A Life in Business Cards
Friday, August 9th, 2019: Arts, Design.
We all collect business cards. A few of them are creative. Most of them are boring.
Here’s a random sample of cards from the 1970s through the 2000s – including a few of my own – that suggest some of the eclectic worlds my life path has intersected with, and the differing ways in which people from those worlds introduce themselves to strangers.
Linda was an artist from Texas, beloved by me and my closest high school friends. She shared many adventures with us, and sadly took her own life in 1978.
This card by my brother is probably the single most effective design I’ve ever seen.
In 1979 I joined my friend’s band at CalArts, and we came up with a visual brand based on mentholated cigarettes. Unfortunately the brand had nothing to do with our sound, which was sort of angry garage rock inspired by punk.
A young painter/filmmaker who had cruelly used me to make her long-time boyfriend jealous invited me to a party at her San Francisco loft. There, she introduced me to Sven, another guy she’d abused. Sven poured me a glass of Seagram’s VO, and the next thing I knew, it was the middle of the next day, and I was waking up sick as a dog in his RV in a garbage-filled alley in the ghetto. Sven, a former film student from Germany, is now the acknowledged authority on Tiki culture.
This was the small engineering office that provided my sporadic day job from 1981 through 1992, supporting most of my work in the arts. And of course, they enabled me to infiltrate nuclear plants and briefly work on Reagan’s Star Wars program, under an improbable security clearance.
Mauricio Figuls, a friend of the Terra Incognita loft and a brilliant spinner of rare vinyl, was part of an art collective in Los Angeles which publishes the notorious AMOK catalog.
When the Terra Incognita band started getting better gigs in the mid-1980s, we decided we needed a business card with classical elegance to match our Latin name.
Katie was my girlfriend, loftmate, songwriting partner, and bandmate. She joined Colossal, the hot special effects house of the late 1980s, when she moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco to join the band. Staff members got to choose the image above their name, and Katie’s was a no-brainer – she was an aspiring cowgirl.
Mel Gray was my lifelong mentor. His family were as close as we got to bohemian royalty in my rural hometown, and after putting their kids through school and retiring from teaching, he and his wife moved to their remote cabin in the woods and became full-time artists and craftspeople. On a visit there in 1990, he advised me to take an aboriginal skills course from Boulder Outdoor Survival School in Utah, and my life path was changed yet again.
Mike became the drummer and production designer in Terra Incognita (1988-1990) and later in Wickiup (1993-1995). His original business card is my second favorite after my brother Jim’s.
I first knew Cheb as Serge El Beze, an Algerian theatrical director and a former member of Julian Beck’s Living Theater, when we began doing gigs together in the mid-1980s. He began DJing at the end of the decade, when the Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed my studio, and in the aftermath of that trauma his ecstatic world-music dance nights at local clubs became a great solace for me and my friends. After becoming an icon of Burning Man and the international dance scene, he died of cancer in 2013.
As we were splitting up in the late 1980s, Katie began making amazing art from found objects in the desert, at her spectacular studio in the Mission, which was like a natural history museum reimagined by Salvador Dali.
Almost a decade after falling in love with the Mojave Desert, I acquired wilderness land there and began meeting other desert rats, like John, a fit septuagenarian who was the authority on desert plants and led young people on extreme hikes into remote wilderness to find them.
In the early 1990s, Buster was the owner of the desert ghost town of Amboy, the proprietor of the town’s only business – a gas station, art gallery, and semi-functioning motel – and perhaps the most famous character in the desert.
After spending my year in the desert in 1992-1993, I returned to the Bay Area and started a new band in Oakland, where Mike the drummer recruited our Cherokee singer, percussionist, and bassist, Jane, who was also a visual artist.
The band lasted until 1995, when my changing musical tastes began to alienate Jane, and my increasing poverty drove me to reinvent my livelihood.
Guy had been the bassist for a brief incarnation of Terra Incognita in 1988. Later, as manager of the legendary Hotel Utah, he booked my next band, Wickiup.
Carson, a fellow San Francisco artist, had become my closest friend by the late 1980s, and in the 90s, as we both struggled to redefine ourselves and make a living in a brave new world, I suggested this job title for his newest card, having no idea that he’d take me seriously.
As Wickiup fell apart and my long unemployment was reaching a crisis point, a friend encouraged me to move to Los Angeles and join his new film and video production company. I had spent six months working as a software test manager at a half-baked CD-ROM startup and was now expected to become a digital guru in Hollywood.
At highbrow “new media” salons in Los Angeles, I met Ken, who was becoming an international celebrity for his Telegarden and Fallingwater art projects. Ironically, he was also an esteemed roboticist who knew my long-ago graduate advisor from engineering school.
I met dozens of influential people at those salons, including Florian of Austria, whose 15 minutes of fame came from a single essay, “The Medium Is…”
The Los Angeles gig never panned out, but I returned to San Francisco just as the dotcom wave was breaking, and landed interviews with the most prestigious internet agencies. Bill led the SF office of the most prestigious of all, MetaDesign, and he was very impressed with an essay I’d written on the future of media – despite the fact that I clearly had no experience to back it up.
But digital media were so new that nobody really had relevant experience, and I ended up joining vivid, a younger and more radical agency which was just becoming the hottest name in the industry. I did so well on my first couple of projects that I was able to bully the management into naming me their first Creative Director only six months after I’d started my new career.
Josiah, an old friend of the Terra Incognita band, was a member of the legendary Invertebrates when we first met, and in the 90s recorded with a friend under the name Dub Club.
On the strength of my new position at vivid, I attended industry conferences around the country where I met people like Peter who were fast becoming media celebrities. He’s now an executive VP at Warner Bros.
Craig was co-founder of razorfish, the hot New York agency inspired by my own company, San Francisco’s vivid. He’s now the CEO of New York Cruise Lines – go figure.
After a year at vivid, I left to open my own design office, specializing in information architecture, which later became known as user experience architecture. I thrived for 3 years without a business card because clients were constantly ringing my phone off the hook. Then the Dotcom Boom collapsed, and I asked a young colleague, a rising star of graphical interface design, to create this business card, inspired by my beloved desert landscape. But it was too late. There were no more clients and the cards were never used.
Hi MAX – I do remember that card -HOW are you doing?- Like the the drunk Wickiup
thanks and praises! it sipple out deh!