natalia ilyin

In addition to being a place for me to put long articles originally published in foreign languages (how much of that did you actually get through?) I see that this blog is also functioning as a Home for Wayward Book Reviews-- this one of The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism, a book by Nicholas Fox Weber. When the design magazine for which I originally wrote this had an editorial shake-up, I wasn't paying attention and forgot to send the darned thing in. However, it occurs to me that this piece will find as many readers here as it would have in the printed magazine for which I wrote it. Thank you, Google Analytics, for that bit of comforting knowledge.

The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism

It took one determined trumpet to fell the walls of Jericho, but it has taken 90 years for scholars and curators to begin to grapple with and dismantle the Gropian curtain wall that created and defends our perceptions of the Bauhaus.

Recent shows at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity) and at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model) included many more aspects of the work done at this most influential of design schools than have any previous exhibitions. The great tussle between the Bauhaus’s Expressionists and its Constructivists is more fully exposed than ever before.

Similarly, a current crop of books and monographs (Gunta Stolzl: Bauhaus Master; Bauhaus Women: Art, Handicraft and Design; Bauhaus Conflicts, 1919-2009: Controversies and Counterparts, to name some) seem uninterested in shoring up the heroic quality of their subjects, and very interested in looking deeply into their subjects' humanity. This is a refreshing change.

The public façade of Bauhaus uniformity was a relatedness of vision that Gropius worked hard to achieve. His most notable effort was the MoMA 1938 retrospective “Bauhaus 1919-1928,” which he himself curated. At the time, he was chairman of Harvard’s architecture school. And in this exhibition--the first to show Americans what the Bauhaus had done-- he skillfully manipulated the facts. People at the school who had become his political enemies or had worked in genres that he considered a bit shop-worn and not of-the-moment were simply downplayed or not included. It was this warped vision--Gropius's public relations campaign-- upon which we began to create our current design history.

For years, young designers have been taught that the Bauhaus, though made up of individuals, had an “essential uniformity of vision,” an essential uniformity that informed all of its students’ work. Because a Bauhaus tea kettle had nice lines, our teachers somehow gave us the impression, inadvertantly or adamantly, that the person who had designed said teakettle had a direct line to the Spirit of Order in the Universe, and that this designer was more rigorous, more righteous, less messily human— more "modern" than we could ever hope to be. Certainly, quiet references were made to one or two "dissenting voices," but generally, we were given to believe that the Bauhaus was about clean lines and order. Nothing, it turns out, could have been farther from the truth.

And this is why Nicholas Fox Weber’s book, The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism, is such a wonderful thing to read. It’s the story behind the façade of the Bauhaus. It’s about the messy, sloppy, lovelorn, narcissistic, masochistic, petty, courageous lives of the people who did much of their best work there.

The wall of impersonality finds no role in our Facebooking world. It is interesting to note that the huge Berlin exhibition “Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model” was created to mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We are seeing that the seamless, impervious State-- the seamless, impervious corporate facade-- cannot hold up to a tweeting generation.

In getting to know these six people of the Bauhaus group (Gropius, Klee, Kandinsky, both Albers and Mies van der Rohe) in getting to know their financial troubles and their small successes, we get to feel closer to them. When Weber pulls them off their pedestals, we have the opportunity to learn from them in much more intimate ways than we ever learned from their "cleaned up" selves.

There is a downside: Seeing these artists and designers clothed in their everyday humanity is like catching the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain. In reading Weber’s book, Bauhaus modernism loses some of its somber, Germanic, patriarchal high seriousness for us. It is a serious loss, this loss of the heroic. We are losing it everywhere, not just in books about famous designers. But it is a loss that allows the Bauhauslers into our lives— makes us care about them, rather than revere them. Love, as Shakespeare mentioned, is not idolatry.

This article was published by 2+3D, a Polish design magazine. I agreed with the editor that I would put it up here after the issue had been out for a while. It was published in Polish, so there's probably not too much overlap in readership here. I do recommend subscribing to the magazine. The images alone are an amazingly valuable thing: you can sort of dope out the gist of the text.

Cutie and the Deck Shoes

Right after Christmas, at the time a fresh new crop of bright sweaters, scarves and hats suddenly appears on the commute ferry from my island, I spied an ordinarily somber acquaintance wearing a particularly festive pair of deck shoes. As I looked closer at her feet, I noticed that along with magenta flowers and acid green lines of varying widths, a large photo of a bulldog smiled up at me from both shoes.
“Shoes!” I said, thinking that by saying “Shoes!” I was neither saying, “I like your shoes!” which would have been an utter lie, nor “Where did you get the tossed salads that are on your feet?” which probably would not have gone down well either. I commute every day with the same people: I must be careful.
“Aren’t they great!” she beamed up at me. “I designed them myself, on Zazzle!” Her habitual dour expression vanished. She was so happy. Curling her toes up, she pointed down.
“That’s Cutie, my dog.”

