Yesterday’s entry was a faithful, unembroidered recounting of a dream I had Friday morning, February 14, while NPR was offering live coverage of the UN Security Council ‘debate’. Confrontation is a better word for it.

At any rate, I fell asleep just as Blix was speaking and awakened with a mighty shout of terror as the small child ran toward me crying.

In writing the piece I found it extremely difficult to keep focused on the task at hand – describing the dream – and keep my own personal politics out of the writing. I found it very interesting that Eric was reminded of the exploding baby vietnam anecdote.

I believe that means I successfully kept my personal politics out of the piece and kept it open to personal interpretation.

Additionally, since it’s a dream, there are some very clear elements in the dream that I can elaborate on.

I couldn’t find my wife, indeed, I was separated from her, because of an act of war (or something much like a full-scale aerial bombardment of the city I live in). Today, (Saturday) we kept a date to see The Two Towers one more time before it melts away from theaters. The film’s showing coincided with the peace march here, which is where I really wanted to be, felt obligated to be, and kept thinking about, squirming and sweating, throughout the whole film.

When I had discussed this with Viv, she had expressed, in the wifely manner, her disinterest in attending the march. That is to say, she would only say “If you want to,” while her body language forcefully indicated her absolute distaste for such a thing.

She is the child of people who fled a country in the wake of a socialist revolution, in fear of her father’s proclivity for talking back to, oh, cops and emigration officials. She’s been very effectively led to fear and doubt the motives of progressive activists in the wake of our WTO experience by nothing more than a lack of courtesy displayed toward her for her political ignorance on globalization issues. My paranoia, fear, and hatred of the political leadership of the United States, both the specific crew in DC at the moment and in general over the course of my life, have not improved her willingness to see me express my political perceptions in any meaningful way.

In response, I have actively choked off my outrage and political analysis, which, really, if you knew me personally in the past, is sort of like hearing me say I’ve stopped eating, or joined the church.

So we went to the movie.

The exploding children are as clear and direct a depiction of my feelings toward the idea of parenthood as might ever be concocted.

The other elements in the dream are all drawn directly from a mishmosh of things we’ve experienced via the media or directly. In my case, the happy, chattering crowd on the hillside is clearly the crowd awaiting the implosion of the Kingdome early in the morning of my birthday a few years ago, an event which obviously echoes another einsturzende neubauten that happened not too long ago.

I do recall in the dream believing that what I was witnessing was a punitive strike by the Air Force against Seattle, that we were the recipients of that “Shock and Awe” crap that surfaced in the media last week or so. Which raises a further issue – I fear the dissolution of our country under the weight of the divergent political perceptions that have been unleashed, and I don’t doubt that such a dissolution will end in fire and blood.

I stood on the steeply inclined hill’s sidewalk, looking into the center of downtown Seattle in the grey light of the late afternoon. The lowering clouds seemed darker than usual, as though something had blackened them, echoing the inky fogs of mid-century London. The air, however, remained free of the distinctive tang of burning coal and I rapidly forgot the oddly darkening cloud cover.

The crowd of people I was standing in was chattering and happy – friends catching up with friends and people looking for the hook up on their cells. I couldn’t tell what exactly had brought us out here on the sidewalk, spilling into the quiet street. It seemed that possibly there was an art opening in the building we were clumped before. I nibbled at my cheese and crackers.

I became disinterested in the crowd and determined that a glance into the gallery was in order. In the background, the lightly accented voice of Hans Blix murmured, barely distinguishable from the crowd’s blended chitchat.

Just as I stepped into the low, wide, blond-wood space, the sounds of happy chatter outside intensified and changed into exclamations, loud questions and conjecture.

I returned to the street to see that the darkening clouds over downtown appeared to be in motion – the heart of the clouds was distinctly darker than the edges, such as the clouds above our location. The center of the clouds had also begun to drop, very quickly, toward the center of the city. The edges of the clouds appeared to be cascading down at differing rates as though they carried loads of coal dust, from the center out, widening.

The shape of the downward-charging cascade was the same as that of one of the broad tornadoes of my mid-western youth – a quarter of a mile across and three quarters of a mile from ground to the cloud deck.

As the leading edge of the falling mass approached ground level, subunits of the collapsing coal dust rebounded, erupting upward again in showers that formed flat arcs. Curiously, just at the edge of visual acuity, the arcing curves seemed to reveal the winged forms of orca and dolphins for less than a fleeting moment before the cascades of fine matter resumed their hurtling journey to earth.

As the crowd exclaimed, Colin Powell’s voice had replaced that of Blix, murmuring yet with strident inflections that lent urgency to the crowd’s increasing unease. As the first of the columns touched the earth bright orange flashes illuminated the city followed seconds later by the cracking thumps of distant explosives being detonated.

