Parallax View

Obey(ed) Giant

Panopticon wins!  Shepard Fairey bans self in Boston: LINK

Applied neoteny in emoticons

- Eye dots further apart (rasterize the colon/semicolon, break apart, extend space in middle if repurposing the text tool).
- Mouth wider, almost extending to side of face (again, rasterize, break apart, and extend horizontal line of paren, "D," "P," etc.)
- Forehead higher than chin (features towards bottom 1/2 of face).
- Features in same color family as skin
- Shading and highlights for round appearance
- Keep it smaller than 24x24px

Easy Rider

Easy Rider (dir. Dennis Hopper, 1969), like it's lesser-known sibling, Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), poses the question, where are you going when all the roads are mapped?  In their constant motion, Wyatt/Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) are seeking unmapped territory, but the only unmapped territory is within. By refusing to settle in one place, by being nomads, they are refusing the predetermined categories of social role and occupation.

Freedom has been synonymous with freedom of the open road since before this country was founded: freedom to wander, to break free of the boundaries of town, city, job, habits, and self, and simply go and see what and who you might find.  The hippies in Easy Rider are icons now, and were icons then.  But they're on a journey much older than hippies - the Beats, too, had their road, the hobos theirs, the frontiersmen and pioneers their roads, stolen from and grafted on top of the Native Americans' trajectories in space.

The film itself is an icon: look at them, cruising past the mountains!  Back when you could just go on the road and hitchhike to a commune and really drop out.  Freedom just to be, it's a beautiful thing.  What the icon leaves out, but the film does not, is the violence inherent in the system.  You do not escape by dropping out.  In fact, says George (Jack Nicholson, in his first significant film role), the ACLU lawyer they pick up in the south, dropping out can risk greater violence:

"Billy: What the hell's wrong with freedom, man? That's what it's all about.
George: Oh yeah, that's right, that's what it's all about, all right. But talkin' about it and bein' it - that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. 'Course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they're gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.
Billy: Mmmm, well, that don't make 'em runnin' scared.
George: No, it makes 'em dangerous."

Along the way they come across various propositions about living a life.  They start in southern California where they sell some presumably high-grade cocaine picked up in Mexico to a Hollywood jet-setter (played by Phil Spector) at an airport, where the rush of the planes overhead echoes the junked cars in the Mexican lot, referring to roads: ahead, not taken, open, empty.  Having finessed the money they take off across the great western landscape, where they literally ride into the Hollywood sunset; Monument Valley is the iconic setting for innumerable westerns.

Picking up a hitchhiker they head for the New Buffalo commune near Taos, New Mexico. (For the film it was re-created in California, since New Buffalo did not allow filming at the time.  See Lisa Law's website for some great photographs of the real thing.)  Here they find a hippie encampment with giant domes, VW microbuses, a mime colony, about a million kids, and free love, man.  Also, agriculture.  Or at least what the hippies are hoping is agriculture in that high desert landscape.  You can see in their faces that the realities of utopia have set in, and it isn't all sitting around playing guitars anymore.  It's work and negotiation and compromise, and not that any of that is bad necessarily, but the fences are showing. The hitchhiker gives them some LSD,

"Stranger: When you get to the right place, with the right people, quarter this. You know, this could be the right place. The time's running out.
Wyatt: Yeah, I'm, I'm hip about time. But I just gotta go."

So they hit the road again, with the arbitrary aim of reaching New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras.  They spontaneously join a high school parade in some small southern town and get arrested for their trouble. In jail they meet George sleeping it off in the drunk tank, who sobers up and negotiates their freedom. He warns them about "attacks on longhairs," and then decides to go on the road with them, producing an old football helmet for the ride.

They stop in a cafe where they are refused service and threatened with violence, while a booth of high school girls perks up and swarms them asking for "rides."  They do the wise thing and leave, but the threat later becomes real despite their continued motion.

