Thought Patterns
by Emanuel
I was impressed by the fact that Vancouver’s Francophone Summer Festival had the insight to invite such great bands as Karkwa and Malajube rather than the usual more “traditional” Quebec bands/acts. Consequently, it was my first time attending the annual live concert and I was not disappointed by the two opening acts, which were to be followed by Pierre Lapointe, to whom I did not pay attention.
Of course, Malajube was a rather obvious choice considering their acclaimed international success that has transcended language barriers. What was interesting is that they opened the concert at 17h sharp, playing in front of a tiny crowd, as it was still quite early. They are a well-oiled tour machine and played heavier than what you may find on their albums. Furthermore, the vocals were not as toned down as on their studio recordings so all in all it was a somewhat different sound, which I enjoyed very much.
Karkwa was who I came to see and they did not let me down, although you could tell they had less stage experience. Lead singer-guitarist Louis-Jean Cormier had a great presence and with the help of keyboardist François Lafontaine communicated great energy. They also chose to play heavier versions of their songs, which I found quite appropriate considering it was a live outdoor show. Their performance lived up to their name, which is according to Wikipedia a phonetic rendering of carquois, the French term for a quiver of arrows. Sharp and plentiful, that was Karkwa.
The only downside to these shows is that I now wish I had live recordings to listen to instead of only their studio albums. Hint, hint. Anyone listening?
Conscientization by dynamic visualization of how fast life goes by, depicted by products, people or blog posts (the irony). This screen grab above shows the amount of plastic cups used by airlines per second (47) and the number of blog posts published per second (19, or is that 20 now?). Go build your own with one of the many different options available on the site, or create your own statistic with your own data.
so_many_a_second is a visualizer that shows mondial statistics on a human scale.
Depicting the ongoing stream of events, this application tries to get the user in touch with the emotional actuality of these objective data.
Original, simple and straight to the point.
Art can be so powerful, as is this image above from Filippo Minelli. Using the ‘CTRL+ALT+DELETE’ that all Windows user are just too familiar with on Israel’s wall is genius. I recently discovered Filippo Minelli’s work and he has some very interesting ideas all while not taking himself too seriously, as demonstrated by one of my favorite pieces titled “It’s so conceptual“. Well worth checking out his work.
One of his current series features a take on Google’s propensity to do Google-everything and setting these ironic suggestions in context, such as this image of Google-answers, set in Notre-Dame. What would you ask?
The rest of the on-going series can be found on his site.
I’ve already posted about my climb up to my University in the past and I thought I would get it in pictures since it’s been beautiful these past few weeks. I’ve been enjoying the climb more and more on my fixed gear and of course that’s much easier when I’m not climbing under light drizzle. It makes the descent more enjoyable as well.
Here it is:
Nice start to my mornings, check out the gradient profile: short but mad steep.
Yeah that’s right, there’s some 14% gradient in there. It’s short so its not that bad except for the fact that I’ve got three similar short bursts to do up some steep hills like this one in the first 5 minutes of my commute, not a mellow warm-up: I’m mashing right out of the gates!
It takes me roughly 20 minutes to get to the bottom of Burnaby Mountain. Going up to Simon Fraser University; here’s the climb profile.
It’s a nice 3.5-4K climb that I breakdown in these photos.
The climb is steady right as you get going yet you can’t find your tempo right away as you might still need to stop for the traffic light. In any case, you know that the first curve will immediately let you know how your legs are doing today.
There’s quite a bit of traffic on this climb so you need to hug the right and this first turn is steep. Usually at this point I am already wondering why I do this without gears…but that thought only lasts for a fraction of a second!
The gradient is steady after the turn and at this point I just put my head down and hammer down. Here’s another difference with riding this climb on my fixie: on my roadie the stiff bike shoes are really good for energy transmission while on my fixie, in my everyday shoes, I can feel the power being lost. I’d prefer to ride my fixie with my clip-ins but I’m worried about theft. I’m working on a storage solution at the University so I can change that.
Still going steady.
The bus stop, when unnocupied, offers some room to swerve a bit and take a mini-breather, if you need it.
This is the last stretch of the first third of the climb. There’s a mellower section coming up so you can power-up again to finish this section strong.
This section mellows out as it it the entrance to the Burnaby Mountain Conservatory so it’s usually nice to be able to get the cadence back up. Not for long though.
