DIMES: This is all good stuff we’ve got so far. In fact, before we get back into that, just to take a pause, I’m going to introduce you. For people who don’t know you, I’ve mentioned you a few times in our community and on X. I’m here with Joe Clark, friend of the show, of joeclark.org, where he’s got a rich library of articles. And our relationship, I guess you can call it, began when I received an E‑mail from you out of the blue on March 14, 2023. I’m looking at it right now. And you did something which would become a trend throughout our communications, which is you’re just tearing a strip off of me.
JOE: No, I deny this. No, no, no, no, no, no. That’s wrong.
– That’s what I was going to say at the start. I appreciate it –
– No, no, no, no. Your vile calumnies must start early on in this episode.
The problem was instead of using proper chapter markers in your audio podcast, which are a pain in the ass to implement, even though they’ve been part of the MP3 spec since the MP3 spec was invented, you simply, in the show notes, note a timestamp where different points of interest occur in the audio recording. The problem is, unbeknownst to you – [Dimes chuckles]
You would have no cause to know this. This is extraordinarily technical. The show notes of a podcast are double-encoded HTML inside XML. So you actually have to know that what you think is visible whitespace when you’re composing these things won’t necessarily translate into the ultimate published RSS feed. So to hack around this, you put extra carriage returns around things so that they won’t run together. So what I told you to do was add at least one more carriage return in front of each of those timestamps that you have in the show notes because otherwise they run together and become unusable. I told you to do that even if N greater than two, if you end up with three of them, because of the complex rules about whitespace collapse.
So I was giving you a technical tip which you had no way to know about. You couldn’t even know it was happening, and you would have no way to fix it and wouldn’t have anyone to ask, either.
DIMES: This is good, because this is kind of a crash course in Joe Clark, and I appreciate this, and you said as much in the E‑mail. Now sometimes I’ll get E‑mails or messages criticizing the show, it’s usually “Go fuck yourself”/“Die” for having background music, things like that. But when I heard from Joe, he said, “Here’s a problem. Here’s a very detailed solution, you ape.”
JOE: Press Return twice. Press Return twice. It’s not a “detail.” Listen to me, now I’m kissing the microphone. I told myself I wouldn’t get upset, here we are two minutes in. Now, I say that with a grin.
The very detailed solution was press extra carriage returns.
DIMES: And that’s what I did ever since, and every so often, maybe every few months, you would have a note. The reason I bring this up is because you have published some very fascinating articles. I think you started a Substack not too long ago, really taking certain content creators to task for –and we’ll get to this in a second, your background in design and whatnot – but taking them to task for scandals against design, abominations against beauty.
JOE: No, typography and copy-editing. So essentially editing the words they produce, which is copy-editing, right, and typesetting them, which is type, so “type and copy.” So not just the grand graphic design of the sort of thing where if you’re sitting on the couch and your partner in crime is sitting on the La‑Z‑Boy over there, you hold the thing up and he can discern the design of it – that sort of graphic design from a distance. That wasn’t really what I was discussing.
I was discussing what I believe your cohort there would call the minutiæ, which can be pronounced in a number of ways, of type and copy. And unfortunately, conservatives are terrible at this. It’s left-wingers who are any good at this at all, because of the different nature of the left-wing and right-wing brains. So I was explaining, not for the first time, that since the dissident right or the alt-right or the anti-progressives – use any term you wish, I don’t wish to misgender you, I’ll respect your pronouns – have devolved into a microcosm, a binary star system of Twitter and Substack, right? All they do day in, day out is tweet and Substack, which is now a verb, apparently, right? “(Verbing weirds English” – Calvin and Hobbes.) Right?
But they’re no good at this because they have no skills. Their skills are typing only the characters visible on their keyboards, imprinted on their keyboards, into text boxes in a browser. That’s the alpha and omega of their skills, and if you ask them to typeset an alpha or an omega, they wouldn’t be able to.
