Hatch Show Print in Nashville: iconic style, letter by letter [WATCH]

 Blog, Video
Jan 252013
 
Hatch can reprint its greatest hits using the same elements

Hatch can reprint its greatest hits using the same elements

You may not know the name Hatch Show Print, but you know the style. Its block letters are visually synonymous with Nashville and country music history. When Hatch began business in 1879, Nashville was the fifth-largest printing center in the United States, and at that time, hand-assembled letterpress was how printing was done.

The middle years of the 20th century were hard on letterpress. Newer technologies rose to supplant the inky, time-consuming moveable type method, and both machines and their output were trashed. But Hatch’s curator and chief designer, Jim Sherraden, saw beauty in its imprecision, and he rebuilt the faltering business into an indispensable institution.

To someone in the 1880s, the blocky letterpress style that filled every handbill and advertisement simply signified disposable culture. Today, with so few practitioners, Nashville virtually owns the look.

I was lucky enough to be invited behind the scenes of Hatch Show Print.

The video shows you just how damn cool it is:

This graphic design stalwart merits its own book: Hatch Show Print: The History of a Great American Poster Shop. I want one.

Hatch Show Print

Letter by letter, page by page, we leave history behind

10 failed movies and TV shows redeemed by later success

 Blog
May 252012
 

At the time? Embarrassing. Now? Fun! Strange how a few years makes you see the joy that was intended.

1. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

When it came out, it was a flop. Not surprising, since it’s a children’s movie that contains a shot of a chicken getting beheaded (it’s during the boat ride scene). The author of the original book, Roald Dahl, despised it. But repeated showings on network television in the 1970s, when there were only a few channels and scant opportunities for kids to watch programs of their own — the beheading was excised for that — made this a beloved property of the post-Moon Shot generation. Gene Wilder’s wild-haired, is-he-or-isn’t-he performance, though wildly different from the squirrelly, goateed Wonka of the book, was a harbinger for modern sarcasm. He also gave the movie the heart it needed to endure — something Johnny Depp, in his unleashed, twerpy interpretation couldn’t muster. Look at the picture. His off-kilter performance is still worth a meme, 41 years later. Continue reading »

Seven things Facebook and Google get wrong about you

 Blog
Jan 102012
 
The Genius of Electricity, Edison Labs, West Orange, NJ

Pride in new technology always seems laughably callow later: Thomas Edison bought the “Genius of Electricity” sculpture at the Paris Exposition of 1889 (West Orange, NJ)

Facebook’s ever-changing look, including Timeline, could be called a triumph of simplification, which is to say a train wreck for easy choices. Love it or hate it — and I, for the record, find it a turn-off — we can’t shake the feeling that things are changing rapidly and to such an arcane degree that it’s a waste of time to figure out how to harness it. Here’s some news: Facebook is applying filters across every aspect of its interface for a very good reason

Facebook’s CFO and public relations tap-dancers tell you it’s about giving you personal choice. But that’s not the most important side of the story. No, Facebook is changing mostly because it sells ads when it railroads you into a new system that limits and labels your usage.

Most of the major sites we use now purport to be able to “customize” what they show you based on what you’ve looked at before. But this worrying fascination with personalized content is built on some logical lapses about who we are and what our behavior really exposes about ourselves.

I’ll be quick since I know you have headlines to barely gloss on Twitter, but there are seven essential fallacies that the whippersnappers at Facebook think are true — but aren’t.

1. If you don’t click on a link, you’re not interested.

I can tell this just from my own web stats on this site. While my post about a cool interactive 1924 aerial map of Manhattan had lots of traffic, relatively few people took things further and clicked on the actual source map at NYC.gov. Simply learning about the map was enough for most people. That’s the way it is with links. We read the headlines and we read the lead paragraph. Much like the inverted pyramid of newspaper tradition, we can glean the basics from the leading edge of a story without having to read further. So a click is not representative of interest, but only of a certain kind of interest. Sometimes, it’s merely an indication the headline was confusing and we needed to understand what was going on. Yet Facebook, Google, and most trendy Web media outlets use a click as their measure of us (as I wrote about in my “The Tyranny of the Click” post). It’s a fallacy.

