This is about the closest we’re going to get to a contemporary art manifesto, from famed graffiti artist BANKSY. I thought this was so well-said that I had to repost it here.

“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

“You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

“Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

“You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”
— BANKSY

As a young professional nowadays in America, it’s easy to see the ways this country is teeming with egotism: self-important college students abound, ready to ramble on about their opinions concerning the state of things; being “consistent” and “right” is the secret objective of everyone in company meetings; in the circus of American celebrity politics, it’s certain death to admit to weakness or second thoughts; looking at pompous, secular sermons like TED talks that incessantly urge audiences to “rethink ______,” much of the presenter’s ultimate purpose there has more to do with furthering a career of insular research and socializing than imparting any sort of real, practical, lasting wisdom.

Because of this, the frantic compulsion to assemble an impressive contact list, to grasp for credit, to consume tremendous amounts of information and news daily so not to be caught without an opinion or fall behind the times remains unchallenged. There is a new commercial novelty to daily life reinforced by social media, cultural mediators, and RSS feeds with most everyone wanting or thinking they deserve a channel to bloviate.

As science, industry, and the relentless ego persist in seeing the world as incomplete, conceit is pervasive in attempts to control others and meddle with nature. Needs are manufactured exponentially in a perpetual, maddening routine of work and waste, all carried out in the name of economy. Over-medicated, consumed by doubt, and illusions, despite all the advances in science, answers concerning personal purpose and fulfillment are more evasive than ever.

“All the truth that is necessary to know has already been spoken”

And with that simple, calming but provocative statement from Dr. David R. Hawkins’ book “Dissolving the Ego, Realizing the Self,”  we’re afforded a clear, refreshing perspective where all the noise of a thousand glib commentators foisting novelty, innovation, and keys to “effectiveness” upon us is at last exposed and silenced.

Divided into three parts and subdivided into eleven chapters, “Dissolving,” explores in part one the nature of the self, consisting of the limited ego and mind, and the inherent narcissistic qualities both possess. In part two, we’re given tools on transcending the small self by understanding how to deprive the ego of its “juice,” to invest in humility, and that devotion to God is the purest and most noble path one can dedicate themselves to. In part three, we’re instructed on realizing the Self, the nature of Divinity, Self, and Truth, educated on the state of non-duality, and what it means to achieve Enlightenment.

“One’s inner spiritual evolution is of greater value to society than any form of doingness.”

With wonderful neologisms like “thinkingness,” “talkingness,” and “doingness,” Hawkins has a rare lucidity in summing up the vain and futile pursuits of the contemporary Western world through Eastern wisdom, evocative of the late Alan Watts. It’s with this remarkable clarity that Dr. Hawkins’ insight, broken up into small passages in this volume taken from his earlier work, “Power vs. Force,” becomes invaluable in “de-energizing the ego” and taking notice of the ever-present Truth.  Radically proclaiming that all opinion and thought is worthless spiritually, it’s difficult to see this point as wrong even from an unspiritual point, particularly in a world that has made generating commercial (read: meaningless), inconsequential online news content and conversations fetishistic and dominating. Those who find the current climate frenetic and exhausting will find peace in Hawkins’ sensible words.

“Dissolving” is a book that is devoid of literal how-to’s, with messages far greater than mere techniques naïve readers might want to consciously force onto themselves. Such is not the way to Enlightenment, and misses the point utterly. Rather, this book requires daily contemplation and meditation on its contents to assimilate into one’s consciousness–and therefore unconscious–toward unlimited Potentiality.

Hawkins’ book is an awesome, eye-opening book, a timely teaching showing that the way to real change, health, and happiness requires not more talking, awareness, and self-dramatization but silence, selflessness, and non-duality.

“To benefit the world, it is necessary to change not the world but oneself–for what one becomes is influential by virtue of its essence (nonlinear) and not its actions (limited and linear).”