This second segment is actually shorter but the road is in worse shape so depending on traffic it might be a bit annoying as you don’t really want to hug the right but you might just have to.
The traffic lights offer a false sense of accomplishment as you’re not there yet but it’s the chance to once again get the cadence up and prepare for the last third of the climb. It’s usually around this point that I get ambitious and that I tell myself that if I wasn’t heading to class, that I’d turn around and do the climb again. But there’s still tomorrow…so to campus I continue on.
This portion has some messed up pavement so I’ll be riding almost in the middle of the right lane. That’s OK since by this point in the climb most drivers will respect the fact that you’re still on your bike and give you a break. Ha, I guess you don’t know how easy it really is until you’ve done it a few times.
Another classic curve that would be a good spot for an attack if in a race: steep and you can quickly look like you’ve put some distance into your followers. As for me in my climb, I pretend I’m trying to stay in someone’s wheel as they attack and are dictating the pace.
The light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. That last curve up ahead is where it opens up revealing the campus. One time, they were doing traffic control on this straightaway with one of those sign that tells you how fast you are driving. Two guys were sitting around monitoring the process and as I rode by I joked with them as my speed didn’t come up on the sign.
When the times comes, it’s back down so I can do it all again tomorrow. High RPMs and the reason why I went back to a brake on my fixie…it would simply be stupid to go through a tire a week to handle this descent.
One lazy but early Sunday foggy morning a few years ago I was going up Burnside from our NW 21st pad and shot a few photos. I was glad to have my camera with me while heading towards a new breakfast spot I’d been wanting to check out. These photos are some of my favorite shots from my year living in Portland, Oregon. It’s not always this foggy, of course.
I’m not sure how these would have turned out if I had been shooting digital at the time. I am really glad that I got these shots on film, there’s a feeling that I think would have been lost in digital format.
That’s it, simply a few photos.
Ferry.
Bridge.
Park.
My preferred choice for this photograph was of course black and white, hence why it was originally posted this way. But what do you prefer? Do you think that color would enhance the picture of Mount Currie or that rather the black and white finish adds drama to the imposing power of the mountain?
You will find here both versions so you can make up your mind and, as I’ve been asked, I could also provide you with a high definition file so you can have my Mount Currie photograph printed for your everyday viewing pleasure if you just so desired.
The original:
Color version:
Paper Magazine had a great idea for its May issue: rebranding the U.S. of A. Here’s the editor’s brief:
HOW WOULD YOU REBRAND AMERICA??? (we certainly need it desperately!) How would you make people love us again? How would you change our brand image? Our perception abroad? How could you project our future to our citizens? If America had a new ad campaign, what would it look like?
This was sent out to Alex Bogusky, Dan Wieden, Ivan Chermayeff, Kevin Roberts, Andy Spade, Shepard Fairey, Ron English, Peter Buchanan-Smith, Steve Powers, Chris Johanson, Jonathan Horowitz, Mike Mills, Geoff McFetridge, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Alex Kalman and I’ve selected the pieces that caught my attention. I had the chance to work with Canadian-born Los Angeles-based Geoff McFetridge before and I have great memories of the collaboration.
Pay attention to the artist’s comments as they are critical to explaining what they had in mind.
W+K12, a creative school based in Portland, Oregon, is an experiment launched by design agency Wieden+Kennedy -- its designers, writers and strategic thinkers collaborate on client projects under the guidance of managing director Byron Oshiro and creative directors Tyler Whisnand and Hal Curtis.
"Lincoln is very much a man for these times, his beliefs and values hold strong to this day. I was thinking of a way to give a new iconic value to the lowly penny. American history is an interesting way to describe what America is like today. I like to think there is a little bit of Lincoln in all Americans. I also thought it was funny to mess with the American flag as a design exercise. I liked that the idea of endlessly designing the flag is both disrespectful and optimistic."
"My dream is for all Americans to reach out to the world and inspire everyone they touch to come together and rebuild a new world of optimism, joy and shared responsibility. Actions speak louder than ads."
"My dream is for all Americans to reach out to the world and inspire everyone they touch to come together and rebuild a new world of optimism, joy and shared responsibility. Actions speak louder than ads."
