Jacob All Trades #322

Coworking, Tuesday's Election, Blandification, Slow Dancing, The Sydney Opera House Turns 50, Driving All Over The World, and The Seven-Ten Split

Hello! I usually write more up top here, but the last month has been exhausting with so much violence and death. I’m not going to talk much about the Israel/Hamas conflict in this particular newsletter but I’d like to share a few organizations that I’ve found particularly helpful to follow during this time:

• Standing Together: A grassroots Jewish-Arab movement fighting for peace, equality, and social justice in Israel-Palestine.

• Mothers Against Violence: Jewish and Arab Mothers In Israel.

• Jewish Voice For Peace: American Jews For Ceasefire.

If you know of others, please let me know. The rest of this newsletter will be fairly escapist, with the exception of the very important U.S. election next week. Enjoy!

Jacob

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LET’S CO-WORK TOGETHER

Trying out a new thing - this Wednesday from 9am-10am PST I am hosting an open coworking Zoom. If you want some accountability and/or to get a gut check on anything from me and any other folks who show up, please join.

RSVP using this Google Calendar link. I’ll send everyone who has RSVP’d a Zoom link a few minutes before the event.

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DO SOMETHING

There’s an election on Tuesday and some huge things are at stake (the right to an abortion in Ohio, a possible GOP trifecta in Virginia, and more). If you have an hour, please donate some time to make calls and help turn out during early voting. If you’d rather kick in a few bucks, please do that. Click below for some upcoming GOTV efforts you can jump in on:

And, if you’d like to know what’s on the ballot near you and why it matters, check out BallotReady.org

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CONSUMPTION JUNCTION

This LinkedIn post by legendary graphic designer Erik Spiekermann is so right on the money. IMO are experiencing the 'blandification' of not only brands but of nearly every visual art form. One section reads, “This is the blandification of our world, where fun has to be taken out of the equation because it cannot be quantified. No consumer cares about a company’s internal reorganization, they want to like a brand. When all brands are beige, the beigest one will not win but will be forgotten. The enshittification of our world is run by people who read spreadsheets in bed and look at their smartphones to tell the weather instead of sticking their heads out of the window.” Read the whole post here.

Remember slow dancing?! Well, I had no idea but — apparently — it’s not a thing anymore. It’s also part off an evolution of dancing that has always allowed people to get sexy with each other in a public space (and without getting married). This fantastic episode of the podcast Decoder Ring gets into the surprising history of slow dance and how touching during dancing has been a way to explore romantic and sexual feelings for teens throughout time.

If you know me well, you know I am a very loyal Tim Minchin stan. From seeing him play for dozens of people at the US Comedy Arts Festival (when that was still a thing) to his work on Matilda and Groundhog Day. Tim was commissioned to write a song for the 50th anniversary of the Sydney Opera House and it’s as inspiring as you might imagine.

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A GOOD LONG WATCH

Do you love the song Pure Imagination from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory? Me too. Did you know you could be captivated for 17 minutes while a music nerd breaks down all the fascinating things about the song? I didn’t either!

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CREATIVE RESOURCES

I use Google Drive regularly to manage work files, but one thing I hate about it is that there’s no easy way to see how much space each file takes up — and it’s straight-up impossible to know how much space folders take. Could this potentially be a purposeful design flaw so that you continually have to pay Google for more storage?

Daisy Disk is an affordable ($9.99) app that will show you where your computer is using space. It’s great. AND, it also will do the same thing with Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, and other cloud-based storage systems.

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WORK I AM JEALOUS OF

Drive & Listen which first went viral during the early pandemic was brought to my attention by colleague Joey Jones recently and I am in love. Created by Turkish graduate student Erkam Şeker, the website / art project curates driving footage from all around the world with local radio feeds. In a Lonely Planet interview, Şeker says “I realized that other people around the world must be missing that same experience of being on the road.”

There’s something incredibly soothing about having Drive & Listen on in the background. In fact, it is so up my alley (pun unintended but also not edited) that it actually is very similar to a project I’ve had on my to-do list for a long time.

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HELP ME FIND EXAMPLES OF THE “SEVEN-TEN SPLIT”

I’m working on a project about film titles. Specifically, something I’m referring to as the ‘seven-ten split.’ This is when there are two top-billed actors who need to get equal billing so the title designer (and presumably agents, managers, legal team, etc) uses a solution where two names have equal importance in the design hierarchy.

Typical design hierarchy uses placement, size, color, etc. to direct your eye to the most important elements. With film titles, whoever is on the left is more important than on the right (since we read left to right). In the above example from Wayne’s World, Mike Myers and Dana Carvey are at the same size and weight, but top-billed Myers is on the left. What do you do when two actors both contractually are owed top billing?

Well, left to right is one hierarchy… but top to bottom is another. In this example from BEEF, Steven Yeun is first from left to right… but Ali Wong is first from top to bottom.

Once you see this layout… you’ll see it everywhere. Here’s a title card from Showtime’s Billions:

So, reader, do me a favor: if you see other examples of the seven-ten split in film or TV titles, will you let me know?

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LITERALLY JUST A BRAG

I’ve been applying for grants recently and trying to build them into my artistic practice. I’d like to get to the point where I’m submitting to a dozen or so grants, fellowships, etc each year. As we get toward the end of 2023 I wanted to shout out a few victories and some other things I’ve noticed from this process:

• Rejections hurt less when you’ve got other submissions you’re waiting to hear back from. Always submitting means that even with rejections there’s possibility on the horizon.

• Putting together something for a grant deadline means there is a deadline. For someone like me who has an overabundance of ideas and a complete scarcity of free time, I have learned that external deadlines are often the main reason I finish a project. Even if a pitch gets rejected, I now have a very polished pitch that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

• I got rejected from the LAPL Creator’s Grant (but have a really awesome podcast/webseries pitch about why libraries are awesome that I’d still love to make).

• I submitted a story pitch to one of my fav podcasts and got really positive feedback. Still waiting to hear back officially, but it sounds like there’s a chance I’ll get to contribute to one of my favorite podcasts of all time.

• I pitched to some really amazing production companies this year. Ones that my parents have heard of. There are several projects that still may happen, and the ones that were passed on still yielded really wonderful conversations with thoughtful and creative execs that I’m thrilled to be in touch with.

• Most film festivals are a complete waste of money to submit to. Just put your shit online.

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Alrighty, that’s it for this issue. Feel free to leave a comment or share the newsletter using the links below.

Party on,

Jacob