In Mardi Gras they go to a brothel and pay for some hookers.  The 60s was still not a great time for women, or their representations in media!  And then they decide to wander out into Mardi Gras and take the LSD, ending up at one of the above-ground cemeteries where they are subjected to the fisheye lenses and heavy editing of the filmed acid trip.  It's not a bad one, as filmed acid trips go.

There is more road ahead, but it's more for us, than for them.  Society opened up, after the 60s, because of the 60s.  Forty years later, our identities are expanded, and more porous.  We're actually expected to find ourselves!  But in short order, and then make something of it.  Or not, but at least be hip to the niche marketing opportunities, on either the buyer or seller end of things.  Freedom is: buying these sneakers! Using this hair color!  Seeing this movie!  And, collecting these action figures!  Additional helmet accessory sold separately.

There's something inside all of us that still wants to be on the road, that always wants it. To be always in motion is to hold one's self in a suspension just above making a choice, in the hopes that in the moment before a decision, all choices are possible.  Or perhaps, that one might never need to make a choice at all: the promise and danger of the endless picaresque.

[From my review on the Brattle Theater Film Blog.]

Nashville

Set in Nashville, Tennessee, home of the Grand Ole Opry, Nashville (dir. Robert Altman, 1975) follows musicians, con artists, politicians, and weirdos as their lives overlap and intersect over the course of a fateful few days.  The film showcases Altman's signature style of combining multiple story lines, noisy, overlapping dialogue, and realistic, scattered camera angles into a complex yet consistent narrative whole.  Considered by many to be Altman's best film, it sashays between dialogue and song, the individual and the political, and humor and tragedy, without missing a beat.

The film opens at the airport, just in time for the comeback of Bobby Jean (Ronnie Blakley), an emotionally fragile country star modeled after Loretta Lynn.  Also arriving in town is a political operative for a third-party candidate (the "Replacement Party"), and a folk trio based on Peter, Paul and Mary.  We meet various other of the main characters either at the airport or trapped in the enormous traffic jam just after it.  Nashville is a company town, to the extent that the characters there do not even recognize some famous Hollywood actors dropping in for cameos (another Altman touch): everyone is either a musician, associated with one, working for one, or desperately wants to be one. And the music world -- specifically, the traditional country music world -- is all there is.

The film is a musical, but is not always thought of as one because the "breaking into song" parts, instead of breaking out, are woven into the plot as the characters perform.  Some of the standouts include Ronnie Blakley's "Dues," Barbara Harris covering Keith Carradine's "It Don't Worry Me," and of course Carradine's "I'm Easy," which not only won an Academy Award for best song, but crossed over from the country to the pop charts, breaking the Top 40.

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Also in the mix are Lily Tomlin as the not-quite-believable head of a gospel choir, Geraldine Chaplin as a narcissistic BBC reporter, Shelley Duvall as a boy-crazy teen, Keenan Wynn as her overtaxed uncle, and Karen Black, transitioning from her role as wannabe singer in 1970's Five Easy Pieces to a successful country diva and Bobby Jean's main rival here.  And let's not forget a young Jeff Goldblum as The Weirdo, given no lines but tasked with transitioning the film on his 3-wheeled chopper when Altman needed to move things along.

The third-party candidate is never onscreen, but is a recurrent character in the movie nonetheless. Overdubbed in loudspeaker-announcement style, his political rants provide a counterpoint and context for the actions of the characters.  This is post-Nixon America, emerged from the devastating generational war in Vietnam only to be confronted with the utter deviousness and fallibility of its leaders in the Watergate crisis.  At the same time the promise of the company-man establishment has utterly imploded, but has not been replaced by the promises of the 60s.  We are left nowhere, having seemingly tried everything, and believing in nothing.  At first you the viewer try to tune out the pronouncements, but bit by bit they add up and you start to tune in.  Especially if you remember any of the 70s!

But even the music world is a microcosm of its larger environment.  At the climax of the movie all the characters gather in an outdoor park to perform or watch a benefit concert for the Replacement Party. The parade of black cars as the candidate arrives consciously echoes a certain procession in Dallas in 1963.  I won't reveal the ending except to say that Altman was both historically reflective and sadly prescient.  It is a scene we had seen, and have continued to see, far too often, both onscreen and off.

