Kamikaze Dreaming
An anti-resume
When theres nothing left to burn,
you have to set yourself on fire-Douglas Campbell, Your Ex-Lover Is Dead.
I recently got a warm introduction through a twitter friend to a woman looking to hire a designer. We had a great conversation, but after I sent over my portfolio she told me that my visual designs are “objectively off-putting to most people” and “kinda shitty”. Unfortunately I think it’s a fairly accurate assessment. It almost seemed like she wanted to hire me anyways, but her team vetoed my application.
I haven’t worked a real job, other than a sporadic trickle of freelance gigs, since 2019. Thinking too hard about my career makes me feel unimaginably bad about myself.
The woman surprised me by providing an intro to someone else looking to hire for his startup. It came with a small caveat: I was told that the man was looking for someone “hardcore”.
hardcore
what could it mean?
I had no intention of studying design because I honestly did not know what it was. But somehow, to the shock of my parents and teachers, I won a full scholarship for it. In the summer before classes started I borrowed every book the Vancouver island library network had on graphic design. I read a history of typography, where I learned that Eric Gill (the designer of “Gill Sans”—used across British life on their government publications, street signage, and on the BBC) regularly had sex with his daughters and dog, and claimed the shape of an erect penis was “excellent in the mouth”. I learned that font designers could aspire to become as famous as regional game show hosts.
The best book by far was “Design Anarchy” written by the team at adbusters, which outlined an extreme anti-corporate grungy mixed media aesthetic where they would do things like take existing makeup ads and scribble over them with sharpies and make that the cover of the magazine.
Instead of the picturesque campus experience of the universities my friends got into with their better grades, our school was in a sad burnaby office park. My grandma paid my rent but I only had $200 a month left over for food, so I mostly ate potatoes and cans of tuna. Me and my classmates smoked weed in the parking lot and pulled all nighters working on our assignments. It was an accelerated program set at a brutal pace, and my classmates that couldn’t keep up failed out of the program: racked with debt and with no job prospects. They had to implement rules that students weren’t allowed to sleep on campus, and were required to bathe themselves regularly.
But some of my teachers were the former creative directors of adbusters! Wowee!
I graduated in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and my parents were going through bankruptcy in the wake of their failed business, so my home life wasn’t great to put it mildly. I abandoned my plans to go back to school for computer science and grinded out spec projects until I managed to get lucky. When I moved to the city for my first job I was dead broke. My school featured one of my designs on a billboard, for which they paid me nothing, and I literally didn’t have the two dollars to pay for the train to go see it so I had to hop the turnstile. I slept on the floor of a hotel room that one of my mom’s friends was having paid for by WorkSafe BC. In most ways I was a somewhat insanely poor choice as a hire because I did not know how to design software, but I threw myself at the problem.
if theres one thing i know how to do it’s throw myself at a problem.
And then those adbusters guys agreed to hire me! They paid me just enough for a room in a hostel off of east hastings street, and I slammed myself against problem after problem. Hey man we need someone who can do sound editing, or video color correction, or motion graphics. Can you take a crack at it? I would pirate lynda.com courses for software I’d never used in creative fields I’d never worked in, and blast through them at 2x speed. In the course of about three days I’d be good enough to cobble together something about 80% of the way towards what an average professional in that field might be able to provide for us.
I was on fire
The project we were working on—an interactive documentary called Welcome to Pine Point—was successful. Really successful. And by that time I had managed to save up a whopping five thousand dollars. Two of which I burned trying to make a short film, but I dropped my hard drive and lost all of the footage (and my 50 bitcoin that I had mined, though I didn’t know enough to be upset at the time).
Riding off the wave of success from being attached to a hip project (the new york times called it “tragically divine”) I decided to move to NEW YORK CITY, and got a job in the music industry designing splash pages for bands. When I flew out I didn’t have a place lined up to stay or access to a credit card, so I had no idea where I was going to be able to sleep. Ask me if I actually knew anything about designing fucking websites. I also made an album cover for Pitbull. Isn’t that cool. Do you like me? Are you impressed that I made an album cover for a famous person like Pitbull? Because I really did, you know. And the job paid well. I paid off seven thousand dollars of student loans. I saved up 40 thousand dollars.
