3 March

What hill?

I turn 40 next week. “Over the hill” as they say. For someone who had their first existential crisis at age 5, a milestone like this is huge. Bigger than I want it to be. But with age comes wisdom, and my angst has definitely mellowed.

25 hit me like a freight train. Fortunately I was not literally hit by a freight train, as that is just the kind of untimely end I have long feared most. But I was not expecting turning 25 to trigger the kind of fear and dread I had first felt on a dark night when the raspy voice of death first whispered in my ear as a kindergartener, and had not really felt that much since.

For several months after I turned 25 I felt traumatized by death’s unwelcome return. Eventually I began to develop a new perspective on mortality, and I was at peace with the finiteness of my existence for another 15 years.

But now as 40 approaches I once again find myself lying awake in bed at night, staring into the darkness, grasping in the darkness, feeling each second slip past, gone forever, one fewer remaining between this moment and the last.

As I said, my angst has mellowed. It’s not what it was 15 or 35 years ago. But what it lacks in harshness it makes up for in urgency. It used to be easy to look ahead into the vast distance of my life, recognize that the end was out there… somewhere… and fear it but still feel somehow immortal. (“Learning that we’re only immortal for a limited time,” as Neil Peart wrote in the lyrics to the Rush song “Dreamline.”) But now it feels — it is — closer, more imminent.

The average male life expectancy in the United States is 78 years, which means that, statistically speaking, I’m probably more than halfway to the end. Under the best of circumstances I may live more than another 40 years, but I might suffer disease or infirmity for a large portion of that time. Or, I might die in an accident or of a disease at some point within the next 20 to 30 years. I might die tomorrow. That’s always been true, of course, and in some ways I suppose your chance of dying in an accidental death probably bottoms out around 40 — you’re old enough to avoid Darwin Awards-style poor choices, but young enough to still have your wits and your agility.

The biggest thing I am starting to learn as I approach 40 that is helping me cope with this kind of existential downward spiral is a growing understanding of selflessness. I have always been pretty self-centered, I can admit. But when you’ve lived for four decades you do start, a little bit, to see an arc of time greater than the span of your own existence. (Or, if you’re not a selfish jerk like I am, you’ve probably seen things that way for a long time.) You finally start to really get that it’s not all about you, that you’re lucky to have the time you have, and then you just need to get out of the way for the next generation.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t want to relish every moment I have before they’re gone.

Limitations inspire design

What makes great design? Why did design seem to take such a wrong turn in the ’80s and ’90s? What has prompted a partial resurgence of “great” design in recent years? And why am I asking all of these highly subjective questions?

My fascination with design first took hold in the early ’80s, and was largely attributable (along with my love of technology) to my experiences with the Atari 2600. I became obsessed with package design and logos, and I also became obsessed with the art of low-resolution, pixilated on-screen graphics.

My interest in “current” video games tapered off as the ’90s wore on, especially when the 3D polygon-based era began. All the new games just seemed ugly and stupid, even though, in an obvious way, they were more complex and more graphically detailed than the Atari games I loved as a child. Simultaneously, my fascination with logos and package design waned as both seemed to just get more obnoxious and overloaded with swooshes and swirls and gradients and shadows and beveled edges and all of the other excesses technological advances made possible.

I’ve wondered for a while what it was about blocky, bitmapped video game graphics that I found so aesthetically appealing. And, in much the same way, what it was about package design from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s that just seemed so right to me, even though they were a lot simpler, and made using much cruder technology, than what was happening in the “now.”

Finally, I realized it was limitations that were the key to the great designs I admired so much. The designers were up against strict limits to what was possible. Mastering these earlier, more difficult techniques required years of practice and experience. And butting up against those limits to produce something of quality required real creativity. This realization led me to the axiom:

Great design happens when designers’ creativity exceeds the limitations of the technologies they use.

