Most of the bigger de- and re-construction projects are taking place up on Detroit Road, the city’s “main street.” I think all of the major ones underway just now involve the arrival or relocation of chain establishments, three of those establishments being eateries.* And one, in particular, being the subject of a modest amount of local controversy. Though in spite of controversy, all four seem to be going ahead, including the demolition of the old Detroit Theater prior to its being replaced by a drive-through McDonald’s.

I’m not especially enthusiastic about this particular development, although after giving it much thought I had a difficult time coming up with a convincing argument to block it, and apparently it’s a moot point now anyway. I do find it kind of regrettable, all the same, as much for the alteration of the city’s general urban landscape as much as for anything particular about the establishments involved. For me, at least, a big part of what makes Lakewood interesting and vibrant and attractive rather than just another suburb of strip malls is this kind of “main street” scene:

This is from Detroit Road; similar development lines much of Madison Avenue, home to my studio and self

The Detroit Theater was a bit to the west of the Detroit/Warren “center” of town, and the multistory storefronts weren’t quite so dense out there anyway. But they’re getting less so, now, with the demolition of both the old theater and a storefronts/apartment building across from the YMCA which is also to be replaced by a fast-food drive-through, Taco Bell having apparently decided that it’s worth moving five or six blocks in order to somehow improve upon their current building, which I imagine the new structure will nonetheless largely just duplicate.

This disappoints me because of what’s going out, more than what’s going in. Because, obviously, single-story car-optimized suburban fast-food eateries aren’t exactly rare in the larger picture, even if they’re still few enough in Lakewood, and aren’t in any serious danger of becoming rare. Whereas, again in the larger picture, I think it’s a different situation with “main street” style multi-story storefront development. It doesn’t seem like much of this is built nowadays. Lakewood still has a lot of it, and much of it is kept in decent condition; Detroit Road has even seen one or two big refurbishment projects in the years I’ve been living around here. Still, I just wonder about the prospects for what little new construction there is to keep pace with demolition. If two or even one such structure is knocked down every year, how long before the city becomes an entirely different place?

Maybe worse, maybe not, but considerably different, and I’m not sure that really makes sense; if someone wants to live in Beachwood, for example, won’t s/he just go live in Beachwood? If the extant Lakewood were withering away, it might be a different situation, but so far as I can tell the city as it exists seems to work pretty well and appeal to quite a lot of residents and businesses beyond me and mine. I mean, in America at least, when you have a reasonably-prosperous community with 52,000 people choosing to live together within the space of five-and-one-half square miles, I think this probably indicates that it must have some or other atypical features which lend it some degree of atypical utility or other appeal. And I would think the community interest would lie in preserving those atypical features rather than gradually ceding them to the same generic, cookie-cutter development found any and everywhere.

I do wonder, however, whether or not anyone has or will be commissioned with that task in the context of long-term, big-picture strategy.

*Aside from the relocation of Taco Bell and McDonald’s (the latter of which does come with a small amusing irony), CVS has also done the move-down-the-street-and-rebuild thing and we will be gaining a Quaker Steak franchise. These latter two do, at least, seem to include some effort to respect the urban style of Detroit Road; for a single-story chain store with attached parking lot I think CVS has at least made its new construction about as tasteful and fitting as possible, while Quaker Steak is actually going to be fitting into existing architecture rather than bringing its standard, standalone suburban model here. Moreover, the arrival of QS will be part of an upgrade to a rather ugly strip-mall type building, which looks like it will at least be a significant improvement to the area by itself even if it doesn’t really address the larger questions I’ve been discussing.

Could the good people at iStockphoto.com please stop saving the comp versions of their images at high resolutions?

Because this is just ridiculous. I am absolutely sick and tired of placing something in a layout and getting a teeny tiny little postage stamp image because someone decided to save it at 250, 300 or even 600 dpi! It’s a preview image primarily for on-screen use, to be replaced by an appropriately higher-resolution image when a design is approved! It should be low resolution so that it places in a document at something like the size it may actually be used at, i.e. somewhat larger than a g*dd**n thumbtack!