DIMES: Now, if I can just call attention to a fascinating piece that I believe I linked [to] on X. I don’t think I reviewed it in full, but I very well might. It’s this great piece titled simply “Conservatives Cannot Design.” And I think it’s at blog.fawny.org.
JOE: Well, yes, joeclark.org/design or /conservativedesign will bring you to that because I know how to make an HTTP 301 line in my .htaccess file. So I can make that work. Just joeclark.org/design or /conservativedesign will bring you to that.
DIMES: And there’s lots of examples in there of book covers, magazines. I know Man’s World gets a mention. So if you would just go into that a little bit because I find the stuff – I have an interest in design, as I’m sure you have, to a certain extent. I’m an amateur; I’m just a passionate fool. But I know you come at this from a – actually, a better way to start would be, can we go into your background?
JOE: Tell us a bit about yourself, Joe.
– For the folks at home.
JOE: Sadly, I grew up in New Brunswick, and while the Acadian kids were out sniffing glue and shoplifting, which unfortunately I also did once, but I repented of that, I was reading, you know, poring over Letraset catalogues and the obscure typography publications that were available in the early ’80s. So to say this made me sort of a John Waters figure with oddball enthusiasms would be an understatement, but the life cycle of the eldergay is to have enthusiasms that are ultimately squashed, but here we are.
Like giving Bart a labelmaker, I had a manual typewriter when I was 15 years old, which camouflaged my age, which would enable me to write letters – to send missives and get myself in all sorts of trouble. Like complaining to the Irving-owned newspaper, the Moncton Times-Transcript – Times and Transcript at the time – that they hadn’t updated their typography since 1929. They phoned me up, learned I was a high-school student, and literally said to me on the phone, “We thought you knew something about this.” Ooh, famous last words. [Dimes chuckles]
Because I’m a child of the 20th century, where if you were intelligent and curious, you really had to search for information, right? You really had to look things up – to the point where if you heard an unfamiliar acronym on TV, there was no way to find out what the acronym stood for, right? Because where are you going to look this up – the encyclopedia? How is the encyclopedia going to have the expansion of an acronym, right?
But this inculcated in the intelligent bookish 20th-century citizen the need to go searching for information, which meant – you know I read everything at the library. I would sit there and read through entire stacks of Popular Science magazines, including the model houses ultimately parodied on The Simpsons. “Why, it’s so modern – it’s ultra-modern. Like living in the not-too-distant future.” That’s from Popular Science.
I went through a whole cycle of reading all the books about aviation – I knew how to file a flight plan, all this business, right? And I read all the books about book design, of course.
The unexpected side effect was that in that era, publishing was professional. It wasn’t professionalized; it was professionaal. And also, at the time, it was difficult to typeset and publish. There was still metal type when I was growing up. This was before even phototypesetting and later computer typesetting with PostScript and so on. So it was actually very difficult, and it required knowledge to do it well, which meant that fundamentally everything you read was well-edited, including well-copy-edited, and well-typeset, because it had to be. Because there was no room for just banging shit out in Arial and sticking it up in the lunchroom at work, right?
So: This is the contradistinction I would draw between your lovable Nazis in the alternative right [Dimes laughs] and – I mean, you’re like Manx cats. You’re just enjoyable pets to have around, right, and wonderful conversation pieces to have when friends come over. You didn’t grow up reading masses of professionally edited copy. Whereas we did in the 20th century.
Also, in the 20th century it was surprisingly easy to get a job in publishing. I mean, I started – I had my first article published in 1989 and I ended up publishing almost 400 of them. I was a Toronto Star columnist and so forth. But in the present day, the democratization of text – text is everywhere, right Some of your older listeners, in other words, people your age, in your mid early late 30s, will remember the thinkpieces, right? And there’s a 20th-century genre right there. The thinkpieces saying the Internet will be the death knell of books and the death knell of reading, right, that we’d become purely an oral culture. No, the Internet has exposed us to more text than any society has ever had access to in the history of the world by dozens of orders of magnitude. We have trillions, quadrillions more words available to us than anyone ever has in the history of the world. But the downside of this is, since anyone can publish – the blogger (capital B or lowercase B, as you wish) manifesto – ethos, anyone can publish, but that means no one has any training. And they’re also not given any training.