"Che Guevara has become T-shirt shorthand for counterculture -- most people in a Che T are oblivious to who he really was and are just celebrating the rebel in us all. In reality, Che went from being a doctor to a murderer in a wrongheaded, desperate attempt to change the world. The Communist Revolution he believed in didn't work -- and were he alive today, he would have to face that fact. Knowing that, the question is: Who would Che wear on his T-shirt? Who and what would (or could) he put his faith in?"
While winning a 4th World Cup Futból title might have brought out the masses of Italians everywhere around the World, the Giro is the sporting event they truly dominate. One of the three events of cycling’s Triple Crown with the Tour and La Vuelta, the Giro is in its centennial year in 2009 and is being raced for the 92nd time.
Of these races, 65 editions have been won by Italians, a very impressive track record if you take into consideration that the French have won the Tour ‘only’ 36 times and Spaniards 28 times La Vuelta. This year’s contenders is stacked and will mark the first time in Lance Armstrong’s career that he participates in the Giro, although he has stated to be there to work for Levi. Cycling’s greatest champions like Indurain, Anquetil, Merckx, Coppi and Hinault have all left their mark on the Giro as well as the Tour and this has always been a blemish on Lance’s record for cycling purists. This most likely won’t be the year that changes.
Here’s the centennial route, enjoy, and get out there riding!
Perhaps it has to do with several years of seeing Mount Currie first thing after waking up everyday but I find this mountain particularly powerful. I felt the urge to go and see it recently and try to capture some of this power so I could take it with me and reminisce. This photograph is one of my attempts although there’s nothing like the real thing.
It still had quite some snow on it last week yet nothing like a mid-winter Currie with its tempting yet perhaps impossible lines. Countless mornings were spent drinking my coffee or stretching while staring it down. I always felt that it was a great inspiration for the upcoming shred day, my time spent with Mount Currie was like some kind of respectful homage to the mountains that were going to let me shred them that day. Even on the days were it would hide in the clouds, perhaps nursing a headache from a night of binge snowing, which was much to my delight, its power was felt. Far from being a solitary experience, I also shared the Currie with close friends – when they woke up…
The years spent in Pemberton, B.C. were punctuated by varying stages of Mount Currie’s seasons and although I never got around to getting the much-talked-about helicopter drop so I could at last shred the line I’d eyed all those mornings, I still feel like a part of me is with Mount Currie forever. And vice versa.
For those who are a bit geographically challenged and aren’t sure where Mount Currie is situated, here’s some help from the folks at Google Maps.
Of course many will say that this was to be expected yet I can’t help but feel disappointed. From the weekend’s NY Times:
The Obama administration sat by last week as 12 Senate Democrats joined 39 Senate Republicans to block a vote on an amendment that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to modify troubled mortgages.
Senator Obama campaigned on the provision. And President Obama made its passage part of his antiforeclosure plan. It would have been a very useful prod to get lenders to rework bad loans rather than leaving the modification to a judge.
But when the time came to stand up to the banking lobbies and cajole yes votes from reluctant senators — the White House didn’t. When the measure failed, there wasn’t even a statement of regret.
While Obama and his economic team may have averted the worse of the crisis so far, they have yet to turn things around as the May 3rd editorial points out.
It had to be done and I at last got around to it. Complete strip down of my beloved road bike from the defunct GT Team Lotto which I only got because of the bankruptcy of the brand in 2001. There’s no way I would have gotten such a nice bike without the failure of GT, so I guess I should be thankful for their downfall although it is quite interesting to read about how the GT Team Lotto came together 6 weeks (!) before the 1999 Tour. The Easton 6061 aluminum frame I have is the same frame the Team had and it feels great with a stiffness that is hard to beat. Throw on there an Ultegra group for everything with some Mavic Classic Pros and you’ve got a sweet ride.
I got my first road bike when I was in my teens and although it might not have been what I dreamed of at the time – a Bianchi with a Campagnolo groupo is what every kid wanted – it got me some good rides. I still remember my first bike cleats that would lock into the pedals over which you would strap down the leather. Crashing in those left you with no options as you were NOT getting out of your pedals. Viva clip-ins.
Anyhow, I’ve gutted my bike and changed all cables, given it a new chain and spent a lot of time getting its lost shine back. I’m impressed on how well my Ultegra groupo is standing the test of time. The most difficult to scrub off was actually old calcified sweat on the front derailleur and my break levers, most likely from my winter indoor spins and I wonder if that’s only happened to me or if anyone knows of a trick to clean this easily? I’ll be riding my bike like this for a short time and the next investment will be a new saddle, something stiffer so I can get more out of my accelerations and climbing. Yeah, I know, that will be the difference that will really push my performance over the top…
This is the last post on the subject of sticker designs I came up with during my teens for my skateboard/snowboard shop. It’s been interesting for me to recall the context in which I was coming up with these designs, specially since this was a long time ago and computers were not as accessible as they are today.
