Mr. Q. Crisp, portrayed by his “representative on earth,” John Hurt, in The Naked Civil Servant (a film with Friz Quadrata intertitles):

I took Quentin Crisp to lunch circa 1994.

Were you delusional for thinking that graphic design is a forum for personal expression or not? “Record covers gave me uncompromised freedom and an incredibly large audience to speak to. And it influenced that audience, for better or worse.”

At least Peter Saville did what so many of us did – to extrapolate from his quotation a bit, he lay on his bed, arranged graphical works on the floor, and spent all afternoon looking at them. (What exact works? A Letraset catalogue? U&lc? A double-page spread of a mansion with a Jaguar parked on its U-shaped driveway? Kids have more of this available to them than ever, except they can’t lie face-down on the bed and look at the computer.) “ ‘I was on my own version of the Grand Tour,’ he explains. ‘My education began by staring at Roxy Music LP covers and listening to Kraftwerk… Suddenly I wanted to know about modernism, the Bauhaus, classicism, the Renaissance, typography, filmmakers, photographers.’ ”

And something else I can relate to: “ ‘Am I a millionaire?’ He pauses for a moment, as though to check. ‘Well, back in January I did my accounts, and for the financial year 2005–2006 I earned £53,000 – that was my taxable income…. I don’t own a property. I owned one briefly…. I just about break even in my earnings; I’m only just getting to the point where I’m solvent. Between 1985 and 2005, I never settled into an ad agency or a large design firm’ ” – well, that’s not entirely accurate; he’s really leaning on the meaning of “settled into” here – “ ‘or owned a big successful design company of my own. That’s why I don’t have any money. […]

“ ‘People ask me, ‘What do you think of Coldplay?’ I have no opinion of Coldplay. I’m 50. I didn’t ask my dad what he thought of Roxy Music.’ ” His opinion should be “The cover of X&Y is a direct copy of my style.” Even Adrian Shaughnessy agrees.

S. McCloud, in Making Comics (p. 156), gives reasons to use or not use all caps in comic-book lettering.

Pro

• About 98% of all English-language comics in the last 100 years have used it, including nearly all of the comics now considered classics. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
• Capital letters are easier to letter by hand.
• Caps fill the space more efficiently [that is, less efficiently – fewer characters use more space].
• Caps blend better with pictures.
• Caps look better with frequent bold/italic type.

Con

• There are a lot of things comics have rarely done in the last 100 years, including nature themes, subtle characterization, and sophisticated artwork; that’s no reason not to try them.
• One of the most popular comics in history, Tintin, uses upper- and lower-case lettering, as do other European comics, and it looks great.
• Easier doesn’t equal better.
• A little whitespace never hurt anyone.
• If upper- and lower-case letters don’t blend with pictures, how do we explain five centuries of illustrated books?
• Bold type is overused and melodramatic [not that we were talking about that].

Missing from this list: Everything else you read all day is in mixed case, including every other book you have ever read.

I don’t think there will be a lot of pedestrian traffic on this rocky outcropping.

But still. Better safe than sorry.

Tara Ariano, alias Wing Chun, is the much-unloved dominatrix of Television Without Pity and, formerly, other sites like Hissyfit. We’ve never met. But, as supreme ruler of the worst kind of jumped-up high-school gang (always swift to interpret vague posting guidelines in favour of preferred members), and equally adroit with the cutting remark, Ariano and her husband, David T. Cole (“Glark”), epitomized the Wrong People’s Internets. Hissyfit’s maxim “You’re entitled to our opinion” was rather selective in its interpretation of who was included in “our.” There were always opinions that could get you banned from the site, get your post deleted, or elicit a warning (viz “Watch it, joeclark”).

Things were made even worse by the highly public married couple’s Web-development atrocities, which broke up (admittedly overlong) “recaps” of TV episodes into as many frame- and table-based pages as possible – all the better to maximize (i.e., dishonestly inflate) page views.

“We” took these miscreants to task several times on the old NUblog (first; second) and in the old archives. Their career was based on a dichotomy, if not outright hypocrisy: They enjoyed the relative low cost and livability of Toronto while their entire enterprise centred around U.S. “pop culture.”