DIMES: I remember when being a blogger was new, and that seems mind-shattering to some people, but I recall when being a blogger was treated as almost a punk-rock thing. Musicians were doing it, and little journalists were doing it. It was kind of exciting in a gonzo way: “Everyone’s going to have a blog! It’s an online diary,” And you had these little E‑celebs springing up, and they were just writing blogs about their lives. I think they eventually mutated into some kind of shit.
JOE: They all got jobs at the New York Times, and they’re all Democrat cutouts. No, we had not coined the term “E‑celeb” yet, but they were E‑celebs. Truly, blogging came into its own after 9/11, because warbloggers came into existence – sadly enough, including Andrew Sullivan. We can’t get rid of him. He’s immortal. You understand this, right? He’s like microplastics. We’ll never get rid of Andrew Sullivan. Andrew Sullivan will never be flushed from our systems.
But in the warblogging era, everyone and his dog, including lamestream-media journalists, had their own blogs discussing the War on Terror. But the problem was there was internal dissension – because this was a conservative issue, a small-c conservative issue, and there was dissension. There’s always internal dissension among conservatives because we don’t get the party line from Media Matters sent along by secret E‑mails that we know exist but officially have never been confirmed, right?
So there would be blogs commenting on the other blogs, to the point where the primary blog about warbloggers was Media Whores Online – essentially Warblogger Watch. But then that wasn’t sufficient, so someone set up a watch site for Media Whores Online: Media Whores Online Watch. And then we got it to four: There actually was a Blogger Weblog entitled Media Whores Online Watch Watch Watch, which is five levels of meta-commentary. OK, you think retweeting is a sin? Turn the clock back to the warbloggers.
All right. So: This was using Blogger and TypePad, right, the off-the-shelf blogging software that strictly templated you. You had to use a template. It was fundamentally impossible to design your own.
DIMES: Blogger used to be huge, unless you wanted to just code your own WordPress site. And WordPress, I recall –
– WordPress didn’t exist yet. No, no, no, no. Wrong-wrong-wrong. I’ve known Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, since he was barely old enough to walk into the bar in Austin, and this is for real, OK? My sites are still hosted by him, and he could unplug them at any time, so I’d better not piss him off too much.
No, WordPress didn’t exist yet. WordPress was created in response to Blogger and TypePad, et al., because it was open-source and allowed you to design your own blog – the design was extraordinarily important – using the WordPress back end, which is all written in PHP, if anyone knows about that. So your timeline is not quite correct there.
DIMES: This is why we keep Joe Clark around. He’s got to keep me honest.
– Well, your Holocaust revisionism is one thing, but your WordPress revisionism is well beyond the pale.
– It’s unacceptable. Did I detect earlier you saying that you bring Blood Satellite up with your friends when you have company over, true or false?
JOE: No, that was a thought experiment.
– It costs you nothing to say yes, Joe. I was drawing an image for you.
– Yeah, they love it. They love hearing about “Rape Romano.”
– You’re assuming I have friends over, so I deny your premises. What is your next question, Dimes‽
So getting back to me. I have a journalism background. Unfortunately, I also have a degree in linguistics, and a diploma in engineering, which is absolutely useless. Fundamentally, the core issue is I come from the 20th century when knowledge was difficult. And I had the mindset, which was very common at the time among the fellows, certainly among the fellows who would become those “special boys” – it would be very high verbal IQ, as I believe your friends like to say. Very word-focussed, right?