The first of the buffeting shockwaves arrived with the sound, as the flickering oranges of the first explosions had become a continuous wave of flaring orange light. The shockwaves carried a bitter, stinging smell that immediately generated at first a wave of shrieks followed by painful, repeated coughing. A single voice cried “It’s acid! There’s acid in the air!” and the crowd turned to flee as one in pandemonium.

Behind them, the intensifying wave of explosions transmitted its sound and shock as well. The continuous roar of the wind and the overlapping thumps of the events became a wave of painfully loud white noise that obliterated the human voice. The city behind the orange and black cloud of acidic dust was rubble.

I turned back inside again to grab my camera and some other material that I had stashed in the gallery as we’d arrived. I sought my wife, hopelessly, unable to hear my own voice. The howling wind had reversed direction and was being drawn to the advancing perimeter of the explosions. A firestorm was forming. Seattle had become Dresden and Coventry, but I would not live to see the political repercussions of the event. A pity, I thought.

The wind and the shockwaves had made it nearly impossible to stand. Thankfully, the heat was being kept at bay by the suction. I noticed that a bank of televisions was tuned to a local news channel, covering the events and helplessly speculating, repeating what everyone in the city already knew. On the crawl at the bottom of the screen, the news appeared. Apparently, though some unknown means, the cloud was producing the spreading firestorm at the center of the city. Tiny human figures were walking out of the fire, apparently impervious to it, crying for their parents. Somehow large numbers of toddlers and preschool children had survived.

The black cloud and firestorm’s naissance and meaning remained unclear. Was it an act of god? Was it an attack? Had some secret weapon gone awry or had aliens arrived, parking over the White House and blowing it into flinders? No-one knew.

The news cut to footage of firefighters and police approaching a group of the toddlers. A flash, and the camera stabilized on a street strewn with limbs. The children were a part of whatever it was that was happening. Avoid children, any children, at all costs.

I ventured back to the sidewalk, now marked with acrid scorch marks from who knew what. The perimeter of the firestorm had stabilized, curiously, but the heat was extremely intense. I drew back around the corner of the building. I glanced back into the building, and I saw a child, crying, his clothing partially burned away and tears streaming down his agonized, soot-caked and raw burned face. He ran toward me, obviously crying out in extreme trauma and fear.

Cinescape went with my X-Men set visit story (think all the way back to October, not once, but three times.) for one of the mag’s covers this month.

I’m pleased to report that the story ran more or less as written, although there’s the obligatory irritating edit. In this case, it comes at the very end of the article and adds the prefix “Almost as if” to a sentence which is clearly a metaphor, weakening it. There are a couple of other changes that I’m not pleased with (notably a “Meanwhile” that turns a true sentence, “so-and-so said this”, to a false one, “Meanwhile, so-and-so…”) but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Sadly, there’s neither a permanent link to the story nor the whole thing online, but for right now you can read the first two paragraphs or so at the home page of the magazine.

I will not be posting the backing material here, as I have done with other projects, because the material is about four hours of audio tapes which I did not fully transcribe.

I am sleepy. And my forearms hurt. I think this is due to writing for too long a sustained period of time. I can only imagine the syntactical contortions that have resulted.

Well, I must yet do the editing pass, so I won’t actually have to imagine anything.

Outlandish deadlines for the March print ish of Cinescape this week. I’m heads down on the second-most time consuming one, a round-up of information on movies-in-production.

I was greatly pleased to see that Word:mac from Office v.X can treat FileMaker Pro databases as a direct merge import source, something that will increase my consistency and accuracy by a large amount when I’m doing the fact-checking part of the procedure.

Other tasks include an article for which there’ll be some significant transcription tasks, something I’m dog-slow at, a roundup of new points since the last ish was rounded up editorially, and that piece to write from the interview with Michael Moorcock.

He had a bit of trouble getting the interview back to me but I did get it on Saturday, and it was exciting to read. I won’t post it here until the print edition is out, sorry to say, but Michael gave fascinating answers to many things I’ve long been curious about in his work.

Following up on my metrically-oriented post:

since March 24, 2002, this blog contains…

• 492 posts over a period of 296 days
• a total of 135,428 words in the entry bodies
• an average entry length of 276 words
• an average daily word count of 457 words

This essentially demolishes my earlier estimates, even looking only at recent output. Over the past 90 days or so, my average daily output has been 685 words, totaling 61,656 words. So it’s good start but not what I was hoping for.

