According to Joshua Habursky, a 20-year-old and a junior at the college, the tree first appeared on December 1 in conjunction with AIDS Awareness Day. Habursky, who is the president of the college’s Young Republicans Club, has approached the club as well as campus leadership to voice his concern about the odd holiday commemoration.

The “decorated” Christmas tree is located in “the Hub,” another name for the college’s student center. Rather than colorful ornaments, condoms are hung on its branches. And instead of a beautiful angel, star or Christ at its top, an open condom is placed over the tree’s higher point. Next to it, a sign reads, “AIDS Awareness! Free condoms! Take one!” Students can apparently nab them right off of the tree. -Billy Hallowell

My two cents:
Oh please, dear! We have corporate fat cats taking multi-million dollar bailouts, but the minute we offer a bailout package to the working class the Republicans are up everyone’s ass.

I find myself less engaged in design and more interested in the messages it delivers. Don’t get me wrong, I really do love the beauty of great design. I love to design all aspects of my living experience from a to z. In fact, I guess you could say I’m redesigning my focus on life, and there’s no better place to catalog that experience than right here. I love the discussions that come about when people share their thoughts.

I’ve never really been one for beating around the bush so I don’t expect everything I say here will please most. That’s not my aim. Instead it’s really more of an open forum diary in which people can feel free to read or not read, and comment or not comment. I fully encourage those of opposing views to the things I discuss to chime in. I have, and always will believe there are no absolutes in life. It’s not in our nature to be as such. With that in mind it means that sometimes you will have the chance to enlighten me as I can you.

We are all learners here.

The section that most paws at my sleeve is number 6, which for convenience I’ll post here, but you really should check out the whole talk and the rest of the site.

6
STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED.
I think this idea first occurred to me when I was looking at a marvellous etching of a bull by Picasso. It was an illustration for a story by Balzac called The Hidden Masterpiece. I am sure that you all know it. It is a bull that is expressed in 12 different styles going from [a] very naturalistic version of a bull to an absolutely reductive single line abstraction and everything else along the way. What is clear just from looking at this single print is that style is irrelevant. In every one of these cases, from extreme abstraction to acute naturalism they are extraordinary regardless of the style. It’s absurd to be loyal to a style. It does not deserve your loyalty. I must say that for old design professionals it is a problem because the field is driven by economic consideration more than anything else. Style change is usually linked to economic factors, as all of you know who have read Marx. Also fatigue occurs when people see too much of the same thing too often. So every ten years or so there is a stylistic shift and things are made to look different. Typefaces go in and out of style and the visual system shifts a little bit. If you are around for a long time as a designer, you have an essential problem of what to do. I mean, after all, you have developed a vocabulary, a form that is your own. It is one of the ways that you distinguish yourself from your peers, and establish your identity in the field. How you maintain your own belief system and preferences becomes a real balancing act. The question of whether you pursue change or whether you maintain your own distinct form becomes difficult. We have all seen the work of illustrious practitioners that suddenly look old-fashioned or, more precisely, belonging to another moment in time. And there are sad stories such as the one about Cassandre, arguably the greatest graphic designer of the twentieth century, who couldn’t make a living at the end of his life and committed suicide.
But the point is that anybody who is in this for the long haul has to decide how to respond to change in the zeitgeist. What is it that people now expect that they formerly didn’t want? And how to respond to that desire in a way that doesn’t change your sense of integrity and purpose.

-Milton Glaser

Before I get to my bit I’d like to point out how awesome that in just this one section he has referenced Picasso, Marx, Balzac and more. It just doesn’t seem like this type of ancillary material is as common, regardless of profession, in the American educational system. My wife did point out though that this can also stem from living a privileged life. I asked some people I know, who are currently finishing their undergraduate studies, what type of courses they took outside of their major, and the required core(math, science, etc.). Most of them working middle class, like myself, and the responses I got were not surprising. Some mentioned they don’t really recall them or more interestingly was that they did, but said it was useless. In this case the topic was philosophy, but it’s the opinion of it being useless that intrigued me the most. True, maybe there aren’t jobs on Career Builder for “philosophers” outside academia, but certainly we can assume that the great works of people such as Glaser wouldn’t have been what they were if there were no Marx or Picasso or Kant or Freud. It’s that very limited depth of field that handicaps our way of life. We act on on the ends over the means, but I digress.

