Tag: Friends

Animated GIF party

Via Mission Mission, I was delighted to come across GIF Party, where animated gifs abide in thriving plentitude. Burrito Justice has a nice one too of the La Tacqueria sign at Mission and 25th lighting up, bit-by-bit.

Animated GIFs were a static, frame-by-frame animation technique that ruled the internet before Flash came along and ruined everything by introducing more sophisticated multimedia. I miss animated GIFs: they had that whole technological-limitations-make-it-easier-to-be-creative thing going for them. Plus, they remind me pleasantly of black-and-white TV now in retrospect.

I got really into making animated GIFs after seeing an experimental film at Artists Television Access that had these sequences where two frames of video would be looped and repeat over and over for minutes at a time. The effect was the same as when you repeat a syllable or two over and over again until it looses its meaning and becomes this weirdly suggestive drone. So, I started taking and looping photos of friends, like this one:

kevin

See this one in its full twitchy context here at the original Mock Duck project, where there’s some crude, oddball interactivity thrown in to boot.

I liked to over-compress my animated GIFs on purpose so they started to take on a weird broken-up dotted texture, like the halftone pattern visible when you peer at a newspaper from up close. In this sense, they differ from the ones on GIF Party, which tend to go in for more of a high-tech uncompressed look.

Mock friends

A few words on each of our buddies in the blogroll:

  • Everyone should check out JohnnyO’s Burrito Justice blog and his excellent post on Mission District trees in particular. This blog shares a lot of the topical preoccupations of Mock Duck (San Francisco, lost urban artifacts, bacon, etc) but manages to cover these themes without falling back on the appalling generalizations, loose inferences and blatant contradictions that riddle this blog.
  • Mission Mission is another San Francisco Mission District-related blog (the authoritative one, I suppose), for those interested.
  • FWIS and NYTimes Book Design Review are both devoted to book cover design, my singular interest.
  • ModularLab is the site of my friends Mark and Kathrin and contains nice visual images.
  • Muzikifan is maintained by the inimitable Alastair Johnston: typographic authority, publisher, world music collector, and occasional Thelonious Monk masquerader.
  • Moonraking is written by Ivan K, professor of English lit and former music critic and Lemonheads poster boy.

Faking your own death

Last night, I caught up with a friend of mine who’s back in Prague after an interlude of living in China. One of the things he’s been doing since he got back is bicycling to Hungary to visit a friend in jail. What’s the friend in jail for? I naturally asked. Faking his own death, I learned. Oh.

Apparently, the friend – one Zoltan Rex, no less – ran up a lot of debt and faked a surfing accident with a few conspirators, including his wife. But, he did a really clumsy job of it, made it really obvious by taking out multiple life insurance claims, etc. My friend originally met him when he was ‘dead’, living under an assumed identity in the south of the Czech Repubic, and never knew there was a prior identity until he was arrested out of the blue. Details of his story are here. What this article doesn’t mention is that he’s now wasting away in a Hungarian prison and has no idea when he’ll be brought to trial.

The jail visit apparently consisted of my friend biking 500 kilometers to Budapest, then standing outside the prison window with binoculars and yelling conversational rejoinders to the jailed guy, who isn’t allowed to yell out the window himself and was therefore reduced to making enthusiastic hand gestures in reply. It seems that the jailed guy had been a big Michael Jackson fan, so my friend attempted to communicate his death by moonwalking and making the cutting finger-across-the-neck gesture at the same time. Which I thought was pretty resourceful.

Edit: Incidentally, there’s a good post up at Moonraking on the very same topic of staged disappearances.

Hello, birdie

A photo I snapped of my friend Brooke a few years ago in Vienna. A bird happened to swoop into the frame at the last moment, just as I was pressing the shutter release– a complete accident.

birdie2

Incidentally, the ferris wheel poking into the picture in the background is the very same ferris wheel used in the filming of The Third Man, where Orson Welles delivers his famous ‘cuckoo clock’ line:

third_man

Bubbles

I had a belated concern over Michael Jackson’s death: what of Bubbles, the singer’s erstwhile chimpanzee companion, reportedly the only moonwalking ape on earth with his own bodyguard ? I asked a few people what they thought was going to happen to Bubbles when they brought up the death of his master over the past week. Answers were unsatisfactory, ranging from “Who?” to my hairdresser who dismissively said, “I don’t know… he’s old now.” I finally looked into the matter and learned that apparently Bubbles hasn’t been on the scene for a long time, as The King of Pop had him shipped out to a monkey preserve once the chimp started exhibiting aggressive behaviors and posing a menace to Jackson’s son. Oh. That’s sad. I prefer to think of MJ and Bubbles as they were immortalized by Jeff Koons, seemingly eternally inseparable:

koons-michael-jackson-and-bubbles-1988

Stuffed Animal Lamps

An old friend of mine has a new art project —  stuffed animal lamps.

alison

Simple concept, elegant execution.  A grafitti artist friend adds some decoration.  There are a ton of them displayed here; I had trouble picking out my favorite one (I also like the sleeping camo guy, and the spiderman).

I like the marriage of functional and frivolous.  I’m also reminded of a case I worked on as a law clerk for a judge, about whether it is legal to copyright a Halloween costume.  The law in this area turned out to be completely incoherent, based on something called the “conceptual severability” test — the idea was that you could not copyright “functional” things, but if you could “conceptually sever” the design from the functional aspect of the object, you could copyright the design.  Of course this test posed an issue for costumes — what’s the function?  The law, of course, had an answer: masquerading!  Anyway the details were absurd — for example, some aspects of the test had to do with the “plushness” of the object, and whether it could stand on its own (hat) or needed to be on something to assume its shape (glove). 

Somewhat of a digression, but these lamps got me thinking about that — is the function just lighting, or also cuteness?

Selective focus

Last week, I had a talented fellow named Ryan Cole do a guest lecture for my Ideas Generation class at Prague College. He talked about the difference between vertical thinking (hierarchical, problem-solving, precludes creative thinking) versus horizontal thinking (associative, lateral, creative but unable to accomplish anything on its own). This is basically something that designers like to talk about a lot, just phrased in nice concise terms.

Two days earlier, I was reading a New Yorker article about the neuro-enhancer revolution- i.e. the fact that lots of people take drugs like Ritalin simply to make themselves function at a higher cognitive level, not because they need it for any corrective reason. One of the concerns about this ‘revolution’  in the medical community (in addition to more obvious worries about health and so on) is the question about what part of people exactly is being made smarter by neuro-enhancers. Is there only one kind of intelligence, or are there some that are made smarter at the expense of others? Studies have shown that concentration (which is enhanced by drugs like Ritalin) actually works to the detriment of creative thinking. One researcher expressed the idea that we might be raising a generation of super-skilled accountants through over-prescription of neuro-enhancers.

Armed with these ideas, it occurred to me that perhaps the primary skill that graphic designers seek to cultivate cant best be described as selective focus: learning to expand and contract the locus of attention, rather than aiming for any kind of ‘genius thinking’ per se. I think this term can also be used to explain the intent of the writing on this blog and its peculiar idiom.