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The Wired Apple Article: Controlling My Inner Control Freak

I’ve been thinking about the recent Wired article on Steve Jobs. The upshot is that Jobs is an asshole: controlling, demeaning, aggressive, so fundamentally disrespectful that he parks in handicapped spaces.

But that’s not all he is. Jobs also has a vision of what he wants to do that is so vivid that he is charismatic in almost the original, Old Testament sense of the word:  some version of the spirit flows through him, touches others and makes them so hungry that they will follow him. 

I’ve worked with people who’ve tried to get away with inverting this formula—I scream, therefore, I’m passionate, therefore I must have a vision. Such people usually don’t have vision at all, they just lack manners.

Some of the great creative directors–and Jobs is fundamentally a creative director–have been notoriously soft spoken. Tom McElligott would just say,  “We’re not quite there yet.”  This meant that the creative team needed to come up with dozens of more ideas.  I’ve also seen people with legitimate vision that was slightly undersized: they needed to listen just a little more to others to correct some lack in their concept and they never did.  The clung to their stunted, merely personal, overcherished ideas for too long.

I’m not Jobs; I’m just not that smart; my ideas aren’t that fully formed. Criticism and collaboration usually helps me see how my work could become better.

I’ve also always liked the original hiring policy of Doyle Dane Bernbach, the single most influential advertising agency in the short history of the industry: you need to have talent, because without talent you’re no use to us and you can’t be a bastard, because life is too short to work with bastards. But the Jobs article still haunts me. 

Chip Kidd's The Learners: I Know, It's Just A Damn Cover, But What A Cover

I keep looking at the cover of Chip Kidd's The Learners: appreciating the thwock! of the Chris Ware line art; the nostalgic frisson of the image printed right on the cover; the cleverness of the angled, partial book jacket which obscures the character’s expression (and which thus gives the cover a punchline); the way the angled jacket invokes x-acto blades and, I just realized, Batman hideouts; the way the type on the jacket suggests the image it hides. This is the joy of seeing an object which has been completely thought through by a gifted practitioner. There are no inefficiencies here, no sputter of compromise, no smear of laziness. Maybe I just know too much about the design process to know how exceptional this is. 

I have totally made up with the internet. I was just as busy today, but I took a break and took a look at this designer's site, and it cheered me up, especially these wonderful photographs of her studio.  I love the airiness of the space, the light, the huge posters which are superbly designed but have some of the  freedom of a kid's drawing, and the fact that the posters aren't framed.  They get to be big, floppy, temporary, sail-like pieces of paper.

In honor of earth day . . .

I'm not going to go outside. That would be crazy. But I am going to open the window near the Nordic Track.  Then I will I return to the rhythm of deadline-driven dread and naps that never quite materialize that is my life the past few days.

Plus, I am just sick of the internet. It has the unventilated, petty, time-wasting, fake-busy, neither life-nor-art qualities that I don't like in my own mind. This is not a balanced consideration but a pungent feeling. 

I love the earth because the earth is not my idea. 

 

 

Who Do You Love?

It just occurred to me, while reading Chip Kidd’s The Learners, that there's a great, obvious question to ask about a novel and that it has never occurred to me to ask it: what does it love?  Chip Kidd’s prose become alive–detailed, nuanced, surprising–when he writes about what he loves: the stylishness of 1961 and the pleasures of pre-digital graphic design.  And when I asked what does The Stone Gods love, the answer wasn’t anything as hard to grasp as “the earth.” It’s the stupid dinosaurs. Her prose wakes up when she writes about them. 

Her Preach Exceeds Her Grasp? Notes On The Politics In Jeannette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

I read the Stone Gods several weeks ago, but I’ve made notes that have coalesced into absolutely nothing since then. In lieu of a coherent essay, blurtings numbered for your convenience:   

1. Maybe I dislike Winterson’s politics because they are not my politics.

Her ideal appears to be an anarchist lesbian collective. I describe my politics as moderate. What that boils down to is this:  I think liberals underestimate how responsible business is for our prosperity and I think conservatives underestimate how responsible government is for our security. It’s a politics rife with howevers. I’m not interested in arguing those points right now, although this is a blog and if you want to beat me up in the comments go ahead.