When Milton talks about visual shift is when I began to ruminate. I started to think about how we go through shifts in style in regards to typography, clothing, automobiles, homes, language and it got me to thinking. This can also hold true with lifestyle. Recently, I’ve become unsatisfied with the lifestyle of the average American. Not in the sense of material possessions, but rather what it is that we do in life.

“Your born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Til one day you’re up in the rarefied atmosphere, and you’ve forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake son.,” delivered by the magnificent Michael Gambon from the movie Layer Cake about sums it up. The American Dream. I think that the everyday process of typical life in this country has become cumbersome to me, and I’m looking to make a shift. Perhaps this is typical of someone my age, but I’ve noticed this in more than just myself.

Of course, all this might just be normal. To draw from Milton’s talk once more he mentions later that “doubt is better than certainty.,” and “One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.” I strongly believe that this is the cause of much frustration in the human scape. We often try to create absolutes in a world where there is no absolute. Ever. Milton mentions that there is a fine line between skepticism and cynicism, and knowing the difference goes a long way.

I get so much enjoyment out of these pieces. Really.

Let me not forget to point out the mastermind behind it.

So what is my strategy? What’s my market? How much do I sell for? No I’m not proposing that we are selling our selves out, and no I’m not casting stones. These are just questions I think of to help me analyze my own actions. Another thing I’ve thought about is that when you see a person’s life laid out status by status it takes all the work out of being a friend. It’s like when you are talking to a friend of family member that you are going to see tomorrow, and you purposefully cut the conversation short because you want to have something to talk about when you get there. So I ask myself if I see everything that you are doing laid out in a nice little profile am I going to make as much an effort to keep in touch personally? Obviously this will mainly apply to friends that live in the near vicinity as I can’t just hop a jet to wherever-land when I need to catch up with someone. I do think that a majority of the friendships that make the most impact in my life are the ones I see the most or live the closest to, because they’re the ones listening. So what do I propose? I think there is just one way to easily test this theory.

I am going to abstain from all of my networking sites except for this blog and my flickr account for the rest of the year. I want to make it my goal to getting back to making friendship what it used to be. Personal. I will use this blog to catalog my experiences and for my usual goings on. I feel that something really good will come out of this or it will totally bomb and I’m a douche-bag. Wish me luck.

more to come…

Beginning:

I paid off my car and promptly sold it. I have now gone an entire year without a car and I can’t really imagine why it took me that long to get rid of it. Now I absolutely despise driving and am a little worried about moving out of Chicago since I enjoy being able to get around without one. Everything about this has been good. I don’t hit up drive-thrus anymore. I am reducing my carbon footprint. I was also able to use the money to pay off some old bills and best of all I bought a couple of bikes.

As far as design goes since we are always on the subject here, this bike is AWESOME. It slices, it dices and it folds into a sweet little carry-on bag that can go on the EL’ during rush hour. The wife and I took our 3yr old for a 35-mile bike ride up to Illinois State Park and camped out for 3 days.

I have no idea how we packed all that and a 3yr old on two bikes and a toddler trailer, but we did.

Middle:

Aside from the camping trip we had a lot of great times at the beach and I got a big hump of school work done. Speaking of the devil I think I should be within my last two semesters of my undergraduate degree. YES! On a random tangent, I saw this and it made me chuckle then weep.

I don’t know what gen I fall in, but I think we can all relate to this.

End:

It was a much needed wrap to this long, long year. Finished another semester and hopefully only two to go. Had my great holiday visit with family, and I got to take my 3yr old to see Chuck Berry. At 84 I can’t see how he is still hitting the stage and you may have heard that his Chicago performance was cut short due to exhaustion. Regardless, I got to hear some good tunes and see a legend. Although it was on the first of the new year it was a good wrap to 2010 and a pleasant start to 2011.

Happy beginnings to you all.

more to come…

-Richard