My boyfriend at the time invited me out to parties with kids who went to princeton, where i learned for the first time that where you went to school matters, and where embarrassed myself by not knowing what a rhodes scholar was. Someone complimented my shoes and I told them that they cost me $300, which my boyfriend told me was very tacky. But hey, at least they thought my job was cool.
I met someone at such a party who invited me to a new media storytelling hackathon. Everyone else gave a presentation on their project that they had applied with, but I didn’t have one, so I sheepishly just made one introducing myself. When I said that I worked on pine point and they gave me a standing ovation.
a fucking STANDING OVATION.
Little did I know that this was the beginning of the end of my lucky streak.
I didn’t really have a realistic sense of proportion about money at the time. I thought that I was set. I scaled back my hours at work so that I could focus on trying to make a name for myself in “““new media”””. I was introduced to a photographer from the northernmost town in siberia, and we worked together for several months on a grant application. I tried to get those adbusters guys I worked for to write me a letter of recommendation, but... uh oh.. they were applying for the same grant?
You know it’s really odd that you’re out running around trying to take credit for our project. We directed it, we wrote it, we came up with the ideas, you just did what we told you to do. Who do you think you are. It’s kindof pathetic honestly. Do you even remember what pine point was about? I’ll remind you, in case you forgot: it was a northern canadian town that disappeared. And you’re making a project about a... northern siberian town that isn’t there anymore. Interesting.
I didn’t get the grant.
I teamed up with a mean french photographer who had the connections to get a project displayed at the MoMA, but we had a falling out before we could raise funding.
I noticed that the number in my bank account was starting to trickle downward. At work they moved me from my cubicle to one that had a pillar in it, and from there into a desk in the hallway.
I found a journalist working on a story about US POW camps for germans in WW2 who wanted to do an interactive piece. Radiolab signed onto the grant application with us. we didn’t get it.
I tried to make an interactive memoir about my family on my own, but they threatened to disown me over it.
I finally got something out: an interactive music video project called Wall Cloud. A reporter hallucinated that it was associated with soundcloud, but other than the music and the text—borrowed from a poem my boyfriend wrote about wanting to leave me—it was all me. My job seemed really interested in making a bunch of them for high profile music acts. I put together an estimate for the costs of producing them but they balked at the price (about $10k a pop) and dropped the project.
I won a competitive hackathon and presented my project in front of an audience at the tribeca film festival. The adbusters guys were there, but they avoided me like the plague. They somehow lost the footage recording my talk and all evidence that it ever happened—other than a terrible image of me on Getty images where i look like I’m pregnant—disappeared.
VR came out. All of the excitement and energy for making cool websites was sucked up by the new ~*~*~ e m p a t h y m a c h i n e ~*~*~.
I broke the lease on my apartment with one thousand dollars left in my account, and booked a plane ticket back to my parents house.
I’ve thrown myself at problems many times since then—I’m going to leave out a whole arc about working at cutthroat Seattle startups—but nothing has ever really seemed to stick. I just finished a writing residency where I had to post a blog post every day for a month: I was worried that I’d fall apart at the seams, but the intensity felt good after sitting static for so long.
I did manage to kiss and make up with the adbusters guys, and I worked for them for less than minimum wage to pay my way through clown school. The project we worked on never ended up seeing the light of day.
Two years ago I did finally manage to make an interactive project that fulfilled my vision. A decade too late maybe. It started out as that memoir about my family that they were going to disown me over, with all mentions of my family painstakingly removed over time. The National Film Board of Canada seemed interested enough in the project to string me along for a year, but ultimately I was on my own. After it came out it was nominated for a webby, but it lost out to a directory website called “Black Women Directors”. I’m still proud of it.
In many ways I consider it to be my life’s work: it took every last scrap of visual ephemera I built up over the years, every good song I ever wrote, and every ounce of belief I had that making things on the internet meant something, and burned it all away. When I finished it I thought that I could be ready to die.
Isn’t that cool. Aren’t you impressed.
Is that hardcore enough for you?