But unexpectedly, I also have an interest in visual design. NOt so much painting and visual art – I have reasonable knowledge; I can get a lot of the questions on Jeopardy on that. In any event, but just as I had an unusual combined humanities and technical education with a piddling diploma in engineering and the degree in linguistics. Although I’m very word-focussed, I’m highly visual as well. I’m sort of like Camille Paglia, right? She has more of a male brain than I do, God love her. And this is a combination you don’t get very much these days – the word-oriented person who really enjoys and can talk about and can interpret visual things.
DIMES: So you think that’s rare – it would be rare for a verbal-IQ type person to have – I think I’ve seen that. I’ve seen a lot of writers I know who take writing very seriously have very little patience even for film or art. They seem to engage with art in a very ideological or historical way.
– The inability to discriminate in the most catholic (lowercase-c) sense is what we’re talking about here. These are the classic absent-minded professors, rumpled with the voluminous beards – they’re all men, of course. We would now call them autists. They merely have male specialization. They can tell you everything about paleontology – “This bone fragment is two million years old,” even though of course the Earth is only 5,999 years old. They can tell you all about that... but they’ve never ironed a shirt, right? To again make a Simpsons reference (we’re up to three): To paraphrase Moe, “I always wanted to see Paris. But wearing a shirt that was ironed – that’d be pretty sweet.” They don’t have enough visual self-awareness to understand how well they present to the outside world.
And you’ve experienced this. You’ve been in Toronto. You’ve been on the subway in Toronto. The way the biomass presents itself is quite shocking, isn’t it? And there’s been a massive, massive fall-off in the general presentation of the biomass since a couple of years ago. Uh, people don’t even try anymore, right? And all these things are of a piece.
DIMES: I sound old when I complain about everyone wearing sweatpants now, but it’s become unignorable.
– Well, OK, of course I get a bug up my backside about this, but dudes showing up at church, at Catholic mass – I know it’s the Novus Ordo – in literal T‑shirt and jeans. Can you try a bit harder? And you’re bringing your girlfriend. Isn’t she telling you how to dress? So these these things are of a piece.
Someone who doesn’t have enough visual self-awareness to present well to the outside world obviously could not tell you about this particular bit of graphic design or even this famous bit of artwork, and certainly couldn’t realize that what they’re writing needs to be edited by someone and needs to be typeset by someone.
Because of course I’m not suggesting that all you adorable Manx-cat Nazis should have the kind of skills I have – that ship has sailed; I come from the previous century – but you have to some understanding that you need to have editors, and you need to have typesetters, and you need to have designers.
And this brings us on to the next point. And I’ve basically taken over your show now, Dimes –
DIMES: If I could just add to that. That’s something I’ve maintained for quite some time. And I know there’s a lot of people in amateur writing circles, especially on our side, that see the title “editor” as more of just a status. You just have it because you started a place that publishes something – it could be a –
– Exactly.
– But to me, and I’m not saying I accomplish this ten times out of ten, but I take editors very seriously. And I remember when I was publishing my book of short fiction, I paid, I commissioned a couple of editors, actually, to look at it, to rewrite it, to give me notes. And I had to have a sense for “The more brutal they are, the better.” Because I’ve worked in many agencies, and I did writing in various capacities, and I worked with people where you’re getting your work slashed apart every single day, so you need a thick skin, right? You can’t take anything personally. So after many years, I don’t take any of it personally. Just tell me if it sucks. I’m at draft seven, I don’t give a shit. Let’s make it draft 12, whatever, but –
– No-no-no-no.
– But say there’s a lot of people who don’t take that seriously.
JOE: Well, OK. I’m here to tell you that’s the wrong way to characterize what actually happens. I again deny your premises. You’re not being torn apart. There’s no emotion attached to this. “What you wrote here is factually wrong, that’s why we’ve corrected it,” or “I’ll cross this out and rewrite it and give you a better way of expressing it.” There’s no emotional content involved in it at all.
– Well, I didn’t want to make it seem like it was emotional, but if this were a body that had come back to me, there would be cuts all over it. That’s just what I meant [by] “tear apart.”
– Yes.
– Deservedly so.