All of the workarounds available on my end are annoying. I can scale up the image in InDesign, of course, but because InDesign creates its own internal preview images based on a file’s saved resolution, some of these end up being about 12 pixels across. So when I scale them up they’re just a blocky unusable mess. I can instruct the program to preview them at full resolution, but this is yet another step, and it goes back to the default the next time I open that document. Usually, I end up just opening images in Photoshop, fixing the file resolution to what it should have been in the first place, and re-saving, but that’s also obviously a major PITA.

Whereas on their end it ought to be a relatively very minor change which could be implemented in their software once, and then done, forever. It would be great if it were!

Have I mentioned (this is a rhetorical question; I know I haven’t) that I really enjoy the show BrewingTV these days? That’s where the “citizens” bit comes from. Anyway, very entertaining, and free. My favorite episode is “iSoloBrewmaster.”

Lot of change going on. I’ll be moving (again) through the next week. (Started hauling stuff today, and man, am I tired. Biggest downside of print, definitely: the mass.) Changes in work, changes going on with the rest of my family. I’m just trying to stay afloat amidst it all. Meanwhile, I should throw a few links up here.

First and probably most interesting, at least for me, is the announcement of change also taking place at the College of Design, back at dear auld ISU. It’s basically an organizational reshuffling, and probably won’t mean that much in terms of the student experience in the short term, at least. But Graphic Design is now becoming a full-fledged Department, rather than just a program within the Department of Art & Design. Got my attention.

Other stuff. Remember that new DC logo I posted about a while back? Bleeding Cool does a nice little assessment of it as part of a trend.

And speaking of trends, I learned a while back that I may be part of one. Specifically, “the “digitally dominant” (ooh, I like the sound of that) a “group of people who mainly communicate via text, email and video, and as a result can go ‘up to’ 48 hours without speaking to someone in person.” Yeah been there done that.

Loosely-related to this, I enjoyed this humorous flowchart from Slate, detailing all of the awkwardness which can accompany bumping into an acquaintance at the gym.

Finally, the Robot 6 blog amused me with this gag illustration by Stephen Collins, about the e-book reader of the future. It’s funny because it’s so true, you know it is.

Meanwhile, I am absolutely utterly exhausted just now. I think the cold April may simply have delayed pollen season, or at any rate the crawl-into-bed-and-die phase which I typically experience that month; in any event that’s about what it feels like the past few days. On top of a long-time client encountering serious problems (which means me encountering serious problems) and an unexpected and depressing road trip to attend some family matters, plus the anticipation of moving (yet again, about which I may have more to say later) in the next week or so.

Bllleaaaaahhhhhhhhh.

To all of the creators and fans who have spent years, perhaps decades, aspiring to get Jack’s back: consider taking a moment to step back and look at how much you’ve achieved. I think it’s something you can feel good about. It’s true that the world is still full of evil, and it’s true that many wrongs have not been righted and that many of them never will be. But when it comes to getting appropriate recognition for Jack Kirby, I submit that it’s time to hang up that “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner and enjoy a cigar.

I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while, and decided it was time to step up and actually say this (or post it) after Slatelantic published this essay by cartoonist James Sturm, about his decision to boycott the Avengers film. Because the subheading, frankly, just seems ridiculous: “Because Jack Kirby has never been given the credit he’s due.” Now in fairness, that may very well be something which an editor wrote and, not atypically, it doesn’t actually seem to match anything in the essay. On the other hand, the essay doesn’t seem to give any particular detailed explanation of a specific wrong for which Mr. Sturm has a specific remedy in mind; for the most part it just seems like a 101 intro course lament of the various ways that Mr. Kirby was treated badly (of which there were many). In any event, I’m guessing that Sturm would probably agree with the subheading and list “getting the credit he’s due” as part of any remedy which he would consider necessary before he could go see The Avengers in good conscience. And I don’t think he’s alone in that.

I also don’t imagine that there would not be other things on such a list, for either Sturm or others who have been vocal in condemning Marvel. But right now I’m not going to go into those other items, or their merits. Right now I just want to address the issue of Jack Kirby getting “the credit he’s due.” Because I think that one can now safely be checked off as “done.”

