Alyssa Quinn

Ten Things I Have Learned by Milton Glaser

1 YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE.

This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didn’t particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realized that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle.

2 IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB.

One night I was sitting in my car outside Columbia University where my wife Shirley was studying Anthropology. While I was waiting I was listening to the radio and heard an interviewer ask ‘Now that you have reached 75 have you any advice for our audience about how to prepare for your old age?’ An irritated voice said ‘Why is everyone asking me about old age these days?’ I recognized the voice as John Cage. I am sure that many of you know who he was – the composer and philosopher who influenced people like Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham as well as the music world in general. I knew him slightly and admired his contribution to our times. ‘You know, I do know how to prepare for old age’ he said. ‘Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you will be unprepared for your old age. For me, it has always been the same every since the age of 12. I wake up in the morning and I try to figure out how am I going to put bread on the table today? It is the same at 75, I wake up every morning and I think how am I going to put bread on the table today? I am exceedingly well prepared for my old age’ he said.

3 SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.

This is a subtext of number one. There was in the sixties a man named Fritz Perls who was a gestalt therapist. Gestalt therapy derives from art history, it proposes you must understand the ‘whole’ before you can understand the details. What you have to look at is the entire culture, the entire family and community and so on. Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energized or less energized. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

4 PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT.

Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was my complete aspiration in my early life because professionals seemed to know everything - not to mention they got paid for it. Later I discovered after working for a while that professionalism itself was a limitation. After all, what professionalism means in most cases is diminishing risks. So if you want to get your car fixed you go to a mechanic who knows how to deal with transmission problems in the same way each time. I suppose if you needed brain surgery you wouldn’t want the doctor to fool around and invent a new way of connecting your nerve endings. Please do it in the way that has worked in the past.Unfortunately in our field, in the so-called creative – I hate that word because it is misused so often. I also hate the fact that it is used as a noun. Can you imagine calling someone a creative? Anyhow, when you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.

5 LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE.

Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realized that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realize that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’

6 STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED.

I think this idea first occurred to me when I was looking at a marvelous etching of a bull by Picasso. It was an illustration for a story by Balzac called The Hidden Masterpiece. I am sure that you all know it. It is a bull that is expressed in 12 different styles going from very naturalistic version of a bull to an absolutely reductive single line abstraction and everything else along the way. What is clear just from looking at this single print is that style is irrelevant. In every one of these cases, from extreme abstraction to acute naturalism they are extraordinary regardless of the style. It’s absurd to be loyal to a style. It does not deserve your loyalty. I must say that for old design professionals it is a problem because the field is driven by economic consideration more than anything else. Style change is usually linked to economic factors, as all of you know who have read Marx. Also fatigue occurs when people see too much of the same thing too often. So every ten years or so there is a stylistic shift and things are made to look different. Typefaces go in and out of style and the visual system shifts a little bit. If you are around for a long time as a designer, you have an essential problem of what to do. I mean, after all, you have developed a vocabulary, a form that is your own. It is one of the ways that you distinguish yourself from your peers, and establish your identity in the field. How you maintain your own belief system and preferences becomes a real balancing act. The question of whether you pursue change or whether you maintain your own distinct form becomes difficult. We have all seen the work of illustrious practitioners that suddenly look old-fashioned or, more precisely, belonging to another moment in time. And there are sad stories such as the one about Cassandre, arguably the greatest graphic designer of the twentieth century, who couldn’t make a living at the end of his life and committed suicide.But the point is that anybody who is in this for the long haul has to decide how to respond to change in the zeitgeist. What is it that people now expect that they formerly didn’t want? And how to respond to that desire in a way that doesn’t change your sense of integrity and purpose.

7 HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN.

The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body. I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch; perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know how - that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if someone was to yell at me from across the street my brain could be affected and my life might changed. That is why your mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama was right. Thought changes our life and our behavior. I also believe that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.

