This week one enjoyed the company of his old college chum (black, plus a few other things, from Nova Scotia). He was reëncountered, by astonishing coïncidence, at ATypI in Vancouver last year. You see, while there I chatted up the only other obvious homosexualist (brick-shithouse build being one factor making it obvious) and discovered, halfway through the conversation, that this was in fact the same fella who lived two doors down in Howe Hall.

I suppose his predilection to lift shirts (also weights) was presaged when he happened upon the TV room now 20 years ago and, witnessing a Central Park concert, blurted “Oh! I just love Diana Ross!” He has butched up considerably since then. (I note that another source tells me that iron was pumped even back in the day, which my friend confirms. Hidden under all those sweaters with sparkles!)

En tout cas, with his Missus ensconced back home in a distant city, it was deemed necessary to enjoy a chaste tour and design critique of the homosocialist industrial complex that is the Steamworks.

At the front desk, we somehow managed not to get the chatty Cathy who keeps lobbing Paul Lynde–style “hilarious” double entendres in my direction (“Once you’ve got your towel on, make sure you do a parade by my booth”); instead, one of the interchangeable gaunt baldies checked us in. My esteemed colleague immediately hit the weight room (he agrees: It’s well-equipped but cramped) and didn’t reappear for half an hour, modulo regular trips to the water fountain.

By this time I had of course located the one and only tall, trim, freckled, cinnamon-fauxhawked fella in the place and was chatting him up. (The jeans-sandals-shirtless look worked well, despite its drug-dealer/rent-boy feel.) He wouldn’t even look at anybody lighter than 180, and as far as muscle is concerned, there’s no theoretical limit. And indeed, he conceded that his bf unit of 10 years meets those specifications.

In fact, of the other esteemed colleagues and whomever else was of interest with whom I spoke last night, exactly one was single. (And he arrived “high.”) Elsewhere, a minimum of two separate couples visibly arrived “together.” And all this says nothing of the known former bf units who were seen to chitchat as if jovially. My esteemed colleague hit up the bigger of the two for workout tips.

[Just as an aside here, can somebody tell me exactly when the grand fiction of “open relationships” came to be accepted as truth? I believe I missed that memo (or Usenet posting).]

Sadly, my long-lost friend doesn’t have much in the way of heat tolerance, so the hot tubs and saunas were not much of a draw. Plus he had this counterfactual idea that the design of the place could only be truly evaluated in bright light (untrue: It’s painted specifically for semidarkness). And like my other esteemed colleague, he thinks the great weakness of Steamworks is that its weightroom and saunas have a bathhouse attached. He was underwhelmed, if that’s a word.

So off he went back to his hotel. I stayed to watch with bemusement as the inverts circled endlessly and cluelessly through the facility, like lobotomized rabbits fulfilling some degenerate hajj. You know, nothing much will have changed in the 60 seconds since the last lap. Why not just sit somewhere interesting and let them come to you?

Unless of course one doesn’t give a shit. The place is simply a day spa with bonus partial nudity. Really, isn’t it quite relaxing to have a place to go where one may be unclothed with other men who aren’t ancient death’s-door Jews brandishing oak leaves? Add the industrial décor and really, what’s not to like?

(By the way, my red-haired friend said the place cost $2 mil. My “visit number” was in the 12,000s, so it’s not as if they won’t be making their money back. Evidently the planned bar has been ixnayed – wisely, since it keeps the inspectors out. They’re gonna expand the weightroom instead. And yes, that is an outdoor smoking pavilion you see outside at the north end, a bit of a vestige now that there won’t be a bar.)

On the way out, the ridiculously boyish “clerk” yet again quizzed and re-quizzed me on how I enjoyed myself (is this a signal of some kind?). At the door, I met a semifamous local DJ (black from Saskatchewan) who walked in with full posse, half of whose number looked at me with great surprise and interest.

I was up by 0830, getting the day, if not the party, started by taking iTunes’s cue to play “My Sharona” and “Bye[,] Bye[,] Bye” back to back.

