After years playing it safe in the e-Commerce world (amazon) this project is exactly what I needed. It back to my roots in design, the specialty coffee industry but went so far beyond. A perfect blend of investigating my own Mexican American heritage, rustic southwest vibes, the vibrant colors of Oaxaca and Aztec mythology. A dream project,
Who knows, maybe I’ll actually print some.
Part 1: The Eyes Have it, Part II: Eye Can’t Believe It’s This Bad, Part III: Eye Robot
Ghost machine
Part 1: THE EYES HAVE IT
The 80s vector grid - on the side of vans, arcade games, and, of course, Tron - was the culmination of decades worth of technological development and anxiety rendered down to an empty optimism. The infinite grid vanishing into a horizon of a virtual and digital utopia. A tool for our collective liberation; a smarter future aided by preternatural intelligence.
Versions of the grid arrive in pop culture as early as 2001: a space odyssey, arguably the ur-text for artificial intelligence anxiety. From that point on all computer screens in sci fi have the grid in some form, most literally in Tron, as an alternate game dimension. Cliche as it is, the grid on our beloved trapper keepers of 80s would die in the Matrix, a spiritual successor to 2001: on a long enough timeline Hal will enslave us.
Part 2 - EYE CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S THIS BAD
In the 2021, the promise of the internet and AI is dead, replaced by empty spectacle by vapid charlatans like Elon Musk who uses the potential of tech as P.R. designed to raise another round of funding and secure deals from the military. For what? To burn money in space because it’s the most men of his ilk can imagine; another market for exploitation.
We must ask ourselves what Silicon Valley has done for us with all the data we unknowingly agreed to give away. In what material way has our lives changed? Is our healthcare better? Rent cheaper? Is our energy more efficient? Is water cleaner? Is our environment healthier? Do we work less?
The answer is resoundingly no. These monopolies of the internet have done nothing but damage our concepts of friendship, freedom, mental health, meaning and facilitated genocide, white supremacy and misogyny….and for what? To sell you shit. To sell you shit with the most accuracy. For a handful of ways to order food? For Uber to destroy the taxi market?
We have been house broken by constant dopamine hits, false promises and open fraud.
Part 3 - EYE ROBOT
So what do we do? We are all plugged in now. We are a captive audience and there is no going back. The yeoman farmer of the 1700s had a choice about being a part of the market and maybe the reactionary and fundamentally flawed “back to the land movement” of the 60s was the last gasp of escape.
But the hyper individualism exploited by the internet has no future.
The grid now is the triangulation of ads, surveillance and data that is paving the road to tech feudalism while we endlessly argue and reimagine the past because we have no vision of the future. The tech ghouls don’t need a vision of the future because they are living it, isolated from market consequences, throwing money into space and able to outrun the planet dying.
They have a vision for us; it’s being broken and depressed consumers living and working in a company town they own.
What is our vision?
The COOL ZONE presents: another edition to the poster series no one wanted then and even less want now!
Remember that one time that more Americans died from a single virus than all wars combined and what we learned was that there aren’t enough bodies for politicians and corporations to sacrifice to our completely real and good “free market”economy?
700,000 just isn’t what it used to be!
COOL!
The COOL ZONE presents: another edition to the poster series no one wanted then and even less want it now! SPRING AND WINTER: OF DEATH.
Remember that one time when you had to commit to a bit forever because the world was too stupid to do the right thing….?
During the beginning of the forever pandemic it occurred to me that since I never went to design school there must have been some things I missed. Probably hundreds of things. Maybe thousands. One of those things is typography. It’s always been a struggle. Even though I educated myself on it I’m still insecure about it. Of course, I couldn’t do my own assignment. During the dread and the ongoing collapse of nearly everything I decided I needed a project that was impossible: child-like but engaging, colorful but not insane (arguments to be made), broken but recognizable. A candy colored retreat into childhood that did not ignore everything breaking around it. Could have been worse than this; I could have learned to make sourdough bread.
The COOL ZONE presents: another edition to the poster series no one wanted then and even less want it now! WINTER OF DEATH part 1!