I think that we are at the point where, in any meaningful sense, Jack Kirby has received the credit he’s due. How many comic related sites can one visit on any given day without finding some mention of Jack, who passed away 18 years ago? How many people with any real interest in comics as an art, or in American superheroes as a genre, are not well aware who Mr. Kirby was and what he did? How many are there who would disagree with the statement that he was an astonishing genius who created most of the good parts of the Marvel Universe plus quite a few interesting pieces of DC? I think in all cases the answer is that these are rare phenomena.

And it has not always been so. In the 20 years that I’ve been paying attention to the comics world, we’ve gone from a time when a a still-living Jack was to a great extent sidelined and neglected, and even a rabid fan of characters like the Fantastic Four which are almost emblems of the man’s work, they’re so thoroughly Kirby, could have only a limited awareness of “Jack Kirby” as “the name of that guy who drew this stuff way way back in the 1960s” … to a completely different world, today, where I believe that even if not everyone agrees with it, anyone who follows news and commentary on comics even a little is going to acknowledge that it’s at any rate a mainstream, well-supported view that “Jack Kirby was the godlike creative prodigy (compared with that overrated huckster Stan Lee) without whom Marvel (as Mr. Sturm argues) wouldn’t even exist.”

As far as I’m concerned, this is quite a change. And one which didn’t happen by accident at all; it happened through the tireless effort of people like Mr. Sturm beating the drum year in and year out. And I submit that he and everyone else who has done so much should take a moment, at least, and feel good about what they’ve accomplished.

Because, again, I believe that in terms of “credit” they’ve accomplished what they set out to do. Yes, there are still things to complain about; there are always things to complain about. I know it angers people that, afaik, Kirby’s name will not appear in credits for The Avengers. But I have to ask, so what? How many of the people going to see the Avengers movie who aren’t already very familiar with Jack Kirby would leave the theatre any less ignorant or indifferent than they were before taking their seats if “Jack Kirby” appeared on the screen for six seconds before the lasers and explosions and provocative shots of Scarlett Johansson which constitute the entirety of their real interest? Maybe a few. And in an ideal world that credit would be up there anyway as a satisfying sign of corporate Marvel finally saying “uncle, uncle” to justifiably outraged notions of fairness (which I suspect is what a lot of people really want) and for that matter, in an ideal world, Jack would still be alive to enjoy the credit and attention. But for what it’s worth, which I think is quite a bit, in that ideal world where Jack was still walking around and available for interviews I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that there would be a lot of interviews, because the fight to get appropriate acknowledgement of what he did has basically been won.

As it is, Stan Lee is getting all of the interviews because he’s still alive. Well, y’know, curses, drat, life is not entirely fair. It isn’t going to become entirely fair. By all means, people should go on working to make it more fair, and my point is in fact basically a tribute and an encouragement to such efforts because the tremendously successful efforts at getting fair credit for Jack Kirby are wonderful, wonderful proof that such efforts can succeed. No, not entirely; again, the world is not perfect. But with that being the case, I submit that one needs to stop sometimes and check perspective because one might be missing the forest for the trees. And I think that’s the case here. On the issue of credit for his work, Jack Kirby has (posthumously) won, and everyone who has worked hard to accomplish that goal has also won.

You want to keep fighting for other worthy causes (and maybe some other worthy contributors to comics who are still way more underappreciated than Kirby), go right ahead. But I suggest that you ought to at least stop here, briefly, to enjoy what you’ve accomplished and take a bow.

You’ve earned it.

First, in about two hours I will be heading out to coffee and record shop Loop in Tremont, and thereby either raising my own hipster quotient or else lowing that of both store and neighborhood… though the real reason for going is to attend AIGA Cleveland’s roundtable discussion this evening from 6 to 8. Probably have notes on the experience later.

Then, about two days seven hours from now (if I’ve done my math right) I will be getting in line for the annual midnight madness party to kick off Free Comic Book Day at Carol & John’s Comic Shop. (This is the store which also hands out those awesome Superman-site maps of Cleveland, every day of the year.) I probably shouldn’t even mention this because the line is sure to be long enough anyway, and I really want to be one of the lucky people who gets inside early enough to score a Cleveland Action Brewery FCBD 2012 Ale. How awesome is this store??

