(NOW WITH UPDATE)    The Toronto Star Wheels section is a giant moneymaker for the newspaper – two or sometimes three sections each Saturday, running, on average, 26 pages of advertising and 10 pages of editorial copy. (Those two figures overlap, of course – editorial and pagecounts can be distributed over the same printed sheets.)

Wheels writers are often jetted off to exotic destinations for superexclusive new-car previews, with all expenses paid by automakers. You can safely assume everyone is flown business class, put up in four-star hotels, and plied with numerous goodie bags. The whole enterprise is flatly an unethical journalistic practice, in which corporations, many of which advertise in the paper, indirectly pay for coverage. [continue with: Wheels EthicsWatch →]

Possibly the loveliest detail of any car.

No… no, not “possibly.”

I have stopped seeing my dreamy gay dermatologist on a regular basis, partly because I wasn’t convinced that the corticosteroid injections were doing any good, and partly because one time he gave an injection into a persistent bald patch in my lower neck and struck a vein or artery or some sort of blood vessel, and my neck swelled up as if I had a goiter, and I was left with a slowly expanding bruise that spread all the way down to my chest. That seemed worse than a small patch of baldness.

Also, I was starting to feel comparatively inferior, seeing this dreamy gay dermatologist who was so successful, despite being slightly younger than I, once every month, as he reported newer levels of success to me as we “caught up” (my success to report was confined to hair regrowth). But this is something that one needs to get used to, since there is only more of it every year that one lives. “Just wait until the President is younger than you,” a family friend, who has since died of cancer, once said to me, after I had rototilled her yard and laid new sod, in a freak masculine episode in my early twenties.

Recently I was in a car driving to the Florida Keys with a young friend who had spent the night with an extremely good-looking guy who was roughly my age and who in those years had already had a career as a Navy SEAL and was now a medical doctor. I have really wasted my life, I remember thinking while staring out the car window at some bleak, mostly-abandoned housing development. I would never be a Navy SEAL or medical doctor, or even a nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant. […]

One night in a different bar a 22-year-old guy involved in the international diamond trade expressed interest in me, but I naturally assumed that it was some sort of prank.

Welcome back, Kotter.

This is ostensibly the British style of 3, a proposition I do not entirely buy.

Now trods the same path as The Walrus in its intellectualized defence of mixed martial arts (Ultimate Fighting™). We’ve got the same claims that MMA is safer than boxing, the same spotlight on a fighter who, far from being a Trailer Park Boy, is university student or medical resident, and, crucially, the same visits to an Indian reservation to witness MMA events that the pugilist governing body refuses to sanction and insists are illegal.

Which one’s gay?

Then we come to the differences. Like: Now actually admits these fighter d00dz are hot. Or, at the very least, the whole “scene” is.

“I’m looking for athleticism, some personality and some skill, not just weekend warriors,” says Freedom Fight’s Peter Rodley. “You gotta remember: these guys are auditioning to fight in front of 4,000 people in their underwear.” […]

“We allow two grown men to get married in this province but we don’t allow two grown men to fight. It’s ridiculous,” says professional MMA trainer Sam Zakula.

I’ve channel-surfed through the various homoerotic MMA shows on television, including The Ultimate Fighter. I suppose these boys are nice to look at, but please: They’re all from the wrong side of the tracks. To paraphrase The Simpsons, they’re just yellow trash.

Fundamentally, this is my problem with homosexualists who profess to fancy MMA. At root, they’re lying. Ask Buddy Cole: “Lately I’ve been taking a lot of interest in athletics. Well, athletes.” They’re trying to undo their unmasculine childhoods. They valourize the same boys who beat them up or picked on them, or, even more tragically, ignored them completely when what they really wanted was a zipless fuck. Or a really rough fuck, a well-schooled rodgering from unschooled louts. (You graduated from university. You call yourself a professional in your personal ad, and you’ve got a really very smart pair of rectangular eyeglasses to prove it.)