2. You primarily want to hear from the same group of people.

So if we agree that a click doesn’t equate with whether I care or who I am, it stands to reason that my lesser-known acquaintances and friends are of interest to me even if I don’t alway interact with them. That’s why I friended them to begin with. In fact, often I use Facebook to keep tabs on people I don’t know very well yet, but would like to. If there’s one thing Facebook is good for, it’s what I call passive affection. (“Facebook’s Gift to Society: Passive Affection” is a favorite post on this blog.) Yet Facebook’s algorithms decide who is important in your life based on your interactions, and they hide all others until you happen to notice they’re missing.

3. You only want to know about things you already like.

In the old days, you’d thumb through a newspaper and even if you didn’t bother to read the articles, you at least were exposed to the headlines so you had a sense for what was going on in the world. Not anymore. Even Google’s search, which we all think of as a raw resource, delivers different results from person to person, which was exposed in Eli Pariser’s depressingly prescient TED talk about “filter bubbles.” Now, two people entering the same simple term in Google will be shown two different results page based on their past usage. This self-selection for the familiar threatens to make us all shallower and more ignorant. I despaired over this same development in “It’s Content You Want to See!“.

4. You want your activities to be turned into ads.

Of course, the reason all of this is happening is Facebook and Google want to be able to tell advertisers what you’re clicking on so they can make more money off you. That’s why they’re doing everything they can to exclude stuff they don’t think you will click on. The need for newspaper advertising was gutted once our consumer economy discovered instant Web search (I wrote about that in “How the Web Destroyed our Economy“), and now advertisers are successfully horning in where they know they’ll find us: on social media. It’s a well-worn argument that most people would rather preserve their privacy than have their activities sold piecemeal. Even setting aside privacy concerns as a matter of transition into a new digital age, the tactic of commodifying our clicks is logically flawed. Because what I click on is not necessarily representative of what I like (see Point #1), most of the time the targeted ads I’m shown are insultingly off-target anyway. I often click on things I have no knowledge about, naturally, because I want to learn about them, so it makes little sense to use that click to market to me later. It’s bad enough that I can’t find what I want in the stores anymore because the modern customer service default is, “Go look online.” Now even my own online life is being used to crowd out the things I do want to see in favor of ads for things I don’t want.

5. You care mostly about today.

This is one good thing about Facebook’s Timeline, which I otherwise hate: It allows you to go back so that stuff you said can be found. Lots of people despise this very fact about it, and it still only gives you the illusion of preservation, since none of it will ever be written down in a certifiably preserved form that isn’t subject to accidental deletion (my concern in “You Are Being Erased“). But Twitter, unlike Timeline, is intentionally temporary. It’s nearly impossible to track down a tweet once it’s a few days old, and even the most powerful programs can’t dredge up a tweet from several years ago unless an outside entity happened to archive it at the time. The result is that we are relentlessly tossing important thoughts on the discard pile simply because the design of our sites knocks them downward, off the table and out of sight. For social media to truly reflect us as humans, it must learn to be about all of us, the before and the after, and not just hook into our prurient interests.

6. Algorithms can predict intangible things about you.

Dating sites boast that their mathematical formulas can pair you with the perfect mate based on questions you have answered. But there is far more that goes into attraction. The echoes of your grade school sweetheart, the reverberation of your upbringing, the whiff of pheromones, the pang of past traumas… none of these can be quantified by a whiz kid programmer. We can’t even predict them ourselves; it’s metaphysical chemistry. We are amalgamations of our experiences. We also, it bears noting, tend to feel “on the spot” when we answer these questionnaires, and we respond with an idealized version of ourselves in mind. So because the questions miss the mark, and because they can’t be answered with the honesty and nuance required anyway, they’re extremely rough. That’s one reason it was so offensive when OKCupid sent me an email saying that from now on, it would show me fewer “ugly” people. How does it know what I find attractive? What we find seductive in others’ faces has many mysterious origins.