Who can forget Ariano’s Hissyfit posting in which she described her frustration that Rogers Cable could not install a cable converter fast enough that would give her access to an L.A. feed of Dawson’s Creek fractionally earlier than the Canadian simulcast? (Well, everyone forgets it now, because, in further evidence that these are quite the Wrong People, archives were simply deleted.) Wing Chun and Glark are a special kind of American sellout, Canadians by accident of birth only.

An epoch of Television Without Pity ended when the two sold the whole thing to Bravo. Not the Canadian one, of course, the “real” one, owned by NBC. You would have to assume the purchase price was in the low seven digits. Finally, the master and paymaster become one.

Ariano and Cole stand at the top of the hitlist of a certain kind of Toronto parasite, a constant griper about the city who nonetheless keeps living here. The reasons why are never discussed, but they have to cancel out the reasons for leaving, otherwise the parasites would have left already. (Or, in the case of another entry on that list, there is no acknowledgement they just couldn’t hack it in New York. Or that something like an arrest record or a decades-long history of drug use and possession disqualify one from entry.) But in another welcome case of hypocrisy reduction, it is now confirmed that the sellouts are finally getting the fuck out of here on June 15.

I won’t miss them and they won’t miss me. No matter what else happens, mid-June is going to be a happy time for actually proud and responsible Canadians. And so I invite you to follow the One Less Hater Countdown. Sixteen days to go!

Merely a month after release in its homeland, its editor’s homeland finally receives issue three of Monocle (op. cit.). There’s been small decline in quality.

• On the Contributors page, I am still not clear why an em dash sits on its own line under the contributor’s name and title (the latter given in grey small caps, so it’s not as if this page does not receive specific attention).
• The maps of Monocle’s global coverage in this issue again show Canada as an unmarked void. Then again, the U.S., Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean are, too.
• Brûlé really takes his australophilia to extremes, with a nine-page treatment of Australian “policing” of the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. A sidebar is a useful primer on the recent history and occupation of Pacific islands. (Issue two did the same thing with South American governments.)
• Did you know that immigrants to Sweden are rushing to svenskify their names, but to do so they have to make up completely new ones? “Under Swedish law, you can’t take the name Larsson if it doesn’t already exist in your family. You have to invent a new name for yourself.”
• Several typos in the issue, including discrete for discreet (that one’s straight out of gay “dating” ads). The magazine has enough money to get these right, and, as I read the issue on a plane (which took three full hours), I didn’t jot them down. (On what? An Air Canada napkin?) I’ve got smudgy pages 2/3 of the way through the book. Quality control, please.
• A minor variation on the woodcut-like illustrations used to deconstruct the fashion sense of world leaders: This time it’s the wife of the president of Argentina, who is pretty much derided as a tacky show-off. (At least her name tones down those Argentine ethnic mismatches: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.)
• In a major variation of the regular interview with important government ministers, this one’s an interchangeable Singapore Chinese salaryman, not the dashing white guys Brûlé actually likes. I detect some nose-holding at work. And I’m simply not buying Brûlé’s newfound appreciation for Seoul (or the weak article on the same topic).
• This issue’s brûléist advertorial is for BEAUTY & YOUTH UNITED ARROWS × MONOCLE, the former being some kind of Japanese fashion house whose monoline cartouche logotype echoes Monocle’s. (Such a thing at least makes sense in Japan, where you sign documents with a stamp, called a hanko, bearing a little cartouche of your name.) The Panasonic Olympic advertorial is back for the third time.
• The whole issue’s theme is bicycling, which leads to the improbable image of immaculately austere Tyler Brûlé pedalling through killer London traffic and smog. I think not. And, as a Gawker commenter pointed out, the new £600 bespoke Monocycle is a relic from the velocipede era. It’s manufactured by Skeppshult of Sweden, whose owner gets his own feature (and who took out an ad near the back of the book). The Finnish Jopo bike, however, looks like a winning combination of lowrider and cruiser (and isn’t listed on the Web site).
• The number-keyed photo spread of a Finnish ambulance van was right up my alley. Civic infrastructure means more than modernist buildings.
• Frankly, I didn’t believe the premise of Ian Mount’s piece on Buenos Aires, here presented as a location for U.S. runaway commercial shoots. One guy “recalls repeated instances of Argentine women arriving on set to play office assistants, wearing far less clothing than would be customary in a typical office in, say, Toronto [sic]. ‘The girl comes out in a short shirt and an almost restrictively tight sleeveless top that has “sexual harassment” written all over it…. They send her back with something a little bit more conservative.’ ”
• Gee, a whole squib on a newsstand in Portugal. Why? They stock Monocle. (I have learned the hard way that Toronto’s giant newsstands in every neighbourhood are unusual. For example, I predict that the only place in Boston to buy Monocle is Harvard Square.)
• Designer pet furniture and food bowls are modelled by an attractive but ill-photographed long-haired dachshund.
• I was really confused for half a minute by the fashion spread featuring Gert Jonkers (no relation), listed as “the co-editor… of Amsterdam-based [fashion] magazine Fantastic Man.” This is straight out of The Celluloid Closet. Jonkers started out as founder and editor of Butt (FANTASTIC MAGAZINE FOR HOMOSEXUALS; q.v.). I gather that twee gay fashion is tolerable for Monocle, but pink pages featuring interviews with porn impresarios, John Waters, and “nongay queer popstar Michael Stipe” are beyond the pale. I’m pretty sure Jonkers was in town – while I was out of town – as guest of honour at an overpriced party for the queer film festival. Whom do I have to blow to get an interview in Butt?
• Last but not least, Monocle channels Spy by buying a ticket on Iran Air’s insane weekly flight from Tehran to Caracas. “When, to my considerable surprise, I’m led upstairs and onto the flight deck….”