8 DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY.

Everyone always talks about confidence in believing what you do. I remember once going to a class in yoga where the teacher said that, spirituality speaking, if you believed that you had achieved enlightenment you have merely arrived at your limitation. I think that is also true in a practical sense. Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable. It makes me nervous when someone believes too deeply or too much. I think that being skeptical and questioning all deeply held beliefs is essential. Of course we must know the difference between skepticism and cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to the world as passionate belief is. They are sort of twins. And then in a very real way, solving any problem is more important than being right. There is a significant sense of self-righteousness in both the art and design world. Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often begins with the Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad – the client, the audience and you. Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable. But self-righteousness is often the enemy. Self-righteousness and narcissism generally come out of some sort of childhood trauma, which we do not have to go into. It is a consistently difficult thing in human affairs. Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co-existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read ’ Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.’ Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine.

9 ON AGING.

Last year someone gave me a charming book by Roger Rosenblatt called ‘Ageing Gracefully’ I got it on my birthday. I did not appreciate the title at the time but it contains a series of rules for ageing gracefully. The first rule is the best. Rule number one is that ‘it doesn’t matter.’ ‘It doesn’t matter what you think. Follow this rule and it will add decades to your life. It does not matter if you are late or early, if you are here or there, if you said it or didn’t say it, if you are clever or if you were stupid. If you were having a bad hair day or a no hair day or if your boss looks at you cockeyed or your boyfriend or girlfriend looks at you cockeyed, if you are cockeyed. If you don’t get that promotion or prize or house or if you do – it doesn’t matter.’ Wisdom at last. Then I heard a marvelous joke that seemed related to rule number 10. A butcher was opening his market one morning and as he did a rabbit popped his head through the door. The butcher was surprised when the rabbit inquired ‘Got any cabbage?’ The butcher said ‘This is a meat market – we sell meat, not vegetables.’ The rabbit hopped off. The next day the butcher is opening the shop and sure enough the rabbit pops his head round and says ‘You got any cabbage?’ The butcher now irritated says ‘Listen you little rodent I told you yesterday we sell meat, we do not sell vegetables and the next time you come here I am going to grab you by the throat and nail those floppy ears to the floor.’ The rabbit disappeared hastily and nothing happened for a week. Then one morning the rabbit popped his head around the corner and said ‘Got any nails?’ The butcher said ‘No.’ The rabbit said ‘Ok. Got any cabbage?’

10 TELL THE TRUTH.

The rabbit joke is relevant because it occurred to me that looking for a cabbage in a butcher’s shop might be like looking for ethics in the design field. It may not be the most obvious place to find either. It’s interesting to observe that in the new AIGA’s code of ethics there is a significant amount of useful information about appropriate behavior towards clients and other designers, but not a word about a designer’s relationship to the public. We expect a butcher to sell us eatable meat and that he doesn’t misrepresent his wares. I remember reading that during the Stalin years in Russia that everything labelled veal was actually chicken. I can’t imagine what everything labelled chicken was. We can accept certain kinds of misrepresentation, such as fudging about the amount of fat in his hamburger but once a butcher knowingly sells us spoiled meat we go elsewhere. As a designer, do we have less responsibility to our public than a butcher? Everyone interested in licensing our field might note that the reason licensing has been invented is to protect the public not designers or clients. ‘Do no harm’ is an admonition to doctors concerning their relationship to their patients, not to their fellow practitioners or the drug companies. If we were licensed, telling the truth might become more central to what we do.

Milton Glaser

19 Feb 2012

Robert Montgomery via Allison Smith

12 Feb 2012

Marina Abramović’s Manifesto

1. An artist’s conduct in his life:

 An artist should not lie to himself or others  
An artist should not steal ideas from other artists  
An artist should not compromise for themselves or in regards to the art market  
An artist should not kill other human beings
 An artist should not make themselves into an idol
 An artist should not make themselves into an idol
 An artist should not make themselves into an idol

2. An artist’s relation to his love life:

 An artist should avoid falling in love with another artist  
An artist should avoid falling in love with another artist
 An artist should avoid falling in love with another artist

3. An artist’s relation to the erotic:  

An artist should develop an erotic point of view on the world  
An artist should be erotic  
An artist should be erotic  
An artist should be erotic

4. An artist’s relation to suffering:  

An artist should suffer  
From the suffering comes the best work  
Suffering brings transformation  
Through the suffering an artist transcends their spirit
Through the suffering an artist transcends their spirit  
Through the suffering an artist transcends their spirit