A sharp pain stabbed at my stomach: A referred pain from 20 years of paying the student loans that financed my design education.
“Your dog!” I said, brightly. “Well, there he is! Hey, I’ve got to get coffee--” and with that I lurched toward the galley and toward the safety of the coffee line.

Standing in line in front of the huge coffee urns, I bowed my head and thought sad thoughts about Cutie and the deck shoes. "It’s the end of design," I thought. "It is the end of aesthetics, of educated decisions, of culture. The Vandals have scaled the wall and they’re wearing bulldogs on their toes."

Who's a Designer?
Seems everyone’s a designer these days. From business cards to backpacks, if you can access a website, you can “design your own.” Design grads are nervous. And, from a certain perspective, they have a right to be.

The proliferation of crowdsourcing sites is increasingly making design a field of unlimited web competition and work-for-hire clauses. This is a shock to students who-- through the endless crits and psychological battering that is a classical design education--have learned clear and set beliefs about who they are and about who they should aspire to be.

So we have people putting dog portraits on their shoes, and we are competing with thousands of people for every job we get wind of on the web. To add to this mix, traditional design schools are noticing a new player on their previously private field, a new breed of “d-school” that promises computer scientists, mechanical engineers, science managers, sociologists and future MBA’s that they’ll learn how to unleash their creativity by using the magic of the “design thinking” they'll find in groups of computer scientists, mechanical engineers, science managers, sociologists and future MBA’s.

These days it can feel as though the real action in design is happening, not in the clean and quiet, white-drawing-table-and Mac-laptop-laden studio, but in some sort of brawl in the parking lot. This makes classically-trained designers, particularly young designers, feel duped. They feel dumb for spending so much on something others seem not to understand or value. They're worried that the aesthetics they have learned at so high a cost are not considered important anymore. They fear, in the words of the old parody of "Home on the Range," that in order to be a designer these days, all you have to do is "get yourself an outfit and be a cowboy, too."

Not unlike Arabian horses, designers are a high-strung breed, and design students the most high-strung. In my office, more students cry about debt than about grades or work-load. Before their eyes, they see opportunity shrinking, behind them, they see debt. They say things like:

"My parents are paying all this money for me to go to design school and my neighbor thinks he can do what I can do because he taught himself Flash and Photoshop and he'll do anything for almost free. Clients can’t tell the difference between me and him and don’t care if there IS a difference!”

If it makes you feel any better, you're not alone. I, too, must confront the anathema of Cutie and the deck shoes. We are all living through the Cutie and the Deck Shoes moment of design history together. Let’s examine what’s really going on here. Are the keys to the design kingdom really being wrested away from “real” designers? Do we really hear the unwashed masses trampling up the palace stairs? And if we do, is that an entirely terrifying and bad thing?


Service vs. Commodity
Ten years ago, I was hearing that design, always considered a service business, was becoming a commodity, and that, because of its superior technological advance, Korea would be the place that commodity was produced. To tell you the truth, this was sort of a relief to me. Making things has never been a big part of my designing life. I talk to people about brand stories, and I am absolutely bored to death by tweaking type.

But for most designers, designers who love the process of design, the change of that which has been individual into that which is mass-produced is a sad thing. In the West there will be a need for designers who direct, but there will absolutely not be a need for designers who execute, because execution will be an “off-shore commodity.” This is hard to bear.

It is hard to bear because we are schooled to believe that we have more personal power as designers than we generally do. This belief gets in the way of our confronting reality. The Arts and Crafts ideal of the well-rounded design master-- the Bauhaus ideal of that master-- was actually defiled long ago. Industry long ago divided design from production. Is this pain really something to write home about? We are an industrial culture that splits operations into their component parts, that does not value the unity of one vision over the cheaper cost of "going off-shore." Why are we now worried about that splitting? Is it because it now affects us in a personal way? We didn't cry when typesetters disappeared. We did sing sad songs over Ludlow operators. But now we're singing sad songs.



Too Many Designers
What we are watching is the consequence of designer glut.
In the 1980s, hundreds of schools in the US suddenly realized that they could make their art departments more profitable by creating “graphic design” majors. These hundreds of departments now pump out thousands of graphic design grads every year. Acccording to the US Department of Labor, 286,100 people work as graphic designers in the U.S. alone. In the next ten years, experts predict that 36,000 jobs will open up. (These figures were compiled before the current recession.) However, according to the Princeton Review, 25,000 people tried to enter the field of graphic design just in the last year in the US alone. This little inequality, coupled with current crowdsourcing aches and pains, means a design degree is not going to guarantee the production job it once did. When supply is high, the customer is king.

