a market opening, unfilled after ten full years, for a browser that can be switched from Canadian English to Canadian French and back again before one’s very eyes.)

Blu Kennedy (no relation) is the nom de porno of a young lad who is about half my age and a ginger. The ideal man? Not quite.

[I’ll renew my objections to the Stroop-effect-like misnaming of orange objects as “blue.” A lad with orang(e) hair should not be calling himself Blu(e). It is baffling, short-circuiting, showstopping.]

I read Ben’s BigMuscle profile from time to time. That profile seems to vex him somewhat. A few weeks ago it said he was living the high life in New York bartendering at Splash and go-go-boying, which I guess is a verb. He’s from Oklahoma and Kansas and is a mere 25 years old. He has a high-school education, according to his MySpace page.

Yesterday his BigMuscle profile showed he had changed his username to BNJ, though it also listed his real name as Ben. The photos were unchanged – a trim, hairless, slowly balding redhead. Today the profile is gone (though, true to BigMuscle engineering incompetence, you can still look at all the pictures).

Now, I refer you to John Waters’s statement, perhaps in Timothy Greenfield-Saunders’s Thinking XXX, that when you watch straight porn you kinda feel sorry for the people (really the girls) doing it, but when you watch gay porn you never feel that way. This strikes me as pretty accurate. There’s a lot of drug abuse in gay porn, and of course there persists the absolute outrage of bareback porn, but most of the time it seems like a nice healthy outlet for male sexuality. (And, if you can find the obscure Dagenham Dave Show, gay porn can even be amusing. That series may be the only soft-core gay pornography extant, if we exclude those videos shown at Woody’s of guys languidly showering in the great outdoors.)

Ben must have had a grand old time during his “scene” with dapper, sensitive Árpád Miklós, the thinking man’s “porn star.” Who better to go 3D with? (One can imagine enjoying an apéritif with him at a well-designed cocktail bar – perhaps something out of late-’90s Wallpaper. We could discuss the Hungarian double-acute.)

I’m just trying to understand the career path and life progression of Blu Kennedy. Was he the kind of boy who knew he was gay very early and came out almost as early? (According to an interview, his mom must have suspected something when he found what every gay man has at one point maintained, a porn stash. Really, the scene in Queer as Folk where Stuart and Vince clean out the dead man’s porn so his mom won’t stumble upon it is only barely dramatized.) Ben lived in San Francisco and liked it there.

But when you move to New York and you’re young and in good shape and a ginger, does it just stand to reason you’ll bartend in your underwear at Splash, and dance on the speakers, and earn extra cash via porn? Isn’t it inevitable?

The bartending business seems like a great way to incur permanent hearing loss. But it gets you out there, doesn’t it? You’ve got twinks admiring your gingery form all night long. And if they want more, they can pay for it cleanly and antiseptically, without the tackiness of actual “escorting.”

But I’m still asking: Is it really a nice uncomplicated career and life progression to splash onto the scene at Splash and online in your mid-20s? Isn’t it better to do porn when you’re older, like Miklós, and have lived a little? Of course you are of legal age, but do you truly know better?

That other ginger performer, Will Clark (no relation), once wrote that he sees his porn career as a reminder that at one time he was a smoking-hot, high-demand piece of meat. Are a photographer, a set, and a contract really needed for that?

As with Miklós, we already know what Blu Kennedy looks like naked. Why not try something a tad more creative, less obvious, more indirect? If you look around a little, you can find a really smashing photo of the young lad, plasticky alabaster skin deployed to some effect, acting like a mannequin in a store vitrine. This icy Aryan-android look may be a better use of Blu Kennedy’s hereditary gifts. It’ll be something he can look back on with a smile.

(Cf. Stair Porn.)