And on Saturday, whenever I finally get up, it will be the day of the 138th Kentucky Derby! Which I really have little direct interest in because I don’t follow horse racing; it’s mainly just an excuse to drink bourbon as well as use it to flavor chocolate-pecan pie. Still, it seems fun, and the different flags produced for each year are a nice little nod to design. There’s a house up the street from me which hangs up a dozen-or-so of the most recent flags on the porch every year, so that kind of makes the event feel somehow fun and festive even here in Lakewood.

Finally, looking further out, May 13 is Mother’s Day. Don’t forget Mom!

This puts me up past 20 items now, I think

Beginning at the top right, The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes was the first acquisition. I actually picked this up in New York. A friend recommended I visit The Strand Bookstore, and so I did; I didn’t have hours to spend browsing but the idea of adding a volume to my Sherlock Holmes collection occurred to me and I soon decided this was an excellent idea, indeed. What could be more perfect than picking up a book involving Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures were first published in the Strand magazine, at the Strand bookstore? This would give me a souvenir from the trip which I would actually hang onto and display, and an excuse to add an item to my collection which would make that item special. Frankly I thought this was borderline brilliant.

This is the only one of the three I’ve read, so far. It’s decent. Some of the stories grab me more than others, and the narrative form is a bit awkward, but it was entertaining. I could see myself taking this off the shelf again. And even if I don’t, it’s by far the most handsome of the lot; The Strand actually had this in hardcover as well as paperback and I chose the latter because this cover was so much more attractive.

The other three are all finds from the Lakewood Public Library’s most recent sale. I think I spent $2 on them, total. Proceeding counter-clockwise, we have The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, apparently transcriptions of rediscovered radio plays. Not sure how much these are/were new stories and how much they were patterned after the original stories by Doyle, but this could be interesting. The design really isn’t, but oh well.

Same goes for The World of Sherlock Holmes, apparently a biography of the great detective. I think there are at least three of these, and probably more; some day it will be interesting to compare them. The cover of this one kind of straddles “blah” and daring at the same time. At a glance it’s the former. On the other hand, there’s almost something audacious about making the title such a minimized element, and basically just communicating through the silhouette image: it clearly says “Sherlock Holmes book” at a glance. It doesn’t really appeal, aesthetically, but I’ll give the long-ago designer (and whoever approved the design) a point for experimenting.

Finally, The Problem of the Spiteful Spiritualist. I have developed a kind of variant on Andy Warhol’s famous dictum; in my view, in the future everyone will be the subject of at least one mystery novel. I mean, the list of “deceased famous figure” mysteries has become so long, now. Elvis mysteries, Oscar Wilde mysteries, the (late) Prince of Wales mysteries; I know there are loads more that don’t spring immediately to mind, too. Within this sub-genre, the idea of mystery novels featuring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle actually makes reasonably good sense. Doyle took a keen interest in real-life crime and really did involve himself in at least a few criminal investigations, in documented history. David Pirie’s fantastic “Murder Rooms” television series and novels have done great things with this concept, moreover. And I kind of figure that these, as well as Conan Doyle biographies, are kind of loose extensions of my Sherlock Holmes collection.

I still don’t know that I would have bothered grabbing this curious Marvel Superhero Team-Up novel about Doyle and Alice in Wonderland creator Charles Dodgson, except. I have this faint idea to some day write my own Conan Doyle mystery. Most fans presumably want to write their own Holmes pastiche; I want to write a story about his creator, for reasons I can go into some other time. Anyway, I saw this and thought “well, if that ever happens, this could be helpful.” And it was 50¢ after all.

While at the book sale I also grabbed this:

Hail Babylon!