My Dodge Charger SRT8 is a good example of how I prefer American muscle to import tuners

• Cars: I like loud, burbling, boxy, American cars, not quiet, sleek, farting imports
• Design: I prefer spontaneous texture in design, not immaculate anti-art of modernist design
• Truth: Science, technology, and logic bore me; we’d all do better to learn more about history and ourselves
• Aging: Advertising glorifies youth when I believe getting older is the best thing that can happen
• Outlook: The West approaches things as incomplete and problematic, as a place to interfere, when I believe the world has always been complete and perfect
• Nature: Animals are greater than man; man will never be able to fully control or understand nature consciously; science has a sort of pathological basis with its obsession of control
• Good vs. Evil: Villains always registered with me as infinitely more interesting compared to their antagonizing heroes; stories with unhappy endings tend to have more meaning than “happy” ones
• Films: I think new feature films are for the most part boring, predictable constructs and formulas of the commercial culture industry, without any semblance of art or reference to truth to the world in which we live
• Women: Brunettes > blondes; curvy > skinny; mature > young; hair > shaved
• Stories: In a sense, I don’t believe in stories and narratives, but prefer the on-going discovery and creation of meaning to solitary, linear accounts

That’s me in a nutshell.

The urge to rebel isn’t in everyone, I’ve observed.

Some people are born passive, others pacified or simply willing to follow. Others, still, come down that birth canal preconditioned as goddamn princes or princesses, perfectly made for the world, without need to question or rebel. You’ve seen them: graceful, at ease, accepted—they gleam in their calm, don’t they? These naturally potent spirits can afford their benevolence, having enviably clear instincts about themselves and their surroundings. With this self-certainty comes power, and with power, fortunes and very real social classes that divide us as people.

The rest of us, the lowborn, have to earn our salt, to do the work and suffering of discovering how we are to survive in the prison of the flesh. Writhing and scrabbling about, there is no obvious or defined path. Most look outward for the answers, clinging to divine prophecies to quell the dread. Some seek quick obliteration in drugs and sex; some are lost to the ambiguities of art, some complete nihilism. At the heart of it all is a quest toward purpose, fulfillment, and meaning.

I have found myself searching for that meaning, and discovered it in rebellion. It’s the spirit this brand was founded in: rebelling against what trivializes or dismisses the unorthodox and eccentric. I therefore resist staying quiet and keeping my commentary to myself. I publicly mock the feeble “niceness” of my generation, denounce modernist dogma of absolutes and facts, and am deeply suspicious of this hyper-social era that’s mission seems to be overthrowing introversion and converting everyone into evermore babbling, vapid transparencies. I want to expose and smash all these unspoken limitations. It’s precisely why I find stock photography, the culture industry, and the imperialism of televised stereotypes all so revolting and insufferable.

So I rebel in order to carry on a tradition of self-invention, uphold liberty, and demand a larger gamut of what a person can be. Rebellion keeps me alive, and at its best it’s an act of creativity, the rebirthing of spirit, the trying of conviction in an age of the flighty and tenuous. That injunction to refuse to follow common experience, but instead to follow intuition, to invoke wonder and imagination that continually shifts the surfaces, resisting an otherwise rigid world of endless work and waste—now that is my idea of meaning, that is my fulfillment, and that is all the purpose I require.

I don’t write tutorials, offer design news or generally care about the local or national politics of the design world. I don’t write about the design work I’m doing for non-disclosure reasons. I am not influential nor am I outgoing. I therefore do not actively participate in the design community (fuck the AIGA). I like to think of myself as a rogue, renegade designer who’s changing the world in his own subtle way.

The content of this blog, then, is me, my opinions and thoughts.

With that, this blog is for venting about mediocrity and highlighting what excites me as a designer. Why do I hold opinions so highly? Because I’ve found that half of what being a designer is is being an opinionated sonofabitch: someone who can cut through the enormous amount of culture and noise out there and to separate the wheat from the chaff. In doing this, I hope to promote things that I personally believe are good and worthy, and condemn or criticize that which needs further work.

