ACCOZZAGLIA

last night, we saw the rented DVD for 24 Hour Party People, which i had truly meant to see while it was playing in the cinema. i’d like to see the other side of the story, without so much attention focused on Tony Wilson, the megalomaniac narcissist de-luxe.

as this recession has made it all but futile to locate any job in my field of practise, i’ve been taking all this idle time to examine my future in graphic art and assessing whether there’s really any legit professional future to be had of it. as i give it more thought, i don’t like the conclusions i seem to be reaching.

for awhile, i worried that i was burnt out eternally from creating visual graphic art-type stuff. whilst watching 24 Hour Party People last night, though, i felt my adrenaline and pulse levitate when Peter Saville walked into the scene for a trio of brief cameos. the one which really got to me, of course, was when he was berating Tony’s visual conceptualisation space and showing him a mockup of the legendary floppy disk 12″ sleeve. as Peter said, “four-colour, die-cut and gatefolded, it’s very expensive,” i remembered exactly why i even got into graphic design in the very first place.

from a ridiculously early age, i always paid attention to typography in my illustrated science books (i had many, ergo i was super geek-plus). i loved beautifully-designed book and music jackets and winced at chintzy or poorly-designed ones. the whole “don’t judge a book by its cover” thing is an early form of political of political correctness with which i didn’t agree. eye candy was good, and staid was bad. moreover, eye explosion is even worse than bad in my book.

less equals more in my book, but more doesn’t equal better.

when i began collecting music in earnest beginning at sixteen, that’s when i really began to notice solid, strong design trends and stylistic themes on album and singles sleeves.

i have a serious love for much of the pre- and early-digital designs preceding the age of desktop publishing. while the lowering cost of such technology democratised the evolution of graphic design, i feel it also cheapened the value of what defines good design and what non-designers consider as “quality”.

everyone thinks they’re a designer in this still-nascent era of reasonably-priced image composition and vector-rendering software. 98 percent of them simply aren’t. they just suck, and their noise just makes the visual din louder and more challenging to find the rare, insightful productions.

returning to the more != better premise, i feel that much of the client work i do for people, especially in a contracting production sense, is creatively stifling for the fact that clients want something as catchy or better than something they recently saw elsewhere on a Flash site or a telly advert. unfortunately, this also renders the cycle of design into an ever-maddening pace of ever-disposable productions and creations, most which aren’t worth their salt to begin with, while a handful really demonstrate a reflection of the times and the motivation of why they were devised in the first place.

i get weary of the complexity and document real estate sprawl which backlashes against the use of simple, clean negative space (pick up any number of commercial magazines if you’re in doubt to what i mean here).

i look at the work of Peter Saville, some of vintage Stylorouge, Mark Farrow, Icon, Sweden, Renck + Drugge, Bergman-Ungar Associates, Area, Jeri McManus Heiden or Vaughan Oliver and think, “wow. this is why i love doing this stuff.”

unsurprisingly, all of these names have involvement in sleeve jacket design of the 1980s and 1990s.

perhaps it’s because i’ve never been able to make more than $29K per annum in any one year of my life. i watch other graphic designers and even art directors whose work isn’t exactly spectacular, thoughtfully rendered or even faintly inspired, and yet, they rake in well over $45K without nary a flinch beyond the same staying-up-til-the-next-day-and-then-some to get a project done to the client’s approval that i’ve been very much personally accustomed to.

because i have relied on the need to produce to merely stave off going homeless again, rather than not having to desperately worry about the rent getting paid each month (to say nothing of making sure i have food to eat), there has yet to be just one time in my life where i could sit down and create a graphic piece without the onus of worrying over whether it’ll help me keep a roof over my head or it’ll land me as a bad lady pushing a Kmart shopping cart.

in other words, it’s never been art for art’s sake for me. which kinda robs the passion if all it really means is that you have to monopolise your creative time into overtime — just to keep from dying.

i’m not sure whether or if it’s different for someone who reliably keeps their bases covered with a decent $50-70K per annum salary, permitting them the flexibility and latitude to take a professional breather every now and again to create for the sake of expression and exploration. that’s an experience which i can’t leverage against what i presently know from personal experience.

but i’m still burnt out. i can’t pretend that i’m not such any longer. and i probably do a horrendous job of hiding that fact, too.

meanwhile, i’m beginning to recognise that my ability to write is something that heretofore has always been a very personal, intimate medium for me to express or convey what i’m really feeling. my graphic art, in contrast, is starkly cold, detached and unemotional (but then again, isn’t that really what commerce is all about?).

starting about four years ago, people who read my work even began to comment at how my writing really didn’t suck. i wasn’t sure how to take this — even now i have trouble wondering what to believe.

i have a complex when it comes to writing, stemming from a professional “mentor” (in the loosest sense of the word) who told my thirteen year-old self that i was “trite”. unfamiliar with the word, i asked what it meant. he told me to look it up. once i did, i was shattered and forever self-conscious about what i wrote or what i spoke to others.

it’s why, if you’ve spoken with me before, you’ve probably heard me sneak in a side-wise, “am i driving you to boredom?”

in the last few years, though, several respectable people have suggested that i should write a book or some kind of critical anthology. on what topic is less important, they say, than whether i do eventually write and publish something somewhere and someday.

so, here i am. apparently, some of what i write is allegedly important enough for people to either partake interest of reading or discuss in the circle of a book club. whatever. meanwhile, i don’t know what to believe, as each new person suggests that i write very well. personally, i thought the first several people who rallied to the idea were completely daft.

now, i’m not so sure. what if i began just writing specific shit and allowing to happen whatever may happen? what if something i write garners serious attention? what if a tome i compose makes some kind of profit from book sales?

two things about this scares me: i treat my writing as an intimate, utterly personal instrument of my own expression. i don’t know how i feel about releasing my words into an unbridled public arena. it makes me feel ominously naked and vulnerable. and if anything matters, it’s that i have a hard time with feeling vulnerable, no thanks to a lifetime whose cultural and social expectations demand you to disallow yourself from being rendered vulnerable, lest you wind up the victim or either character assassination or a fatal blow to the skull and and left to rot in a shallow grave — if i’m even that lucky.

second, i don’t want to burn out on something i value as passionately as writing. it would be simply tragic, given how scant the other ways with which i know how to produce abstract expression.

i don’t have a lot of money for film like i once tried in 1998. in fact, there are still a dozen-plus undeveloped rolls from 1998 to 2000 that still sit in the fridge, hopefully not spoilt past the point of no return. my Nikon F-801′s camera bag has more dust than any real photog could ever allow. i’ll admit it: this lack of use and neglect is a sacrilege, plain and simple.

moreover, i don’t need funds to make writing happen, and i’m not limited by technological barriers, either.

* * *

so. what to do?

i keep playing this new scheme in my mind to see how things could possibly turn out: if i started to write for a living (initially, and predominantly, as a copywriter — which is one of the creative services i already provide to my clientèle — while only creating graphic art on a more personalised, special-project only basis (such as commissioned media art or exhibit projects where i stand to receive a sum for sold work), how would each mode of creative expression be affected in the long run? would i mitigate the drained feeling for graphic design i feel now, while continuing to thrive from my written work, or would both inherently disappointment me and render each other into an irreversible burden?

yeah, so, ummm. i have no answers. i really don’t. i also don’t feel like i have much latitude to even be bandying about these concerns right now, given how i don’t have a full-time job helping me to balance economic security with leisure — if you could even call the need to express oneself a leisurely activity. i somehow don’t think so.)

i should split. ciao.