I like the Gilgamesh story, and have been thinking of picking up a copy for a while. As this was there, and cheap, I brought it home. Not sure it’s the, one, definitive version for me, but it’s good. Nicely designed inside, and while the long introduction (definitely longer than the whole poem itself) is probably dating rapidly with its multiple references to the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, it was still thoughtful and interesting. The cover design is, hm, well, I can’t fault the selection of artwork. The choice of Trajan (yet again) for the title seems pretty lazy, but oh well. The color, though, wow. Yeah, it really is electric blue. Weird.

Not sure who designed either one

Not a lot needs to be added here, I think. Usual “Swipe File” disclaimers apply, of course. I might not have noticed this resemblance, even though one book followed the other within 11 months, except for the fact that I found the left design interesting and saved a picture of it in my personal design inspirations “swipe file.” Not entirely sure that its use for Mann & Ornstein’s book is nearly as conceptually clever as for Ronson’s; indeed it seems relatively arbitrary. Though given their thesis, there’s a bit of an amusing indirect, presumably unintentional, relevance through visually associating the book with a work about psychopaths.

Finished this book cover, the other day; I didn’t post the front when it was first approved but when I looked back I thought hey, this is kind of nice. Bright, colorful.

I think those things in the upper right are Chinchillas, fwiw

I’m also happy that I was able to wrap a continuous layout around the spine and back cover, rather than treating them more-or-less separately as often happens. In doing so I rearranged the order of the back cover copy from how it was provided. I used to do that some times and then kind of dropped it; since this was approved, I may need to begin trying that again. Frankly, there’s always a temptation to simply lay out the spine and back cover art as mechanically as possible. That part of the project doesn’t pay a lot, it’s relatively little-noticed compared with the front cover, no one is particularly demanding about the level of design, and I’m often dealing with a large amount of copy which limits the scope for anything clever, anyway. I try to avoid giving in to that temptation too often, for two reasons. One, a desire simply to do and remain associated with good work. Two, to some extent there is very much a self-interest issue even if it isn’t cash-based; the more uninspired shortcuts I take, the more I’m effectively training myself to do uninspired shortcut design work. You are what you do all day. In other notes…

Still going around the sun, here. Various things going on, most of which I will go into at the proper time. Meanwhile, I seem to be writing more of these “omnibus status update” posts, which are in a sense both a response to being busier and an illustration of why I am busier right now. (Warren Ellis has done these at times, and lately his own blogging has fallen off but he has just started a new e-mail newsletter which is basically of the same, sit down once a week and address a number of things at once, nature; perhaps much the same situation at work there.) This past week I spent the greater part of my days, six days straight, sitting and working away at Project X. And part of the reason for efforts like this is less an impatience to be finished ASAP than it is a desire to finish some time this year. I expect to finish far sooner, but it would be difficult without working intensively. It’s kind of one of those things where interruptions are very, very costly; if I work for much of the day with few days off the whole thing might take, say, 120 hours, whereas if I work for shorter periods with more gaps progress would be not only slower but a lot slower, and the whole thing might end up taking 200 hours simply because of the time involved in repeated “cold starts.”

And by the same token, some of that applies to blogging even if the effect is much smaller. With a good platform like WordPress there’s really very limited “friction” involved in writing a new individual post, and yet. It’s really more mental friction, I guess. The process of deciding to turn away from whatever else is going on, sit down, log in, compose my ideas, type them up, assemble whatever links or image will accompany them, add tags, preview, proofread, post, check it again, decide it’s good enough and finally log back out and, more to the point, think about all of these steps along the way.

Edit: Also, AIGA Cleveland is hosting another reverb event this coming Wednesday. As this one will be an evening event I will probably actually make it, this time, and do plan on doing so at any rate.

Ummmmm what else, I guess I’ll close with a random thought. While I was at the Y, yesterday, I saw the most baffling crossover-promotion TV commercial for General Electric. It was basically touting GE’s innovation and smartness, kind of an updated extra-progressive spin on the old “we bring good things to light.” Except for the odd choice of the particular “good thing” they chose to spotlight. Nothing mysterious about the focus on wind turbines, as representing renewable energy, tomorrow’s infrastructure, environmental impact, etc. But then they pursued this odd tangent of “we create these products which create the electricity which allows brewers to create beer.” And that could almost work, except for the particular beer which they highlighted as made possible through GE’s technology: Budweiser. I mean, wha? “Hi, we’re GE, we’re as innovative and progressive as the nation’s number-one flavorless mass-market corporate beer brand.” Ohhhhh-kay.