Remember early in that one winter we were on the eve of vaccines, ICUs across the country were filled, and we collectively accepted that 300,000 bodies just isn’t enough to fire anyone over or set anything on fire over? Why would you want to?
300,000 dead Americans just isn’t what it used to be!
Absolutely everyone in charge did the least but did it the best they could so that their friends and cousins in healthcare companies and all corporations couldn’t be sued for 300,000 bodies piling up for no reason by people without jobs and homes!
COOL!
“The COOL ZONE presents: Some posters back at the demand of no one, that you would never want to hang anywhere. SUMMER OF DEATH I & II (III died).
Remember that one summer thousands of people died for no reason? Why would you want to?
Absolutely no one in charge did the best they could!
Cool!”
![SUMMER of DEATH II [Recovered]-01.PNG](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57983bb7e58c62b2f1065190/1604870765711-XKU8CCA17HC88H5WPL0N/SUMMER+of+DEATH+II+%5BRecovered%5D-01.PNG)
Saul Bass homage Poster set designed for the film Lacustre by (full disclosure) great friend, frequent collaborator, and Mexican-In-Charge, Paolo Zuñiga. His film is beautifully shot and incredibly thoughtful and as of this writing finishing up a trip through the film fest circuit. (He chose the second one for his submissions.
(Completed summer of 2020)
Travel Postcard: U.S. HWY89.
The earth has begun to reclaim most of the parking lots in Gray Mountain but for now it remains in the early stages of decay. As I sweat through perfecting a shot a group of people stop to inspect the apocalyptic scene; an abandoned hotel and gas station. Then I hear windows begin to break. It's hard not to be irritated. You can't help but wonder, do they feel comfortable because it's abandoned on indigenous land or do they just feel comfortable? (If you have to ask yes they were and yes, they were).
Over the last 30 years I've passed Gray Mountain a thousand times while traveling to Page. What seemed like a decent business dwindled over the years, parking lots emptied and the vibrant southwestern paint faded. Not long after art work began to appear on the boarded up gas station. Every few years a installation would be completely made anew. Though most of the artist's names or handles are hard to find, @jetsonorama remains a constant presence with large black & white large format prints depicting Diné life. It's a reminder that our assumptions of creative life; a thing thought to be mostly cloistered in large cities, are deeply flawed and the existence of rural and indigenous artists, if not next to a major highway, mostly go unnoticed. The people breaking windows and taking selfies in the abandoned rooms never came near the art work. Maybe to them even if it's on an abandoned building its still just "graffiti".
Win some, lose some.
Youth is wasted on the young. The phrase contains all the mechanics of linear time, all the inevitable one way-ness of it, the push towards whatever is tied up in the choices we can’t understand. In the midst of seemingly limitless powers to abuse yourself, to indulge yourself, it’s clear and painfully obvious that those powers aren’t enough. If we had known what we know as soon-to-be-40 year olds; that our solid ideas about love, friendship and music would fail us in time, we just would have pushed everything harder. Maybe we would have savored it more. Maybe our ignorance saved us.
During the pure exhilaration of youthful excess my twin brother and I met Tariq Mills, a tall, lanky, funny and very talented drummer. He was the most explosive, unpredictable and fearless musician I had met and with him we formed a band to match, an exhausting prog-punk three piece. We practiced, we partied, we loved, we toured, we fought. On our worst days he was still a thrilling musician to watch and some of the best moments I ever had or will ever have on stage were with him and my brother. At the very least I am indebted to him, he helped me connect to music in ways I dreamed about; in ways that were as close to spiritual as I can get.
The last time we saw each other we weren’t on speaking terms. That was 12 years ago now. Despite that I am deeply saddened by news of his passing and my heart goes out to his wife and their son who will be born in April. From the pictures and stories he will hear, I hope he knows that on stage his Dad burned so very bright and gave us all something we can never thank him for.
photos by: Ellen Wright, Rob Queenin, Jessica Marshall, Darrin Armijo-Wardle
A short video portrait of my friend and former co-worker Lisette Barbera. Both of us spent a lot time in the specialty coffee industry and like so many industries it struggles with representation, racism and misogyny. This is just a tiny portion of a great conversation and I suspect in the coming years more and more people will be hearing from Lisette. I can't wait. She recently received a scholarship from the SCA (Specialty Coffee Association) provided to members of the coffee industry who are marginalized by society standards.