Bonus essay question: Which is really better – their way of being gay or mine?

Update (2004.08.03): Curiously enough, our cinnamon-fauxhawked friend was seen sashaying up rue de l’Église the very next night – accompanied by the bigger of the known-former-bf-unit pair and an overbuilt self-described French-Canadian who had also been seen scurrying around the premises.

Did somebody finally screw up the courage to say hello?

Somewhat more nauseating colour than last time, but at least the Karmann Ghia script is nicer than the VOLKSWAGEN nameplate.

Yes, a pink slinky alone, abandoned, forgotten down on the subway tracks.

These delightful, anachronistic blue-green signs are virtually unnoticeable as one whizzes, or indeed wheezes, along the boardwalk.

I prefer my ligatures bold, capitalized, and decked out in bell bottoms (which dutifully snag in your cogs).

Or rather, they don’t do Web standards, either.

On a previous day, I summarized the standards compliance (usually noncompliance) of type sites. Long live Porchez for understanding his medium!

Now. What about design sites of the K10K ilk?

I don’t understand their purpose. I think they’re nice to look at, but really, that’s a positioning statement: “My site about design has to be well-designed. Q.E.D.” Nonetheless, they border on useless. Tiny links in iframes, usually given without enough annotation to clarify why you should care, barely constitute “content.” They’re designed around a kind of short attention span. The sites’ appearance, and much of the work they point to, are inexplicable even if you consider the tradition of personal work. They, and it, are simply insubstantial.

However, I’m not arguing that the opposite pole – turgid, overwritten design treatises – is any better. I’ve spent a good ten years trying to kill off that kind of design writing. Tarted-up illustration galleries are at least honest – though if these sites were thoroughly honest, they’d do everything in Flash or simply post GIFs (or, to continue their bias toward the pluperfect, PNGs).

In essence, design sites are about as informative as those failed old portal sites were. But since they look so very much nicer, well, you get to tell yourself you are hip, cool, and recherché when you look at them.

En tout cas, I guess the design is the content. But they’re using a structured document medium to deliver the design. And there are rules to follow. We know you’re all visual ’n’ shit, but we still expect valid code.

Is anybody giving it to us?

Not according to batch testing. My esteemed colleague Bryce Johnson ran a few dozen sites through the CSE validator, and none of them passed.

I then laboriously ran all the sites through the official W3C validator, and one of them did pass: NewsToday. Mazel tov!

Results

• Sites were chosen based on my own hip, cool, recherché knowledge and the listings at the misleadingly-named Stereotypography.
• Individual iframes were not validated. This, by any measure, is a limitation. (Look at it as homework for somebody else.)
• Many sites had no DOCTYPE (“ND” in the column below), and many of those needed a character encoding imposed upon them before they would validate (“+8859-1” or “+8859-2” below).
• The two validators didn’t agree. Even though the W3C validator has occasional known faults, it is more trustworthy, a policy I’m sure the owners of NewsToday would support.

Discussion

1. Most sites tested have trivial infractions that could likely be cleared up in minutes.
2. Some sites could divide their cavalcades of errors in half if faults found early on in the source code were corrected.
3. Design sites are viable candidates for standards compliance since they
   • tend to use oddball HTML structures like iframes, and
   • employ a lot of pictures of text.

   Getting those right is a challenge, which is exactly why they should do it.

4. All the reasons articulated in my previous posting apply here: Sites dealing in visual artworks are not exempt from the need for standards compliance.
5. No, Didier, ol’ pal, this does not constitute some kind of vendetta against or excoriation of design sites. I’m just running a few facts by everyone here.

Now, what about K10K? A mere three errors, fixable with a custom DTD. Still the king of the jungle. But look out, lads, for NewsToday – it packs quite the dagger when it snuggles up in bed.

Fact-check my arse

This study involved a lot of automation and also a lot of cutting and pasting (using CopyPaste, natch). I expect that errors will have been introduced. Do let me know of any. Among other things, I’m not sure I rendered each site’s name consistently, let alone correctly.