Additionally, I’m a believer in the adage that all that is not given is lost. Even if what I write isn’t relevant or read today, tomorrow, or a year from now, it’ll still exist, archived somewhere, available to the tentacles of every search engine. I liken this blog to a letter in a bottle, a continuous, nothing correspondence with no one possibly, but the salutation “to whom it may concern” always prominent. With that, my isolation and alienation reveal themselves.

For the most part, if you haven’t guessed already, I’m a cantankerous, disagreeable, joyfully profane misanthrope. My most happy hours are spent sitting on my ass designing things that have little consequence to mainstream consciousness. Bitching and moaning are my other favorite hobbies, though I assure you I’m equal parts positive and negative.

This all needed to be stated, if for nothing else but to evoke in myself the enthusiasm I have of my own purposes. I don’t have social recreations apart from this where I go “camping, hanging out with friends, and hiking” or any of that active, health-minded, happy-go-lucky bullshit. I’m a loner who is religiously devoted to art, design, communication, and imagination exclusively, and figure I should erase all doubt if any was lingering about what FRAKTURE means.

Me and Ben Fiorina at Kennywood, June 1997

“There is an end
Of all things that thou seest! There is an end
Of Wrong and Death and Hell! When the long wear
Of Time and Suffering has effaced the stain
Ingrown upon the soul, and the cleansed spirit,
Long ages floating on the wandering winds
Or rolling deeps of Space, renews itself
And doth regain its dwelling, and, once more
Blent with the general order, floats anew
Upon the stream of Things, and comes at length,
After new deaths, to that dim waiting-place
Thou next shalt see, and with the justified
White souls awaits the End ; or, snatched at once,
If Fate so will, to the pure sphere itself,
Lives and is blest, and works the Eternal Work
Whose name and end is Love ! There is an end
Of Wrong and Death and Hell!

Even as I heard,
I passed from out the shadow of Death and Pain,
Crying, ‘There is an end!’ “

–Lewis Morris, The Epic of Hades

You were real, you were righteous, you were hilarious, utterly thoughtful and absurdly rare. You were my brother and best friend–without me even realizing it. I will never forget you or the times we had together. Rest in peace, great friend. There is nothing else to say. I will miss you immensely for the rest of my life.

Obituary:

Benjamin Leonard Fiorina, of Pittsburgh, formerly of Middlesex Township, passed away suddenly Thursday, Sept. 8, 2011. He is survived by his wife, Anna (Poukish) Fiorina; his parents, Gregg and Sue (Wolinsky) Fiorina, of Valencia; his sisters, Randi, of Dayton, Ohio, and Jaime, of Columbus, Ohio; and his grandmother, Elsie Fiorina, of Jeannette. He was also the grandson of the late Samuel Fiorina and Leonard and Arlene (Goffus) Wolinsky. He leaves behind several aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. Ben graduated from Mars Area High School in 2004 and graduated in 2008 from the University of Pittsburgh, magna cum laude, with a bachelor’s degree in History. Ben was an avid bike rider and frequently took long rides around the city. He was also a talented musician, playing guitar, bass and keyboard. In his free time, he enjoyed composing and recording music, reading books about history and science and traveling. We will miss his gentle, true spirit with all of our hearts. Private services will be held at the WALTER J. ZALEWSKI FUNERAL HOME, Lawrenceville. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in Ben’s honor to the non-profit group Bike Pittsburgh, 3410 Penn Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15201.

Sign the guest book here.

Three seed packs I designed (Courtesy of Fireman Creative)

I usually don’t make it a habit to blog about what I’m working on (it’s a long story) but the Heritage Seed Collective is one such exception since we’re in need of funding.

The above are three seed packs I just recently designed. The designs have been featured in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and Table Magazine (Summer 2011 issue).