Last night, at the official bar of @media 2007 “America,” an Orientalist girl, out for a boring “date” with an Orientalist Hawaiian d00d, attempted to pick up me and two other guys.

Unclear on the concept? Or maybe she was just chatting us up to get rid of her date. This is not exactly a difference I can easily detect.

And, anyway, an update

(2007.05.28 18:52)    San Francisco and New York are the sole citystates within the U.S.; they could both separate from the homeland at any time, becoming mini-Lesothos with their own money and culture. Only a few telltale signs remind me that I’m in the United States: Cars without headlights on, indistinguishable banknotes, half-arsed payphone hardware, English-only product packaging, the “wrong” ethnic mix. (No one ever seems to mention the effect that your city’s ethnic mix exerts on you when you travel. In particular, there are more Latinos here by an order of magnitude, and the two cities’ black populations have different origins, so they look different. Oddly, doddering Chinese grandparents from the mainland look and act the same in both places.)

I was warned by blogs written by former San Franciscans who returned there for visits that the city’s homeless problem is astronomical. It is. I thought we had it bad.

I adore the well-preserved old buildings jammed cheek by jowl on crisscrossing downtown streets. I even like a lot of the new buildings, and I made the mistake of underestimating Yerba Buena Gardens the first time I walked through. Standing in Union Square (another New York–citystate element) amid throngs of shoppers is busy without being overwhelming. Maybe it’s the lack of gigantic video billboards. (I CAN HAS STREETFURNITURE? It isn’t all good news: Don’t come to this city if you don’t want faux-antique billboard posts on every second corner.)

As an avowed transit fan, if only a recent convert to such a religion, I had to take the BART, which I’ve been reading about since I was a kid. There is no more futuristic subway system. The trains, with their angled tinted windows and offset driver’s windscreen, hurtle into sterile modernist stations, outfitted with the least legible signage of any system I’ve ever seen. (Really, they use white-on-grey Univers along the walls.) Automated announcements use a male voice for one platform and a female voice for the other, neither of them all that intelligible. (The technology has improved a lot. Time for an upgrade.) BART trains’ padded seats are a nice touch, though the noise level is disturbing. In an echo of Toronto’s Old Mill, several stations are half-inside and half-outside.

I was initially unclear on what the Muni was. (That word has the best logotype ever, a cherished wavy relic from the ’60s reminiscent of a Lance Wyman design for the Mexico City Olympics. Keep it at all costs!) Not only is it the name of one of the many interlocking bus systems in the Bay Area, it’s another subway system of sorts. I didn’t even notice at first that my subway “train” was actually two light-rail cars. Like the BART, the Muni switches from subway to surway at points.