7. You love customizing sites.

I’m busy. So are you. I don’t have the energy or the inclination to comb through my Facebook Timeline and select cover images, prune bygone updates and photos, and set subscriptions and visibility levels for all of my friends. After all, the last two, three, and four times I went through the trouble of setting everything the way I liked it, Facebook changed everything overnight, neglected to write instructions, and buried the alert in its privacy notice. Now, nearly every site you use on a regular basis thinks nothing of radically altering its user interface, proclaiming the upheaval an improvement, and then assuming you have the will to think of every possible new privacy violation, cut off every new loophole, and search out every available preference. The people who code these sites assume you will be excited about customizing your usage because they live in a world where computer geeks are overly rewarded, so they assume you are not only tolerant of their endless retroactive patching of blatant weaknesses, but that you admire them for the changes. Your time is their toy.

Such is our era’s technological arrogance. Such are these smug, benighted programmers.

 

 

You are being erased

 Blog
Jul 192011
 
Pac Man eating memory

Chewing through memory, daily

Your biographer is screwed. You are leaving nearly nothing behind.

While you pour your energies and thoughts into the machine sitting in front of you, you are leaving nearly nothing about you that your descendants will be able to find.

You know it’s true. Compared to your parents, or your grandparents, what are you handing down besides possessions? Most of us have trouble locating email folders that are just five years old. Yet thanks to old-fashioned pen and ink, historians can still account for the day-to-day activities of everything from the backstage staff at Ziegfeld’s New Amsterdam to the most lowly privates marching in the Civil War to the art acquisitions of the Kings of England.

Impermanence abounds. You write no letters, preferring email. You send no cards, choosing instead a quick Facebook wall post. There are no romantic proclamations, wrapped in ribbon at the back of a drawer, to be burned upon your death. You have left nothing like that behind.

My own journal writing tapered off neatly as the Web rose. That’s how most of us use our free time now, not by collecting and sorting our thoughts and feelings. Most of us journal only via status updates. Set aside the fact you watch too much TV and surf the Web too much. It’s doubtful that you kept a journal anyway. You will probably say that life is too busy.

We read books by Kindle, accumulating no libraries. We cannot make notes in the margin to edify their future owners of our books or reignite ideas in ourselves later. We cannot write meaningful inscriptions or dedications when we share books that offer ideas friends will love. Amazon has even decided to take back some of the books we buy. Our personal libraries are becoming merely borrowed information, never rendered truly ours or integrated with the contours of our lives. Our public libraries cease to exist altogether, or have halted in their development.

Today, Borders bookstore announced the total liquidation of all its stores, further forcing more Americans to buy their reading material digitally. Digital media, or the failure to harness it, are being blamed, but we all know that people are reading less and watching more. Rented intelligence, rented experiences.

The songs we buy are a forgotten password away from oblivion. We no longer even purchase movies much; instead, we scrub through our entertainment by remote control, skipping through entertainment episodes. We live and die by what can be related over the water cooler, which is often the program that was on last night but will be forgotten in a month.

The great influencers of our time shout into microphones. They don’t pour their thoughts onto paper where they can be debated for years into the future. All of our fine thinking is gone with our hot air.

At Luxor, Egypt, where they know how to leave stuff behind, in 1998

Your photographs don’t exist. Almost none of them have been printed. They are merely a temporary collaboration between light and data. The very memory of you is being stalked by a 404. In fact, every digit on our computers, which contain nearly every detail a biographer would find interesting, can vanish into the memory hole with the wave of a single magnet.