Of those that do get a job, only 30 percent will still remain in the profession after five years. Why? Because most of the work of the average graphic designer is repetitive, dull, boring and not at all the bang-zoom life of, say, Sagmeister on Bali. These students sign up for that Sagmeister life: but most of them find work sitting in a cubicle working on someone else’s design for some sort of phone interface. Fun as that can be for a year, it is not fun for five years.

Is it so terrible to admit that most of design is a commodity? Yes. It is terrible, because it signals change: Because it forces traditional design schools to take a look at themselves and at what they are selling. The Bauhaus enrolled 150 students, more or less. Their "star designer" percentage was off the charts. Not too many institutions today could come close to matching it. Not too many Bauhauslers ended in cubicles tweaking phone apps.
There was no competition. There was little production.

Not so for the average graphic design program in the US today. The average graphic design program must now ask itself: Is it fair to inculcate students in this legacy of individualism when they will soon be plunged into a market that really does not value that individualism? Right now, many design schools still teach students the holiness of their profession: Few prepare them for the truth of it.

Utopian vs. Aestheticist
To add to this small yet roiling kettle of fish, “Design with a Large D” has, in the last few years, received the dubious distinction of being “the next new thing” for business. Design has become, again, a vehicle for Utopian thinking.

Evidently exhausted by years of finding various tipping points, thinking without thinking, acquiring the seven habits of highly-effective people, memorizing the 48 laws of power and uncovering the five dysfunctions of a team, we are now told that right-brainers will rule the future, that we should unfold the napkin and solve complex problems with simple pictures, and that using “design-thinking” we can do everything from revamping our Fortune 100 to providing goats to starving farmers in Africa.

Design can, of course. But that kind of Utopian door-opening is cage-rattling for people schooled in the systems and programs and change-defying arcana of the fossilized curricula to which so many design departments cling.

The real issue here may not be that design is wandering off into the purviews of other disciplines, but that our Utopians are veering away from our Aestheticists. The Aestheticists feel that the hard-won sensitivity and sensibility of a “classically-trained” designer is the most important aspect of design. The Utopians feel that design's role in social change should take precedence over type-tweaking. (Sometimes, when I look at the actual physical output of the d-schools, I see a momentary film-like sequence. It's Gropius’s design-workers building their Utopian cathedral, bliss upon their faces and “Kumbaya” upon their lips, but this time they're all holding self-created blueprints for how the building is to be built, and the resulting edifice looks more like the Tower of Babel.)

Bruce Mau started the real rumble off a few years back with his exciting if histrionic Massive Change, a Utopian dream of unity which became a sort of mini-industry. Here’s the gist from its continuing website:

"Massive Change explores paradigm-shifting events, ideas, and people, investigating the capacities and ethical dilemmas of design in manufacturing, transportation, urbanism, warfare, health, living, energy, markets, materials, the image and information. We need to evolve a global society that has the capacity to direct and control the emerging forces in order to achieve the most positive outcome. We must ask ourselves: Now that we can do anything what will we do?"

Similarly, David Kelley, the founder of IDEO, runs Stanford University’s “d-school,” which features fun, fresh groupings of vital, excited people running around taking bootcamps and classes in “design thinking,” none of which references or cares a whit for the various aesthetic dogmas and drills so integral to the thinking of a person principally educated in design. Kelley’s compatriots at Stanford:

"…aim to provide experiences in design thinking, to increase everyone's confidence in their own personal innovation process (sic), and to make a contribution to the world."

Holy-Moholy. No wonder design Aestheticists all over are flapping their hands and worrying that their type skills not respected like they used to be, that everyone has jumped on the Utopian bandwagon and that nobody appreciates them and their 100-year history of problem-solving any more. What if they don't want to tear down everything they've learned? What if they want to design alone and elegantly, and don’t want to jump in to collaboration and mask-making and make-a-structure-out-of-these old-bashed-up-beer-can games? No wonder they tell me the dark ages are closing in again and the canary is passing out and no one will really ever set beautiful type again and nobody will care and we're all going to die.

When "design" itself has acquired tall walls and an impermeable perimeter-- when the act of designing, or solving problems, is secondary to "the right way of being a designer" then we owe it to ourselves to ask where our real allegiance lies. Are we just threatened personally, or is there something bigger at stake?