This fourth version saw me discover typography design as I had a good friend who was studying industrial design and gave me access to many books on typography design, and availability of fonts at the time. I’m not trying to say that this type selection is very sophisticated but rather that it was my first step in exploring the power of typography design, and what different impact it can have on designs. I wish I had some of the alternatives I was considering at the time as I’m certain those would have been enlightening with respect to the chosen font. Anyhow, based on these books, I remember use tracing paper and a photocopier to design this last sticker, spending some time in the Cegep de Sainte-Foy’s Industrial Design classroom with my good friend François. The circles here have a pretty basic purpose as they support the type and give them a reference point as well as a contrasting color for increased visual impact.
Looking back, I’m quite pleased with my color selection as well. The evolution of the stickers for my shop depict an interesting time in skateboarding and although this one might not be as obvious as the others in marking its time, it was omnipresent as I also had my car painted up with the logo on the hood with additional designs on the side panels. There was no more driving around unnoticed! I wish I had some photos of the car with the logos, that’s something I’m going to have to find…
Sticker #4
Here’s another great cover from a recent issue of The Economist; this one utilized Obama’s G20 speech on nuclear weapons and did an incredible job with the layout. Imagination: powerful both for the concept and the content at hand. This led me to gather some other interesting covers of The Economist, featured below, as they have often done a good job of capturing timely issues in a very illustrative manner.
Furthermore, I found the Magazine Publishers of America Top 40 covers of the last 40 years with some stunning covers, one which helped put another recent The Economist cover into context. It was The Economist’s take on Saul Steinberg’s 1976 classic New Yorker cover, View of the World from 9th Avenue, which ‘represent[s] Manhattan’s telescoped perception of the country beyond the Hudson River. The cartoon showed the supposed limited mental geography of Manhattanites’.
The Economist’s version, portraying what could be the Chinese’s limited view of the World:
Another amazing cover on the Top 40 list is this post-9/11 New Yorker cover, which
‘repositioned Art Spiegelmans silhouettes, inspired by Ad Reinhardt’s black-on-black paintings, so that the north tower’s antenna breaks the “W” of the magazine’s logo. Spiegelman wanted to see the emptiness, and find the awful/awe-filled image of all that disappeared the on 9/11. The silhouetted Twin Towers were printed in a fifth, black ink, on a field of black made up of the standard four color printing inks. An overprinted clear varnish helps create the ghost images that linger, insisting on their presence through the blackness.
Finally, here is a limited selection of some of the past year’s great The Economist covers:
It’s been too long since I’ve been there but my mind finds itself drifting into the line-up anyhow. Most likely because it’s a good mental escape from all my exams of late. One more to go. This amazing duck dive photo is of Wayne Levin and you should go check his photography out. Powerful.
Speaking of powerful, have you ever wondered what it would be like to be out at Jaws? I’ve never considered it myself although I’ve been as close as the launch spot to it on the Island of Maui, in the sugar cane fields. I am nowhere anything close to the surfer I would need to be to go there, and I will never be but now I can get pretty close. And you can to. This pretty cool aerial view allows you to zoom in really close. OK, it’s on a ‘small’ Jaws day but so what, it’s still the closest you’ll most likely ever get.
Here’s another incredible photo from Wayne Levin.
Ironman competitors & fish
Rare and few are the shows I feel compelled to catch when they air. As a matter of fact, I can’t recall what was the last one. Maybe something that aired when I was a young teen? 30 Rock is the show that has me fiend-like, aching for the 22 minutes to last longer so I can get my fix.
Created by Tina Fey, who joins a long list of SNL stars to make it big outside the Saturday Night arena, the show has a great variety of enticing characters, often outdoing each other from one show to the next if it isn’t during the same episode. Not only is Alec Baldwin simply amazing and the quirky Tina Fey outlandish in her role as Liz Lemon, but Tracy Morgan, aka Tracy Jordan, is as unpredictable as he is real. Hard to tell where the character starts and the person ends.