My estimated hourly output, if I work an hour a day on the blog, is 458 words overall and 685 words for the last 90 days. If i work on it two hours a day, those fall to 229 and 343 words an hour, respectively.

That translates into estimated composition speeds of from 4 to 11 words a minute, at best half of what I had thought to be the case. Granted, the estimates included the Cinescape online news writing, which really does average 1200-1500 words for each news run and ideally takes a total of two hours a day for each run.

Shoot.

My ten longest posts:

1. September 1988, part four: 4265 words on 20-Sep-02
2. September, 1988, part two: 2089 words on 18-Sep-02
3. The Wreck of the Shenandoah: 1730 words on 7-May-02
4. Man Conquers Space: Status, Part II: 1594 words on 7-Jan-03
5. Man Conquers Space: Background, Part I: 1590 words on 6-Jan-03
6. Rereading Middle-Earth: 1550 words on 19-Dec-02
7. Man Conquers Space: Release Date and Technical, Part III: 1513 words on 8-Jan-03
8. September 1988, part three: 1502 words on 19-Sep-02
9. The Two Towers: 1492 words on 13-Jan-03

My ten shortest posts:

1. A mailbox in my neighborhood.: 12 words on 13-Jul-02
2. A Still Life, part one: 12 words on 13-May-02
3. Drive Yourself to Work Day: 10 words on 30-Jul-02
4. heh heh: 9 words on 29-Aug-02
5. Back Study: 9 words on 19-Aug-02
6. A Flashy Puppet: 8 words on 15-May-02
7. blogrolls: 6 words on 7-Dec-02
8. the MANDOLECTRICK: 6 words on 11-Apr-02
9. …: 0 words on 11-Sep-02
10. See you Sunday!: 0 words on 20-Jul-02

I wonder if these last two posts are the cause of some problems i was having with the SmartyPants plugin in MT.

UPDATE: On installing the WordCount plugin, it’s apparent my blog-based productivity estimates are, uhm, a bit off. Sadly, I found no readily available statistics plugin for MT. I think my overall thrust in this enry is still correct.

Generally speaking, my average blog entry is 1,200 words. Or so I think. That’s about an hour’s work. So in a week, I average about 8,400 words here.

Two weekday news runs for Cinescape also produce a similar number. They actually average a bit more, about 1,350 words each (broken into five stories), for a daily total of 2,700, and for a weekly average of 13,500.

My print and review work for Cinescape looks to be in the neighborhood of 5,250 words each month.

My estimated composition speed, very roughly, is 22 words per minute.

Therefore, I spend about:

• 30 hours a month (an hour a day) on the blog
• 40 hours a month (two hours each weekday) on online news for Cinescape
• Four hours a month on other Cinescape material

Which means I work, on writing, about half of a full time job, about 72 hours a month (in reality, it’s a bit more: the print work takes time to research and rewrite, luxuries which the blog and online news items rarely are privileged to receive).

Based, with acknowledged inaccuracy, on my 22wpm composition speed metric, that’s about 95,000 words a month, less than a third of which gets into the blog.

Based on a rough copy-fitter’s method of word counting (count four lines on a page to determine average line length, then multiply by lines on a page and by pages to yield total word count – it’s usually within ten percent), Susan Orlean’s novel The Orchid Thief contains about 94,000 words.

I picked it simply as a representative book, curious at my output, my estimated productive capacity, and the amount of material that may be perceived as appropriate to a single published volume.

Sliced another way, were I to select a specific topic and cover it via blogging for three months, more or less, I would have the raw material to produce a single coherent volume. This interests me. I am aware I’m neglecting really significant aspects of the labor. My blog readers are probably very nearly wholly unaware of my interest and joy in carefully planned literary structuring, for example, or in my non-blog writing method (outline, draft, edit, rewrite, cut, rewrite, cut).

But my point, to myself, is that this labor might be trained and put to use with the long term goal of producing something more structured and with some possibility of also producing revenue.

Blogging daily as I’ve been doing is something wholly unexpected to me. In the past, each time I attempted to write on a regular basis, the writing would inevitably fade away after nearly no time at all. I have a nearly sixteen-page “journal” begun on the occasion of my family’s move to Switzerland for a year in 1982. It peters out after about a month.

Additionally, in the past, editorial personnel of various publications have repeatedly approached me with assignments. These assignments were nearly always in association with a specific event and I never viewed them as extraordinary or saw in them an indication that perhaps I should write or take my writing seriously or think of it as a possible source of income or even for god’s sake take more than the absolute graduating minimum in English while in college.

A hallmark of my maturity, I flatter myself, is the eagerness with which I adopt each passing evidentiary display of my own fallibility. I clasp them to my chest, joyously crying out, “I was wrong! My certainties were erroneous!”