[From my review on the Brattle Theater Film Blog.]

Five Easy Pieces

In Five Easy Pieces (dir. Bob Rafaelson, 1970) Robert Eroica Dupea, played by a young-ish Jack Nicholson, has "dropped out" by dropping down a couple of levels in the class structure.  Frustrated by the constraints of a serious classical music career, when we first meet him he is working on an oil rig, hanging out with his working class buddies at the bowling alley, and dating a diner waitress (Karen Black), in a thorough rejection of his upper class background and ideals.

However, his new identity doesn't fit him all that well either.  Stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the fields one day, he leaps out of the car and discovers an old piano on the back of an open moving truck. Pulling the cover off, he starts playing Chopin's Fantasie in F Minor on the out-of-tune upright, accompanied by the Art Brut of the commuters' horns.  Then the one-two punch of discovering his girlfriend is pregnant, and his father is dying, sends him back on the road, ostensibly to visit the family compound and pay his last respects, but really to question again his place in the scheme of things.

So he jumps in the car and starts up the Pacific Coast.  While his girlfriend smothers him by alternating baby talk with Tammy Wynette tunes, they pick up a pair of hitchhikers bound for Alaska.  Providing social commentary as comic relief, one hitchhiker goes on what is presumably a states-long rant about consumerism, the environment, and the hidden costs of late capitalism.  All of which is right but none of which you can imagine yourself wanting to hear when trapped in a car together for days.  But it puts a little space between him and the waitress, as if to remind us that the structure of society does play a significant role in who we get close to, despite experimentation with social spaces.

In Puget Sound his family maintains an Ingmar Bergman-like compound on an island, where, following their ex-prodigy patriarch, they have all dedicated themselves to classical music.  It is inferred that Bobby was the most talented of all, and we see some black and white Van Cliburn-style photos.  It was this hothouse atmosphere of high art that Bobby rejected when he left.  With the entire 1960s happening a ferry ride away, how could a young person with any passion insulate themselves by playing prewritten notes from hundreds of years ago?  Yes, there is artistry in interpretation; in fact classical pianists predicate their careers, and themselves, on exactly that.  But all the notes are neatly contained in measures, all the roles are prescribed, all the interpretations are determined: adagio, forte, pianissimo, glissando, legato -- da capo.  Where is there room to find yourself?  Where is there room for something new?  Thus the oil rig, the nonintellectual friends -- and "classic" country music.

But while at the compound he tries to reach across anyway, attempting an affair with his brother's fiance. Catherine (Susan Anspach) lives fully within classical music.  She is attracted to Bobby's freewheeling energy, but realizes that he's not rejoining her world, and she, despite the open door, has no intention of embracing the uncertainty on offer in his.  The tragedy, it is suggested, is that only with a fellow social refugee can Bobby have the option of finding or creating some kind of new identity and new world into which to fit himself.

In an emotional scene with his father, he breaks down and confesses that he hasn't found any answers "outside," either:

"I move around a lot, not because I'm looking for anything really, but 'cause I'm getting away from things that get bad if I stay."

But the father has had a stroke, and cannot speak.   What do you do when the promise of the 60s doesn't pan out?  When the predetermined role is not what you want, but your class-based road-tripping is revealed as tourism?  The father says nothing, as if to say, "well, this was what we had to offer.  You didn't want it.  We (the establishment) don't have any advice for your new world.  And if you don't want that either, well . . ."

The most famous scene is of Bobby ordering toast in the diner. Toast is not on the menu.  So Bobby tries to order a chicken salad sandwich, hold the mayo, hold the lettuce, hold the chicken . . . he does not get his toast.  That he doesn't get his toast is only further confirmation of the fact that he has not found a place in either high- or lowbrow culture.  It is not on the menu.

