Yesterday was awesome. I was kind of sleepy when I went to work, but I meandered over to the co-op on my lunch and got some kind of organic mocha. For some reason, I drank it and I didn’t crash like I normally do when I drink caffeine… I guess all this organic crap is actually good for you.

I ended up having this three-hour conversation with my boss about the future of our magazine… we didn’t come to any conclusions, but at least we got it out in the open. The things that I thought were the problems weren’t really the problems, so I know where to focus my efforts.

We’re not alone though… every publishing house and magazine is trying to brace themselves and play their cards so that they are in the right spot once we move into a post-Internet world where the role of print publications is negligible.

I had been looking forward to going to Lipstick all day. It’s the dance-indie-britpop-electropunk night at Old Ironsides. Annie and I had almost gone to it like three years ago, and I wish we really would have… the music they play is just awesome. The first time Susan, Zero, and I went, the night that it caught on fire, they played Elastica, which was awesome. Tonight it was Peaches (I was freaking out and singing along to “Boys Want to Be Her,” I wish Christen could have been there) New Young Pony Club, Death From Above 1979, LCD Soundsystem, Calvin Harris (!!!!), Cut Copy, CSS, Justice, Chromeo, and a bunch more.

We had tons of fun… I dressed up in my tight black jeans/converse/black collar shirt/pinstripe blazer/skinny white tie outfit, and I could have totally swapped in for one of the Interpol bandmembers. I liked the crowd there… there are the hardcore too-skinny fauxbohemians, the rocker kids in skater shoes and hoodies, and the flirting-with-hipsterdom people. I also saw Scott and Homeless Nick.

So, I actually wasn’t disappointed in the night at all. I didn’t even have to give Zero a ride home. And after I got off work I hung around a true love for a while and read this extremely interesting book on design that Zero lent me. It’s a collection of essays, but they do revolve around a single point… that our society is becoming more and more a shopping mall… a landscape dominated by advertising that reduces the meaning of forces that hope to oppose its message to parodies.

Basically, the old thought was that if the design world appropriated the tools of the advertising industry and use them to subvert, a meaningful message will be displayed… but it turned out that the opposite was true. In flirting with this duality, corporate advertising masquerading as art became legitimized, and at this point it’s hard to see what future design has in a world dominated by corporate sponsorship.

Any misgivings can be waived aside with the claim that this state of affairs is now simply inevitable, so we might as well grab the benefits with both hands, and any criticism can be rejected as a point of view that naively fails to understand the financial expediency of culture’s pact with commerce. When Morgan Stanley, sponsor of “Surrealism: Desire Unbound” at the Tate Modern in London, draws a parallel between the way the Surrealists “threw back the boundaries of conventional art by challenging conventional thinking” and its own history of “challenging traditional thinking to help our clients raise their financial aspirations,” such a comparison has long since ceased to strike us as the slightest bit absurd. [p. 17]

Poynor, Rick. Designing Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.