HEY MAN CHECK ME OUT

Q: What are you reading?

A: I just finished A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace. It’s a collection of essays with ranging topics, from the Illinois State Fair, to David Lynch, to Cruise Ships, some written in a straightforward, first person narrative, some written in an academic voice, and some written somewhere in between. He’s interesting to me because, like Don DeLillo, I stayed away from him for a long period of time based on what I had heard or read about him, which is, mainly, that a lot of people think he’s pretentious and show-offy as a writer. The word “difficult” is often bandied about. But, after having eventually gotten into DeLillo and realizing that people who make comments like those aren’t the kind of people that I normally agree with, I decided to try something of his.

I read Infinite Jest, which is a very long novel of DFW’s at the end of the summer/into fall. It was published in 1995, but it takes place in about 2010 (or so). The fact that I had been aware of this book for a long period of time but had purposely avoided it before relenting and reading it in the year that it takes place (without knowing that that’s when it takes place), plus the fact that it takes place in Boston, combined for the book to have a somewhat profound effect on me. I proclaimed it the best book that I’ve ever read to anyone who’d listen, speaking in breathless tones and cornering people at parties with “Now listen to me!” creepiness. My wife is reading it now, and she has experienced the same all-encompassing feelings, but is perhaps more tactful about how to express them.

The book is about a lot of things, and a lot of different characters, but I think it’s sort of about one thing: how people give themselves over to things to be happy. DFW raises a lot of interesting questions about entertainment and media and a lot of the things he was writing about in the early 1990s were eerily prescient. Simply: I’m interested in exploring these themes in my thesis.

Q: By developing the mind map what are the three things that interest you the most?

A: The above-mentioned stuff, for one. One absurdly far-fetched idea is to someday direct an adaptation of Infinite Jest, which I think would be best-suited as an HBO/cable show that stretched four or five seasons. The book really is that dense. That being said, the book, in its labrynthian/cyclical structure would certainly lend itself to some sort of interactive exploration, whether it be an installation or even a really bitchin’ screen-based interface. Mainly, I don’t really think this is something that I would seriously pursue, but the ideas that it has engendered are productive.

I’m also interested in the (bear with me) idea of Good vs. Evil. This is something that David Lynch has explored in a variety of guises, and which I also find endlessly fascinating. I saw an installation by the filmmaker Kenneth Anger at the PS1 in NYC (I showed a slide of this in Brian’s class) which was amazing…the whole place was covered in red vinyl with some segmented sections that served as viewing rooms for Anger’s films. Anger explores subjects that people might, depending on who they are, find “Evil”: Satanism, Homosexuality, Biker Culture. Granted, I’m not interested in his subject matter in a sort of “I want to watch an art film about a bunch of gay bikers” way, so much as I’m interested in: Why on earth would someone be interested in that? Why are people interested in what they’re interested in? Why do some people think worshiping the devil is a good idea? Etc.

Q: What bothers you about design today? How do you want to change it?

A: Design doesn’t necessarily bother me as much as the choice of design, or lack of design, that pervades much of “society”. Joe Quackenbush had a point when he mentioned the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru/parking setup being lame. It doesn’t have to be that way. Not to harp on DD (but this is a Seminar assignment…so maybe it’s required), but they’re a good example of design, in a lot of ways. Their thing is to get coffee and food to America’s Everyman. America Runs on Dunkin’™. Etc. So they’ve catered their design to fit into what they think America’s Everyman might want: No nonsense, get in, get out, go to a lame job, go home to a lame house, etc. Which is fine. But something like the parking lot fiasco that Joe Q. described shows a lack of forethought and design. If DD really wants to help America’s Everyman get on with his life, they should really consider the whole experience and realize that spending 15 minutes in a drive-thru isn’t really a great way to be efficient, productive, etc.

As for how I would want to change it:

I would like to be involved in design on a variety of scales, in a variety of media. I love it when I go to restaurant or bar and the menus are done well. Or a hotel room is well decorated. One of the most epiphanic moments of my own personal experience of design was last fall when I went to my sister’s wedding in Spain. We flew into Madrid, and the airport is a revelation. Richard Rogers did it; look it up. The use of color and light and the fact that he made an airport into a positive experiential realm are pretty amazing.

So: I’d really like to do a lot of different scales of design, especially collaborating with my wife, who would also like to do a lot of different scales/types of design.

Q: What inspires you to get up in the morning?

A: Knowing that there’s at least a 57% chance that I’m going to see Joseph Liberty.

Q: How has the starting of a blog influenced your writing/thinking?

A: It’s been said that writing is a more concentrated form of thinking, and it’s sort of one of those aphorisms that I hold on to and find to be true. So, forcing us to write about our thoughts is obviously a good way to get us thinking more convexly about the things that interest us, or might interest us, or don’t interest us. Last semester Gunta quoted a woman (who I imagine to be her mentor and who was possibly named Ann West) multiple times, saying something along the lines of “How can I know what I think until I say it?”, meaning, in my estimation, that until one focuses one’s brain in an attempt to create a sentence or thought or paragraph about something, ideas exist in a nebulous region, waiting to run into fronts and precipitate (or something). An appropriate question this semester might be “How can I know what I think until I blog about it”. Etc.

Q: I noticed from last semester that sound was a big part of your exploration. Why?

A: Looking back at my two first semester studio projects, I can see now how sound might be perceived as being “a big part of my exploration”. However, in each project I was more concerned with the visual explorations and connotations of my work than the aural. My “You Are Here” project definitely came from sound in that my initial idea was “Sparked™” by hearing a song on the radio. And the content I explored (music videos) was created in service or illustration of a sound medium. But my investigation ended up being purely visual, to the point that I was interested in stripping the sound away from the videos completely as a way of concentrating more pointedly on the visual similarities/dissimilarities of the work.

And the Memento project went in the direction that it did mainly as a reaction against what I deemed to be the purely visual/video project that had preceded it. Once I decided to basically strip away the visual of the movie, I realized I was left with sound. Looking at it now, I can see that to some extent I was interested in exploring a largely sound medium (the music video) without sound and a largely visual medium (film) without image.

As for why I like sound: I don’t know. I’ve been a musician for about fifteen years and sound is part of my vocabulary. Figuring out a way to express ideas sonically is one of the challenges of trying to be a musician.