BookCampTO was held yesterday at what was billed as iSchool. “iSchool? How trendy,” you think. It turned out to be the dismal exposed-aggregate fortress known as Robarts Library, an assault on the human condition that Spacer™ apologists fashionably defend. Worse, iSchool is actually the completely unremediated ass-end wing of Robarts known as FLIS or FIS, the Faculty of Information Science. It’s where you disappear, never to be seen again, if you want to become an MLS, which has nothing to do with selling houses, or making money, or seeing daylight.

BookCamp was supposed to be stretched the concept of an unconference to its limits., but so many people signed up that organizers had to set aside any debased anarchistic vestige of lesbian-style community facilitation and just decide who got a speaker slot and who didn’t. How was that really worse? Show up too late to an unconference and some Creative Commons apologist will inform you there’s no more room for your idea. Convenient.

Even viewed optimistically, there were only four viable sessions out of 23, one of which I missed because I was having my regular double espresso while reading the Globe. That one documented a method of translating XML (hence XHTML) directly into native InDesign documents. My kinda progress. (I later chatted up the inventor, John Maxwell. Surely we are now best friends forever.)

I got there halfway through luncheon and saw attendees splayed out on the lawn like kindergartners. That especial public intellectual with the neon-green backpack was, surprisingly, in attendance. (Now less reprehensible! We’d probably get along famously, but this theory seems unlikely to be tested. I can’t figure out how he survives in broad daylight without hat or sunscreen.)

I filed in for esteemed colleague Stephanie Troeth’s session “The Evolving Ecology of the Book,” cohosted with Carlos Scolari of Argentina. I had not seen Steph, surely the sole Malaysian-Chinese-Australian Montrealer extant, in some years, and quizzed her on Canadian English. (She flunked.) She now finds me a bit much.

We sat around arguing about vaguely related topics in E-book and P-book production, while some motormouth “designer” kept loudly declaiming graphic-design bromides he’d seen on blogs (line length, Zuzana Licko [mispronounced]). Somebody else complained about poésie, and the only solution anybody offered him was audio recordings. (This is the talking-book argument write large: Why teach blind kids to read when they can just listen to everything? Why even bother writing poetry down?)

It was a mixed audience, so I didn’t expect technical competence from everybody, but I adamantly do expect minimum competence from people who dare to complain about typography of E-books. How long will it take them to learn that ePub is XHTML 1.1 plus CSS, hence ePub files are Web pages? If you can Google “We read best what we read most” well enough to holler it twice in a session, why can’t you learn what happens when you separate content and structure from presentation? What happens is you lose control. (But! You can use max-width to limit line length. Poetry is a problem you solve with BR and hanging indents.)

This went on for some time. I’m back to believing that, at a technical level, Toronto sucks. It took an American, Liza Daly, who actually owns a Kindle and a Sony Reader, to steal the show with her announcement of ePub Zen Garden, which aims to do for XHTML+CSS (“E-books”) what CSS Zen Garden did for XHTML+CSS (“Web sites”). That same designer laboured to show everyone his brilliance and exclaimed “Oh! So you wrote an emulator for—” at which point I lost it and, after he finished, explained she hadn’t emulated anything but single-page display. All of it is styled markup. So is what you’re reading now.

I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do next. I thought “Books & Podcasting,” with no session description, would be least awful, and trudged upstairs to find a Victrola running an LP record at high volume. A hitherto-unknown podcasteuse with a foreign name and one of those grating mid-Atlantic accents (“BookKahmp”) struggled to keep her hair out of her eyes. (Baldness has its advantages.) She promoted her program of reading authors’ works out loud without their permission and distributing them via RSS. Illegal at best, but so are a lot of things.

Various publicists and publishers wondered exactly how to set up author podcasts. I was the sole voice of reason telling people not to use Skype for such interviews, since dropouts are guaranteed. “But people are so very much more forgiving with a podcast,” I was told. “In fact, whenever I find an ‘overproduced’ podcast I turn it off.” These were the closest things to outright lies I encountered all day. Nobody on the planet considers nice clean spoken-word audio “overproduced.” And you can do it in 48 kbps. (You want to use Skype? Use it to do a glorified double-ender.)