Self-validation

You can validate the sites yourself – if you have, for example, an urge to keep tabs on them, or what have you – by following these links:

1. All Maple
2. Annup
3. Archinect
4. Aticco
5. Australian INfront
6. BD4D
7. Binah
8. Cobalt Revolver
9. Core 77
10. Creative Behavior
11. Coudal
12. Deformat
13. Design Made in Germany
14. Digital Ultras
15. Experimental
16. Halfproject
17. Infourm
18. Kiiroi
19. Linkdup
20. Moluv
21. Nervous Room
22. NewsToday
23. Now Wash Your Hands
24. Pixelsurgeon
25. Scene 360
26. StickerNation
27. Surfstation
28. Swedezine
29. 3D Realms

Jones 27 JUL 2004 01:52pm Toronto Public Library Jones 416-393-7715 213854####3468 Lunch with / 39100051362799 Due: 17 AUG 2004 * Roger Ebert's book of film / 39100039973857 Due: 17 AUG 2004 * Celebrating 120 Years of Service 1884-2004 Telephone Renewal #: 416-395-5505 Web Site: http://www.tpl.toronto.on.ca

The Parallax View (1974) by Allan J. Pakula posits a secret league of assassins and infiltrators.

Would you pass their test?

PARALLAX CORPORATION

Division of Human Engineering

Personality Inventory

• I am a healthy person.
• I like fashion magazines.
• I worry sometimes.
• I like high places.
• I like romantic stories better than adventure stories.
• I am at my best in large groups.
• I am often frightened when I wake up in the middle of the night.
• When I am feeling happy, someone is sure to spoil my mood.
• Sometimes strange men follow me.
• Sometimes a little thing will run through my mind for days and days.
• I am never embarrassed.
• I see things around me that other people do not see.
• I have never vomited blood.
• I know who is responsible for my problems.
• The sight of blood does not make me sick or afraid.
• I would like to be an actor.
• Often I can’t understand why I have been so irritable and touchy.
• Someone is out to get me.
• My father would hate me if I got into trouble with the law.
• There is something not right about my mind.
• I like to win when I play games.
• I never liked school.
• I want people to remember me when I am gone.
• I have never cried.
• My friends always end up double-crossing me.
• Knowing important people makes me feel good because it makes me feel important.

I mean, who can say no to any of these things? Who would not like to be an actor?

“Up Against It”

Neil Tennant told an interviewer that, by that point, he had been clubbing for 20 years. What’s the return on that kind of investment? “Synchronize your watches: There’s still time to kill… drinking this swill to sweeten the pill.” What you’re “up against” is the grind of the gay bar – and the realization that you’ve been going out, with hopes leavened by whatever degree of success, for many more years than you’d like. Rick Bébout notwithstanding, “the Bar” remains merely a bar. It’s part of the bill of goods that coming out – back in the days when we had to bother – sells to you: You can stop being lonely by standing there surrounded by hundreds who, you’re told, are just like you. Funny how they never chat you up.

After you’ve been going out long enough, you reserve the right to roll your eyes and snicker. “Long after the war has ended, we’re still… in fatigues” may be telling us a lesson about the appropriateness of inverts wearing camo pants. When was the last time you fought in a jungle?

“Young Offender”

Whoever’s stuffed into those pants might be some svelte young thing, all gay-liberated and post-queer ’n’ shit. So at ease with themselves, really, unlike you at their age, or, truthfully, you at every age.

You can’t help it if your weathered carcass and/or your hypothalamus pull a Mark Leduc, staring at the boy and projecting. “I’ll do what you want if you want me enough. I’ll put down my book and start falling in love. Or isn’t that done?” (Can’t you imagine Tennant wearily looking up from a serious paperback?) “Will I get in your way, or open your eyes? Who will give whom the bigger surprise? […] Young offender, how you resent the lovers you need. It hurts when they bleed. Young offender, why the pretense?”

Frankly, I’ve had nothing but trouble with men my age. Apart from crackproofing the place here, I don’t see what I have to lose by shopping downmarket, though when I try to visualize how that would work, I only ever see a strawberry-blond Olympic medalist taking my place.

