1. Words
2. When I Write I Am
3. We Will Watch The Universe Die

I’m not sure why all the titles are starting with “W” these days. “W” isn’t really a letter that gets much play, so maybe it’s my not-so-subtle subconscious attempt at helping it get out there on the scene. Or maybe it’s completely coincidental. Or maybe… it isn’t.

…the very Prince-like, but still original Jamie Lidell. You can snag his new album Multiply off Bleep and it’s guaranteed to make your head bob, force you to make ugly r&b groove faces, and remember all the times you sat around listening to vinyl spin Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding. (And if you didn’t do that, you should really look into to it because you’re seriously missing out on some of the best moments of musical goodness you’ll ever get to hear).

…ballet involving heavy machinery you’ll ever see.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this picture. It is perfect in every way. There is no possible alternate universe where I could love this picture more than I do right now. I have no words left.

…use of a gold record in the history of music. Link via Lanna.

I have to admit, when it comes to you, i’m torn. You pulled us all in with your super-comfy t-shirts that feel like they’ve been loved on by a cotton coneseuir for years and then you made nice with a PR persona built on “Sweatshop-Free Labor” (which really isn’t fooling anyone anymore… yes, it’s sweatshop-free… your factory is in LOS ANGELES), paying workers fair wages, giving them health insurance, subsidized lunches, etc. and keeping jobs in the US… all supposedly unheard of in the garment industry. And you managed to do all of this at a healthy intake of $140 million last year, which is quite respectable for a relatively new garment company.

But then you had to go and use pornography in your advertising.

Dov Charney, your father figure founder says, “Our advertising is a reflection of young adult life – the next generation.” So let me get this straight, the web-based ad campaign you just released (to sell your CLOTHING) that features a posed (to look unposed) amateur model in a shower with a wet, white t-shirt and little else is “…a reflection of young adult life?” Really? Because I completely mistook it for a reflection of sexist, exploitive, and (unfortunately) very common sex-sells advertising practices. I always thought that the “Let’s use amateur girls who look innocent and take badly-cropped pictures of them so it looks like fetish photography” route was for people who weren’t smart enough or creative enough to come up with any worthwhile marketing ideas.

Granted, I realize that my resistance to your advertising has everything to do with my worldview and nothing to do with yours, but my main point isn’t so much that i’m disgusted by this move (although I am) but more so that it was COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY from a business standpoint. You’ve doubled your revenue for three straight years. Why take the low road? Why be so perverse in your corporate image? Why alienate customers that would buy your products if you’d just learn to use a little restraint? Your advertising doesn’t reflect me, it makes me not want to buy your products and I don’t see how that could possibly be good business.

Perplexed,
Joshua

…way to spend 50¢ this summer. (And I don’t mean the rapper).

A few days ago, Casey and I were chatting via IM about the fact that it didn’t really feel strange that we’ve known one another for over a year, but we’ve never met. We both have friends we talk to on a regular basis that we’ve never seen face to face. Yes… internet friends. I meet people on the internet. Scandalous.

I say this to set up the current state of my life, which is the avalanche of recent opportunites to meet a few of the dotcomrades “in real life” as they say. Lee and I went to Greenville last night and had the pleasure of spending a few hours with the fantastic Paul Armstrong and his equally (if not more so, natch) fantastic wife Sonya as they were passing through our side of the world on the way back to Cinci (aka The ‘Nati) from their yearly vacation on the SC coast.

Much eating, laughing, sharing, walking, and encouraging commenced. Sonya had never had sweet tea. Read that again. No, YOU shut up… she’d never had it. True story. I love the people that crisscross my life in seemingly random ways. There are so many times I really hate the internet… but it’s worth the drama for the occasional wonderful folks you get to connect with and get to know even better.

For those dotcomrades that I have yet to spend face time with… I salute you.

I love you, Dad.

Can we talk about
haiku? And senryu, too?
Like brothers, so close.

I figure some of you might not be in the know about such things, so I thought i’d explain so you wouldn’t zone out everytime I post haiku or, if you are in the know, say “You know, that’s really not haiku.”

Haiku is a traditional Japanese literary form consisting of 17 syllables in three lines of 5, 7, and 5. Haiku also contain a word (called the kigo) which is descriptive of the season in which the poem is set. Typically haiku combine two different images, are written in present tense, have a focused description, and have a pause at the end of either the first or second line. Each of these rules are based in Japanese language and literary tradition and while most Japanese haiku poets don’t break these rules, haiku written by non-Japanese poets almost always breaks one (or more) of them.

Senryu is similar to haiku in terms of construction, but tend to be about human nature, minor weaknesses, failing of character, etc. They are often cynical or darkly humorous and such can dispense with the nature references. In other words, that sounds right up my alley so to speak.

From a traditional Japanese, purely technical standpoint, I write senryu and call it haiku. And by doing that, I join in a long line of english poets who do the same. In fact, most of them don’t even adhere to the 17 syllable thing, opting for more of a “Take a deep breath and you should be able to finish this three-line poem” structure. At this point, I still enjoy the syllable structure, as it’s a challenge to communicate the singular thought in the best way in such seemingly limited ways.

So now that you’re in the know as to what they are and where they’re coming from, I hope you enjoy these fun little excercises in poetry thrift that I will continue to call haiku simply because I can.

With change comes faith in
things unseen, volumes unreamed.
Words not yet thought yet.

It’s not you, it’s me. I just can’t do this anymore. I need my space. Yes, I do like poetry. Yes, I think I might like poetry more than you… what does it matter? I don’t know… I haven’t even really thought about where it’s going yet. It just started, lay off… I don’t have to plan the rest of our lives yet. Don’t worry. Aaawww… don’t CRY. I’m sure you’ll meet somebody, too.