Stop and think how much you’re leaving behind. If someone were to write a biography of you in 100 years, what would they be able to use? Do you keep papers? Do you write notes? Without an electrical outlet, will there be any evidence that you existed?

No librarian has yet solved the problem. Just as every American over 30 occasionally runs across a plastic floppy disk from the past yet has no way to read it in the present, the historians in charge of maintaining our very history are finding the rapid turnover of technologies and the uncertain degradation rates of digital storage media to be no match for the dwindling government funding allotted to making sure we don’t lose it all. The Library of Congress has an entire Preservation department dedicated to placing bets on emerging media and making sure the stuff used just a decade ago doesn’t becoming inaccessible forever.

Trying to get ahold of our impermanent artifacts is why, last year, the Library of Congress acquired all the public tweets ever sent. The chatterboxes of the bloggerati scoffed, but in fact, the staff there is concerned about how we are becoming historical ghosts. They are desperate to find a way to preserve the details of our day-to-day lives, now that quill and pen and Bic have all become only occasional tools. Just when they find a disk method that works, technology “improves,” and evolves the holdings right into obsolescence. There isn’t enough tax money to make sure we keep our archives current. So with every warped analog tape or time-damaged disk, our history is at risk, too.

Corporations collect purchasing information about us daily, but chances are none of it will be available to anyone once it’s no longer useful for selling us stuff. In an ignored but urgent issue I covered last year, creditors pull the plug on servers containing local newspaper archives the minute they go bankrupt. Your fears, your dreams, your challenges, your perceptions — what’s being recorded in a way that can be read, and most importantly felt, years from now?

Genealogists get frustrated because can’t learn much of our early American ancestors. Baptism records, marriage records, census entries, death notices. That’s because many of our ancestors were unremarkable, historically speaking. Because few left papers behind, their legacy of proof extends mostly through what the government or the church collected from them — provided it wasn’t burned or lost since.

Now we have great recording and cataloging tools available to us. Our fingers are touching the buttons of these tools every single day, including right now at this very second. Yet we are leaving nothing more behind than our indigent farmer and immigrant progenitors did. Will you be as mystifying and faceless to your future family as your 1820s ancestors are you to? If you are, will it be your fault?

Because I now end this post with a stroke of my keyboard, using a period that doesn’t truly exist on a disk that can be wiped out by enemies ranging from solar flares to Breakfast Blend coffee (please print this post for me), I prove my point.

Connect the dots

Leave behind no evidence and there can be no true conclusion

The Tyranny of the Click

 Blog
Feb 242011
 

A 1942 War poster. Ironically, it was referring to unions

Do you even know what’s happening to your news? Media companies are tracking the hot terms that people are searching for from minute to minute, and when those terms come up on their computers, there’s a little button. Hit that button and a new rough draft is created with those search terms as the topic. That way, by focusing on coverage of what’s hot, “news” organizations catch viewers.

You don’t hear about things because that thing is necessarily important. You often hear about it because people are searching for it on Google today. This way, Nicole Richie’s wedding is covered more than Richard Holbrooke’s death.

Until a few years ago, your newspaper would send someone to cover the City Council meeting because it was an important service to the community. Not everyone would read that story about the meeting. They might flip right past it on the bus or in the coffee shop. But the City Council members watched their step because a journalist was watching. That’s what they called journalists: watchdogs.

Not anymore. Once media outlets gained the ability to actually know how many people click on each story, the temptation was too great. Rather than presenting news because it’s sometimes the best thing to do for our country and our communities, the news has been nearly completely monetized by corporations. And, as we know, pretty much every news brand is owned by a corporation.

Recently, Nikki Usher, writing for the Nieman Journalism Lab, took a contrary point of view in her post “Why SEO and audience tracking won’t kill journalism as we know it.” The crux of her argument was this: “…journalists, for too long, have been writing about what they think their readers ought to know, and not enough about what their audiences want to know.”

I wonder if she’s a parent, and if she is, whether she raises her kids that way.