The concept of Record Store Day is particularly interesting because, apparently, it might well be called “disc store day.” Per the more-or-less official site

This is the one day that all of the independently owned record stores come together with artists to celebrate the art of music. Special vinyl and CD releases and various promotional products are made exclusively for the day…

So it is about vinyl records, but it’s also about CDs, which interests me because of the odd relationship between the two just now.

It’s hardly news that the now-venerable compact disc seems to be in the midst of a fade-out. I’m pretty sure that sales have been declining for some time, and that I’ve even read that much of the music publishing industry has kind of resigned itself to that fact and begun emphasizing other strategies. One of which is, obviously, digital music. I wrote some while ago about the redesigned iTunes program icon dispensing with the now largely-archaic CD incorporated in its original design. Meanwhile, there’s Automotive News predicting the disappearance of CD players from new cars. And more recently Low End Mac remarked on the prospect of optical drives departing from new computers, a prospect which is in fact already underway; my brother purchased a MacBook Air recently and while its lack of an optical drive surprised him, it doesn’t greatly inconvenience him. I believe that most of his music has been digital for a long time now. Meanwhile, for those whose tunes have not been virtualized, yet, there’s Murfie offering a curious sort of halfway-house assistance toward that point.

And of course, as the LEM item about general-purpose optical drives disappearing from computers suggests, the twilight of the physical disc is not restricted to music. As it notes, Apple seems to be moving away from software releases on disc, and I know that other developers including Adobe would love to lead users down that route as well. The movie industry, by contrast, is having a more difficult time with the idea of a viable business model which doesn’t include physical media and continues to seek new gimmicks to prop up disc sales, but in a larger context it seems like it will be a losing battle.

Indeed, in a larger context, it seems like the sale of physical media is a losing battle. “Atoms” are so 20th century; invisible bits in the cloud are where it’s at now. Digital music, digital movies, digital books, as well as digital finance which like everything else has its winners and losers. In a fascinating multiple-front push for digital media my bank is currently trying to entice me to forego paper statements in exchange for a flash drive and a chance to win a Kindle; meanwhile, the US Postal Service is struggling to survive as mass adoption of such electronic communication has caused its traditional bread-and-butter to evaporate.

And in reading about Record Store Day I can’t help being reminded of Free Comic Book Day, another event which promotes physical-media retail stores and also seems, increasingly, like a bit of a plaintive rear-guard action against obsolescence. Particularly in light of a recent firestorm kicked up by experienced provocateur Mark Waid‘s comments about print comic books being hopelessly uneconomical. The world of comic books, with its small but enthusiastic section of futurists, its opposing body of retailers seeing extinction, and its large everyone-else segment which has significant investment of one sort or another in a physical-product system but isn’t necessarily committed to it so much as just uncertain what to do, probably represents much of the media-publishing economy as a whole.

The one exception might be the music industry, which is arguably largely through the transitional phase by now as a result of being forced, kicking and screaming, to confront the trauma of bit technologies’ impact on atom-based business models before any of its peer industries, beginning way back in the antebellum America of the late 1990s. Things are still evolving, but that seems to be pretty much a given in this era, and with that in mind the music industry is probably about as comfortably settled-down in a world of purely electronic media as anyone right now.

Which is one reason why the phenomenon of the vinyl record album is so completely fascinating.

A feature in The Economist confirms what I encounter anecdotal evidence of all the time: “vinyl is back.” I read about new vinyl record releases on Warren Ellis’s blog, though I read about all kinds of weird stuff there of course. But according to the Record Store Day site there are hundreds of new releases on 7″ and LP, terms which I only vaguely recognize but which are at any rate types of vinyl records. The explanation for vinyl records’ persistence are varied; there are of course die-hard audiophiles who insist that nothing else sounds as good, and a few months ago Neil Young set off the world wide web’s irony alarm when he claimed that digital-music tycoon Steve Jobs was among their number. Vinyl may or may not sound better than CDs or electronic files of one type or another, though personally I’m of the strong opinion that sound quality isn’t really the point either way. The Economist item notes that “Many vinyl records come with codes for downloading the album from the internet” and suggests that “Some think that half the records sold are not actually played.” I have no difficulty believing this; I suppose a good test might be examining whether the rebound in vinyl record sales has been accompanied by any kind of rebound in turntables, although conceivably turntables might also be purchased simply as display pieces.