2. Fiction gets facts wrong.

The Stone Gods is political in that it takes an anti-global warming position and, broadly, advocates a policy. (Stop it.) Policies are built on facts. Fiction is ill-suited to a discussion of facts because, well, it’s fiction and it’s inherently ironic: there is always some wiggle room between the writer and the narrating voice. Wiggle room, opacity, obliqueness—They blur facts; they destabilize answers. The book isn't without political subtlety: it acknowledges that one of the problems with global warming is that some of it is caused by developing countries and one of the solutions might be to curb their development.

3.  Politics is melodrama. 

Most politics—and by politics I mean the things that ricochet around in our heads and in casual conversation and in blogs–is melodrama. It’s Yankees-Red Sox, with even more self-righteousness. And the pleasures of melodrama are the pleasures of hatred. 

4. Fiction thrives on fucked-up protagonists. 

Cheri Johnson once told me that the best fiction creates a character you love and then makes them do something you hate. I don’t think fiction needs to always push characters that hard, but somebody’s precious soul needs to be compromised, strained, confused, clueless, exposed, self-sabotaging, vulnerable, conflicted, something.   

5. So is there such a thing as good political fiction? 

I think so. I love fiction that takes the broth politics has uncomfortably heated and plops a character in it. In 1984, the clocks are striking 13 and Winston Smith has to deal with it; the world of The Road is a microwaved anarchy–do you kill the man approaching you?   

Speculative fiction can also take our choices and push them. One of the pleasures of the Stone Gods is a future, or maybe a past, where cosmetic surgery has met genetic coding to create “age fixing.” Winterson explores how weird this could get. But my favorite moment is when our hero, who is opposed to age fixing, glimpses the face of an actual old woman and it sickens her.      

There’s also a kind of political narrative that shows how flawed people get good things done. I loved Charlie Wilson’s War but its politics are more or less mine.    

6. The things I could be missing

The flawed protagonist could be the earth.  The flawed protagonist could be humanity. 

There may be no policy recommendations. Global warming may be a tragedy, with humanity as Hamlet.

The only things we can be counted on to recycle are our mistakes.

Spring is my favorite day of the year

Rites of spring: Noticing things because you don't have your head down and you're not rushing to the nearest destination–such as the crazy "Five" next to the sober "Fifth" on the Minneapolis Fifth Precinct at Bryant and 29th. Flowers where there was grotty snow two days ago. Idiotically happy dogs. Click on photos to enlarge.

This statue is located outside the Cenex station, as you enter the town of Sherburn, and I've been thinking about it ever since I snapped this picture two weeks ago. I hesitated to post it because I thought it was great but I was afraid it might be taken wrong, as a slight against Sherburn. But here's the deal: a farm town which puts up a really quite lovely statue of a pig has got oodles of gracious self-knowledge and has no trouble mixing self-deprecation with self-love. I grew up in Rollingstone, Minnesota. I know about these things.

Lofty Thoughts: After Seeing Cheri Johnson and Bonnie Rough

I don’t get out as much as I’d like. We have a persuasive couch. But I just got back from seeing my friend Cheri Johnson read with Bonnie Rough at the Loft. Cheri writes wonderful fiction filled with the subtle sabotage of our minds and the vivid textures of the world. Bonnie Rough was a pleasant surprise: she uses research with a great generosity and deftness, so it’s a kind of extension of the imagination. There is also the wonderful uni-tasking of a reading: there is only you, listening to what is being read; the air, like the air in a good library, seems calmer and richer than normal air.  All of this—plus running into other MFA buddies–made me want to write.   

Mets Commit Error

In Design Observer,  Michael Beirut starts an entry by broadly lambasting the templated nostalgia of current baseball park design. I was all set to argue with him: what’s wrong with nostalgia in a ballpark? where does nostalgia end and resonance begin? blah blah blah? (Yes, "blah blah blah "can be a question.)

But I realized that be was making a more subtle and interesting argument. (He realized the same thing and retracted his broader arguments in a comment.)  Beirut believes the designers of the Mets' new stadium got the particular nostalgia wrong. Instead of referencing someone else’s past—the facade quotes Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers played until 1957–the design should celebrate the Mets’ own history. This team was born in the early sixties and triumphant in the late sixties,  so why not look for inspiration to the World’s Fair of 1964 and JFK airport, which were both in the neighborhood? I would go further: why not grab all the stylish optimism of their founding?