There’s a freshness and a value to prancing software engineers and sociologists. But its value may not actually be a design value. It might be a perimeter-bashing, wall-breakdown value. Which is not the same thing. No one can deny IDEO’s spectacular success at making itself the go-to design think-tank. But take a look at their website. It’s one of the most potchky type messes this side of the Rockies. It’s impossible to read and leaves one with a sense of queasiness not brought on by excitement, but by visual exhaustion. If the “d-schools” had more readable websites, perhaps I’d fear the demise of traditional education more. Right now I feel that the Utopians serve a wonderful, fresh-air purpose. But they could use a good type handler, too.

The great thing about IDEO and the business vogue for design-thinking and all those custom sites and crowdsourcing is that it is shaking up an industry long proud of its elitism, long taking its hog-tied market for granted. “We have a skill and you don’t. You will have to pay us an enormous amount for deploying that skill on your behalf. Our skill-set was handed down to us by the high priests and therefore you will know it to be good." Well. It worked for 100 years.

Nothing in design is as fixed as flux. First we called ourselves idealist modernist form-makers, then we decided to be Marxist social reformers, then we became self-styled social critics, then Structuralists, then Poststructuralists, reading texts and slipping in subversive inclusions. After that we tried for Postmodern irony, then, when we became exhausted by the navel-gazing of the previous generation, for post-postmodern formalism. Since we had private access to the tools of communication, we were able to graft many limbs on to the tree--limbs that really did not bear much fruit for the person paying the tab. Is it really such a wonder that sometimes a client just wants to pay fifty dollars for a logo and be done with it?

Pretty Journals and Fresh Pencils
Much as the new crop of “d-schools” trumpets its fresh approaches, much as their organizers run around accessing everyone’s design capabilites and throwing open various barn doors of “design thinking strategy,” the truth is that not everyone can be a real designer. True, most people can learn from thinking about design and confronting problems in the ways a designer does, just like everyone can learn from reading "A Manual of Style" or from drawing with charcoal. But everyone who reads "A Manual of Style" does not become a writer. And everyone who draws with charcoal does not become an artist. At best, most of the people who go through Stanford's "d-school," and programs like it ,will become exactly what this world needs: good clients. Partners in design. Clients who understand the design process.

As a writer, I often run into people who say,
"Oh, you're a writer? I just LOVE to write! I'd write all day if I could-- if I didn't have to do real work (wink) I'd just write, write, write, write, write. I've got an idea for a mystery— can you to introduce me to your agent?”

These people will never write a book. And if they happen to assemble a manuscript, no one will ever buy it because it will not be valuable enough to the experience of other people for a publisher to buy it. These people like the feeling of writing. They like buying pretty journals and fresh pencils. They love to workshop and go to coffee and discuss writing. But they have no clue what real writing entails, they have no clue of the long nights and the churning of the stomach and the work it is-- the tweaking it takes, the line editing, the back and forth between writer and editor, the tinkering with structure, the craft. They will never pry the number of my agent from my compressed lips, and if they somehow did, my agent—a fabulous agent—would reject them so fast they’d have whiplash.

Because you enjoy writing in your journal does not mean you can write. Because you pay Stanford a bunch of money to be exposed to "design thinking strategies" does not make you a designer. Proficiency in rusty beer-can structure experiments does not make you an architect. Some design things just aren't about one's own personal quest for innovative strategies. Some design things make sure the envelope doesn't get caught in the post-office router, that the building doesn't fall down on your head. And in that pursuit of elegant solutions to plain old realities lies some of the real relish in being a good designer.

Identity in Flux
Designers have always worried about their identity. They worry that clients don’t appreciate them. They are always explaining their jobs to people who have no idea that everything a person touches was designed by someone. As a community, design has the identity issues often found in a really good actor. It can take on many personalities, but has a hard time maintaining one of its own. That’s because, Aestheticists or Utopians, we are a screen for culture. We manifest what our culture values, what it wants, what it has convinced itself it is, right now.

Right now, our culture wants to survive. It wants to find some good drinking water. It is less concerned with aesthetics and more concerned about polar bears slowly drifting away from each other on melting ice floes. Design seems to be manifesting more on the Utopian side these days and less on the Aesthetic.

Real-full-time-this-is-my-life-honest-to-God-designers need to find balance. They need to balance a gift for synthesis, a gift for aesthetic relationship, and a gift for understanding the cultural stresses and strains inherent in the time in which we live.

Changes in public access and perception do not change the value of educated designers or of the design process, nor do they make educated designers obsolete: the more the world changes, the more the function of educated design remains the same. That function is to martial the resources of the human mind and spirit in order to make life safer, healthier, better, more beautiful. Anything else is just gilding the deck shoe.

New Studies: Music Makes People Nicer
David Berreby on August 13, 2010, 12:14 PM


Birds do it. Bees do it. But primate species don't sing and dance, except for Homo sapiens. Why is music-making part of human nature, then? Why do we enjoy singing in three-part harmony or clapping together in church, which wouldn't appeal for a single second to our chimp or orangutan cousins? This paper proposes an explanation: Music, it says, makes little kids nicer. Maybe it evolved because it made our ancestors more cooperative, and hence more successful.