The best scene of the movie, though, is the one under the closing credits. A long shot of a gas station, it sums up the entire decade to come, its broken promises, its open-ended swarm of attempts and options, its apathy and confusion.  Life doesn't stop just because you haven't figured it out.  Right.  So, what's next?

[From my review on the Brattle Theater Film Blog.]

The Last Picture Show

The Last Picture Show (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) presents the enigma of the old western wrapped in the mystery of the new.  Set in the early 1960s in a windswept Texas town -- the kind of small town that springs up on the way from somewhere to somewhere else -- the story focuses on two high school seniors, Sonny and Duane, co-captains of a football team so monumentally inept that at one point they manage to lose 121 - 14.  The future they face seems as bleak as the empty streets in the town and the endless flat plains of the surrounding land.  They sense it as they stumble through the paces of late adolescence: girlfriends, jobs, uncertainty.

The acting is naturalistic and remarkable; you feel as if you are there despite, or perhaps because of, the choice to shoot in black and white, and the camera's occasional intrusion right into the characters' faces.  You don't know them deeply, it is a film more of surfaces than interiors, but you know them as well as they know themselves.

And this may be enough. The Last Picture Show was adapted for the screen by Larry McMurtry from his loosely autobiographical novel of the same name.  Throughout his career McMurtry has both memorialized and desmystified the west, and the western (including Lonesome Dove, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a TV miniseries, and Brokeback Mountain, for which he co-adapted the screenplay), wrestling with what he sees as its central question: do we -- can we -- make any difference in all this space?

This is the challenge posed by the west to the western-as-genre.  It is not nature seen as Ruskin's sublime, or tamed into gardens, or courted at its edges by cities and ports.  The great Yellowstone post-volcanic caldera is clearly not cultivated with human interests in mind.  And despite our continuing attempts at such cultivation; the west has implacably insisted on its scale, its silence, and its terms.

The film keeps a respectful distance from its characters while doing a close reading of the landscape. But how can one do a close reading of emptiness?  One way is to look closer.  What seems empty has been significantly altered by its human inhabitants: the trees, as one character points out, were not there when he was young, they have been planted since.  And the pond where they fish had not been a pond, before people arrived who felt like fishing.   We carve out little habitats in space to suit us.  While fishing, Sam ("the Lion"), Sonny's ersatz father figure, remembers a love affair:

"If she was here, I'd probably be just as crazy now as I was then in about five minutes. Ain't that ridiculous? Naw, it ain't really. 'Cause bein' crazy 'bout a woman like her's always the right thing to do."

As you watch you realize that the entire place has been imagined into being by films.  America defined itself by identification and confrontation with the west -- its size, its inhabitants, its demands and its freedoms.  The western got its start as a literary and theatrical genre almost the minute that the actual frontier closed -- the fences were still down in the landscape of ideas.  In films, the western turned hardscrabble Civil War veterans into icons, and invited suburban WWII vets to imagine that they too were larger than life despite the end of the battlefield.  Any lingering feelings of insignificance were both justified and mollified by the oversized vistas, as man could not hope to be heard by distant rocks, themselves marked only by the passage of geologic time.

The echoes of Bresson and Godard here are not accidental.  Faced with the impersonality of the natural landscape, existentialism seems an almost "natural" response.  How do we fit into this immensity?  What are we doing here?  And yet, existentialism is not the right response; it is too interior, and also, oddly, too bleak.  The landscape has not been tamed, but it has been modified, and it may not require huge amounts of introspection to do something about it.

The literal last picture show in the movie is an 'old' western, a showing of Red River, the John Wayne classic dramatizing one of the first cattle drives and the beginning of the free-range cowboy.  But the final few frames are themselves framed by the run-down theater, and when the lights come up you can see all the empty seats.  The new western is not cowboys fighting with Indians, or each other.  The new western is a confrontation with emptiness, and the challenge to make something up to fill it, something worth it.  The American response to just showing up without a script is -- well, let's make something of it.  As Lois, the femme fatale mother of the high school's femme fatale puts it,

"I guess if it wasn't for Sam, I'd just about have missed it, whatever 'it' is. I'd have been one of them Amity types that thinks that playin' bridge is about the best thing that life has to offer."