JOE: Everyone needs an editor, and not many people produce clean copy. I was one of the few who did back in the day. All right. You’re impinging on the 20th-century catchphrase “My manuscript came back all bloody,” “He bloodied my manuscript” – this kind of thing – which was exactly what you’re saying, when you got your book manuscript back, which you had, you know, laser-printed on an HP LaserJet II in WordPerfect 5.1, which was the best setup that has ever been created to produce text, it would have all sorts of red and green and blue marks on it.
– Yeah.
– This is lampooned in Bright Lights, Big City: The chief verificationist complains that he uses the wrong colour pencil.
DIMES: Yeah, and let me say, one of the very best notes you can get, it’s very, very simple, especially if it’s in creative writing. The note says “I’m bored.” Like you’re maybe halfway through the first page, “I’m bored. What’s going on? Why is this happening?” I’m looking at this from someone who hasn’t read this story 23 times like the author has. So I’m like, “This needs to be shortened”; “This needs to be made more exciting.” And sometimes that’s really gutting it, but, you know, those notes are very important. It’s not just like saying, “OK, we have to keep the skeleton of this and just change what clothes were on it.” It’s just, no – break the bones if you need to if it makes it better.
JOE: I would never jot something down on a manuscript along the lines of “I’m bored.” That editor needs to be spoken to by a senior editor. That’s demoralizing and it’s not your place as an editor, no matter who the hell you are, to act imperiously toward the writer. I will say again: Everybody needs an editor, including highly competent writers. I’ve always had editors, I need editors, etc.
Put me in the same room with the editor who wrote “I’m bored” on your manuscript, and I’d have a good conversation with them. That’s seriously demoralizing and disempowering and is unnecessary.
DIMES: I’m gonna send you an E‑mail from one editor I paid a couple hundred dollars for, before it was leading into maybe a bigger job. But it was just “Give an assessment.” And it was just, you know, a one-page E‑mail, but everything was vitriolic. He at one point said “So have you even written before?” So he was offended and – this was a guy who allegedly had worked for 25 years in fantasy and science fiction publishing.
JOE: Oh, well, there’s your problem. I should tread lightly here because I don’t actually edit fiction, I edit severe and complex nonfiction when I edit [anything]. Like editing all the strings in a certain software application, and the creator of the software is German, so imagine all the trouble I had in that.
In any event, yes, that guy is simply a jerk and is probably burned out. If you have nearly a lifetime’s experience editing nothing but truly amateur copy, you will burn out quickly. There has to be a respite every now and then from someone who actually knows what he’s doing, and apparently that editor had not had such a respite.
Well, I’m legitimately sorry that happened to you. That’s not how you deal with copy-editing, because there is no emotion attached to it. Even when I edited Bill Stumpf’s book – he co-designed the Æron chair; I’m sitting in one now, and it’s a Size C, thank you very much – and I told him that his book was not publishable.... Time passed. In fact, 20 years passed, and I literally walked through a bookstore, and there was the book, published two decades later with none of my edits implemented. So it took him 20 years, but he got it published. But all I said was, “Your book is not publishable.” [...]
JOE: It’s actually hard to write a good design book, even if you’ve created one of the most iconic, one of the most iconic products of the 20th century.
– Well, it’s interesting you say that, because I got a request just today from someone looking for a good design book. It was a very general question.
JOE: Graphic design or some other kind of design?
DIMES: They kind of made it sound it was both design but also typography, and then maybe some general design. Someone who just doesn’t know much about it. So they were like, “Give me a book about what makes things look good.”
JOE: Well, there are two obvious beginner books from, which are from the ’90s and written by Germans. Again with the Germans! We can really never get away from the German influence, can we? Even after the Nuremberg trials –
DIMES: They just do things right!
JOE: Yes. I’m gonna go off on a tangent in a sec, but start with these two books from the ’90s which are easily gotten for pennies off the used-book sites, or even – one of them has a Creative Commons–version PDF, so you can download it without feeling guilty.