This piece was intended to be the beginning of a series of portraits of working class people of color fighting, struggling and creating in the deeply red state of Arizona.
At the end of last year I logged off my social media accounts. The decision was a slow burn as scandal plagued and ethically compromised companies proved time and time again they are uninterested in how their power is used to hurt and misinform. The foundation was dubious to being with; a permanent digital record of the full time job you never asked for: branding yourself everyday with no end in sight and no question if that is healthy. All it took was ten years for these companies to fundamentally change your idea of friendship, family, and your sense of self. All it took was to exploit our seemingly bottomless need to be liked.
RGB-split/glitch-self portrait series created in After Effects.
There are two threads I feel in the dark, one takes me toward self-preservation and, on good days, hope. And on the tough days the other thread takes me to an end like Anthony Bourdain. Like most I knew him through the a screen, through his words and like most can lay no special claim to him. My mind felt the distinct surface of those barriers on last Friday. As I had a drink in his honor, whiskey neat, sitting alone next to the back yard pool watching the light fade on the water. I rambled a bit. An atheist talking to a dead atheist I thought might make him laugh, as it should any good atheist. Prayers to nowhere.
The impulse to wonder what anyone could have done in those final hours is strong. To wonder how a man who curiously devoured life, who filled the last 30 years of his life with more experiences than most of us could given an extra lifetime, who seemed to have achieved that dreaded phrase that Americans are obsessed with: having it all. For depressed people “having it all” can mean greater risk; more people to fail and a deeper darkness. On a micro level, I know the self hate that waits on the other side; when I was musician and I performed the best I could, or after filming when you have wrapped, all that you experienced and achieved for that moment is now gone. It's just you left. The process is over. And then you start wondering if it ever happened at all. It’s like trying to touch fog.
When you are in that hotel room alone that is what the room is made of. The certainty that you can never have that again and it would be better not to try. To not want. To not hold on so tight. I don’t know what he went through in the room but I know on certain days the thread I follow through the fog in my mind leads there. What I focus on is one aspect of Bourdain that truly inspired me: his relentless reinvention and curiosity. He didn’t allow his background or age to keep him from transforming himself, from addict/chef, from chef to writer, from writer to tv host and finally to something bigger - a force that demonstrated that empathy can conquer the fear.
Your first time visiting New Orleans might give you just a hint but doesn't come close. You realize the United States you have built in your mind - the State of whatever region you're in -is an overlay of a more recent past. For most it seems the turn of the century is as "old timey" as it gets. New Orleans can't or more accurately won't- reconstruct the influence of indigenous, African, Spanish and French culture to a homogenized, easy narrative despite white supremacy's best efforts.
Where New Orleans gives you a hint of where the past and future seems to live simultaneously, Cuba seems to exist in these extremes and it's stunning. Walking through Havana, or even by way of a "yank tank", it’s time travel of the order that the best science fiction aspires to. French colonial architecture juxtaposed against 57 Chevys, the skeletons of new hotels in foreground of century old embattlements, brand new Chinese-made buses rolling through tobacco fields passing horse drawn carriages. It's easy to call it a time capsule, some living breathing anomaly, but that dismisses an entire island in the midst of profound decisions about it's future and misses the struggle that is ahead.
In the weeks prior to my trip a lot of people suddenly seemed to have expert level opinions of the island and grave concerns of Cuba "changing". Anyone who travels there, myself included, are why new hotels are being built and why a Starbucks could end up there. I don't have answers for that. But as I have witnessed how unbelievably repulsive Americans behave in Mexico I know no one wants that. Cuba needs to do the best thing for Cuba.
As an extremely drunk American who cornered me at a bar famous for Hemingway being a humorless drunk at detailed partying through Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba, stock piling rum and cigars for upper management at his company. I can imagine most Cubans don’t want their country to be a drunken pit stop on some boring dudes mission to impress his boss.