Sebastian Kirschner and Michael Tomasello recruited 96 four-year-olds from German day care centers and set them to playing games in pairs. Some played musical instruments and sang with the experimenter, while others played the same game, but without music. A later game was set up so that one child needed help from the other, who had to choose whether to aid the partner or keep playing.

Kids who had played music together were considerably more likely to help, the authors report (a pdf of the entire paper, which details their ingenious experimental methods, is here). Perhaps, Kirschner and Tomasello write, music evolved because it focuses attention on collective goals, and so satisfies an innate human desire to be "in sync."

That's in line with this finding, from an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Hospitality Management, which reports that when restaurants offer background music —at least, nice background music in the form of songs with "prosocial lyrics"—customers leave bigger tips. (Credit to Tom Jacobs for reporting on it.)

Kirschner, S., & Tomasello, M. (2010). Joint music making promotes prosocial behavior in 4-year-old children??? Evolution and Human Behavior DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.04.004

Jacob, C., Guéguen, N., & Boulbry, G. (2010). Effects of songs with prosocial lyrics on tipping behavior in a restaurant International Journal of Hospitality Management, 29 (4), 761-763 DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhm.2010.02.004
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In an unguarded, light and carefree moment, lulled by sun, the scent of lavender and a large double latte in a big china cup, I recently told a friend of mine that I did not consider him a genius. What an error. Take a brilliant American writer and tell him you don't consider him a genius and he'll crumple like a California poppy at evening. I did my best to explain, but the damage was done. Again the semiotic interpretant reared its sleepy bed-head and stared dully at me through the tousled sheets of communication. Again I wondered that anyone is ever able to get anything across to anyone else.

Oddly, I had meant this observation as a compliment. To a Russian-American like me, being called "a genius" is not a particularly good thing. But of course, this writer is not Russian, did not grow up with Russians, and was using the American interpretation of what "genius" means.

To an American, being a genius is being Alexander Graham Bell. It's being a brisk inventor in a white coat and clean laboratory with some pretty colored liquids bubbling away in retorts in the background. It's the person thinking up and feeding equations into a gorgeous array of computer terminals in order to unlock a cure for Alzheimer's. In the US, a genius is the person who finds the cure, saves the day, figures out how to cap the oil spill-- gets the society out of a sticky wicket by using his brain. In the arts, American genius writers save the day by telling the reader what it is that needs to be saved, and often stand around looking craggy and stalwart. They all seem to have vertical creases in their tanned cheeks. Even the women.

But to a Russian, being labelled a genius is not being labelled the clean guy in the white lab coat. It's being labelled Grigory Perelman: Strange eyes, big bushy beard, tangled eyebrows, hair like an unclipped shrubbery. A recluse. Lives in small apartment with cat. Even the UPI syndicate couldn't track him down recently for comment when he turned down a million dollars won for solving a 99 year-old open mathematics problem called the Poincare Conjecture. Turned it down because of vague and unexplained dissatisfactions with the "international mathematics community." Now see: THIS is the Russian take on "genius." THIS is why, when a Russian says, "Your son is a genius," he tends to look down at the floor and wag his head slowly from side to side. The Chinese curse is, "May you live in interesting times." The Russian curse could be, "May you depend on a genius."

Brilliance, to the Russian, is the great thing. A brilliant composer is a contributor-- he is not a lunatic who writes wonderful stuff but decides for some reason to burn it and to only eat carrots from then on. A brilliant composer lives a rounded life: it may have its emotional upheavals, but it is not completely without one toe on the ground of reality. He shows up for the audience. A brilliant writer, to a Russian, is a writer who sums up human experience and at the same time describes the truth of individual existence in that universal experience.

But a Russian genius is different. He is a human that looks like an ordinary three-dimensional human but sports a brain connected to something other. Though finite in size, he lacks any boundary. The Russian writing genius tends to take a downward plunge. He may start as a brilliant writer, but then will wander into being a political conservative or an anarchistic nutball, finally packing up his possessions in a small sack and running away from home at the age of ninety, as Leo Tolstoy did. Tolstoy was a genius. Anna Ahkmatova was brilliant. She was three-dimensional, every poem she wrote tightened the loop of existence to a point. She manned the lariat.

Mama Perelman, should she still be with us, should she be the old pensioner I think she probably is, must have been ready to defenestrate her son for the unbelievable stupidity of not taking the prize money in Russia's current economy. (True, he felt that most of the work had been done by another mathematician, and this was truly honorable, if misguided from the standpoint of finances of day-to-day living.) "But what can you do," her pensioner friends at the vegetable stall probably said with a shrug after the call came through and the money was forever lost-- "What can you do? He's a genius."

