Monthly Archives: September 2005

the elusive hope (6 of 10)

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note: ten-part series continued! | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, he found himself on his couch flipping back between golf and tennis on his television while sipping on a cold bottle of Sam Adams. Both sporting events were of smaller tournaments, but the big names were still playing. He especially looked out for Tiger Woods and Roger Federer because they were both number one in their respective sports. How does it feel to be the best in the world at something, he wondered. And something that makes a ton of money. He reached for the can of Planters Honey Roasted Peanuts on his messy coffee table and grabbed a handful. Like his father, he always felt that beer was best enjoyed with a complementary anju. He flipped back to tennis when they started showing John Daly whipping out a driver. How pathetic – that guy looks like me, he thought as he rubbed his protruding belly. He then watched in awe as Federer easily handled the Australian Lleyton Hewitt to win yet another tournament.

The three-day weekend had been unexpectedly pleasant. He took a sick day on Friday because he drank too much beer on Thursday night while watching re-runs of reality shows on VH1. He eventually got out of bed on Friday around 3pm and willed himself into making ramen noodles. He even remembered to crack two eggs and throw in some of the spoiled kimchi for extra flavor. For the rest of the day, he browsed various Internet sites, reading up on various celebrity gossip, techie news, and even a few New York Times articles before it all degenerated into pornography. The dangers of mindless web surfing: the slightest hint of sexuality anywhere – perhaps a photo of a celebrity in a revealing outfit or a pop-up advertisement with an air-brushed image of a hot model – was enough to give him a tingle and an automatic click of his Windows Media Player, the preferred venue for the delivery of fantastic audio/visual aides. He hated the way Japanese videos always blocked out the genitals with a pixelated blur, but he sometimes found the girlish screams of the women to be arousing. While nobody ever visited him anymore, he still kept the bottle of Jergens lotion in the medicine cabinet of the bathroom. He always remembered to put it back.

He was in the middle of a self-love session on Friday evening when his cell phone rang. He glanced to see if it was a call from his parents, which, if it was, he would ignore. It was a number he did not recognize. He turned the volume down, wiped his hands, and picked up the phone.

“Hey, it’s Greg. What’s up?”

He paused. He hadn’t heard the voice in many years. They had seen each other at parties and gatherings several times after their friendship-ending argument, but they avoided any direct contact. They had exchanged feeble greetings here and there, but rarely made eye contact. They discreetly inquired after each other through friends once in a while, but never went any further.

“Hey. Nothing much. How’re you doing?” he asked, detecting a slight tremble in his own voice.

“Not too good, man,” Greg said, letting out a sigh.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Well. I was laid off last month. I don’t know what to do. I can’t keep asking my parents for money,” Greg replied.

“That sucks. Sorry to hear that,” he said, in a serious tone, “but why are you calling me? Do I owe you money or something?”

“No,” Greg said. “Listen. I heard about you. Your divorce, your shitty appearance, and your stupid job. What the fuck? User support? Com’on. You’ve got to be kidding. You don’t even like tinkering with computers.”

“Okay, so I’m not the glowing success that I thought I’d be. What the fuck do you want with me?” he asked. Who is this asshole, thinking he can talk down to me after all these years, he thought, growing angrier.

“Calm down. I’m not calling to piss you off. I’m here to make amends, okay?”

“What amends?” he asked.

“Look, we’re both down and we both know it sucks. Why don’t we just forget about what happened ten years ago? That shit is trivial now. We both fucked up, so let’s just admit to it,” Greg said.

“And what? Be friends again? You think it’s really that easy?” he said.

“Okay. Let’s forget about that for now. I’m desperate, and you’re not doing so hot either. I’m thinking about getting into it again. Our old business. And I want shit like it was before. The market is hot right now. We can make it happen,” Greg said, beginning to sound more optimistic.

“Are you for real? We’ve hated each other for the past ten years, and you’re asking to be business partners? Is this some sort of joke?”

“No. I’m serious. Let’s meet up. Monday, 8pm at Wolfgang’s. My treat. If shit doesn’t work out afterwards, at least the meal will be free. Deal?” Greg said.