This isn’t my own history, since the closest thing to a bully I dealt with was a big ugly Jew with a good body. (A Jewish bully in New Brunswick. Pace Angelou, they bring the shtetl with them.) This idolizing is one form of dishonesty piled on another. It’s well more than and much worse than idolizing your oppressors. I barely buy it from Shad Smith, the hardscrabble felon/fighter/homosexualist. The ongoing (unrelated) quest by a puny gay rugger to become an actual competitive martial artist fills me with contempt, and I don’t do contempt very often. (You could look him up. He has nearly the same name, making him an also-ran yet another way.)

If that’s not political enough for you, they’re all too happy to sic a ginger on a Muslim.

Yeah, we got your clash of civilizations right here.

(UPDATED 2008.07.23, 2009.04.30)    I have completed my first round of research into the TTC Web-site contract. The easiest thing to report is the bid totals.

The winner, Devlin, bid about $432,000. Like several other bidders, including Bell and Radiant Core, Devlin applied to have the money portions severed from the released records. I’ll be appealing that, I’ll win, and I’ll report the results. (Bell withdrew its appeal; figures published below.) Such a severing was particularly pointless in Devlin’s case, given that the result was published. (Then again, bidders applied to have information severed from one page of a document that was clearly reiterated on another page. You must be new here.)

Four bids were deemed noncompliant for various reasons – those of Advoca, Bell (yes), eSolutions, and Intrafinity.

I have the internal reviews and scoring for most bidders and will publish those as soon as I figure out a reasonably comprehensible manner of doing so. Figures below include all mandatory and any optional elements. Keep in mind that every company listed below lost.

Vancouver rechercheuse Karen Fung has completed her honour’s thesis into Toronto Transit Camp as an example of unconventional social change. I was one of her interviewees, and my remarks were, I suspected and told her, farthest from her core topic. (“What was your expected outcome from Transit Camp?” “Radiant Core would get the TTC Web contract.” That sort of thing.)

Anyway: Money quote?

[P]articipants also felt that the TTC did not express adequately to the participants, post-event, whether they had received insight or value as a result of participating in from the event…. While this can be somewhat expected for the TTC, which was working outside any previously established process with its participation at Toronto Transit Camp, the fact that this is typical even of those authorities who engage the public in accordance with their own public-engagement efforts indicates that this is an area in need of significant improvement. […]

For many participants, the TTC’s sincerity in participating in Toronto Transit Camp was questioned or even interpreted cynically, as a public relations or a political maneuver that had no basis in a desire for change or improvement:

[The TTC staff member in the session] didn’t necessarily have anything particularly important to say. I know he was there really as “strength in numbers”… and I really felt that it’s all very well that [TTC Chair Adam Giambrone is] there, but I don’t think they came in to be offensive, they came to be defensive. […] I don’t feel like they came in to actually hear what we were going to say, despite Adam Giambrone’s speech at the end of the day. I really think that they were there to just to make sure that shit didn’t go down. Like a riot or something.

Many other interviewees, who described the organization somewhat negatively with regards to its capacity for change, openness or flexibility, repeated this skepticism. These interviewees described the TTC as risk-averse and being too focused on the operational cost, at the expense of providing a positive customer experience.

I used to listen to the podcast with the grammatically questionable name, Be a Design Cast. It was produced by the so-called Be a Design Group. (If anything, would one not want to “be” a designer?)

The podcast was succeeded by The Reflex Blue Show. It’s from two of the same kids, Nate Voss and Donovan Beery, under the ægis of their new nom de baladodiffusion, 36 Point. They may be OK designers, but they should stay away from the Web, since the code and appearance of their new site are terrible. (Attention to craft as shoddy as this would earn you a C in design school. Tables for layout and garish comic-book colours map quite accurately to “I couldn’t decide on a font, so I used Arial” and “This free stock photo is just what I’m looking for!”)

I listen to the Reflex Blue Show. It’s overlong. It’s not altogether interesting. These are hardly novel criticisms of podcasts. Nonetheless, it is a form of wish fulfilment – wish manifestation, even – of which I know only two precedents. Voss and Beery are junior graphic designers in Omaha, Nebraska – yet they run their own podcast on graphic design and, in many cases, interview visiting design microcelebrities. They find enough to talk about in general, and they also manage to piggyback on whatever design events are happening in that small town.