Once I understood this, suddenly it made sense to me why so many of the low-budget shareware games I’d seen for the Mac over the years looked and felt like crap to me, even though on a surface level they were clearly more advanced than those old Atari games: it’s easy to create a game on a modern computer, using modern graphics software and object-oriented programming languages. You don’t have to have any particular skill or knowledge to do so. But, because it’s so easy to do passably, it’s much harder to do really well.

Pitfall! and Super Mario 64: Yes, strangely, I really do prefer the one on the left.

Atari 2600 programmers needed an immense amount of knowledge of the intricacies of the system, and the tricks to exploit its extremely limited, but quirky, technical capabilities. You didn’t get into programming games for the Atari 2600 unless you knew what you were doing. Well, OK… there was plenty of shovelware in the system’s later years, but the ratio of good to crap was much higher among the 700 or so games released during that system’s lifetime than it is for the tens of thousands of mostly worthless games currently available for the iPhone.

So then, what is it that has caused — to some extent — “great” design to re-emerge in recent years, even as technology has advanced even faster than before? I suspect it’s due to a reawakening among designers to the merits of the earlier ways of doing things. Letterpress, for instance, has experienced a massive resurgence of popularity lately. “Retro” design is popping up everywhere. Perhaps it’s just that the hipsters are taking over the world, but I think this renewed awareness of what made mid-century design so great has led to designers re-imposing those limitations on themselves. Technology has advanced far enough now that there’s almost nothing that can’t be done, including recreating the limitations of earlier analog technologies in the digital realm. Think of things like Hipstamatic for the iPhone: it takes your iPhone’s digital photos and makes them look like something from an old point-and-shoot camera from the ’60s. Or look at the background design on Web Designer Wall, a visual style that saw a surge in popularity about a year ago but that’s inspired by watercolor and ink techniques that were especially popular in the ’60s. Or look at video games like The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (among others) that brought a cel-shaded animation style to 3D polygon-based video game design.

These are just a few examples off the top of my head of modern designers imposing limitations on themselves to inspire their designs, now that technology no longer forces those limits directly. If you can do anything, it’s hard to do anything well. It’s too easy to get lazy or to simply lack direction and focus. In the past, technological barriers forced designers to focus. Now, they have to do it for themselves. Fortunately, that’s starting to happen.

Please understand your income tax before you complain about it

Half dollarI found this on Daring Fireball but it’s worth passing on to my minute (!) but loyal (?) readership:

Does ABC News understand how income tax works?

I knew this (aren’t I so smart?) but I suspect a lot of people don’t, and if you’re ranting and raving about taxes, or especially about the Obama tax plan, it’s probably worth a refresher. The relevant quote:

In reality, a family earning $255,000 will pay the higher tax rate only on its last $5,001 in income; the first $249,999 will continue to be taxed at the old rate. So intentionally lowering your income from $255,000 to $249,999 is counter-productive; it will result in a lower after-tax income.

In other words, yes, there are tax brackets, and incomes within the different brackets are taxed at different rates. But you can think of it this way: your total income is divided up into segments based on these brackets, and each of those segments is taxed at the rate for that bracket. So trying to reduce your income to get under the wire of a particular tax bracket is fundamentally misguided.

Love Spatula (I don’t know what it means either)

The first release candidate for the track formerly known as “Bluesy Groovesy” is ready.

As for the title… I have a list I’ve been compiling over the past couple of years (ever since I finished my last solo CD, which was in June 2005) of potential song titles. That’s been the source of most of the titles I’ve used so far in this project. (I’m saving the best few for last… but it’s mostly just about finding a title that seems like a good match for the music.)

Well… I had this one title in the list. “Love Spatula.” I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean, and I can’t remember why or how I came up with it. It seems like it’s probably one of those situations where I misheard someone speaking to me, thought they said “love spatula,” and found the phrase so strangely intriguing that I had to write it down.

At any rate, it seemed fitting for this song, for whatever reason. Enjoy.

Note: To conserve server space, I’m clearing out older versions of the Hors d’Oeuvreture songs. Visit the album page to hear the latest available version of each track!