If you are in Seattle, I would like you to drop by Bulldog News at 7 pm tonight (Thursday) to take part in the Foolish Oracle’s Office Hours.
The Office Hours are designed to address a few problems.
Over a year ago (I can’t remember exactly) I started this Substack as a way to regularly put my writing into the world without having to deal with the often taxing rigmarole of trying to get published in the conventional sense. My audience has remained very small by most standards, but it’s enough people to fill a small theater, so that’s not nothing.
For various reasons, I’m wary of most online self-publishing platforms (like Substack). There are people who know me quite well who would describe me as a luddite. Still, this felt like a viable option, and I began to enjoy the outlet. As mentioned before, the problems with Substack (Nazis and such) became too overwhelming, and (also as mentioned before) I’m not thrilled with any of the alternatives.
Office Hours is meant to be an analog meeting place for creative sharing. Through it, I hope to both get back into zine-making, and cultivate a community of artistic sharing that would run counter to the toxicity, banality, corporate authoritarianism, and mono-cultural saturation of cyberspace. This works best if others participate, so if you can stop by, please do!
We will attempt to hold Office Hours every Thursday, but this will only be possible if we achieve a certain level of engagement. Today is only our second session, and it’s far too early for me to feel this crushing weight of pessimism and irrational disappointment: this will not work; this will not transform into what I believe it needs to…
I think part of the problem is that I am having difficulty expressing what Office Hours even is, but this is partially by design. What Office Hours becomes depends on who shows up. We will shape it together. Roughly speaking, it is designed to be an artistic sharing space, which will include a sorta “open mic” component, though I hesitate to call it that, as it brings to mind a certain vibe that I’d actually rather avoid. Thinking of it as a communal rehearsal space and informal workshop makes more sense to me.
I hope some of you are able to stop by.
This is the Third-To-Last posting here on Substack. After, I will export the mailing list and send updates directly through email. Hopefully, this will eventually give-way to print media that can be mailed or shared in other ways.
Elaborations on Monocultural Saturation:
Recently, I stumbled onto a depressing youtube video (in the tiktok style). In it, a graphic designer of some sort noted the abundance of rough hand made signs along a well-traveled stretch of city-street (in New York City, I think). Most of these signs asked dog owners to clean up after their pets. Some of them were in shop windows and announced little updates or bits of information (I can’t quite remember, and am not going to watch this horrifying video again, but the signs were the equivalent of hand-made reminders to store hour changes, or lack of public restrooms, or “be back in five minutes” type missives).
The graphic designer noted that, despite the prevalence of the dog-related signage, the streets were still strewn with canine shit. He reckoned he could help, by creating more eye-catching signage that conformed to certain standards more conventionally engaging. He thought, thoroughly well-meaning, that he could put his skills to good use and help out the harried shopkeepers scrawling quick signage to solve urgent though perhaps not dire problems. And so, he attached his expertly crafted signage near the original signage. It did not appear, from the video, that he removed any of the original signage—I think it was handy, for film making purposes, to have a before and after sorta shot, but also perhaps he felt a little crummy removing someone else’s sign? But did he not see a crumminess in the unnecessary and passive-aggressive policing of the design faux-pas committed by folk sign makers, unprofessionals who cannot be blamed for not knowing the dos-and-don’ts of kerning, who can’t be bothered to research the optimal ways to catch and hold the human eye?
I imagined a world of signs like his, and then I imaged a world in which everyone always made their own handmade signs, on inadequate material, with sloppy penmanship, harried and uncaring, or sometimes just idiosyncratic and unpracticed, or sometimes just inevitably imperfect, the result of imperfect humans living imperfect lives somewhat un-apologetically, without the need of machines to smooth over our messy contours.
I prefer the latter world: sloppy, frenzied, diverse, beautiful. Each sign made by a different hand with a different writing implement often on different size pieces of paper, paper culled from wherever one can get it.
The precision and uniformity of the graphic designer’s signs brought to mind an oppressive world of banal standards that disallow eccentricity. It brought to mind a world of totalitarian conformity and—counter to the graphic designer’s well-meaning but pretentious and condescending intentions—artlessness. For, if we replace all of the ugly ineffective signage with the Platonic ideal of “pick up your dog’s poo” signage, we not only miss out on all that messy worldliness, we also may miss out on the subtle gems, the effortless and human calligraphy, the sudden moments of whimsy and inspiration that can come over the sign-maker.
One could argue that this graphic designer was only trying to help sign makers who clearly made their signs out of rushed necessity, the annoyance and inconvenience of it all imbued in the hurried handwriting, the wrinkled paper. If some of these signs showed some skill or some inspiration, he would not have interfered. But, who is to say? Who is to say that this harried, rushed, annoyed state is not part of the process? Who is to say that the original sign is not in fact exactly as it should be, a work of absolute and transcendent beauty? Why does this one helpful man get to decide what counts as a good sign? Because of his background, his education? I guess so.
But what I see is a man trying to make an already overly branded world even more branded and uniform.
I am reminded of the near extinct oddity of old websites, before those who came to own and control the internet forced a series of standards on things in a manner near-universal. I am reminded of chain restaurants. I am reminded of the way social media sites like twitter, instagram, and tiktok nudge our expression into a format most resembling an advertisement. I am reminded how politics too is reduced to a series of soundbites, or ads, or headlines. I am reminded of book covers from mainstream publishers and posters for Hollywood films, always conforming to certain standards, designed almost scientifically to be effective. I am reminded of the (refreshingly good) instagram account that collects and collages the photos of other instagram users to reveal how we all keep taking the same exact pictures, over and over again, trapped in a hive mind with no imagination. This happens because we are obsessed with doing things correctly, and have been taught to do so mostly by industries whose standards aren’t so much aesthetic as they are greedy. This effectiveness is not about communication, it’s about capital. It’s about ownership. It’s about hording people’s attention.
But maybe I’m getting worked up over nothing. This dude’s just having a bit of fun. Besides, maybe there’s more to the story. There’s only so much information you can cram in a 30 second documentary about a rogue graphic designer trying to improve people’s messages to the world around them, taped to windows, stapled to poles and trees. What is the short film but a fun little gag? Don’t take it so seriously!
I also don’t mean to be too hard on this dude. Maybe the makers of the “bad” signs really appreciated his help. Maybe it helped keep dog shit off the sidewalk. Utility is everything, after all. If it works, it works. Pay no mind to the world we destroy in the process.
Please excuse any errors above. Time constraints.