Russian geniuses make life an absolute hell of absurdity and missed appointments for their wives, daughters, mothers, priests, Party Commissars, mechanics, landlords and co-workers. They routinely run their cars out of gas, forget to pick up whatever it was they were supposed to pick up, make ridiculous decisions and lousy judgements about everyday things like locking doors and feeding pets, assume that mathematical logic and life are related, say the wrong thing at the Party meeting, complain that they just "can't make you understand" the obvious logic and value of their most inane arguments.

They're at once child-like and childish, sometimes charming, always selfish, thoughtless and entitled. And though they might be terribly funny and be able to imitate people or improvise operas at the piano or figure out a conundrum or prove a theorum, in the end their lives usually turn out lonesome. The people who wanted to be close to them have finally had enough of them. Reality is a hair-shirt for a genius, a hair-shirt he only forgets when in his head or on his stage. How many die like Tolstoy, overcome in a train station on his final run from home, held in the arms of a woman he couldn't abide?

To the Russian mind, genius is a curse, not a blessing. "He was a genius," my grandmother used to say, and then, after a pause, she'd repeat, "He was a genius. He died."

Bill Hill, the man who helped bring you reading-on-the-screen, generally a big thinker and smart guy, seems to have suddenly found his poetic voice in a new Youtube video ostensibly about the oceans of the world being One. Much as I agree 100% with the sentiment, particularly in view of the trashing of the oceans through which we are currently living, there is something about an ex-Microsoft software genius shooting video of himself on a surfboard and intoning wise words in a voice-over about the ocean that activates my ridiculity alert system. I'm not sure why. Worst part: I really like the guy. Bill: "Japan" does not rhyme with "Taiwan." Who's going to tell you if I don't?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTL76IrFJvg

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a small problem with music. I am no musician, couldn't sing you the top note of a chord if it hit me in the head. But I get hypnotized by music-- get obliterated by the ordering of time and sound. I believe it is inherent: music is encoded in the Russian genome.

This losing of my intelligence and self-control near music caused untold idiocy and pain to self and others in my younger years. I distinctly remember a very young Sharyn O'Mara, now a dean at an art school, tracking me down to some music den in Providence in the early hours of the morning, after noticing that I had gone missing from the grad design studio, twenty years ago.

But now that I am mature I have developed some excellent coping skills for this music problem. I'm generally ok if I'm careful and avoid talented people and don't listen too closely to things. Rarely now do I hear something or someone that stops cerebration cold and turns me into a hypnotized blob. And this is good.

In a recent chapter of my past, it was incumbent upon me to show up fairly regularly at area open mics in order to show support for a musician friend. I wasn't very good at being audience to most of these half-baked efforts, but I tried. Anyway, many open mics and many coffeehouse concerts by aspiring artists went past my ears for years. I really don't remember any of them except one.

I showed up to a coffeehouse one evening, got a coffee, said hi to a few people, sat down in the gathering audience, saw a person named Eric Miller standing at the microphone, heard the first few notes of his opener, and promptly lost my brain. It was Providence all over again. The music-response gene went active. Thank goodness there were people there to drag me out at the end of his set.

Eric is a real singer/songwriter. His are not the uncontrolled musings of an unformed consciousness. He plays acoustic: He knows how to write and he knows what he is writing about. He has just the kind of dark voice suitable for his own lyrics, and those lyrics are sometimes rollicking, sometimes sweet, sometimes bittersweet. His arrangements are fearless. And he's always on top of his music, in control of it, making it work for him.

Well, what can I say. That night I wanted to buy a CD. But, unlike everyone else I had heard in those years, he did not have one for sale. He told me he felt he wasn't ready to make one, that he needed to work more--hone his skill, write more. In this day of instant CDs, in this day of instant belief in the value of one's own artistic creations, when do you hear someone say that? So a couple years have passed. Yesterday I opened my mailbox to find "There Is Nothing for You Here," Eric Miller's first CD. (www.ericmillersongs.com) It is rounded, mature, thought-through: beautiful. He is ready: It is time.

One thousand dollars. Want it?
The Winterhouse Writing Awards deadline is June 1.
That's four days from now! You've got pleeeeeenty of time. Blow the dust off of something and get it in.