Let’s not paint a misty picture of that dinosaur, the old-fashioned newsroom. Even newsprint men wrote a lot of stories merely to feed the appetite of what people wanted to know. Too many. That’s been one of the pillars of the paper since the days of Yellow Journalism, when Helen Jewett’s hatchet murder was the crap du jour.

So Usher has conveniently edited her portrait of historic journalism. She also doesn’t quash any of my SEO fears; she affirms them. She merely looks down her nose at the healthy watchdog function of traditional journalism the way a 7-year-old sniffs at spinach. She also unwittingly succumbs to one of the oldest journalistic tricks in the book: Be contrary, and you’ll be read. Perhaps it’s the same impulse that makes me want to contradict her on my blog.

It’s certainly true that newsrooms are catering to clicks. Yes, journalists in even the best newsrooms craft news they feel is important. It’s a critical function of editors and writers — and merely by choosing what’s important enough to cover they reveal, by definition, a bias that cannot be removed from journalism.

I know there’s an overclass of largely educated, information-hungry people who swear Twitter is uncovering the world’s great ills and revolutionizing revolution, but I would argue that most of its successes have been at shining additional pinpoints of light on areas already in the spotlight. It’s certainly not reaching a wide enough audience to right the wrongs of the local City Council, and there’s no one behind it who can dive into a sleazy corporation’s file cabinets and come up a month later with redemption clutched in their fist.

And since Twitter posts only reach the people who have elected to follow their chosen writers, until there’s a wayward re-tweet to filter out to a new audience, posts actually serves to isolate people in their own bubbles of self-interest. I wrote about the growing intellectual dangers of “personalized” content here last fall.

When you make news too social and slavishly desperate for clicks, the watchdog stuff doesn’t get seen. Oddity wins, not boring old justice, and great stuff gets lost every day. You’d have gulp many gallons of the social media Kool-Aid to think that the much-touted “democracy” of the Web solves all ills. It doesn’t, just as unchecked capitalism can create some pretty hefty poverty problems for the lowest rungs of society.

And the City Council meeting goes uncovered, and the greedy government and corporate ravens rampage without notice. Even if a writer gets the whiff of shady back-room deals or wrongdoing masked by by a thicket of impenetrable paper, the low margins of the Web mean that no one’s paying anyone to put the time and elbow grease into an investigation. When writers get $15 a post, how could they?

Click-derived stories and social media gossip are rapidly leading us to an even larger echo chamber than the one we’re living in now, where newsrooms pump out stories on topics they see appearing on Google Trends, to masticate regurgitated topics of proven tastiness, and to chime in, not break stories. Hollywood began subsisting on recycled rehashes a half-decade ago. Now it’s the news’s turn.

American news coverage has always struggled between profit motives and watchdog service. But the Web made response measurable. Now pure capitalism rules all, and there’s no room for that do-gooder parasite, the watchdog.

Be careful, America. Darwinism is not democracy.

Left to our own devices, we're seduced by the latest ones

Enough is not enough anymore, and everything is ‘over’

 Blog
Jan 112011
 

Today, a singer-songwriter I like, Jay Brannan, had an outburst on his Facebook page: “when an item or article of clothing wears out or breaks, i want to replace it with EXACTLY the same thing. the idea of “discontinuing” or “redesigning” ruins life.” Soon after, he tweeted the same thought, refining it: “the idea of “discontinuing” or “redesigning” ruins life,” he wrote.

I feel this way, too. I want what I want, and I want what works. But American commerce usually has other ideas.

Over the years, I have come to suspect that the tendency of American industry to incessantly reboot, reimagine, retool, and recycle is a symptom of more than petulance. It’s not even a sign of creativity, or of homage, although it’s usually sold to us that way. It’s desperation.

Don't be fooled: Grandpa liked pictures just as much as you do

Our parents and grandparents enjoyed many of the same products, more or less unchanged, for generations. My mom grew up with pretty much the same Coca-Cola in the 1960s that her mother grew up with in the 1930s. But our generation just can’t resist mucking everything up.