Either way vinyl record purchases could be perceived as simply a shallow, frivolous fad, though it certainly doesn’t appear to be simply a phenomenon of baby boomer nostalgia. Unsurprisingly, a vinyl album can baffle children born around the turn of the century. And yet they are apparently of some interest to some local college-age youths. Of course it’s probably impossible to fully examine the cultural significance(s) of a vinyl record revival without mentioning the considerable associated risk of being outed as a “hipster.” An “indulgence” of “obsolete” technology seems to be, with some exceptions, one of the fastest ways to earn the dreaded label, though for my part I think that mockery of “hipsters” tends to carry a strong flavor of conformist backlash. A while back I read an article which invoked the concept and one of the comments verged on self-parody with its “uh! can you believe?!” expression of almost offended scorn for the sight of some presumed hipster actually using a typewriter in public. And more recently I saw another item at Slatelantic (the two sites just blue into one for me) attempting to advance a serious argument that anyone still using a pre-smartphone mobile is already verging on hipsterism and can’t have any other plausible reason besides making some kind of silly “statement.” Which, particularly as this would include me, seems to move the threshold for intentional anachronism incredibly close to “anything whatsoever which is not the cutting edge.” My iMac still runs OS X 10.6; does that mean I must be “playing around” on a “retro” toy rather than conceivably doing any serious work? Or does the very fact that I still have a desktop computer at all, rather than relying on a tablet, make me a “hipster” just by itself?

It wouldn’t surprise me, really, nor would it particularly concern me. I’ve written about this a bit already, and aside from a great deal of personal indifference to whether I seem “cool” or whether I seem like I’m trying to be cool by being uncool (or by making fun of those whom I perceive to be doing so) I think the whole concept is rapidly becoming untenable, at any rate when it comes to the idea of anachronisms in technology, fashion, etc.

Ad photographed in New York which kind of illustrates the situation

We’re rapidly evolving a world in which, at least for most citizens of industrialized nations, technological efficiency is becoming so great that a determination to avoid any sort of intentional “anachronistic” indulgence is going to lead to increasingly pointed questions about what one actually wants to achieve and why. Though to be honest I think anyone would be hard-pressed to even attempt this anyway, given how much ends and means, new and old, decadent and thoughtful have already been chopped up and blended together. Take food and drink, for example. Industrially-produced, processed instant meals would seem to be more technologically advanced than organically-grown, local “slow food,” but I don’t think that too many of the people making fun of typewriters or “dumb” cell phones see an equal pretentiousness in farmer’s markets. And can someone tell me which type of beer signifies a hipster? Is it a) a local craft brew, b) canned Pabst Blue Ribbon, c) both or d) these notions are just kind of stupid aren’t they? I think it’s d.

Which brings me back to discs, finally. In a lot of ways I feel more and more kinship with vinyl collectors. I’m pretty sure that I don’t buy or hold onto CDs for any kind of status display, as I rarely have guests who would ever see my CD collection, though part of the reason I like them is for their display properties, for my own enjoyment. The same goes for books, which I like to have around me sitting on shelves, though it probably doesn’t apply to comic books, which don’t really look either attractive or interesting in any remotely-practical storage set-up. The particular set of reasons for keeping around any given type of physical media probably has partial but not complete overlap with the set of reasons attached to any other type.