“One in a Million”

For the urban invert, age and maturity are only occasionally coincident. Monogamy, loyalty, and decency are as well-promoted here as democracy is in Cuba. Remember, you’ve got two types of inverts, the promiscuous and the romantic, and the entire “community” caters to one of them. What might have been the alternative is simply the norm, most corrosively exhibited in the entire concept of “open relationships.” They are, in the main, a cover story for a criminal absence of self-restraint or a simple bullying, in which the stronger partner threatens to leave unless the weaker partner “opens” the “relationship.”

So if you are in that other camp and, from across the room, your eyes should meet, the odds are not in your favour. You’re gonna have a problem later, because the best he can match love with is merely sex – one time only, or at his beck and call. “One in a million men, change the way you feel,” you ask. It’s not gonna happen.

I considered discontinuing my reading of 24 Hour Party People by Anthony H. Wilson, “[b]ased on the original screenplay 24 Hour Party People by Frank Cottrell Boyce,” after p. 1 (“It’s a great, great city, but should develop it’s sense of humour, perhaps”). I ultimately did so at p. 8 (“ ‘”Inconstancy is my very essence,” says the wheel”). I then rapaciously speed-skimmed for the important bits.

You do realize how very much I idolize Peter Saville, Suede album-cover débâcle notwithstanding?

Pp. 57–60:

“Excuse me, Mr. Wilson, I’d like to introduce myself. I’m studying typography at Manchester Poly. I know who you are and that you do lots of things and if you ever need any graphics, I think you should use me.”

A phone number was given or taken. A connection made.

Thank God for Patti Smith. It wasn’t just Horses that changed Wilson’s life.

It was two months later that Peter Saville, a sort of twenty-year-old Bryan Ferry lookalike with searingly intelligent eyes, turned up at the Granada canteen to see Wilson.

Over a cup of GTV coffee, Peter showed Wilson a book on Jan Tschichold. He showed him the Penguin Crime covers from 1941, the constructivist play posters from the 1920s and the cover of the 1965 Hoffmann-LaRoche catalogue…. The utter commitment of this kid said soul brother. […]

“He’s great but useless. The brochure turned up three weeks after the exhibition we needed it for. Great brochure, though.” […]

Two trips to Peter’s sedate flat in Manc suburb Altrincham (upper-middle without much middle) to watch him arrange and rearrange black rectangles of thick paper on a big piece of yellow card…. Wilson retreated back from the door just in time to see Saville striding through the throng, with a big cardboard tube under his arm and mane full-on flowing.

“Jesus, Peter, what’s that?”

“It’s the poster.”

“But this is the gig [happening right now].”

“So.”

Reasonable answer, thought the rapidly-calming Wilson. Peter’s aura of “the artist” had that effect.

The yellow-and-black constructivist masterpiece was unsheathed.

“What’s the point in bringing the poster now? This is the gig,” said Wilson.

“I know. I couldn’t get the right yellow.” […]

It was just so good. Yellow and black; a use of a Thirties æsthetic that was to catch on about nine months later, but rarely done as well in Paris or on Madison Avenue. And this was for the fucking Russel Club in Hulme. Genius gets forgiven damn easily.

Pp. 144–145:

“I have been asking myself a question and I want the sleeve to answer that question…. How many colours does it take to replace language, to replace the alphabet?” […]

Wilson had an edgy feeling. Colours. Special colours. Pantone fucking colours. Most people print colours by the four-colour printing process…. And Factory did that. But every so often Peter or one of his acolytes… asked for a special colour[, because] Factory’s designers did not trust the cyans and magentas to get together specifically enough to give them the exact bloody shade that their vision demanded….

With ten colours representing digits 0 to 9, you could make numbers 1 to 26 and reflect a Western European alphabet.

So that was that. They’d have this bloody picture of a bunch of flowers and some colour-coding instead of lettering. Sounded good. No one complained. No one ever did. Peter was good. That was enough.

(Q.v.)