Stop Stealing Sheep and Learn How Type Works by Erik Spiekermann. Now, this is that’s a bold a bowdlerization of what Dwiggins said a man who would letterspace lowercase would fuck sheep – excuse the vulgarity – so it’s been bowdlerized to Stop Stealing Sheep. Again, excuse the vulgarity.
– You know where you are, sir.
– Yes, I know, but I always say “excuse the vulgarity.” It’s like the Mohammedans saying “peace be unto him.” And the next one is Branding with Type by E.R. Ginger. E.R. Ginger is one of the names, if you remember. If you like redheads, who among us doesn’t remember Ginger? but Stop Stealing Sheep and Branding with Type are two very easy books. You can read them in 25 minutes each. You blow through them and you’re not missing anything, right, and it gets you started.
Now, there are lots of beginner books about typography and graphic design. Ordinary Googling will come up with some very good options. Basically every public library in Canada has lots of them and you can literally go to the branch and they’re all in the roughly 742 in the Dewey Decimal System you just start reading one after another after another.
Now the tangent I’m going to go off on is the genre which was invented by one lady, and she’s the one and only inhabitant of that desert island of graphic-design autobiography. We have a Russian-American named Natalia Ilyin, and she’s written a couple of amazing books about being a designer and a graphic designer, which are graphic-design autobiography.
Toronto Public Library has them because I made them get them.... Once you read Natalia Ilyin, this will be a bit of a a palate-cleanser, because then it uh opens up a new world to you about how one could have um perhaps not a vocation but an avocation in uh design. You can learn about design design, right?
And this is the sort of thing that your audience base would be would be amenable to. Because the term we now use, as I mentioned before, is “autists,” right? Basically, your entire audience is autists. [Dimes chuckles] I prefer the term “enthusiast.” But typography, and to a lesser extent copy-editing, there’s a whole other story there, is amenable to this because I know this happens because I’ve verified it.
I’ve sat in Jonathan Hoefler’s office. He and his former partner Tobias [Frere-Jones] were one of the most famous type designers, you know, featured in documentaries, New York Times articles written about them, you know. They did custom fonts for Martha Stewart. He showed me the invoice from Martha Stewart with literally her initials saying “OK” on it,....
All right, fine. I’ve sat in Jonathan Hoefler’s office and had him confirm that this happens. He’s minding his own business. The mailman comes with the postal mail. There’s a manila envelope with nicely typeset label and return address label. You open it up and there’s a nicely typeset letter.
Dear Mr. Hoefler:
My name is Jason. I’m a high-school student (senior) in Terre Haute, Indiana. I’ve been interested in typography since I was in middle school.
I’ve been examining the typeface that comes standard in Apple products, Hoefler Text, and although I recognize that this is your personal interpretation of the Garalde family, I believe you have some ahistoricisms in Hoefler Text.
I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve taken the time to redraw the typeface for you, and I include a sample printout [a specimen sheet].
If I’ve caused offense, I apologize, but please let me know what you think.
Sincerely,
Jason
Terre Haute, Indiana
And enclosed would be a complete redesign of their typeface by a high-schooler. This has literally happened.
It’s amenable to the specialization-heavy male brain.
DIMES: I’m going to make a note of those books because I need to jump more feet-first into design theory. I’ve taken art classes throughout my life. I’m sure you’ve noticed the font marketplace exploding with amateurs on Dafont.com. What’s your take on people designing fonts?
JOE: Matthew Carter, the greatest living type designer (I’ve been to his house), pointed out there are more good type designers and typefaces now than ever in the history of the world. Many free typefaces are extraordinarily well-crafted, like those that come with operating systems. Even Microsoft’s new typefaces like Aptos are well done, though it’s quite odd historically.
The problem is the equivalent of SoundCloud rappers – kids banging out garage fonts. In the 1990s, empires were built on garage fonts, like House Industries in Delaware, who now own the archives to Photo-Lettering Inc., where Mad Men’s Don Draper would have had his ads typeset. Those fonts aren’t very good. The high-schooler writing to Hoefler is the crème de la crème. I’ve never looked at Dafont.com intentionally – it’s where you download pirated fonts, right?
