xoxietyblog

I’m glad to have the opportunity to keep my hand in as a book reviewer for the LA Weekly from time to time. I recently had the pleasure of reviewing Sex For America, an erotica collection edited by Stephen Elliot. (I love the illustration by Jason Levesque that accompanies the review.)

One of my favorite stories from the collection, about a supposed tryst between the author, Jerry Stahl, and Vice-President Dick Cheney, originally appeared in the Weekly and can be read here.

You can also read a review I wrote last year of Elliot’s wicked-good short story collection, My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up. Then, if you’re still undeterred (and most likely undeterrable) you can go ahead and read an erotic short story I wrote for the Weekly about a million years ago, Diary of a Female Rapist.

The day after designer Jeff Croft changed his site design, he woke up to 50 angry emails. His answer to his critics included this beautiful gem of an idea, responding to criticism of his sinful use of low-contrast text on a dark background:

I knew some folks would cry foul, saying it wasn’t readable or “accessible” enough. But I designed it this way intentionally, and I’ll tell you why: it’s because you’re not supposed to read those parts. Okay, that might be overstating it. But, those items that are very low contrast are supposed to fade back into the page some, so that the core content pops out, and you focus on what’s really important. De-emphasis in design is every bit as important as emphasis.

I would never have thought to frame these ideas like this, but I love his point. And it speaks to my most frequent complaint about site design, which is that there’s always too much noise on the page, things shouting at you from the sidebar, the footer, the nav!

I got an object lesson in this very thing on our trip to Toronto, when I kept wanting to use the internet to find us restaurants, and kept finding sites that looked like someone had put a newspaper in a Cuisinart and set it on frappe. If my eye couldn’t figure out where to land in a few seconds, I’d move on. I’m not even sure I needed to find what I was looking for in those first few seconds, just some single, engaging that I could read that would give me a feel for where I was.  People who run websites get very anxious about everything being right there, “above the fold.” But the page gets so crowded there isn’t any room left for the reader.

I made a visit last week to Dearborn, MI, where the Henry Ford Museum has Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House on permanent exhibit. First sketched in 1927, the idea when it was proposed for manufacture in the late 1940s was that the house could be manufactured using aircraft machinery by returning vets, and sold to those same vets as housing for about the same price as a Cadillac. The house is very Jeston-chic, but is also about 80 years ahead of its time in terms of pre-fab manufacturing, energy-efficiency, natural heating and cooling.

The sadness comes from standing so close to a relic of greatness that never was, the house of the future that we never got to live in. Did I miss the future? How I miss the future!

We’ve traded futurism for environmentalism. Both are really about the same thing–the perfecting of our technologies and the reach for paradise on earth. But one is characterized by hope and faith in mankind, the other by an oddly smug self-loathing.

Go ahead, ask him!

Jackie and I were having lunch with Chris Yeh last week, and Jackie suggested Chris should have an advice column, because he really can answer just about any question you might think to pose–call him as the Oracle of Palo Alto. At this point, Chris copped to owning asktheharvardmba.com, and no sooner had the words left his mouth than I started thinking about some of my favorite retro fonts, Hominis and Amienne, and a set of photoshop brushes I found on DeviantArt…

Truth is, this is hands-down my favorite kind of site to build, and I view it as a kind of “test case” for what I most want to do, which is to act as a publisher and editor, launching content-driven sites much the way a small, boutique publisher would publish books. As Woody Allen said, “At the moment it’s just a Notion, but with a bit of backing I think I could turn it into Concept, and then an Idea.”

Jackie wanted a new design for her blog. I wanted to do something that was attractive, but also kind of a Web 2.0 spoof, as Jackie is such a 2.0 maven. She is an epic twitterer (got me started this weekend), hence the reference to the twitter logo.  She told me she loved sunbeams, too…. This is a fairly lite reworking of the really superb template she was already using, Digg 3.

Her other blog is hosted on wordpress.com, and over there we just tarted up the banner a bit.

I have an architecture story in the current issue of Sactown, my first for this groovy publication that is less than a year old. It feels like a big city mag, and they fact check with the rigor of The New Yorker, which is always a good measure of the quality of a publication. I haven’t even seen the layout yet, but the house I profiled is perhaps the most liveable modernist house I’ve ever seen (as in: I want to live in it). You’ll have to check it out on the newsstand though, as the story isn’t online.

NB, I believe that Sactown co-editor-in-chief Elyssa Lee and I may be the only two living souls to have written for both InStyle and Inc….

photo by Corey Yeaton 

Jackie Danicki is a connector, a prime example of what Malcolm Gladwell described as “the kinds of people who know everyone and possess special gifts for bringing the world together.”  The party she threw last night for her client, European SEM co. Latitude, was the best kind of mixer, where there was no such thing as a usual suspect, just lots of fascinating individuals making fizzy connections.

Companies often think that an event has to have a theme to succeed–I’d say that it’s far more important to have a charming host with a knack for promising the unexpected. It hardly felt like networking at all! I don’t think Jackie has a title, but if I were to make one up, it would be Director of Synergies.

A highlight of the evening for me was listening to the CEO of a hot startup recount how he and his two partners quit their jobs–then spent three months “sitting in the garage” trying to think of something to do. It reminds me, while I’m in looking-for-work mode, that “work” is never about finding the right company, or the right job, or even the right area of endeavor, but about our eternal quest to add up to more than the sum of our parts, both individually and together.

TierneyLab is hosting a discussion of this odd concept, prompted by a new book on the subject of “Nudges,” which boils down to: non-binding directives issued by the government that strongly encourage a preferred behavior, while obscuring less preferred behaviors. One analogy given is prominently displaying fruit in a cafeteria, and keeping the chocolate cake on the down-low to encourage healthy eating.

The huge problem with the idea of “Libertarian Paternalism” is that true liberty thrives in a culture of choice. Reduce freedom to something that is technically allowed you in the fine print, while applying massive, top-down pressure to conform, and you reduce liberty to lip service.

Paternalism of any kind can never be a good thing for an adult human, or an adult culture. A paternalistic government infantilizes its citizens, by definition. Grown up cultures don’t need to be run by daddies or nannies.

She is an Italian starlet named Ova Fritatta, who cracked in 1930, while in Spain filming Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s lost surrealist masterpiece, L’Age D’Oeuf. You can vote for her here.

I am going to spend the afternoon decorating eggs. Have not decided yet whether to use analog eggs or digital, ie, the kind that come out of a chicken or the kind that come out of Photoshop. Will possibly do a mashup of both.

My mom was crafty, so as a kid we always did eggs. I was probably 15 or so before I realized that Easter was known to some as a religious holiday (?!?). My plan is to enter the Hatch 1st Annual Easter Egg Design Contest, because the contest website is so beautiful it makes me feel something akin to worship. Whoever did this alphabet series at left seems like the egg designer to beat.