Check out this clip of the real Tracy on a Chicago talk-show as he’s in town to promote his stand-up shows. Holla at your peeps! Will the real Tracy please stand-up!
To allow for some context, this post is the third in a series of posts about the different stickers that were produced for my skateboard/snowboard shop when I was in my teens. These posts were sparked by the fact that I managed to get my hands on a old issue of TWS Skateboarding in which the shop and myself were featured, and so began the trip down memory lane.
This version was the third sticker I produced for the shop, and once again, it is very much a reflection of the period. We were right in the middle of the World Industries ‘stealing’ graphics from everyone era and so it was simply “the” thing to do. You can’t really blame me for such an obvious choice as the King of Beers, right? I was a teenager enjoying life to the fullest, skateboarding and snowboarding tons while working hard at making my shop/skatepark stay on top of the game while completing CEGEP (Québec’s equivalent of Junior College). Those were good hectic years with plenty of late-night sessions at the park followed by hommages paid to the Anheuser-Busch clan.
Sticker #3
We had gotten past the need for information overload by this time as the word had spread and the skatepark was pretty well known so the objective of this sticker was now to compete against some other shops that by this time had sprung up. It was about image. Of course all the best skaters of the area were sponsored by the shop so that was a big help, although they were also at times our worst enemies (the lesson here is that you can NEVER make everyone happy).
The substitutions on the sticker were made in a very simple manner, and viewed in today’s everyone-has-photoshop times, they look rather primitive. But nobody really took notice and the mass amounts of stickers flowing through the shop kept going, we were still getting kids coming asking to buy large quantities of the sticker, well in the hundreds. This was specially true of kids coming to the shop/park from areas outside of Québec City. I always thought that it was really cool to get such support and I got to meet so many cool skaters from all over the province, many of which who became friends.
The Imperial Vice Presidency
Shadow President
Co-President
Deputy President
Many variations of the above have been used over the years to describe Cheney’s Vice-Presidency and whichever you might think best captures the reality of the 8 Bush years, no recollection of Cheney’s legacy can be complete without reading Angler by Barton Gellman of the Washington Post.
The title of the book & series, Angler, refers to the code-name given to Cheney by security services with an obvious link to Cheney’s love of fishing. For those like myself who missed the Pulitzer winning series in the Post, this read was all new material, and riveting it was. In Gellman’s own words:
Cheney reshaped national security law, expanded the prerogatives of the executive branch, midwifed the birth of domestic espionage, rewrote the president’s tax bill, shifted the course of a river out west, shut down negotiations with North Korea, and had a major role in bringing war to Iraq.
A Vincent Laforet photo
The above photo was shot by Vincent Laforet, the same photographer featured in my previous surfing post, showcasing the versatility of this amazing lensman.
Back to the book, and to quote an excellent review on Powell’s web site: “Gellman explains how it happened, step by step, machination by machination, all of it unfolding with the logic of a one-man conspiracy.” I will direct you towards some other equally well-written reviews (The New Yorker, The NY Times, The New York Book Review) for you to judge if you should read this book, but, as it is also said in the same Powell review:
Cheney abused power, but he was free of the petty corruptions that have tainted so many other powerful men. “Cheney believed that the country was in mortal danger and that he knew better than anyone else how to avert it,” Gellman concludes. It will be some years before we can judge how right he was.
As for the time being, allow yourself the read so that you can judge yourself. The access the author had to Cheney’s staff was unparalleled, and now with all of the Vice-President’s documents sealed, it will be a long time before further light can be shed on all of Cheney’s behind the scenes highly influential actions.
Everyday I get to enjoy the view from campus. I really enjoy the perspective we have of the North Shore mountains with the frequent climatic variations notorious for this part of the world. Simon Fraser University’s main campus is located at the top of Burnaby mountain and I simply wanted to share a photo I took last week after one of this winter’s many snowfalls.
In the Spring/Summer, you can often find me on this patio catching up on my readings while enjoying the view.
View from Simon Fraser University, West Mall Complex
Soon enough it will be the time of the year when I start heading out on my fixed gear and wander through the city in search of interesting photos to snap. Here’s one I dug out of the archives, it’s from last summer and was taken during what I overheard some fellow Vancouverites refer to as a ‘heat wave’, although it barely got up to 30C and evenings still featured the cool West Coast ocean breeze.
Nothing like East Coast summers but still hot enough to warrant summertime hydrant cool downs.