When it comes to compact discs, I think the reasons are a combination of practical and emotional, some of which are shared with John Hatchett whose views contrast with those of fellow Low End Mac correspondent Simon Royal commenting on the same technology. Like Hatchett, I like having a physical object which acts as a back-up to information stored on magnetic or flash media, and which I own outright and can, if I so choose, re-sell. I also like having something to look at beyond just a thumbnail in iTunes, and in this regard I find the CD a convenient compromise between the glorious but unwieldy record album sleeve and the anonymous electronic file. For my part, the shelf of CDs actually seems like a more useful and accessible “user interface” than iTunes or an iPod, which is entirely contrary to the conclusions of Mr. Royal. Royal writes that “I don’t listen to music on a home stereo any more, because my music is stored on my iPhone, and if I wanted to do so, I would hook up my iPhone to my stereo, as is it quicker and easier than finding the relevant CD.” I don’t know if his view is right or wrong, or if my own is, but mine is definitely different.

To some extent the technology involved is different; I don’t have an iPhone and while I have an iPod it won’t fit all of my music, and even if it did I don’t really have any device I could plug it into other than headphones, which I loathe nearly as much as earbuds. At home I have an RCA CD player (plus tape deck), in the approximate form of a modest “boom box” device, which is probably close to 20 years old. It seems entirely quick and easy to use, to me; even if I could plug an iPod into it I have difficulty believing that I could navigate through nested menus on a postage-stamp sized window faster than I can find a CD using spatial navigation and plop it into the player’s disc compartment. Of course, not all of my music is on disc and I can’t play those unless I burn them to CD, which I’ve done in some cases but by no means all; on the other hand I have nice speakers hooked up to my iMac and so I can listen to that music very easily most of the time when I’m sitting right here anyway.

I find CDs convenient in the car, too, for what it’s worth. Again, my 2000 Camry doesn’t have an iPod port, though I could probably in theory play music from my iPod with a cassette adapter; that sounds a bit cringe-inducing to me, too, but it’s not really an issue because I prefer to just bring along some CDs anyway. I will readily confess that reaching over to the passenger seat or up to the sun visor for a CD while driving is probably not an ideal practice from a safety perspective, but it’s probably not really worse than fidgeting with most of the built-in controls, particularly as the relevant motions are pretty much reflexive by now. And if I have to take my eyes from the road to pick out one case from another, I’m not sure how this is any worse a distraction than navigating the menus of an iPod could be. Honestly I’m not sure how anyone could possibly attempt that while driving (short of plain texting-while-driving indifference to safety) or even whether most people do. Maybe everyone just hits “play” and doesn’t do any selection while driving? I would find that rather limiting and, frankly, “retro” in an age of on-demand.

The good news, for me at least, is that I think discs are here to stay. At least music discs. I can see a day when my video devices and computer and car have no disc player, eventually, but a personal abandonment of music CDs seems likely to be a lot further off, and not really something I will ever be in any way “forced” to do. My CD player seems like it might well keep chugging away forever, and even if it doesn’t I doubt it will be very difficult or expensive to replace even decades from now. After all, people are still releasing and purchasing new vinyl records. Someone somewhere will make a CD player, and it will probably be cheap thanks to manufacturing technology and easy to acquire thanks to the internet. And I will probably be able to buy new CDs, for similar reasons; even if artists and publishers aren’t making any direct provision for release on compact disc, there will probably be third-party services à la Café Press which they can simply provide a link to which will produce a CD, print packaging, and mail it to me. And for that matter I will very likely be able to do the same thing myself; I can do so right now after all and it’s difficult to imagine this capacity going away if the predictions of personalized home manufacturing via “3D printers” etc., prove remotely accurate.

So, sigh of relief, I suspect that at least some of my stuff is safe.

Three bonus links which I didn’t quite work into the above post anywhere:

• Mark Evanier pondering what to do with a vinyl collection, as well as a different kind of optical disc which has pretty well gone the way of Betamax (though I would bet you can still view them if you really want to, and for that matter can probably still view Betamax tapes which I’m sure someone somewhere must still have), the laserdisc.
• A BBC item on even older and rather more thick round audio-storage media, the wax cylinder. Otto von Bismarck speaks again.
• Paul Graham with an interesting essay from 2007 on the changing significance of physical “stuff.” Fascinating reading, though I wonder if he would still advance the proposition today that “Books are more like a fluid than individual objects. It’s not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books…”