It was happening too fast. Minutes before, he had been watching close-ups of a woman’s breast being molded by a man’s hand. Now, he was being asked to consider a career change. What did he have to lose? He searched his mind for an answer. Nothing.

“Okay, I’ll see you there.”

“Great. See you then,” Greg said.

After they both hung up, the conversation kept repeating itself in his head. He stared blankly into the screen, which continued to play the porno clip. How did Greg get my number? This is weird. He dragged the mouse cursor to the upper-right hand of the screen and clicked on the X. He was no longer in the mood. He needed a beer.

He woke up unusually early on Saturday. He even made the effort to grab coffee from the nearest food cart on the street. He spent the greater part of the day familiarizing himself with real estate and interior design again. In ten years, he had not completely abandoned the industry, having read a few articles from magazines from time to time and helping a few family friends to arrange things in their new homes; but he hardly considered himself an expert now. Tastes had changed and technology had made things different as well. He read various magazines to get a flavor for recent trends. He browsed through the real estate section to see the value of properties in the city. The prices were nearly four-fold from what they were a decade ago. More and more, people, it seemed, had shelled out a great deal of money for property. Less was being spent to let others design the space; people began to place more faith in their own abilities to lay out and style the interiors of their homes. They watched Martha Stewart on television and read House&Garden.

He returned to his apartment with a notepad full of things copied from books and magazines as well as a few original ideas. He felt as if his blood had begun to flow again. Productivity, and more importantly, the desire to be productive had breathed in a sensation of rebirth. How long it would last, he did not know, but he wanted it to go on. He went to his desk and began to browse the web for more ideas. He closed pop-up ads without a thought and pored through online photos and sketches of rooms late into the night.

He watched as Federer held up the winner’s cup, a small and insignificant-looking item. He wondered where the cup would go on Federer’s trophy case along with the championship items from the Grand Slam finals. After taking his last sip of beer, he turned off the television and got on his feet. He opened up his closet and reached for a black Adidas shoebox. It contained photos and notes from ten years ago, of projects he had worked on with Greg. He remembered the days when they took cab rides all over the city, measuring tape and Polaroid camera in hand, eager to scope out new spaces or find treasured antique furnitures at corner stores. Within the pile, he found a photo of himself, Greg, and Janet. Janet had been a personal assistant of a high-powered real estate lawyer who had recently purchased a brownstone on the Upper West Side. The lawyer had asked her to find the right people to design his new property and to oversee the process.

The first time they met, she made him wait in a chair for twenty minutes while she sorted out an issue regarding a late payment by one of the lawyer’s clients. Boy, does she sound like one nasty bitch, he remembered himself thinking at the time. Yet, it was hard to deny her attractive features – her thin yet determined body, her shiny black hair, her fierce almond-shaped eyes, and her full lower lip. Twenty minutes was a blur in the mind of a man in the presence of a pretty woman.

He shuffled through a few more photos and then put away the box. It was still only the afternoon. He decided to take a walk to Chinatown to see what sort of furniture they carried these days.

the thing about design

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there is something intensely satisfying about design. and i’m not only talking about graphics. when i think of design, it takes on many meanings, but at its core, i think design is, more or less, the way things are put together. and this entails the amount of care and effort a designer puts into it.

of course, on a daily basis, we mostly associate design with the visual because the first thing we do with things is look at it. but good design – and i’ve found that this always holds true – is not so much the aesthetic value of the end product, but all the work that has gone into making the end product feasible and meaningful.

take interior design, for example. you can load your room with the nicest paints, the most expensive furniture, and the most ambient lights, but if there is no application of design skill, your room becomes a mere warehouse. there is no unifying expression of these elements that is suppose to constitute a well-designed room. the same goes with many other things – websites, magazines, buildings, cities, hair, etc. this is why a lover of design should not limit himself to just one area – a lover of design appreciates all design because the same basic principle of care, effort, planning, and skillful execution are all there. and if you are able, you will find ways, either consciously or subconsciously, to embed intellectual expressions into your work: a drawing may contain irony or satire on various levels; a clay model may represent a post-modern condition ; a color scheme for a room may be an homage to a description in a famous novel.