Blackberry Meadows Farm approached Fireman Creative to design nostalgic-looking seed packs for the endangered heirloom seeds the farm had selected to save. The seeds were selected from the Slow Foods Ark of Taste list. Currently, Heritage Seed Co. and Fireman Creative are attempting to raise $10,000 on Kickstarter to fund a website that will promote community building, create a seed saving resource and a place for digitally mapping where these species of plants are being grown. Fireman Creative would both design and build the site. Presently, we’re only about 30% there and have only until July 1st to reach our goal or we receive none of the funds. The following video does a good job of explaining the project and where we’re currently at:

So, be a hero to these endangered seeds and kick in a buck at HeritageSeeds.org.

People have to stop making the wide-eyed, blank stare face for DVD cover art--it's not amusing

With her shrill voice, overly sardonic delivery and flagrant generalizations on relationships, Whitney Cummings’ “Money Shot” is the shallowest comedy I’ve yet to endure. While Cummings is certainly one of the prettiest comics to take the stage, it remains her best and only apparent quality in this 48-minute exposé of a harsh little comedienne princess without anything much original to say.

“Money Shot’s” theme of negativity diminishes Whitney Cummings likability right from the outset. Snide and remote, her jokes seem to come from a mean-spirited place of self-centeredness that obstructs them from being funny. She doesn’t let up in her tirade about relationships, and is charmless and repugnant in how she reciprocates the world, wondering how much of what she says really is hyperbole and what is truth.

Cummings’ attempts at comedy above all lack imagination and creativity, not to mention a fleck of good taste. Even to someone who enjoys the material of George Carlin or Kevin Smith, she is raunchy out of expectation more than anything else, making some of her jokes sound down right foul. Cummings’ vileness doesn’t end there, however. Her perspectives on the opposite sex, rooted in gross generalizations that begin with her incessant “You guys” salutation, as if she were addressing a uniformed audience of identical men, adhere to every trivial stereotype Cummings must operate under, restricting her comedy’s audience down to women like herself.

At a meager 48-minute run time, it’s a relief when the credits roll. Unworthy of the standing ovation she receives, Cummings seems surprised herself. This cul-de-sac of a comedy show I would advise all to steer clear of.

* out of *****

Buy credits.

I’ve been pretty pissed off as of late–I won’t even try to hide it.

Since the CD player in my car froze to death this winter, I’ve been without my metal to drown out the pestering thoughts that run amok in my mind whilst sitting in traffic. All that silence has made for good time to brood on my next invigorating rant on the mediocrity I suffer and endure daily. So if there’s one subject I’d like to focus my energy on today, something that sends me into a complete fit of intolerable rage (aside from marketers telling me to join the conversation), it’s traversing the desert of fakery that is stock imagery.

For non-designers, stock imagery is just one of the many detestable bastard sons of a capitalist society: canned bullshit pictures that’s sole aim is to act as a sort of noise and filler, even a soft propaganda, to communicate stock ideas that fill (read: waste) ad space. Its very criteria is to be as socially conversant, whorishly generic, and politically correct as possible to maintain mass acceptance and saleability.

What’s it look like? Imagine being afforded a glimpse into a parallel world, where all signs of meaning and character have been annihilated: well-manicured suits feigning interest over a laptop, ubiquitous close-ups of business handshakes, photographs of anonymous skyscrapers, gummy stick figures holding hands around a globe, pinpoints in maps, white grinning customer service reps with perfect teeth and headsets—it is anything and everything neutral that doesn’t say anything in particular, requires no permission to photograph, or a mote of good taste to purchase.

Seriously, kill me now.

I personally find it amazing how photographers and illustrators are able to shoot or illustrate subjects like this, avoiding implicating or saying anything whatsoever, and yet still somehow arriving at an image commodity in the end. It’d be art if it wasn’t so fucking boring. But they are fathers to thousands of images with no origin or identity, free from expression, from any reference to time, place, and context. Browsing a stock image library becomes like seeing the world through the eyes of someone with severe amensia: environments systematically cleansed of meaning and character, all scenes artificial and blank, faces—blanker. It is an endless, hopeless, soul-eviscerating nihilist’s dream, an exhausting vortex of commercial lies visualized without a scrap of authenticity or veracity to the world in which we live.