Here's the url:
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/writing-awards

Remember to check your work against Natalia's Writing Tips/Errors of Death:

Writing tips:

1. SPELLCHECK and then re-read for inappropriate words that spellcheck may have substituted in eros.

2. Even if you think you are way past this, make sure your sentences all have a subject and a verb. Not texting here.

3. If you use more than five words in succession that someone put on Wikipedia or that you overheard in a cafe, credit that person, book or site. Credit everything. This makes you look intelligent and thorough and willing to play in the writing playpen. Stealing is an end to your career as a writer. We have to trust you. (Unless you're an old Postmodernist but nobody remembers the "untrustworthy narrator" at this point, so forget I said it.)

4. Read your writing aloud to your partner or to the dog. Don't let either critique your work--particularly the dog--but listen to yourself. Where there are pauses, there should be commas. Where you get bored with the drone of your own voice, take out those words. Where you are tempted to say "yadda, yadda," eliminate that idea. Real writing flows like spoken language. So turn on the tap.

5. Trash your thesaurus and promise to never use it again. Thesaurus-writing is obvious to a real reader, often featuring words in places where their exact meaning is a shade off and doesn't fit. Trust yourself and use the words that come to your mind.

6. Avoid cliches, stuffers, boring extra words, acronyms, text-lingo and dumb pseudo-words that mean nothing in a sentence. Oscar Wilde said, "If you've ever heard a word, don't use it."

7. Don't pretend you and your reader are just lying around in robes watching TV and eating caramel corn. Sit up straight and act like your intelligent Aunt Josephine is visiting. Too sloppy, too familiar writing is unappealing: It is a pose.

8. Avoid using the verb "to be:" He was, I am, she is, they were. Instead, substitute an active verb: she saw, he ate, we sniffled.

9. Chances are you are not a Doctor of Philosophy. Chances are you are not a big-time liberal arts academic. So do not feel that you must puff up and prance around with big words and phrases. The smartest things are said in the fewest words. It takes guts to write short.

10. Every time you make an assertion back it up with a fact. "The landscapers in my neighborhood are tri-lingual. Florence Dosono, my gardener, speaks Japanese, English and Spanish every day." Back up assertions with facts every time, don't just float on and on asserting yourself into the clouds. That's what my Russian grandfather called "heavenly biscuits." Including examples gives the reader a toe on the ground.

11. Don't try to figure out what you are trying to say while you are trying to say it. Don't have a couple beers and suddenly decide you are Dylan Thomas and let it all out on the page. You are not Dylan Thomas or any other Dylan so stick with sobriety. No one wants to read along as you chase around with a butterfly net hoping you'll find an idea. Find the idea. Write the idea. Go on to the next idea. Build them all up to a nice little idea-pile in which they all relate, and then let the reader go home for lunch. It is juvenile to expect your readers to keep reading to sort out your nonexistent thinking for you. They'll just stop reading and go on to the next entry.

Natalia'a Errors of Death:

1. Being boring. Difficult ideas need to be presented in short, clear ways that do not sound like the drone of a diggery-do. No one has the time. Watch your pacing.

2. Being too clever. You are not a leprechaun. No need to prance. A good funny moment is valuable, but pace them. Use them to open up your reader's heart, and make him want to keep reading. Don't act like you're auditioning to be a late-night stand-up comic. Being too funny will undercut your thinking with a design audience, which is basically a sober, steeped-in-the-Bauhaus bunch of INFPs. Ask how I know.

3. It's and its. It's a real problem. Because every word uses an apostrophe in its possessive EXCEPT "ITS." It's= it is. Its= "something belonging to IT."
Never forget this. Write it on your head.

4. Everyone does not have "their" baseball. Everyone has his baseball or everyone has her baseball. "Their" still catches in many throats, so avoid it if you're trying to win an award. If you get yourself into an "everyone" tangle, either make everything plural, (we all have our) or go back and forth between his and hers in your piece for the next ten years or until this grammatical problem ceases to be one.

5. Lay and lie. These are two separate, completely different verbs, but they look alike in some declensions and so there's a lot of confusion about them. The quickest way to show you cannot write is to use lay or lie incorrectly. This is the deal:

I lie down, I lay down, I have lain down.
I lay the book on the table, I laid the book on the table, I have laid the book on the table.
When do you use "lay" and when "lie?" You lay an object down. (That's where "getting laid" comes from, it's about objects, not lovers.) But a person lies down--anything that has control over his or her own body lies down. When you are in control of something, you lay it down.

The words ,"Now I lay me down to sleep" seem confusing. But in them, the person speaking is treating himself as an object, and for this reason he uses "lay" instead of saying, "Now I'm lying down to sleep." Using "lay me" is archaic usage, so don't use it.

Again: You lay an object down. A person lies down. So does a dog.
When you command your dog, teach him to "lie down." (Lay down is grammatically incorrect and lord knows we can't have dogs responding to ungrammatical commands.)