this is probably one of the reasons i love films. while films are not often associated with design, i always find myself viewing film as one of the ultimate expressions of design; where else can you incorporate style, realism, narrative, the arrangement of sets and bodies, the technology of cinema, and the psychology of the viewer all into one neat piece of art? it is a design medium that requires the totality of a designer’s faculties as an artist and coordinator. no wonder it takes so many people to create films. and a good film is often a rare find.

i sit in my cubicle each day and execute another kind of design. it is one done on Microsoft Excel, the bane of an analyst’s existence, as many would say. it involves capital structures, collateral portfolios, and various mechanisms that measure interest and principal payments along with the hedges and waterfalls. believe it or not, there is an incredible amount of design that goes into the process, not only in the way you execute Excel to carry out the various functions, but in the way things are laid out for others to understand and the methods of combining all the little pieces into some complex, well-oiled structure. sure, the glory of the product being shown on the silverscreen is absent, but underneath, there is an eery similarity to it all. it is just about adjusting to the language and being willing to express yourself in a different way. each day, i find myself making this transition little by little, and while there are moments of frustration when an endless sheet of numbers just doesn’t make any sense, the feeling is often not too far off from the experiences of sitting alone with a pile of tapes wondering how i’ll ever cut up and edit a film that bears any meaning.

in the end, a good design is a good design, no matter where you find it.

kanYe West and the kitsch thing

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i am usually skeptical about celebrities who show their humanitarian stripes in public. i was unmoved by all the celebrity hype surrounding the G8 and talks of ending world poverty. Watching Brad Pitt talk about it in a solemn tone didn’t inspire me at all. I was disappointed that John Mayer wasn’t one of the performers that day. Kanye West, however, did perform. And he also gave a solo performance on Sunday, regarding the recent Hurrican Katrina tragedy.

in what was a live NBC-produced program to raise money for the Red Cross, Kanye departed from the teleprompter and let out a torrent of criticism and opinions that probably made many people very uncomfortable (from WashingtonPost.com):

West: I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, “They’re looting.” You see a white family, it says, “They’re looking for food.” And, you know, it’s been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black. And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I’ve tried to turn away from the TV because it’s too hard to watch. I’ve even been shopping before even giving a donation, so now I’m calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help — with the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way — and they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us!

and after Mike Myers feebly (and confusedly) read his line off the teleprompter, it came back to Kanye, who said:

George Bush doesn’t care about black people!

although the West Coast never got to see the Kanye rant, it was one of those great, unexpected television moments. i am a Kanye fan because he is creative, arrogant, funny, and in such instances as this one, bold. who truly knows what Kanye’s motivations were in doing what he did? did he want to create more buzz, maybe boost up some of his album sales (his 2nd album was released last week), or maybe distinguish himself as a socially conscious rapper? i especially liked his attack on Bush because Bush seems to have been spared by the public and the media for his inability to respond quickly (look at polls that basically excuse the president – ABCNews.com).

whenever tragedy hits, there’s always going to be a great deal of kitsch that comes about (i am using “kitsch” as kundera described it in unbearable lightness of being, which i just finished earlier today) where the images of loss and angst are nicely balanced with images of people helping each other and celebrities writing big checks. this is how we go about systematically mourning tragedy and then adjusting ourselves back to a “normal” state. but with every major crisis like this one, there are opportunities to question certain things and examine some issues that challenge our conventional views of our institutions and the way things are. then again, the entire practice of “looking underneath” and “challenging conventions” has become a mainstream, money-making industry (e.g. Michael Moore, anti-Bush movements), so i can’t be sure that we gain much from crisis to crisis. we just seem to go through set motions.

one more thing – i liked this New Yorker piece by David Remnick on Bush’s missteps in dealing with Katrina. he throws up the kitschy veil of “non-partisanship” to relieve himself of accountability:

“…he knew that he had delivered a series of feeble, vague, almost flippant speeches in the early days of the crisis, and that the only way to prevent further political damage was to inoculate himself with the inevitable call for non-partisanship: ‘I hope people don’t play politics during this period of time.’”

Mother Nature and her weapons of mass destruction.