5. An artist’s relation to depression:

 An artist should not be depressed
 Depression is a disease and should be cured
 Depression is not productive for an artist 
Depression is not productive for an artist
Depression is not productive for an artist

  6. An artist’s relation to suicide:  

Suicide is a crime against life  
An artist should not commit suicide  
An artist should not commit suicide  
An artist should not commit suicide

7. An artist’s relation to inspiration:  

An artist should look deep inside themselves for inspiration  
The deeper they look inside themselves, the more universal they become
 The artist is universe
 The artist is universe  
The artist is universe

8. An artist’s relation to self-control:  

The artist should not have self-control about his life  
The artist should have total self-control about his work  
The artist should not have self-control about his life
 The artist should have total self-control about his work

9. An artist’s relation with transparency:  

The artist should give and receive at the same time
 Transparency means receptive
 Transparency means to give  
Transparency means to receive  
Transparency means receptive
 Transparency means to give  
Transparency means to receive  
Transparency means receptive  
Transparency means to give  
Transparency means to receive

10. An artist’s relation to symbols:  

An artist creates his own symbols  
Symbols are an artist’s language  
The language must then be translated
 Sometimes it is difficult to find the key
 Sometimes it is difficult to find the key  
Sometimes it is difficult to find the key

11. An artist’s relation to silence:  

An artist has to understand silence
 An artist has to create a space for silence to enter his work  
Silence is like an island in the middle of a turbulent ocean  
Silence is like an island in the middle of a turbulent ocean
 Silence is like an island in the middle of a turbulent ocean

 12. An artist’s relation to solitude:

 An artist must make time for the long periods of solitude
 Solitude is extremely important
 Away from home
 Away from the studio  
Away from family 
Away from friends
 An artist should stay for long periods of time at waterfalls  
An artist should stay for long periods of time at exploding volcanoes  
An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at the fast running rivers
 An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at the horizon where the ocean and sky meet  
An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at the stars in the night sky

13. An artist’s conduct in relation to work:  

An artist should avoid going to the studio every day 
An artist should not treat his work schedule as a bank employee does  
An artist should explore life and work only when an idea comes to him in a dream or during the day as a vision that arises as a surprise  
An artist should not repeat himself  
An artist should not overproduce  
An artist should avoid his own art pollution  
An artist should avoid his own art pollution  
An artist should avoid his own art pollution

14. An artist’s possessions:  

Buddhist monks advise that it is best to have nine possessions in their life:  
1 robe for the summer  
1 robe for the winter  
1 pair of shoes  
1 begging bowl for food  
1 mosquito net  
1 prayer book  
1 umbrella  
1 mat to sleep on  
1 pair of glasses if needed
 An artist should decide for himself the minimum personal possessions they should have 
An artist should have more and more of less and less  
An artist should have more and more of less and less  
An artist should have more and more of less and less

15. A list of an artist’s friends:

 An artist should have friends that lift their spirits  
An artist should have friends that lift their spirits
 An artist should have friends that lift their spirits

16. A list of an artist’s enemies:  

Enemies are very important  
The Dalai Lama has said that it is easy to have compassion with friends but much more difficult to have compassion with enemies  
An artist has to learn to forgive  
An artist has to learn to forgive  
An artist has to learn to forgive

17. Different death scenarios:  

An artist has to be aware of his own mortality  
For an artist, it is not only important how he lives his life but also how he dies  
An artist should look at the symbols of his work for the signs of different death scenarios  
An artist should die consciously without fear

(Source: youtube.com)

#art
#ideas

5 Feb 2012

When my husband died, because he was so famous & known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me — it still sometimes happens — & ask me if Carl changed at the end & converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage & never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief & precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive & we were together was miraculous — not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous & so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space & the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me & it’s much more meaningful…

The way he treated me & the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other & our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.“

Ann Druyan, talking about her husband, Carl Sagan

(Source: fuckyeahexistentialism)

19 Jan 2012

You go full-speed ahead, the track is engaged by the passengers that come aboard, which are the actors, the collaborators… and that’s extremely invigorating. The great thing is to be hungry. Therefore you try harder. I am getting to a certain age. I know there are people around me of my age that seem a lot older, but that’s because they’re not with young people, they don’t have the engagement, they believe that the questions have been answered, or there’s no need to respond any more. The great thing about being with people in our world, or young people in general, is they have the stupid questions. And we know they can’t be answered, but trying to answer them is extremely engaging. And extremely energizing. And I think that’s what it’s about.