They’ve still got trolley buses, many of them the same ancient stock that Toronto used to have and Vancouver still does (complete with “linen” destination signs). Scarcely any of the buses are wheelchair-accessible, and I don’t see how that’s remotely legal; the high quads of ADAPT didn’t get themselves arrested by blockading San Francisco cable cars for nothing. And yes, they’ve got the old cable cars, which are too antiquated to be of interest, but there’s also a fleet of PCC streetcars nearly indistinguishable from Toronto’s old stock. Some of those have inexplicable wheelchair logos near the entrances.

(With some residual Toronto fear of getting nabbed for carrying out a legal and permissible activity, I took transit photos left, right, and centre, which shall be Flickrized in due course.)

What of the people? It was surprising how many of my friends and acquaintances were actually out of town during my visit (at IML, in Paris, in Greece). Disappointing, but just bad timing. What was more surprising was how many friends and acquaintances promised to meet and did not. (BLIND ITEM: Which Britpack alumnus has metamorphosed from lithe, adorable limerent object to full-on self-absorbed prick in two fleeting years?)

I was eventually granted an audience with Geekslut, of whom I have been a defender, aide, and abettor for years. I don’t know how you can go wrong with a 210-pound ex-Army grunt who’s been stabbed, run over, and beaten up more times than he can count, while also flexing database muscles to bail organizations out of disasters. (Then there’s his 600-strong queer guild on World of Warcraft.) We couldn’t be more different… we have barely anything in common… and that makes him my kind of people. While he’s more than able to fend for himself, you fuck with Geekslut, I’ll fuck you up.

Stephen was, moreover, the ideal creampuff to have on one’s arm during a walking tour of the storied Castro, which – so help me – reminded me of the gay street in Brighton. (Seen one, you’ve seen ’em all. We really are coin of the realm by now.) My esteemed colleague was wary at first, but eventually warmed up, going so far as to admit his surprise that I was “personable.” Yeah, you’re all heart, baby.

And as for your other questions about me and Geekslut, the answer to all of them is NO. Consuming watered-down Cokes Diète at Pilsner, a bog-standard homosexualist bar from a kit, scarcely counts for anything either.

I did, however, have the best Japanese food of my life at Minako, a hole in the wall on the Mission, a street so sketchy it reminds me of Eastern Ave. before they raided the Hell’s Angels. Minako is so small and so busy that you put your name on a list and the proprietress calls your shoephone when a table is ready. I was lucky and got my own table almost immediately, although that required a solicitation from another lone diner. (“Excuse me, sir, would you mine if I shared your table?” “The honest answer is yes.” The proprietress backed me up on that.)

I noted the vast swaths of veganist options, of which the proprietress (and her mom, who does the cooking) are proud. I was served a superb salad; tofu gyozæ upside-down under a shield of pastry; a bento of seasoned brown rice and six or eight different types of pickles and savoury amuses-bouche; and an excellent basic dish of vegetable tempura that finished with the best mouthful of mushroom I’ve ever had. If you think vegans are vegans because they have “issues” with food, you haven’t seen me in a place like this.

The conference? I enjoyed the conference. Nobody seems to be blogging (short for “Web logging”) about it, and there are barely any photos. (Then again, any keyword beginning with @media is difficult to search for.) The conference-closing Hot Topics Panel™, also unblogged (and, like the rest of @media, unrecorded for podcast), triggered an outpouring of sincerity that embarrassed even me. But I meant every word of it, even if every Sunday other panelists and audiencemembers are informed that someone like me is doomed to hell and deserves what he’ll get.

The trip was another case of being surrounded by friends (I had to move friends to sit down), but afterward I reverted to my standard frustration and regret that everybody else has a real business. On the plus side, he who has finally closed the gap from 99% of the Canadian Web-accessibility market to all of it – that last percentage point representing 100% of my own business – was at least not present at the conference staring me in the face in a jovial and matey way. It’s great that you all know and respect me, but I’d like a bit more money in the bank. Surely this is not all the sarcastic gay vegan deserves.

One is scheduled to speak at @media2007 (a difficult phrase to Google) in San Francisco, Thursday and Friday. Incredibly, I have never been to “San Fran,” and am looking forward to full-on friscolity.

Approved persons may meet me.