Coke replaced sugar with high fructose corn syrup. National Geographic went from an exploratory, heady photographic journal to a lightweight photo book that seems to be inspired by the lifestyle section of your local newspaper. The previously enigmatic Mr. Peanut and Tinker Bell spout quips like second-string sitcom characters. The affordable VW Bug that served the budget needs of surfers, hippies, and young adults fresh out of college was superseded by a luxury version more likely to suit moneyed marketing executives. What’s left unchanged? What’s actually better?

Ah... that's better!

Why do companies incessantly monkey around with stuff that was proven to work for generations? Why does Facebook change its interface every 14 months, and why do we discard the latest must-have staple of everyday life (Friendster, then MySpace, now maybe Twitter) as “over” sometimes seemingly because it’s been around for more than two years? If everything is declared “over,” what will last?

People now relish the hasty dismantling of the very things that caused the destruction of the institutions that came before them. We’re tripping over ourselves to trash the things that are most central in our lives, and praising redesigns and retoolings that have no real cause to exist except for the unsettling and hollow feeling that “it’s time.”

There is a wide, and growing, school of thought — very active on Twitter and other social media — that celebrates the science and design of every new change and new reinvention, but never stops to pragmatically wonder if any of it was really necessary.

Those Bug-buying marketing executives are partly to blame. In corporate offices across the world, people are actively justifying their jobs in order to afford those VW bugs they so unwisely changed. So is Wall Street, whose stockholders demand companies make more and more money instead of just enough money.

These days, if you’re content to merely get by with a decent living, you must be a farmer. A real business, one with investors and cubicles, is one that needs to constantly top last year. Modern business must exceed enough, and to do that, it doesn’t honor tradition so much as strip mine it.  It waters down the formula, it chases trends with no hope of social endurance, and five years later, when the public only dimly recalls the revolution, they must either do it again or pull the plug.

Someone earned a bonus for this

The threshold of profit is now so high, thanks to stockholder demand, that a candy bar with a modest following — say, a Nutrageous in America or a Fuse in Britain — has no hope of survival because it’s not a smash. A very good television show, such as My So-Called Life or Arrested Development, cannot live because it isn’t a blockbuster. Your favorite coat, your best pair of socks, the cut of your trousers — so many things that do not need to be changed must be made unavailable to you because in some boardroom somewhere, an upstart junior executive dodges the axe by justifying the eradication of the old. Like having children, destroying old things is a way to leave an imprint forever.

What has become of American tradition? I mean, besides the fact that everything we buy went from local, mom-and-pop origin to global, gotta-please-the-stockholders scale. Our grandparents lived with stuff that played unchanging roles for most of their lives, but our generation shucks off everything once it loses the whiff of trendiness and gains a well-worn groove of familiarity. We even have entire industries that celebrate this utter lack of self-identity: What do you think fashion is all about?

On a recent TCM documentary series, Moguls and Movie Stars, historian David Stein said: “We revere them. And then we destroy them. And then we revive them and make them saints.” He was talking about Clara Bow and Marilyn Monroe, but he might as well have been talking about our beloved products, which are the shadow celebrities of American culture.

I don’t think it’s just about the nature of a consumer society. It’s become systemic, making so many of the props in our lives into something rootless and rudderless, with a new expectation that nothing is allowed to age and cement.

Our society now has a subconscious expectation of a flimsy lifespan. My fear — or realization — is it’s a sign that America is in steep economic decline. We jump so rapidly from product to product, and we abandon without hesitation the few constants that have bound our wide society together. We tell ourselves that we’re improving what needs improving, but in truth, our economy has gotten so bad that businesses can no longer survive on the old, just-good-enough margins. They have to keep racing ahead. Enough is not enough anymore.

It’s been said, and I agree, that Americans have the attention span of hey what’s that–