Chris Doyle Made a Japanese Monster Porn Musical | VICE

16 Nov 2011

I’ll tell you a story about that. I have very close friends who used to have a jazz club in Hong Kong. I was there every night, I was their photographer, just because I was their friend. Four of them were Supreme Court judges. And one day I came in and there had been an article like the ones you’re talking about, and the head of the Supreme Court, who was a little bit drunk, said to me, “If you came before my court I’d throw you in jail for lies like that. I saw this article in the newspaper about you being a Norwegian sailor and this and that—what total bullshit, that’s impossible.” And I realized, fuck—even someone I regard as a friend doesn’t believe how I live. And certainly, it’s so far outside of convention, I better fucking forget about convention. I’m doomed no matter what. Kids from film schools say to me, “I love your work, I wanna be like you, I wanna make my first film next week.” And I go, “Yeah. What have you done? You’ve been through an academic system, and if you’ve been to film school I assume you have a certain amount of wealth, what the fuck have you done in life? What are you gonna tell people? You gonna talk about your high school experiences in America? Or how wonderful it is to go skating illegally in Trafalgar Square? What the fuck are you gonna talk about?” It’s a problem. Of course, if you don’t have anything to say, why open your mouth? It’s just gonna be platitudes. Or something clichéd. Or something totally unnecessary to anyone else’s experience. That’s what you see all the time. People making films about making films. Because that’s all they know!

Chris Doyle Made a Japanese Monster Porn Musical | VICE

16 Nov 2011

I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than “die,” “pass away,” the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday…

And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have heven heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what — a hundred years? two hundred? — and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1863, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such.

That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

(via themadeshop)

15 Nov 2011

Anniversary

meganamram:

One year ago today, I got in the driver’s seat of a car that my mother paid for and gave me and drove from Portland, Oregon to Los Angeles, California to (at most) flourish and (at least) not die. Ten years ago today, some normal-sized people hijacked some normal-sized planes and flew them into the Twin Towers in New York City, two of the tallest buildings in the United States of America, and killed nearly three thousand people. They killed thousands of people, and they psychologically killed thousands of others and ushered in an age of broken America and they made the date 9/11 into something more than it ever should be. It should be some lame day in mid-September where a lame kid complains about going back to some lame school. Instead, it’s an anniversary.

How many is 3,000? I guess I know the answer to that. It’s a little more than 2,994 and much less than 2,498,670,210,952. But realistically, my brain can’t comprehend more than about 322. That’s how many kids could fit in my high school auditorium, where my twin brother and I once did an interpretative dance as Hitler for a class final (we got an A; suck it, Hitler). I can’t estimate. If I had to guess, I would say there are exactly 100 sites on the Internet. So the tragedy that is 9/11 (or the Holocaust, or Darfur, or…) is too big for my small brain. And there’s a special subset of suburban guilt reserved for the inability to comprehend a horror.

Part of the reason that I can’t make myself feel the grotesque grandeur of 9/11 is that I’ve never been in a tragedy. I’ve experienced bad, but I’ve never experienced tragic in the epic, transformative, Greek sense of the word. Tragedy is like a branding iron. Everyone who lives through it becomes a product of that tragedy. You realize you’re just a slab of meat. You might continue living your life in a fairly normal straight line, but that tragedy knows to whom you belong. You have its smoldering mark on your body.

I’ve never been disfigured by tragedy, but I have felt joy. Transformative joy. Whatever the opposite of 9/11 is, I have felt that. I have experienced the not-small miracle of being able to do what I love. I am healthy enough that I don’t think about how healthy I am. I get to live in the fun house mirror that is Los Angeles. LA is so silly, in the most benign sense of the word. Its streets are stupid and benign. Because I’m privileged and young and white, I am blessed enough to not know about the streets in LA that aren’t silly and stupid and benign.

