...on the grind...and petty fiefdoms

you see, the industry has just broken the bastard's back. my october/november issue was shut down to save money for the 4th quarter...bad move. it looked really good. i am disheartened. fear not, the bastard still has a job thanks to a 3 year contract between the company and the organization.

on a funny/absurd note. the art director at the organization is to the bastards reckoning, about 14 years old but she designs like a 9 year old. because the organization puts up alot of the costs to produce so every issue, they dictate content on 4 pages. the president gets one and the other 3 are industry content. for the last 2 years, the organization has been buying an ad and running a little profile of different folks in the industry that runs alongside a list of names of people that they are thanking. it reads like an anthrax albums thank you list. i even think they thanked john and mary zazula and metal blade records. either way, the bastard doesn't design it and thusly it looks like crap. i'm not saying that the bastard is in any way better than the giants of my industry but, i could maybe hang out in a corner of the same room with them and drink the kool aid with them so long as i don't make too much noise.

anyway, the ad is hideous. it doesn't work with the overall look and feel of the magazine and thus, is an eyesore. on top of that she puts it together using software that the company doesn't have so the bastard doesn't have it.

OK. QUICK SIDEBAR:

I have worked in publishing for about 11-12 years. i learned how to use a mac in college. i learned it not from a manual but from a graphic design teacher who helped me make the transistion from traditional media artist to a graphic artist. most old medium artists don't see it this way. the see graphic artists as sell outs and hacks and no talents. oddly enough, the folks at my alma mater who feel this way aren't terribly good artists of teachers (allthough one of the former heads of state there was a great painter but an awful person) and it breeds the kind of disrespect that only disgruntled students feel. anyway, i made it my business to know how to do my job well as well as know how the tools work. anyone can use the tools, not everyone wants to learn about the artsy half. they figure, "it's a corporate job, i can drive a desk, i can get by". no, you can't. i have worked with people with great design sense who can't use these machines that make it easy for untalented/good networking hacks to get into this business. and i have worked with hacks that know how to use the computer and NOTHING substitutes for having the eye. the eye that sees what is current, what is beautiful, and not that eye of the beholder shite, the instinct to have an idea of what is beautiful to a large audience, and the sense to know the difference between what is beautiful to you and what is to your audience. more important of the two is currency. not everyone stays current. i have met many like this. long story short, learning how to use quarkxpress WILL NOT MAKE YOU CREATIVE, it comes from the heart and it can be learned, and it's not in a manual. that's just my take. have at it.

meanwhile back at the ranch, so i have to rebuild the ad every issue. and i have tweaked it because the bastard believes that you CAN have too many fonts on a page and too many typeface weights on a page. call me silly but that's the case. so the 8 year old calls up scoop after we had to sit through this awful news and tells her that we've been fucking the ad up since april! first off, if this has been going on since april why do you wait until the october issue to bring this up. on top of this, upon comparison, the bastard sees that he specific complaint isn't valid. the specific complaint had to do with the weight and point size of something that is actually the same size and weight. there's just less words. how do i know this? aside from laying them side by side and seeing this, the bastard has been specking type since before she was born! ask annie, daughter of mogh, captain of the klingon hockey team who used to do the prepress with the bastard and she will tell you that i used to spec type all the time for various chuckleheads who couldn't properly supply a typeface. the bastard would spec it and replace their fonts with something that was a reasonable facsimile and the designer was none the wiser (francisco, baston, herman, you know from whom i speak daughter of mogh) so i know from what i speak. in the end it pissed me off because it's a bad year for magazines and i get some ass end in this and some jerk who hides in an office in Connecticut decided to kick the bastard when he's down. i think i'll have to kick back. and i will.

—the bastard