I previously wrote:

[Oliver] Sacks would interview his patients and typewrite 500 words about each of them, their conditions, their lives. (Almost my exact approach when I meet anyone from another nation, tribe, or language group. I just don’t jot anything down.) Now, if only I could put my hands on the article that showed Sacks appearing last onstage at a neurological conference, after everyone else had recited dry “case histories,” and asking the attending doctors “Why aren’t any of you telling us what your patients are like?”

Sacks, in his own On the Move:

• I would sometimes tell [a medical student] to see a patient with, say, multiple sclerosis – to go to her room and spend a couple of hours with her. Then he had to give me the fullest possible report not only on her neurological problems and ways of living with them but on her personality, her interests, her family, her entire life history….

  [He] was often struck by the fact that I would often recommend original (often 19th-century) accounts. No one else in medical school, [he] said, ever suggested that he read such accounts; they were dismissed, if mentioned at all, as “old stuff,” obsolete, irrelevant[.]

• Series are needed – all sorts of generalizations are made possible by dealing with populations – but one needs the concrete, the particular, the personal too, and it is impossible to convey the nature and impact of any neurological condition without entering and describing the lives of individual patients.

• Mr. QUENTIN CRISP’s “representative on Earth,” Mr. JOHN HURT, enacting a moment in which Mr. CRISP might be happy, in The Naked Civil Servant.

  

• Steven Tilotta’s study (or colourized) of how Liberace might respond if surrounded by all-but-identical masked and harnessed pups.

  

Mr. CRISP of course never really experienced a happy moment.

I did tell you I took him to luncheon, did I not?

Just as the WordPerfect supplementary spellchecker dictionary was a window onto the soul circa 1988, one’s iPhone lock screen fills much the same function three decades later.

It goes without saying everybody else’s lock screen is awful, and, worse, entirely unconsidered. The system battles good taste on several fronts, offering deceptively named Move and Scale options that only allow the former in practice. Go the extra mile and save images in native resolutions (hard to look up and complicated by behind-the-scenes scaling and now parallax or perspective) and you encounter the fact that the two most difficult things to get onto or off of an iPhone are a photo and an URL.

• I was trying for a minimalist design (later I noticed it made my phone entirely black) that anyone nearby would struggle to notice, let alone decode. I used Weekend fan art, inverting it successively in each of the modes Graphic­Converter offers, of which the final sepia is one. It took easily a dozen tries to get image width right, add padding, and vertically position it correctly. And it is indeed a tracing of the iconic image of Russell and Glen’s final kiss.

• For iPhone Eks, I disclosed to artist Topher McCulloch that I had been reusing his work all along, and asked for a version that would natively fit the new resolution. He sent one back, but, to my surprise, the original wallpaper transferred over perfectly with no intervention.

  But that became too austere and ascetic. Plus I’d been looking at it for years, or had become banner-blind to it over time. Something with a bit more life was in order: This was a job for Edgar Murillo’s colour sense. Again very few illustrations could be crammed into the unyielding aspect ratio.

After I set up these beautiful and vibrant interfaces, two words that rarely go along with the third, I looked around at so-called gay lock screens and found nothing but banged-together “LGBT+” propaganda. We’re supposed to have taste.

Fundamentally, these are our personal phones, and we can put whatever we want on them, whether it be porn or inspiring male photography and illustration or (I’m thinking of my longtime friend’s lock screen here, which requires pages of scrolling through small-type notifications) cruising alerts from Grindère or Scruff.

Wangs and pup tails are up next.

See also

Flickr album thereof.

Friends of Canadian Broadcasting is the curiously named nonprofit lobby group (perverse official orthography: FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting) that exists solely to argue for greater funding for, and greater reach of, the CBC. Anything else it purports to do is nothing but a cover story.

“FriendsCB” offers the annual Dalton Camp Award for stilted essays reinforcing the national governing broadcast lobbyist’s narrative. While Friends’ Web site still lists spokesman-for-life Ian Morrison as its spokesman, in fact “Daniel Bernhard is FRIENDS'Executive Director and Spokesperson” (sic). Ages ago I wrote him a letter about the Dalton Camp Award’s bizarre requirements.

Rule 8 has the temerity to state:

All ideas in an entry shall be the original written expression of the entrant… and shall not… contain any libellous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise unlawful or objectionable content.

An entry in an essay contest shall not contain “objectionable content”? (How precisely does an “idea” contain “content”?)

It is reprehensible that a lobby group for Canadian broadcasting – which, to quote §2 of the Charter, defends “freedom of the press and other media of communication” – should state that an entry in a writing contest might get DQed because some volunteer judge got offended. (Or purported to.)

I reasonably believe an essay advocating for privatization of the CBC would be deemed “objectionable” and disqualified. Doesn’t this rule turn an ostensibly free essay contest into a Soviet-style exercise of recapitulating the national governing broadcasting lobby group’s consensus on perpetual, indeed perpetually increasing, government funding for the national governing public broadcaster? Isn’t the purpose of this rule to enforce consensus and blatantly warn off entrants who might dare to dissent?

Without unblinding any competition judging, on what ethical basis can you support the inclusion of such a rule? Will its application be struck from this year’s entries, and will it be deleted entirely for future years?

Of course I didn’t get a response. (I asked again.)

2018’s winners involved work by Brad Stollery, a male-feminist civil servant, regarding Internet access for “Indigenous Peoples.” (Remember, white cishet males: Calling them Indians, Inuit, or Métis, or even aboriginals or First Nations peoples, is as racist as calling Desmond Cole a nigger.) The student award went to a creative-writing student and female, Georgina Beaty.