Because of that, it’s easier for me to imagine one year ago today than it is for me to imagine ten years ago today. On September 11, 2001, I was in eighth grade and I very calmly thought to myself, “Well! I will not ever play varsity volleyball in high school, because the world is over.” On September 11, 2010, I took the first steps of what would become my pilgrimage to my dreams. For the past year, I have attempted to slowly close in on my dreams in concentric circles. For me, the world began on the same day that it ended, albeit nine years apart. (Spoiler alert: I never ended up playing varsity volleyball anyway, due to my doughy, Jewish physique.)

I can’t think of a better day to speak directly to my “demographic” – skinny 18-to-34-year-olds and spam bots. I am talking to YOU right now, Tweeters and Tumblrers and Bloggers and whatever the HECK else portmanteaus we can whip up while sitting in ironic coffee shops ironically listening to Spotify. We are coming of age in a culture not of un-enjoyment, but of anti-enjoyment. Passion is not just superfluous – passion is weakness. If you like things, you might like the wrong things, and then you’re WRONG with a capital “DOUBLE-U” with a capital “D”, and then you’re BAD and ugly and FAT and SUPER FAT. The Internet can’t figure out whether it wants to beatify things or damn them, so it just gets all sorts of contentious. Contention on the Internet is silly in the worst sense of the word. Personally, I hate confrontation. I like to think of myself as a sickly Victorian child, or a maybe a sickly geisha. Very demure and easily persuaded and sickly. If the Internet is a super highway, we all have road rage.

To participate in this chic backlash against passion is to have a small mind. In my humble, unimportant, normal-sized opinion, it is better to have a small BRAIN than a small MIND. If you have a small brain, you can still be a good, kind, hard-working, dumb person who can manage some sort of farm or daycare. If you have a small mind, however, you very well might hurt people with it. You are just getting a sliver of the delicious Bacon, Ham, & Cheese Lean Pocket that is being young in America.

Spending your youthful energy on combative, kinetic apathy is a waste. Stuff is AWESOME, GUYS. Something about everything is awesome. Because I live in LA, CA, USA and not other places in the world, I get to write things like “fuck fuck FUCK fuck fuck FUCK” on the Internet (the title of my next blog post). I can condemn Burkas while comfortably wearing a Snuggie (a gateway Burka). I can do an interpretative dance as Hitler for 322 people (suck it, Hitler). I can do whatever I want (sort of) and I can eat whatever I want (not carbs) and be the opposite of dead.

The people who, ten years ago today, flew those planes into the sides of two of the tallest buildings in America had minds that were even smaller than mine (and possibly yours, if you’re wearing a shirt from Threadless Tees). Their worldview was so closed to interpretation that they thought the only answer was a large-scale terrorist attack. I’m not saying Hipsters are Terrorists (though that is a very funny sentiment that I never thought I’d get the chance to write). I am saying that closing your mind to sincerity and praise and appreciation might be the first step in squandering the fucking awesome human condition you possess. Please do not close your mind to the not-small epiphany that epic joy exists.

Please, PLEASE feel free to completely disregard and disagree with and disJimBelushi (I made that word up, because I CAN, IN AMERICA) this essay. Why should you listen to me, when I’m forehead-deep in the disaffected goo that is my generation? I’m sitting in a hipster coffee shop in Hollywood, a living, breathing, self-important, self-hating cliché. My caveat is, I sort of wrote this for myself. I want to read this diary entry in one more year, or ten more years, or three-hundred-and-twenty-two more years, and see how wonderful and confusing it is to be happy and young in the face of slaughter.

If you are reading this, you are not dead. I myself happen to be very not dead. I’m giddy and sleepy and fighting the need to pee and listening to one of my favorite songs (“True” by Spandau Ballet) and physically not dead. I make enough money to waste it. I’m spoiled enough to be addicted to the culture of coffee. I wear rainbow sunglasses every day. I have a crush on 40% of the boys in my gchat bar. Jesus, this is awesome. I want to be not dead every day of my life.

I love LA and I love NY and I love America and I love being not dead. Happy anniversary(s). Here’s to one and ten more.