The style of this skateboarder is really indicative of the era during which we opened the indoor park. This stylish frontside air could have been Chris Miller but it’s actually Nicky Guerrero, the Danish vert skater. Moving on from our successful first sticker, we wanted to make sure that the message about our park would be communicated by the new sticker. Since the park was mostly ramps, also indicative of the era, a vert skater was certain to capture the imagination of all skateboarders.
Also featured is my clumsy attempt at typo design, yet another indication of the times, since personal computers had not yet infiltrated our daily lives, nor was design software easily accessible at the time (I believe the first design software I used was FreeHand, but that was much later, and furthermore, that’s another conversation).
This sticker is my least favorite of all of our stickers, and the reason why is the cramming of a lot of information on it: the new indoor park, the address (you must find the park to skate the park, right?) as well as our booming snowboard and phone-order businesses. The result is not very visually pleasing but, in a pre-internet era, perhaps it was necessary.
Sticker #2
Slightly of better quality, this sticker was better at handling the weather but no that much…indeed, all the elements were printed on a clear layer which was overlaid on the white background and they would sometimes separate, leaving the white background firmly stuck on whatever surface it happened to be on but with nothing else. Only after having several thousand stickers printed is when we realized this little issue so we had to roll with it…but we did make two other color versions with the hopes of having solved the issue, but to no avail. The two other color versions, collector editions if there ever were any, were white & blue as well as red & blue.
Another era was to be represented on our third sticker, which I’ll cover in an upcoming post.
Perfect HD surfing delivered flawlessly over the interwebs and shot by a digital SLR photo camera, take that television! I must have watched Vincent Laforet’s latest clip over a dozen times since I was put on to it by a friend, and I’ve now learned to only do so prepared to wipe the drool off my keyboard so impressive is the cinematography camera work!
Pro photographer Vincent Laforet spent some time in Hawai’i with Jamie O’Brien shooting HD film sequences with Canon’s new 5D Mark II and the results are breathtaking, both from a camera work angle as from a surfing angle (BackDoor switchfoot, BS 540).
Not your typical surf photographer,
Vincent was recognized as one of the “100 Most Influential People in Photography” by American Photo Magazine in 2005 and was named one of the “30 photographers to watch under 30″ by PDN in 2002. He and four other photographers were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography for their post-9/11 coverage overseas in 2002.
he nonetheless brings to the table, in my opinion, a game-changing approach to surf photography. I look forward to seeing more from him, as well as from other wildly innovative ideas in the world of surf documentation.
The title does not refer to what you might think (it’s actually been quite sunny this winter). It has to do with Canada’s poorest zip code, the Downtown East Side and what a few police officers have been doing about educating the youth of the dangers of ending up there. I just discovered the ‘Through a Blue Lens’ documentary available on YouTube and it’s worth watching if you want to get a realistic idea of what life is like down there. It’s produced by a few police officers that call themselves the Odd Squad and from the look of it, they’re doing some really good things in the community. Their mission is to produce ‘reality-based documentaries to give youth the knowledge to avoid the pitfalls of drug abuse’.
While this past week featured a lot of press about the upcoming Olympic Games in Vancouver, I thought The Globe and Mail did a good job of using the timing to feature ‘Canada’s Slum: The Fix‘. It’s worth some reading if you’re interested in the subject as there’s a lot of information there. Here’s a excerpt I found representative:
“My drug of choice is more,” he says — more of whatever is available.
Asked if he is trapped on the Eastside because of drugs, he says: “No. Poverty did that. We live in a shithole. I mean, who wouldn’t want to get high down here?”
I’ve posted about the topic before with specific regards to some of the most inspiring ideas on the subject. It’ll be interesting to see how this will play out during the Olympics.
One of the first things I needed to do once I had the skate shop going was to get some stickers made. What could be of any more importance than that? This was going to spread the word and let people know that we wished the shop to help build the skate community from now on. And it had to be eye catching as to make sure anyone who skateboarded would know where to find us, which might sound obvious now but back then, in the summer/fall of 1988, skateboarding was much more obscure than it is now.
There’s a funny quote that I’ve seen around many times that says that one of the best things about being sponsored is the free stickers. Well the sticker also had to be produced cheaply enough so that we could give a bunch of them away. At this point in time I had already owned a TRS-80 computer that would take 20 minutes to load a game of pong from audio cassettes, but designing stickers on this computer was out of the question, clearly not as accessible as it might be today on any given computer. Furthermore, I was not artistically inclined and I had never done anything like it, where to start?