Pragmatism, not existentialism, is the result of an uniquely American confrontation between individual and social desires -- desire in general -- and a landscape so unmistakably made for itself.

[From my review on the Brattle Theater Film Blog.]

The Final Frontier

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Before he was called up to captain the Enterprise, then-lieutenant James T. Kirk was taking a much-needed rest break on Earth. Wounded in battle by Klingon phaser fire, Kirk was furloughed to Big Sur to recuperate from his wounds and prepare his shoulders for the mantle of command, which he felt was due to drape itself around them very soon.

In Big Sur he found a modern-day Sherwood Forest, where a casual assortment of Luddites had taken up residence and ranching in abandoned Missions and primitive wooden shacks. It was a simple, yet good life: clean air, fine weather, magic healing waters, a William Jamesian semi-incestuous relationship with his sister...fine for the unburdened soul to feel the pure joy of being alive.

Unfortunately, just down the coast there lived a commune of blond black-wearing soulless demons, who had fled Sweden to escape the micro-management of the Incubus -- none other than the Lord of Darkness himself, Ingmar Bergman -- but still continued doing his bidding on Earth as contractors. These demons, or succubi, would lure hapless, fallen men to the ocean by hypnotizing them with their promise of secret art-film depths and delights. However, upon reaching the ocean (symbol alert!) the man would stumble in the waves, whereupon the succubus would step on his head. This would allow the Dark Lord to capture the man's tainted soul, which he undoubtedly needed to populate his upcoming films.

Apparently this became a little dull for the demons, and influenced by the California creed of self-expression, one of them decided to express herself with the challenge of luring a truly 'noble' man to his death. Thus the danger to our captain.

But ever-resourceful Kirk has a secret weapon: love. If the succubus falls in love with him she will be unable to do the Dark Lord's bidding. Of course Kirk doesn't know this, and doesn't know that Kia, the wayward succubus who shows up at his doorstep one day, is not mortal and has no soul. After a few minutes of awkward banter, they fall in love under a conveniently-timed eclipse (that's "eclipso" in Esperanto).

Did I mention this was in Esperanto?

Don't worry, there are English subtitles! Well anyway, after that, Kia the succubus can't really steal souls anymore and basically has to go on workman's comp. Her temp agency is not amused. The other succubi decide to raise the Incubus himself to take care of a clearly escalating situation. If one succubus can fall in love, what's to prevent it from spreading to the entire workforce? Their organization would fold faster than you can say vaporware. So late one night they perform the ritual to raise the Incubus, who obliges by emerging out of the lawn. The Big Guy has been told to incarnate as a young man, because how they're going to stop Kirk and reclaim Kia is for the Incubus to go after the sister, who of course has been superseded in her brother's affections and has nothing better to do.

So the Incubus lurches out of the ground and after they wipe the mud and dandelions off his face they realize he looks exactly like...George W. Bush!  No one has the courage to break the news to the Incubus about his unfortunate contemporary resemblance, so the sister is conveniently blinded by the eclipse (um, eclipso) so she won't make the Jerry Seinfeld face when he shows up to seduce her.

This goes off without a hitch, which is good as we're already at least 90 minutes into the movie and there really haven't been any action scenes since that first redshirt got his head stepped on in the beginning. The Incubus seduces the sister and lures her to his big gothic house where the succubi hold the sister down so he can kill her by giving her head. And just in case anybody misses the point, a Special Effect is helpfully provided: a fast-motion close-up of his flickering tongue closing in on the, um, camera.

Well, there are probably worse ways to go.

Meanwhile Kia is leading Kirk on a midnight ramble while she struggles with her work ethic -- lure him to the beach and step on his head, or subvert the System in a personal gesture of defiance and drop out to live in peace, harmony and love.