While I still don’t completely grasp the psychological significance of this and am far from abandoning my native absurd sense of certainty about many things, I think maybe my dismissal of writing was an error. If I adopt this view, it’s entirely in character for me to begin thinking about how to turn this from tool and practice into more.

690 words. Seems longer. Hm. Maybe I need to recalculate.

I have a good-sized assignment for Cinescape (writing their year-end episode guide to Enterprise: 4500 words. eight hours, including breaks and dawdling. I’m the MAN!) so I’m thinking I may have a few light days coming up.

Today (the 18th) is my fourth anniversary, though! Don’t know what the plan is just yet, but I’m sure it involves some gooood eatin’!

Tangentially, I saw on boingboing that Art Speigelman has a review of the recent Fanatgraphics book on certified Golden Age comics genius Bernie Krigstein up at the New Yorker site. My contact at Fantagraphics apologized that he couldn’t get me a review copy a month or two ago; it’s a big, fancy, expensive book and his review copy stock is limited. I’m pleased to report that Speigelman’s review is a hum-dinger, replete with personal anecdotes:

He basked when I pointed to a visual onomatopoeia that conjured up a subway’s rumble. It was as if messages he’d sent off in bottles decades earlier had finally been found.

At the end of the paper, I had compared his approach to that of some important contemporaries whom I also admired, including Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner. When I read that paragraph, Krigstein darkened. “Eisner!” he shouted. “Eisner is the enemy! When you are with me, I am the only artist!”

Hee hee! Well, I guess I’ll just have to accept that I’m not in Speigelman’s (or Krigstein’s) league. Some days, you just gots ta take yer lumps :).

So, I was lying awake idly wondering how old our newest neighbors are. One’s in the community college down the street, one works doing IT stuff. Good, considerate neighbors. Twenty-something.

Then I realized that persons who graduated from high school this spring, as tradition dictates, will be mostly eighteen years of age sometime in 2002.

I graduated high school the year they were born, 1984. In what appears to be some sort of coincidence but which is in fact a mathematical property which applies to anyone that thinks about this, they are, this year anyway, half my age.

What can the world look like? No Watergate. No Vietnam. Hell, they were born the year the Mac was introduced to the market! Four years of Ronnie, but I’d be surprised if he generated memories. Four of GWB the 1st. Maybe some vague impressions. Eight of Clinton; coincident with adolescence, even.

Eight years of a bad economy, eight of a good one, and two character builders so far.

(Note to kids: what political party controlled the white house when the economy was your friend? Note to DNC: do you guys even exist? For god’s sake, DO YOUR JOB! Oh, never mind.)

And then this matter of 9-11. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be an eighteen year old today, I think.

Every political stimuli I was exposed to by the time I was eighteen clearly demonstrated (Vietnam! Watergate! Central America! Iran-Contra! October Surprise!) that American politicians are nemesis, liars, with no respect for democracy, human lives, the rights of man, or the constitution.

So far, seems unlikely that kids have seen the mask stripped, and less likely as time goes by and more FOIA requests are remanded by GWB the 2nd.

As noted in my previous entry, on May 14, I inaccurately dissed Wired’s new house body and headline font as Helvetica. on June 28th, Wired Creative Director Darin Perry dropped by to set the record straight. It’s actually Aksidenz Grotesk.

Prompted by this unexpected turn of events, I’m taking the opportunity to write more thoughtfully about Darrin’s recent changes to the magazine in the context of its’ design history. First, it should be recognized that I have a more emotional relationship to the magazine than I do to any other mag that I read. Wired’s first couple of years, before the website opened for business, were a magnificent – and frankly transgressive – reading experience.

Editorial direction was wide open. Contributors wrote about the infinite possibilities for change that the developing new technologies opened up. Everything from alternative, technophilic non-capitalist economics to the impact of the new technologies on democratic decisionmaking processes were written about. It was inspiring, exciting, and fired my imagination.

The look of the magazine during these years reflected the excitement of the content. Graphic design was the first industry to be powerfully affected by the emergence of personal computers. Just at the time Wired debuted the first round of really committed, highly technologically literate designers were hitting their stride.

The magazine, during this time, acquired the reputation of being ‘illegible’ (unfairly, in my opinion), mostly due to the use of flourescent inks for captions or body copy in some cases and for a willingness to experiment with layering and unconventional ink choices (silver captions printed on top of duotone photos, for example).

To the public at large, these looked as radical and confrontational as the subject of the magazine, which at the time was the utopian possibilities inherent in the development, exploration, and exploitation of the new technologies.