Omaha is kind of an arts capital of the Midwest, but the kids have pulled off an achievement in mythmaking on a par with the contention that Winnipeg has a huge arts and cinema “community” (it never did, and Guy Maddin couldn’t wait to move to Parkdale) or that Toronto was home to roving bands of well-hung, uncut queer punks in tight clothing (a complete fabrication). Bravo there: Keep it up and eventually you’ll have Matthew Broderick or Reese Witherspoon on your show.

But Voss and Beery are almost insufferable to listen to. They offer an American bravado that’s been sitting under a heat lamp too long. It’s the manufactured enthusiasm of a college (not university) football game, of a “tailgate party,” of football in general. There’s too much reliance on brassy, punchy, overloud, overstrong delivery of drawn-out syllables – as if they don’t quite know how they’re going to fill up their airtime, so, like radio amateurs everywhere, they drawl. Also very American. And guyish. Terribly, terribly guyish.

I continue to labour away at a psychological explanation for why the Gays dominate every field of design except the only one I’m really interested in, graphic design. (And typography, the micro to graphic design’s macro.) Designers are so straight you cannot fucking believe it. They’re so straight they run podcasts that could be about college football teams but are actually about fonts and layouts. Designers are nicely dressed and nicely turned out and are good solid Macintosh supremacists, but they have children and families and the only guys from whom they feel different are the working classes, because designers are educated.

But there may not be much of a gulf, I realize now. Graphic design is workaday, unfancy, invisible most of the time. It is less so now that the Web has made it actually possible to explore the kind of personal work that photographers have always had at their disposal, but the Beatrice Warde crystal-goblet theory remains firmly in place. Graphic designers make things that are used. We use them by reading them, but that’s something everybody does. It’s practical. This, of course, is one of the many reasons why intellectual design criticism does not work, never did work, and is doomed.

As I write this I am watching a not-very-good interview (QuickTime movie) with one of those Dutchmen, complete with a Dutch name that English-speakers cannot take seriously, who runs Butt (FANTASTIC MAGAZINE FOR HOMOSEXUALS; q.v.). As the interview opened, a guy minced out and sat down with the Butt editor. The guy mumbled his name in the gayest accent I’ve heard all year… and I realized the name was that of one of the Usual Suspects of intellectual design criticism, Andrew Blauvelt. He’s design director and curator of the Walker Art Center, whose bespoke font has practical, workaday snap-on serifs.

Blauvelt giggled away and tossed off bitchy little minijokes straight out of the gay playbook. He crossed his legs like a girl. He didn’t act quite like a girl, but seemed indistinguishable from a contestant on Project Runway. He’s completely unconvincing, especially when asking deep intellectual questions (anything using the word “duality”), and he’s unconvincing because he walked right out of the gay catalogue. Meanwhile, the Dutchman is equally gay, but has an accent other than the gay one and rather different mannerisms. I know many Dutchmen, half of them type designers and all of them heterosexualists, and I do not find the accent grating; the editor’s body language seems unaffected and plausible.

Host and guest are similar enough that they were even both wearing sweaters, yet one guy came off as credible and the other did not. The effete, stereotypically gay intellectual talks a lot about design; the tall, foreign art director founded three unique magazines. Perhaps it is not actual homosexualism that is the determinant but some degree of masculinity.

Effeminacy stops you from doing things. (It may put you on Project Runway, but how much schoolyard bullying did that cost along the way?) Guy designers are, in the main, straight-guy designers because straight guys get shit done and that’s what graphic design is all about. It isn’t art or fashion in the slightest and isn’t the tiniest bit twee. Now that I think about it, certain notable homosexualist designers like Roger Black aren’t maladaptive in this way either.

My working theory, then, is that artistique gays go into fashion design and actual art. Graphic design might as well be engineering. It’s just too threateningly practical for these terribly sensitive, terribly misunderstood little dears. The proportion of homosexualist engineers seems equivalent to that of homosexualist graphic designers. If you made it into either field, does that mean you dodged the pink bullet?

Essentially, Mike Rowe (q.v.) would make an excellent graphic designer.

It’s just a theory, of course. Like my theory on why dykes would be great at Web development, it will surely be taken the wrong way. Then again, I’m tired of twisting myself out of shape for you people.