Of course they've already offed the sister, so it's not too harmonious or anything right about now. Kirk discovers this and challenges the Incubus to a fight (Pon faar! Fight to the death!), where he kills the Demon of Darkness by sticking a stick in him. (It's not really clear how that is supposed to work.) And anyway the Incubus is only faking and is not really dead, since he was never really alive, either. He's undead, Jim! But apparently now, since he thinks he has killed, Kirk's soul is tainted and the Incubus can use him. (Although of course he already *had killed, being a soldier home recovering from battle wounds, but never mind about that.) But Kia loses heart and won't help, and post-fight Kirk manages to crawl (he always did have amazing resilience) to the local Mission, where he pants on the floor in a very picturesque-Kirk-panting kind of way and mulls over the meaning of purgatory, or something like that.

The Incubus then tries to prevent Kia from going over to the other side. She runs and gets as far as the Mission door when the Incubus catches up and a struggle ensues. The struggle is a little casual and uncertain of motive, but then the Incubus changes into a giant black goat, and we're shown a close-up of his tongue. Flickering.

Uh-oh.

But Kia heeds Kirk's exhortations and heaves the goat off, managing to crawl nearer to the Mission door, where Kirk reaches her and pulls her into the sanctuary of the church. Then the cinematographer solarizes the goat.

Epilogue:


The Incubus, disgusted with the performance of his U.S. subsidiary, catches the redeye back to Sweden. Kirk cannot get over his resentment about Kia's involvement with his sister's death, and when the Enterprise calls him up with an assignment to go where no man has gone before, he doesn't think twice before beaming aboard, where he embarks on a career of breaking every soft-focus heart in the galaxy in some kind of protracted, projected scheme of revenge. Bergman would be so proud! Kia, being heartbroken yet soulless, and also immortal, is left without gainful employment, and decides to become a Bay Area performance artist whose work undermines a gendered reading of negative space. The Esperanto scholars will observe that no one in the movie pronounces the language correctly.

Um, yeah. The end.

Message board

A kiosk has appeared in the Square near the Creature.  You write a question on an index card, pin it on the kiosk, and then a little while later it gets answered, either on the website or on the back of the index card.  Questions I saw ranged from "will I ever win her back?" to "what kind of puppy is best for a small apartment?"  Answers are from - everyone.

Forgot to write down the URL for answers.  But, I like RL for the pinned up questions. A very Burn-flavored installation.

Filmstrip the trailer

A few scenes from Filmstrip. Embed:

Filmstrip - the trailer from otolythe on Vimeo.

Filmstrip on IMDB!

Filmstrip, my animated short from 2006, is continuing its independent existence.  It just got its own IMDB page, with a trailer!!  Entire film will not be online (my choice); occasional viewings are in RL only. And sometimes on TV.

From the synopsis: Filmstrip is an educational filmstrip for young adults about the perils and absurdities of modern relationships. Mimicking filmstrips of the 1960s and 70s, Filmstrip tackles infidelity, open relationships, California, Burning Man: all those things you wished you learned in school!  

It has the "beep," you OGX-ers will be glad to know.

If you've ever dated me, you will hate this movie. Which is undoubtedly why it's been so big a hit with everyone else.

All the noise, noise, noise, noise!

Still from early Thos Edison film of trick bicycles, in this case in front of a painted backdrop! (via Matthew Battles at Hilobrow.com)

I love the noise here - the combination of old-film grain and dust, and digital artifacts. A nondual formal layer on top of the image; not separable, not A, but not ~A. It reminds me of first semester in art school, how we were encouraged to find "our Gesture," in a (yes) gesture to the midcentury modernism that still influenced painting departments in the late 90s. Abstract Expressionism cast a huge shadow, despite Pop Art, despite Conceptual, despite postmodernism and irony and the kitsch revival and the interwebs. I think Pop/Conceptual is much more important (philosophically) and influential (culturally), but the individual heroic gesture still forms the canon at the core.

Anyway these pixels and lines and noise are The Gesture for the whole youtube genre of films and clips brought onto the web, the hand of the machine that they all share. Actually several machines. But it's an anti-gestural Gesture in that the machine is exactly not the individual. In fact it is our opposite - reproducible, unthinking, inert. It is not Society that opposes the One, it is the "Not."

