Category Archives: News

Seriously, Folks

Rarely can one can equate anything that a designer does during the course of a normal workday with a potentially prosecutable offense, but Mitch Mosallem, a former executive vice-president of graphic services at Grey Worldwide, managed to confound that common sense by landing himself in jail for about six years. According to Adweek’s account of the affair: “Mosallem pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with former salesmen at The Color Wheel, a New York-based print production house, to rig bids and overbill Grey clients such as Brown & Williamson on print work.”

It’s weird to see something as basically innocuous as graphic design have such disastrous consequences, isn’t it? What’s so disconcerting about Mosallem’s situation is that it’s almost the stuff of made-for-TV movies, and yet imagining designers in any scenario worth of popular entertainment — whether a life-threatening situation or a weepy melodrama — is generally an exercise in absurdity (all apologies to Mosallem’s family for the very real misfortune they’ve suffered). Take a graphic designer out of the context of graphic design and place that person in a much more serious context — like corporate embezzlement — and it somehow becomes difficult to take him or her very seriously. Why is that? Is there something inherently ridiculous about the job I’m showing up for every day? Should I become a fireman?

Continue Reading …

+

Fight the Fire

Fires in Southern California

When I lived in Southern California in the early part of the 1990s, I saw earthquakes, wild fires, droughts, floods and the worst civil riots in recent American history. Not necessarily for those reasons exclusively, I found it hard to nurture much affection for the Golden State, but I still do have good reasons to remain sympathetic to the plights of its citizens — not the least of which is because my mother, sister and nephew all still live there.

And, from fiscal crises to horrific lapses in Democratic judgment, I always feel at least a little bit saddened by the unfortunate events that always seem to beset the world’s fifth largest economy. The recent wild fire raging throughout Southern California is another of these instances. I just got off the phone with a colleague in the Southland, and he’s tense with worry that he may lose his home to this monstrous natural disaster. I took a look at the satellite photos at NASA, too, and I found myself humbled and frightened by the immensity of the smoke. My heart goes out to everyone facing this elemental beast.

Continue Reading …

+

Hast la Vista, Democracy

SchwarzeneggerWatching the recall process in California has been like watching an insane neighbor dig up his backyard in some crazy treasure hunt. Every day, as first the grass and then the soil and then the pipes running beneath the neighborhood get torn up and piled in a destructive heap, the yard becomes a worse and worse disaster, and yet it still seems hopeless that the neighbor would ever listen to a reasonable argument against calling the whole thing off.

Continue Reading …

+

The War, Not the Country

The situation in Iraq is often referred to as resembling or possessing the potential to become ‘another Viet Nam,’ which is a phrase that really, really frustrates me. It’s not that I don’t agree with the spirit of this statement, because there are indeed some striking similarities in the case for this country’s continued involvement in Iraq and the United States’ prolonged motivation for waging war in the country of my birth… similarities which don’t necessarily help the case of either those supporting or opposing the Bush administration. As a historical lesson, the war we fought in Viet Nam in the 1960s and 70s can yield some valuable insight if we’re careful in our consideration of its legacy.

Continue Reading …

+

On This Day

A year ago today, we informally closed our office on the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, from fear of some recurrence of terrorist activity and, at least on my part, out of a sense of confusion. It wasn’t clear to me how we as a nation should act or behave, how we should honor the dead, and what bearing my personal enmity for the way that the Bush administration had been prosecuting the war on terror should have on the way I conducted myself on 11 Sep 2002. It seemed best to sit out the day quietly, abstaining from anything remotely inappropriate.

There was a lead-up of anxiety to that one year anniversary, but this year, the milestone seems to have practically snuck up on us without fanfare or expectation. I’d wager that today, much more so than last year, so many of us woke up this morning and headed off to work with virtually no compunction or sense of danger, even those living in or heading to lower Manhattan. Now that it’s here, we still mourn the day’s historical loss, but otherwise we feel a kind of detachment from it, too. To some degree, we seem to feel safer, or to be willing to resume our illusion of safety.

For me, what’s saddest about that day, beyond the tragic deaths we shouldn’t ever forget, is the lasting damage that the attacks have had on the fabric of our life, principally taking the form of a government run amuck, one bearing less and less resemblance to the America that our forefathers envisioned with each passing day. The attacks have, in many ways, achieved their effect of undermining democracy by essentially brokering a willing exchange of civil liberties — the defining trait of American character — for an illusion of safety. I wouldn’t even describe it as safety, but rather a kind of comfort in which danger is displaced to more convenient locales. The attacks effectively installed a regime of mendacity at the helm of American government, and they have led us dangerously off course. We need to replace George W. Bush in the 2004 election for President of the United States.

Continue Reading …

+

Looking for WMD in All the Wrong Places

Bush & PowellKnowing that I am a bit quick to cry foul over anything the Bush administration does, I have tried to reserve judgment on the current, somewhat desperate, so far unsuccessful search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the run-up to the recent war there was predicated on half-truths, falsehoods and specious intelligence; a decent overview of the situation as it stands this week is available at The Economist. Clearly, any WMD program that Saddam Hussein may have had in place does not live up to the tremendous advance billing given to it by the Bush administration. If weapons of mass destruction are indeed found in Iraq, I’m convinced it will be a discovery guided by serendipity rather than intelligence.

Continue Reading …

+

The Day the Music Died

FCC Chairman Michael Powell and his two Republican cohorts sent a powerful message today to companies that already control much of America’s television networks, newspapers, radio stations, and cable television systems: ‘No more will we coddle you in your duties in upholding the First Amendment. From now on, media companies had better grow up and learn how to promote the values of free speech and democracy all on your own.’ At first shocked by the sudden turn of events, the media companies are expected to rise to this great patriotic challenge by further consolidating the principle venues for broadcasting, publishing, communication and discourse. It’s a great day for this great country. Ugh.

Continue Reading …

+

Weekend Worrier

The number one thing I will be doing this weekend is worrying about the impending vote at the FCC on relaxing the rules of media ownership. Most people who know me will readily agree that I am starting to harp on this subject, but it pains me greatly. The vote takes place on Monday, but the attendant media coverage is so wildly disproportionate to the vote’s significance to the health of American democracy for the next generation (which is to say there’s very little coverage ) that it’s all I can do to just complain aloud about it.

Actually, it brightened my day a little today to see Ted Turner come out publicly against relaxing these rules, even though he is a major shareholder in and board member of AOL Time Warner, a company that will clearly benefit greatly from these proposed changes. But I still dread Monday afternoon and the almost assured kick in the groin of free speech that the results of this vote will bring. Have a nice weekend!

Continue Reading …

+

Cuts Like a Knife

Congress is set to approve the third-largest tax cut in history … yet another political victory for the Legion of Doom that is the Bush administration and its collaborators in Congress. Everything that was bad about the second-largest tax cut in history, also engineered by this administration just two years ago, still applies to this one: deficit spending, disproportionate benefits for the rich, deferral of fiscal responsibility to the next generation of tax payers, and a general absence of plausible logic.

Continue Reading …

+

The Man without a Face

Behavior is located on West 27th Street, just north of Chelsea and the Flatiron District. It’s not generally considered a dangerous neighborhood, as evidenced by the several luxury high-rise apartment buildings that have been built here recently. And yet, we were made aware today that there have been two very recent rapes within five minutes walk from our offices, both thought to have been committed by the same suspect, and one of them happening on 27th Street itself. (As reported by The New York Times here.)

Continue Reading …

+