Like any prostitute, there isn’t a sole person who would do this if they weren’t being paid.

Ironically, on a site of images, reading how the uploaders describe the banality of said images is usually the most entertaining aspect. I know all about SEO (search engine optimization) and providing “accurate” descriptions but these descriptions do more than simply describe but seem to almost mandate reality as authoritatively and unimaginatively as the images themselves. Every average looking female model becomes a “beautiful girl.”  ‘Confidence’ is a common tag. You can sense the drudgery and mindlessness of their job in their lifeless, unimaginative descriptions, typing and tagging images like the lobotomized thralls iStockphoto has turned them into.

But the conformity, the idealism and cultural stereotyping is sickening on these sites. Far from simply seeing people or models, I sense the tyranny of such images. I see that, if this is the visual rhetoric of corporate conversations (ugh), this is how we ought to look, to dress, to smile and interact—this is all Acceptable. Because corporate HR values, no doubt the patron and target audience of stock image websites, is the new golden section for how we ought to look and behave, both professionally and personally. Kodak moments have become stock photo moments as Jim DiSpirito, a colleague at work, so aptly put it. These propagandist visions seem so vivid and complete that I’m surprised there aren’t images for the more private aspects of life as well, teaching us what proper fellatio, defecation and childbirth ought to look like.

The corporate workforce, in their mandatory, passive blue shirts, ready to have a one-on-one conversation with you (rolls eyes).

Jean Baudrillard, the late French cultural theorist and post-structuralist who I continue to read and admire (and sometimes laugh at), writes quite lucidly in his essay “The Evil Demon of Images,” on not stock imagery but images in general and their referent.

“It is precisely when [images] appear most truthful, most faithful and most in conformity to reality that the image is most diabolical.”… “The immense majority of present day photographic, cinematic and television images are thought to bear witness to the world with a naïve resemblance and a touching fidelity. We have spontaneous confidence in their realism. We are wrong.”

While Baudrillard goes on to explain how he believes film events conspire to produce real events (but that the film events are the true events—‘real’ events the simulacrum), his disbelief in a dialectical between image and reality, etc., another passage jumps out and seems to ring true for my purposes:

“…the image has taken over and imposed its own immanent ephemeral logic; an immoral logic without depth, beyond good and evil, beyond truth and falsity; a logic of the extermination of its own referent, a logic of the implosion of meaning in which the message disappears on the horizon of the medium.”

Diabolic, nihilistic, immoral: these are the only words to describe stock imagery.

But I get it, this path of least resistance for stock image users. I get that stock imagery’s demand arose out of the recognition that companies who use this stuff really aren’t so different from each other: that they’re all interested in globalization and expansion, that everyone wants to communicate the same messages of friendly customer service, trustworthy business partners, and efficiency in the same processed, entirely meaningless way.

Maybe it serves a purpose, maybe I complain too much, or maybe I’m right in what I see. However it is, for sticking with me to the very end, I’ll leave you with the most titillating photos I was able to find on iStockphoto, and another insightful quote by Baudrillard:

“The fatality lies in this endless enwrapping of images (literally: without end, without destination) which leaves images no other destiny than images. … In the absence of rules of the game, things become caught up in their own game: images become more real than the real; cinema itself becomes more cinema than cinema, in a kind of vertigo in which it does no more than resemble itself and escape in its own logic, in the very perfection of its own model.” —Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images

About to head over to Mr Smalls Theater in Milvale, PA to go see Norwegian black metal band Immortal–whose chilling black metal sound and presence has caused a sudden blizzard to precipitate!

Immortal has a pretty central theme of winter, frost and cold which is why I found this particularly amusing. Given ol’e Punxsutawney Phil predicted an early spring, and the snow has pretty much melted around here, I sure know I didn’t see this storm coming. Never underestimate the power of metal…

With any luck, I won’t wreck on my way to or from the show. Probably just jinxed myself.