The crazy thing is, it's beautiful anyway.

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Let's talk about work

Let me tell you about Friday.

"What is this?"  he asks. He is pointing to an asterisk. I am talking to a developer, I am a designer, we work in IT, and it is Friday.  The project is weeks overdue, but not because of identifiable risks in the design and partner buy-in phases; but because the developer (qua 'resource') had been assigned to something quite different which has also had major overruns.  He is finally 'taking a look at' something he had already claimed to have 'taken a look at' last Wednesday.

The asterisk is in the CSS, which says, among other things, width:250px; *width:250px. So I start to explain about IE hacks and the box model and how the different browsers do not implement CSS consistently, and I am helpfully drawing some boxes on the white board inside a schematic "webpage" (rectangle across the top, sub-rectangle flush left, some lines for "here is the content;" you know, the usual) with some arrows and numbers, when I notice that his eyes are doing a kind of nitrous-like oscillation between utter incomprehension and actual fear, and I know that I am getting nowhere at all.

What I have done (not on the whiteboard) is created a front-end mockup showing the design of a webpage.  But instead of just drawing a big picture in Photoshop and then batting my eyes and falling back on the to-me completely inadequate but to-them fully acceptable liberal arts/art school copout and saying, here, now YOU make it WORK, I have built out the mockup in valid HTML/CSS with the appropriate hacks so it is multi-platform cross-browser compatible blah blah blah.  And I have gone one better.  I have commented out the code.  For those of you not in IT, "commenting" means including passages in natural language, like English, as margin notes in the file, which translate the various blocks of numbers and letters and punctuation marks for the other humans involved.

But we're building this application in Sharepoint.  So what the developer needs to do, in addition to writing real code, is translate the CSS into Sharepoint CSS.  You might think there would be almost no translation necessary, like the American lying back and thinking of England.  But actually you get there and it's filled with Scots and you can't understand one single syllable and even their gestures are opaque. Well yeah except that one.  Basically Sharepoint (do I need to explain it was built by Microsoft?) uses a CSS so byzantine, so overlapping, and so endlessly granular, that we could compare it to Islamic calligraphy -- that is if it was actually beautiful.  And not broken.  So for every normal-sounding CSS term, like say, .tab_left, which refers to (wait for it) tabs on the left, SP will have 4 or 5 different things with names like .overwriteTabtab normal Ncol_lrleft, referring to the top left edge of the tab in the selected state in the page view screen for the second visit to the home page by the admin. Etc.  It's not so much that it's synthetic, as that it's ridiculous.  But it does not involve any real Morlockian superpowers, it's basically sheer persistence and attention to detail.  Which anyone who works in IT has or gets, as "it" remakes you into its own image in 10,000 hours or less.

I've offered to do the translation myself, and I now offer again. But I know that he cannot accept it because it's kind of a turf thing, and if they let the Photoshop princess help make the sword, next thing they know she'll be taking care of dragons and using the Holy Grail for her travel mug and -- re-coding the story -- and then where would they be?  Plus I don't really want to do any more code, or code-LITE, than I already do, as I am very busy running my Twitter movie and sending pithy one-liners to my friends and converting my business comic into vector graphics and optimizing key details from my scans of the two-dollar bill.

So now it is Monday.  The developer has foisted the CSS off onto his own personal Rumplestiltskin by sending, not the CSS file, but the URL to my HTML mockups. Which would not be a disaster except that the very expensive, Preferred Vendor, Sharepoint Specialist contractor second developer somehow could not manage to do a "view source" on the page and retrieve the CSS, and has been pinging the project manager all weekend with questions like, well, what is the width of the columns supposed to be anyway? (See above for answer.)  Today I am going to a training session on end-user best practices for Sharepoint portals, which as a User Experience Designer I will need to evaluate for whenever it might be that we actually get this thing built.  Tomorrow?  The world.