As Wired entered middle age, around the third or fouth year of publication, there was a distinct shift in editorial tone. An initial redesign may have accompanied this shift. Articles critical of international global capitalism were nevermore seen; fifty-something white guys dominated the cover; advertisements for the status toys of our overlords predominated in the pages. I regularly become enraged while reading it, and dropped it as a subscriber.

The redesign de-emphasized some of the wilder aspects of the early years but kept, in a somewhat tamed fasion, many of the others. Flourescent inks, for example, were still used on a regular basis. However, the era of wild exploration was past. Interestingly, the magazine kept the reputation as a wild design leader long after the spark of these experiments had dimmed, and the look of the magazine actually employed a combination of conventional magazine layout approaches and evolved design solutions that descended from the earlier experiments.

At about this time in the magazine’s history, I was involved in a long discussion on the Graphics List concerning, oh, I guess the semiotics of both incarnations of Wired. The conclusions I reached from this discussion were:

• The orginal design approach reflected both the “opening” created by the new technology and at the same time reflected the danger and difficulty created by the new technology: fragmented and “hard to read” type and photo design is the future;
• A desirable side effect of “hard to read” or dissonant design is that it acts as an encoder which automatically separates those in the know from the clueless, much as jargon or fashionable clothing;
• By successfully maintaining a reputation of being “hard to read” or edgy while in point of fact becoming much more accessible in design and mainstream in subject mater, Wired successfully expanded their readership and consumer appeal while maintaining premium pricing and creative requirements for advertisers, a real grail for lifestyle magazines.

In effect, Wired created a myth of an exclusive club, and then turned it into a tourist attraction without letting the tourists become aware of the change in status. While the editorial change (not the design change) drove me out the door, cursing and muttering imprecations, I must say I found the excercise admirable and informative.

Today’s Wired, beginning with the issue that first featured the current look (it had Steven Spielberg on the cover), gives some evidence of an editorial shft away from celebrating wealthy white corporate leaders. In all fairness this is predictable in light of the onging economic tragicomedy we are all observing daily. I certainly hope they’ll pick up a bright pen and run it through each and every one of the companies we’ve watched melt away – beginning with Enron and Andersen and moving up through Xerox and WorldCom. Wired could choose to assign, for example, Bruce Sterling or (now this I like) William Gibson to cover the fraud and theft which are currently wrecking the economy. But I’m not gonna hold my breath.

Although an outcome like that is unlikely (and in all honesty I don’t think Sterling could be critical enough to meet my desires for such a piece; Gibson’s dark glasses would be just right for me, I think), so far since then both the Spielberg issue and the current “Nike project” issue had a sufficient amount of interesting material to hold my attention. The intermediate issue, in which the Wired Index was re-introduced, was, not successful in so doing. In the current issue my favorite piece was the “Infoporn” on nulclear material, and I must say a part of my enjoyment was derived from the presenation of the piece: phosphor green on black, very nice.

The redesign, which employs Aksidenz Grotesk (Thanks, Darrin!) to effectively do away with the early-nineties visual noise while still employing layered printing, da-glo colors, and other signature elements of all of Wired’s looks, also reflects the direction street design has taken over the past five or six years, on rave cards, club flyers, and the like.

This school of design combines a retro-seventies futurist esthetic in the use of understated sans-serif fonts with softened, regular geometric shapes such as squares or rectangles with rounded corners to convey a cool, polished sensibility.

This mode of presentation is derived from the work of Swiss designers on the eve of World War Two, and became very influential in American design in the late sixties and early seventies, when it projectd a ind of intenational, eurocentric futurism. Think of Kubrick’s “2001” and Woody Allen’s “Sleeper”, and you’ll know what I mean.

It’s interesting to note that each time this high-modern approach to design becomes predominant (and Wired is not the only mag to undergo a retro-mod restyle of late – a href=”http://www.macaddict.com/”>MacAddict just unveiled a similar, sans-all-the-way look in print if not online), it was in times of economic turbulence, with no clear upturn in sight and a great deal of uncertainty in the air.

In the case of Wired, does this affect the sense of exclusivity the magazine still strives for? I’m not certain. I suspect it does; after all I doubt that a subscriber in Chinchilla Flats, Texas has seen as many rave cards as I have here in Seattle; and while I can see the magazine as a manstreaming of this design approach, it probably still looks pretty cutting edge to our imaginary Texan.

At the same time, simply becasue it’s a less confrontational design, it may provide greater accessibility at the newsstand, which in turn might translate into a spike in circulation. So Darrin, I take back my flippant dismissal of your hard work, and hope you enjoy reading my more honest and thoughtful reflections on both your place of work and the specific contribution to it you have made of late.