6. Never say you are passionate about anything or I will kill you in a sudden fit of rage. It's a horrible cliche.

I can't think of anything else. But if you do, please add it to these tips and errors.

And get that piece in to Winterhouse Awards pronto. You could do a lot with 1000 dollars.

Much of what my grandmother knew instinctively-- and taught us all instinctively--our culture suddenly realizes it must rediscover. She was not a naturalist or a flower-child, just a normal person, a normal woman of her era who understood where she fit in. Everything was a part of everything else. The compost fed the rose. She treated Nature in the same way that she treated people. They had their ups and downs, just like relationships with people do, but it was a relationship based on respect. That's just the way she thought, and how the people who had reared her had thought. Was she radical? No. Just measured--just related to her surroundings.

I recently came upon the work of Murray Bookchin, a wild-eyed eco-revolutionary of the Rachel Carson era. “The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital," said Bookchin. His argument was that most of the activities that consume energy and destroy the environment are senseless because they contribute little to quality of life and well being. Is this radical? Thought to be. So radical that these ideas split the American Green Movement right in half.

But the plunder of the spirit being tied to the plunder of the earth was completely obvious--wordlessly obvious-- to my grandmother, whose own grandfather (now we're going back to before the American Civil War) was known around Gaffney for letting a third of his land lie fallow every growing season. He didn't believe in using the new fertilizers, he didn't believe in beating the soil into submission and for this reason he missed out on a third more revenue every summer. Radically stick-in-the-mud? Or forward thinking?

Bookchin, the radical Marxist, said that the function of work is to legitimize, even create, hierarchy. He believed that understanding the transformation of organic into hierarchical societies is crucial to finding a way forward. I'd say that understanding that transformation is crucial to finding our way backward--back to the cyclic rather than the one-off, back to the sustainable rather than the pillaged-- back to the dreams of the lover rather than those of the rapist.

Since the inception of design, the myth of the black-clad, chain-smoking, heavy drinking, overworked designer has been the Romantic ideal. Where I went to school, these slumped, hung-over, chain-smoking designers perched on studio stools all over the design building. We called them Art Balls. Gender didn't factor in. Sometimes a studio looked like it had been taken over by these black blobs with four metal legs.

Designers-- graphic, game, motion, apparel, architectural, or interior-- have amazingly sensitive antennae that pick up the smallest social indications about what they should act like, what they should emulate and how they want to be perceived. In response, they become semiotic semaphores, signaling their hipster-ness, their nonconformism, their sensitivity or, alternatively, their conservative modernism, their neo-modernism or their eclecticism through their clothing and their actions.

Is it a left-over pose from the myth of the Romantic Hero-- the wild-eyed painter swashing away at his "Liberty Leading the People?" Is it a feint at the garb of shamanism? At dividing oneself from the "average" person in order to retain mystic connection to powers greater than Self? Is it a hangover from the avant-garde of 100 years ago, a monk-like resistance to the luxury and lures of the comfortable bourgeoisie? Or is it the stance of the basement guitar hero who knows, deep inside, that no girls will ever scream for him?

Embracing and living the Art Ball life of chain-smoking, energy-drinks and alcohol may be a pleasant way to form an identity at 19, but if you're living that way at thirty you're going to have all the mental freshness of a Goodwill sofa. By 40 you'll be enjoying a Thorazine highball daily between managing hacking cough-spasms and auto-dialing your ex, begging for permission to see the kids. Rock stars don't need to come up with new ideas all the time. Like restaurant chefs, they perfect perhaps 40 standard recipes and spend their lives repeating them to different audiences. Not so the designer. Every pancake is a new pancake; every song a new song, sung once.

So here's an idea. Design could start to value the idea of the happy, balanced designer. I know. It sounds so wrong. The entire structure of design is against happiness and balance in its practitioners. What would we talk about if we didn't talk about how tired we were, how overworked, how busy, how stressed? Imagine knowing a designer that wasn't hurting himself in some way. Such a designer would turn the whole mythology of design on its head. Which needs to happen. Because, let's face it, if a designer does not understand what it takes to sustain Self and spirit, do you really want his taking on designing sustainable things? For sustainable things, at this point, are really the only interesting design things.

And so I press you to take heed of the Committee for Happy American Designers at www.happydesigners.tumblr.com. They've had enough of the old Art Ball paradigm. They're swimming upstream, relearning how to eat, sleep, design, play and connect with other people--not just machines----all in the same 24-hour period. Shocking, I know. Radical. And it's an uphill fight, what with most of the art directors in the world having been schooled in the old "hurt yourself" mythology. It could be crushed or it could be the beginning of something better than what we've got now. Sustainable design must start with teaching designers to sustain their own lives, their heart. I'm with them: It's time we say goodbye to the Art Ball.