I was distracted during this nonsense by a trim, well-put-together old guy who walked in. Everyone immediately looked his way as though he were important. Turns out he was: Mr. Hugh McGuire put this whole thing together. I kept wondering: Why is an obvious heterosexualist so well dressed? Much later, it came to me in a flash: Of course – he’s from Montreal. It’s permitted there, a city where nobody ever laughs at your hat.

I was just barely able to stomach the title of a later session, “Open-Source Publishing,” despite the fact it is a complete oxymoron. What I ended up with was some fat nerd writing “FOSS” on a blackboard, a sure sign I was going to be given another indoctrination into the virtues of open-source software, which everyone in the room already knew about. (The true purpose of any vertical-market conference: To remind the audience of what it already knows.) Who can function without open-source software? But what does it have to do with books?

I walked smartly into the perfect afternoon sunlight, with hat but sadly without sunscreen, and thumbed my nose at misapplied open-source philosophy by enjoying a soyaccino at the very nearest Starbucks. (Not artisanal, not locavore, not fair-trade, not free as in beer. And no harm caused to cows.)

I gotta quit going to these things.

Whether or not we actually agree with or endorse the following ideas, the gay community (sic) is afraid to talk about them in public. (Not sure if you’re allowed to agree with any of these? Ask somebody more oppressed than you.)

1. Trannies were gay all along. And vice-versa.
2. FTMs are men because they say they are, especially if they don’t have breasts anymore. MTFs are women as soon as average passersby cannot tell they aren’t.
3. Once your personal ID, like your driver’s licence, shows your new, correct gender, it’s just catching up to the gender you had all along. The matter is settled; the law doesn’t make those kind of mistakes, and we can always trust what the government says about us.
4. Barebacking is merely a complex and ultimately quite understandable personal choice.
5. It really is impossible to intentionally infect someone with HIV – not just in practice, but in principle and in law. After all, it takes two to tango.
6. When we say AIDS is ravaging sub-Saharan Africa, “AIDS” has the same definition it has here.
7. The fact that lesbian bars have never been commercially viable (beyond one per city for limited periods) is due to sexist discrimination, mostly perpetrated by gay men.
8. Drag is a beloved cornerstone of entertainment at gay bars. It continues to be offered solely in response to unstinting audience demand.
9. “Dating” sites have not, in fact, destroyed the actual community that was formed in gay bars. A site like Manhunt is in fact a community builder.
10. Gay couples are the quintessential double-income/no-kids family, with much more disposable income than comparable straight couples.
11. Adultery is a meaningless concept in gay marriages, hence could never suffice as grounds for divorce.
12. Gay opponents of gay marriage are unfairly ostracized and marginalized for their well-founded dissident view.
13. There really is no such thing as a rice queen. The very concept, not to mention the term, is a racist lie.
14. Who among us can honestly say he hasn’t at one time or another spontaneously described himself as “LGBT”?
15. When a gay-male organization hires a lesbian to run it, the organization shows it has done nothing more than engage in antidiscriminatory hiring practices.
16. It just stands to reason that gay-pride organizations have an obligation to hire male and female “cochairs” of equal administrative power.
17. Dykes are so different, so special, yet so persecuted and downtrodden they need and deserve their own parade.
18. Most male teachers self-evidently are not gay. The scarcity of male teachers in elementary and kindergarten classes remains inexplicable.
19. Of course gay men aren’t defective variants of straight men.
20. What with metrosexuality and badgering by their faghag girlfriends, straight males are now so civilized they’re just as interested in involving themselves in gay men’s lives as their girlfriends are.
21. With so many hairdressers and fashion designers (words whose very pronunciations are a dead giveaway), the sole discernible evolutionary role of the gay man is to enhance the fuckability of chicks.
22. Deep down, each of us really is just like one of the Sex and the City girls. The only question is which one.

Why would we live in fear of debating these ideas? Because Islamofascists aren’t the only ones who issue fatwas.