I could introduce you to my roommate…

It was fun while it lasted,
Joshua

Michael Eades’ personal site Yewknee has a fun little community project when the hot weather rolls in each year. Go check out the Summer Mix Series. I, of course, participated.

Years ago, I had a wonderful, wise friend tell me that I didn’t need to hold on so tightly to specific artistic disciplines… that I very well may be talented in a lot of areas and need to be open and honest and welcome transitions from one to another in my life because at certain times, in certain seasons, the inspiration and motivation and things-to-say wouldn’t necessarily exist in the discipline I thought I should be focusing on.

I didn’t believe a word of what he was saying.

Five years later, that subtle, delayed mentorship is being proven true by everything that’s happening in my life. I doubt i’ve had anything to say musically for quite some time now, but i’ve held on tightly to it nonetheless; and subsequently written mediocre songs AND prevented myself from using some of those gifts to say things elsewhere. The terrible thing about holding on so unmovingly is that when something gets taken away, it hurts. We trick ourselves into believing we own these things, or that we’re entitled to have them. But how long can you keep your hand in a fist? The closed fist mentality does nothing but drain our energy and, inevitably, hurt like hell when our hand has to be forcibly opened to remove something that isn’t ours in the first place.

I want to keep my hands open and let my gifts rest in my palms. I’m grateful for them, but they can be taken from me whenever God wants to take them. And the crazy, almost-illogical thing is that living like that is freeing. I trust He knows and loves my heart and so I trust that. And i’m free to enjoy the change of the seasons and all the excitement and apprehension and good-fear that comes with trying something new.

All that to say, you’ll still hear some music tonight from me at the show… but you’ll probably hear some poetry, too. Can you dig it?

Welcome to the next season.

I got nothin’.

You should own Vertical Horizon‘s Live Stages.

OK, the experiment was fun while it lasted, but since my Javascripting and Internet Explorer do not play well together, i’ve abandoned the wonderful world of hide-and-go-seek posts for something a bit more normal. I’m sure that all of you reading via RSS feed are appreciative of such drastic measures.

And now back to your regularly scheduled, non-IE-bashing blathering.

While it appears that some people viewing the site in PC world via Internet Explorer 6.0 are still experiencing an error message, some of you viewing the site in that ever-so-annoying browser aren’t getting the error. Quizzical, eh? Logically, I’m going to have to lean towards thinking it’s a personal settings or computer-specific issue, and not a browser compatibility issue. In other words, sorry, but you might have to deal with the error message.

If you don’t want to be around while I nerd out completely, you might want to go ahead and bail on this post; we’re on a slippery slope towards pocket protector land and headed down with a quickness.

I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s causing the supposed error. Programming nerds of the world… unite. IE tells me that it requires an object (unnamed) on line 30 character 7. Easy enough, right? WRONG, Indiana Jones. You’re not finding the treasure that easy. The first time that message appeared there wasn’t even any code ON line 30. So, I experimented with moving some lines of code around (separately in the CSS, HTML, and Javascript) and there’s still an error and it’s still line 30 character 7. Phantoms, perhaps? Ghosts of programmers past? Maybe a nasty case of motherboard gremlins? Do you have any idea how maddening this is?

This is why I like print work. CMYK plays nice with everyone.

There are quite a few things on the horizon. Let’s just go in chronological order to cater to all you wonderful Type A folks.

Friday night i’ll be handling opening set duties for Lee McDerment at Carpenter’s Cellar, as has become the custom. In the coming weeks, HRTWRK will be putting the finishing touches on Lee’s full site and helping Carpenter’s Cellar out with some visuals and advertising and such. That’ll be fun, it’s a great venue.

I’m doing some editorial illustrations for Law Of Inertia magazine that will hopefully show up on your newstands in issue 24. Look for it. Buy it. Poster it over your bed in your room. You know the drill. Casey and I are about to start a Designlogue or two. And Jozias and I are working on a collaboration, too. Check out his recently launched new version of Otra Design.

Welcome to the new redesign. For the 55% of you who who regularly view this site in Internet Explorer, stop. Just stop. No, seriously… why are you doing this to the world? Do you hate us? Do you hate yourself? You’re holding us all back from forward progress. It’s the equivalent of perpetuating the notion that the world is flat. THE WORLD IS NOT FLAT and IE is actually a DEVIL BROWSER so would you just stop it? The error message some of you are getting? NOT AN ERROR anywhere else, just in your stupid browser. It won’t even tell me what the error is or where I could find it to attempt a fix.

In case you didn’t pick up inference skills or the ability to coax simple context clues out of the depths of meaning in-between the lines during all of your years of schooling, I hate IE and its virtual harem of random error messages is messing with my world right now in an unpleasant way.

Do us all a favor, go download Mozilla Firefox. It’s painless. It will make your web experience wonderful. It will help to bring about the inevitable destruction of IE and everything it stands for. Stop being a wussy “I’m scared of the INTERNET and I don’t know if I should DOWNLOAD things” kind of person. Help kill the beast. Help me keep my sanity.

…Post-It Note chicken cartoons you’ll see today. My personal favorites are of the irrational fear variety like this one and this one. I’m a sucker for a well-played pun. This guy’s funny.

Through the wonder of Netflix, I have procured a copy of the highly underrated cinematic classic Freejack, an enjoyably quotable action movie lovefest with such thespian greats as Anthony Hopkins, Emilio Estevez, and Mick Jagger. I suggest immediate viewing when the contingent of you that are currently in another time zone return from the windy city.

Also, Batman Begins has begun. I think it would go nicely with a dinner side of wings… sort of a theme night, if you will. Just call me the social coordinator.

Regulators, mount up,
Joshua