For anyone who skateboarded during that era, the design of the sticker is obvious, we simply used one of the best selling graphics of the time – the Vision Gator – and inserted our basic info. It was an amazing success and was most likely the first contact many had with stickers as we quickly had to start selling them since people wanted hundreds of them at a time. What we did is that we’d give them out for free, like up to five per person, but then if someone wanted 25 or 100, and it happened way more often that I would have ever thought, we’d sell them at cost, whatever that was at the time. It was like people wanted their own little piece of the skate scene. It was a pretty sweet feeling to cruise around the city in my teens and see stickers from the shop at bus stops, on buses and of course, on skateboarders decks.
Sticker #1
For cost minimization reasons, the stickers were printed on paper rather than on vinyl so they did not fare so well in long Quebec winters when exposed to the harsh conditions. That was a downside for sure, specially since we were about to start selling our first snowboards at the shop and that we wanted the love to spread to the snow as well. In any case, we became so associated with this visual that we kept it for a while, well after Gator had moved on to other graphics. Looking at it today, I think it still works. I really enjoy the simplicity of it as well as the visual impact it provides as you’d recognize this anywhere even if only glimpsed from the corner of your eye, the bright orange definitely helping. Who would have guessed that this design project would be only the first of many to come.
More on the other shop stickers to come, stay tuned.
Notice the question mark. I’m most definitely not the only person asking this question but I heard a very interesting viewpoint this week that I think merits more attention. Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School was a guest on the January 29th edition of one of my favorite shows, Bloomberg‘s ‘On the Economy’ podcasts, during which Tom Keene ‘taps the best minds in Economics’, and Porter, after discussing the Obama stimulus plan goes on to tackle the issue of health care in the United States.
The interesting premise of his opinion, beyond the discussion of universal coverage and insurance issues, is whether or not the health care system as it currently operates creates value. His answer is that it does not and you can see for yourself if you think about what health outcomes are generated by the important expenditure on health care. Does the system create value in the sense of better health or does it rather encourage more complex treatment by its financial incentives towards more intrusive interventions? The point is that the health care system is misaligned with our values and that the delivery of health care will pay a doctor less if he finds a way to solve a health issue in a less complicated, less invasive way. I find this point about incentives very interesting and topical given the current economic situation we’re in.
Remember that the current state of the economy initiated with a ‘credit crunch’, which was brought about by misaligned incentives and that the Department of the Treasury still doesn’t know how to price the assets on the insolvent banks’ balance sheets. Banks were making money out of thin air (finance still recently represented the largest portion of profits in GDP in the US, that is the movement of assets where no only monetary value is created out of ‘thin air’) and the responsibility that used to come with credit was no longer aligned with making solvent loans that one day would be paid back but rather making loans simply to repackage them into complex financial instruments to be sold at profit to other financial institutions, and so on. There is a lot of the responsibility of the current situation that falls back onto incentives being disconnected with our ‘values’, or specifically in this case our values of understanding and correctly pricing risk.
To conclude about health care, I found the real insightful point made by Porter to be that the customer (patient) is not the central focus of the system. It sounds really obvious but I believe that it offers a fresh way of framing the issue, although not necessarily easier to solve. The issue is not all about universal coverage but rather what do you do if universal coverage is achieved since the misaligned system would still be the infrastructure patients would have to deal with.
As you might recall, last August I ran with the World in the Nike Human 10K Race. Other than a feel-good event aiming to get a million people to run a 10K together, we were also raising funds for one of three charities of our choice. Mine was the United Nations’ Refugee Agency nine million program and I recently received the news that $1 Million had been raised.
While this is infinitely small in comparison to the numbers thrown around these last months for bailouts and stimulus packages around the world, I believe that this million will have an impact on some of the children who most need it.
Again:
The ninemillion.org campaign was created in 2006 by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) in partnership with Nike and Microsoft.
The goal of the campaign is to give more than nine million children better access to education, sport and technology by 2010.
The ninemillion.org website exists to raise funds, but also to give voice to those who often go unheard, allowing visitors to see pictures of the camps where children pass much of their lives, read refugee children’s stories and understand what refugee children’s lives are like.
Our community encourages people to talk about the issues and about how they are helping.