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The Nature of the Designer

The nature of the designer in society is to give shape and form to the abstract.

That means if an abstraction requires an unidentifiable form, the designer must work to provide cultural clues and provoke shared norms to make that unfamiliar form recognizable in the abstract unknown.

The designer’s strength is in the semiotic — but the world runs on the semantic — and so the designer must become the ultimate translator between the real and the imagined. 

That transliteration of economy leads to a richness of the human spirit and a flying out of the depths of worldly compromise.

If form is a factor that shapes vision, then the designer constructs the bones of the living.

Without design, we collapse into ourselves for a lack of infrastructure and we suffer the loss understanding indicating what we are and where we are going.

Victoria’s Secret: Sexy or Slutty?

Victoria’s Secret has an image problem.

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The Uncanny and Homesick Sexual Longing

As a young man I read an essay by Sigmund Freud called “The Uncanny” that continues to ripen and haunt me year-after-year as I am continually pressed to re-examine the realm of ghosts as wish fulfillment, how unrequited love compels a longing for a return to the womb and why the psychoanalyst becomes the mediator of these aesthetic spirits that chase and terrify us in our waking lives while they visit us in dreams and nightmares.

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Choose Your Eyes or Your Ears

We are celebrating “Deaf Awareness Week” in the USA as we honor the work and achievements of the Deaf on a worldwide scale. 

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Mandatory Writing Test for All Politicians

I am convinced all candidates for public office should be given a timed, public, writing test so we can witness in live time the real logic of their mental process and reasoning.

Do we appreciate their arguments and rationale?

A writing test confirms or disproves if the candidate is true, educated, and appropriately emotionally expressive.

A writing test gives us the best educated insight into the confirmed person beyond the fluff and the handlers and those who “shape the message.”

You cannot hide from your words or the consequences of your thoughts.

In Favor of Contemplation

If one hopes to create something of everlasting worth, one must take deep moments to pause and contemplate the idea in time, space, and proximity to an eternal truth.

Contemplation leads to questions and answers that may not be readily provided.

It is in that chasm between the wondering and the answering that gives us context for caution against living and dying and we too often wage death over the sin of life.

Memes of Belonging

Are we required to join? Are we made to create? It is necessary for us to belong to someone other than ourselves?
What happens when we are carved from each other and caved in a culture from which there is no escape?

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Nothing New Under the Sun and the Cannibalization of Ideas

Is there such a thing as an original idea? Or have all inspirations already been had? Are all thoughts actually the result of cannibalization?

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Normal Discrimination and Average Power

Michel Foucault is one of those certain talents where a quirky mix of genius, talent and savantism all congeal in the mind of one person to shed the powerful glow of meaning and context on the rest of us One of Foucault’s passions in life was his love of words and his research into the power of labels.

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All Performers are Broken

All performers are broken in some unique, profound, way. They seek to heal their broken minds and bodies by becoming someone else and by believing in something other than their own misery.

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