Take a wild guess which entry didn’t win. [continue with: Dalton Camp Award 2018 →]

Bullneck on Flickr takes all sorts of photos of bike cops and bubbas, almost always with the knowledge and permission of their subjects. Still, some viewers of his photos have been a bit dickish about things, reusing photographs and generally causing embarrassment. Hence this photograph was per se deleted from Bullneck’s Flickr: [continue with: Essential manly attribute: Width →]

(UPDATED) Every single thing Peter Saville (.info; q.v.) says is interesting here.

“Someone once asked me, ‘What do you think got you interested in graphics?’ When I searched my memory I had this recollection of being fascinated as a child by my mother’s charm bracelet. The bracelet… has a variety of graphic symbols on it. […]

“The yellow Perspex card on the right is a pass I designed in 2007 for Tony Wilson’s memorial service. Tony, who cofounded Factory Records, was the most important person in my career.[”]

Update (a day later)

Interview, 2015:

• What is “the cult of Peter Saville”?

  In many cases, people had a little moment with something early on that they hadn’t had before – something that introduced an idea that family or state or school or life so far had not introduced…. And oddly, because of the canon of pop, it recurs in a way that one would not have imagined or expected. So of course, you know, in my case, Unknown Pleasures is required listening for each subsequent generation of young people…. There are certain visual things to do with Joy Division and New Order’s covers which are slightly different. So that little moment of discovery of something that life might not have shown you yet, it still recurs.

• And people my generation and older are kind of hardwired to forms of logic. We actually look for solutions in things; we look for logic; we look for understandings of the world. During my mid-career, analogue began to give way to digital – gradually, initially. Some of the work I’ve done with people [e.g., Suede] has been about that transition…. The digital began to allow for a kind of a multiplicity of things, for things to happen simultaneously, for there to be more parallel strands going on in both digital practice and then, in a way, kind of digital experience.

  The digital over the last sort of 20 years has really fractured and kind of become atomized. So our experience of things and our relationship to things is kind of atomized. The kind of previous almost pedantic way of things seems really kind of archaic now – that B would have to follow A, and then C and D, that there would be this kind of logical sequence of things. The era that I grew up in of isms, of romanticism or classicism or Vorticism… and the kind of mini-phases of fashion that were kind of self-contained, have given way to a kind of pluralism…. So our cultural experience has become entirely pluralist.

• Adam Curtis (q.v.) explains the origin of the cultural concept of brainwashing

• “Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also [happened] the Soviet Union”

• Cashing out of San Francisco

• Hubris of Elon Musk

• Burton Kramer (a new Order of Canada Member): “I just got very tired of knowing more and more, and the client always starting from ground zero”

• Lesbians protesting transgenderism, as they should:

  1. “After Pride, I have questions”

  2. “The trans ego: Why allies are becoming TERFs”

  3. “just think about the fact that weren’t it for a black trans woman, you, a cis lesbian wouldn’t have the rights you have today” (sic)

  4. “Could you be a transwoman? Take the following test”

• The Art of Manliness’ head Mormon (q.v.) describes his ten most meaningful postings

• XTRMNTR(/not XTRMNTR) turns 15

• Male Fashions can barely be believed

• “The Apple Park Visitor’s Center is a demonstration of an accessible building when cost is no object,” unless you need to press an elevator button

• Michael Malice (q.v.): “when you shop at the same sign store as the Westboro Baptist Church”

  

• Desecrating the saintly rainbow flag:

  My prediction for next year’s outraged and modified flag will include:

  azure

  for women with prostate cancer

  topaz

  for LGB murderers

  opaque

  to memorialize all the brave QTpinkXYZ who died for their flag colour

• In response to Larry Kramer’s jeremiad:

  I’m working-class and I’m pretty goddamn complacent. I’ve earned it. (I’m also in my 30s and have been happily partnered for years, so maybe that accounts for some of my contentment.) So are most of my gay friends in real life (the good ones, not the losers who never grew up). Thankfully, none of them have been infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome (transmitted through sharing dirty social media and [through] unprotected mass-media consumption).

  Over time, I’ve come to realize how perpetually unhappy some people choose to be and, worse, how many of them channel their misery into outdated struggles. It’s almost like some people use the all-encompassing and nebulous threat of homophobia to cloak their own personal failings so they can shirk responsibility for bad decisions, bad habits, etc. Maybe the cashier at [the drugstore] isn’t homophobic, Harry – maybe you were an asshole? […]

  Cf. “Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter.”

  Maybe it alleviates their depression if they can pretend they are oppressed and fighting for justice, but really it’s mere role-playing. Indulging these fantasies is about as helpful as pretending men can get pregnant and dicks can be female….

  Also, it’s funny how most of you would normally clutch pearls at anything with a whiff of America First, yet this is exactly what you’re doing with gay rights. Most of our time and money and attention could be best spent not on LGBTQUIAA​DONKEYLIPS bullshit at home, but gay rights abroad in the various shitholes that still murder men and women for same-sex attraction. That would be effective altruism. But no, America in 2018 is some hellhole to a bunch of loud, privileged dopes who don’t know how to live happily ever after….

  Instead of worrying about helping a five-year-old future gay guy block puberty, instead of making sure unattractive narcissists attention-whore themselves without being rightly made fun of, instead of entertaining the delusions of closet cases and straight people with a fetish, we could be actually helping our cause where it’s needed the most.