DIMES: It’s not pirated. A lot are free, some made to look like movie posters, like The Sopranos’. There’s kooky, over-designed stuff that’s almost unusable.
JOE: Those extreme headline or display typefaces have a history going back to Italian Modernism and Futurism. Typefaces like Stop are still used today. These aren’t designers, they’re hobbyists. We’re awash in riches. The most memorable logotype of the 21st century is Stranger Things’, using ITC Benguiat. It’s iconic, like the Kiss logotype in the ’70s. Your edgelords have memes and MAGA hats, but those are objects, not design.
The #DraftOurDaughters hashtag and visual meme from a couple of years ago was fantastic. A teenage girl weeping at a veteran’s cemetery – “Her father died to protect his country. Now it’s her turn.” But the design sensibility of the right-wing is all objects, like memes, Apu, Wojak.
DIMES: Absolutely, the worse the design, the better. If it’s not [done] in MS Paint, [don’t bother]. You must use Impact.
– Conservatives are lousy at design because they’re word people and idea people. That’s why you’re good at podcasts, YouTube, talk radio. You come up with neologisms like whitepill/blackpill/redpill/bluepill, moralfagging. You’re good at naming things, but normiecucks have never heard these terms.
Left-wing people go to design school and produce beautiful works. Michael Bierut at Pentagram designed the Hillary campaign logo. The Democrats have blue-chip talent. Shepard Fairey’s Obama “Hope” poster, using Gotham by Jonathan Hoefler, is a stepping stone between the Kiss and Stranger Things logotypes. There’s a direct line from “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” to the Obama poster.
DIMES: In our space, it’s not cool to know a lot about street art. Everyone sees it as degenerate, so I have this hidden knowledge.
JOE: “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” started with sniped, wheat-pasted posters, becoming a meme. Shepard Fairey designed later versions, structurally identical to the Obama Hope poster.
– My cohost Judas and I used to do graffiti, sneaking into trainyards to write on trains. The psychology of someone who does this for no profit, just to propagate an idea, is fascinating. The anonymity is striking.
JOE: The best slogans ring true, like “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” or the vegan “Not Your Mom, Not Your Milk.” The best examples come from ACT UP New York in the ’80s and ’90s. They were extraordinarily successful, more than the Freedom Convoy. Their Silence = Death poster, in a variant of Gill Sans with an inverted pink triangle, was designed by a gay Jewish communist. They systematized everything. Identity Evropa tried to have a graphic identity with their “It’s Okay to Be White” posters, but they got torn down immediately. There’s been small examples of successful design interventions, but the right wing isn’t well-suited to this, and there’s no knowledge of the history.
DIMES: I liked the “It’s Okay to Be White” posters. They weren’t overdesigned, they were bold and simple, standing out against the noise. People tune out advertisements – banner blindness. Whatever happened to that?
JOE: It had its moment. You can’t last forever. We’re talking about Obama posters, Andre the Giant, and ACT UP from previous decades. It shows these things are possible.
DIMES: You refer to right-wingers as “you people.” What would you call yourself?
JOE: I called you right-wing assholes in my affectionate sobriquet. I grew up in gay and lesbian journalism, writing for Xtra, OutWeek, and the Advocate. Masha Gessen was my editrix at the Advocate, for heaven’s sake.
I burned out on that because I’m older and I understand these people would genocide me if they could. During the covidaids, a switch flipped. I decided discourse was no longer possible. I took the NEETbux and stayed home, like the “incels” who reached their saturation level of [being held in] contempt. I have people aggressing against me, including being assaulted on the TTC. I don’t talk to normies.
Even though I was always a Catholic, I was away from the church for a breezy 44 years. I have no explanation why. Three years ago, I came back after listening to podcasts like Trans Regrets Snoopy Presents the Bible. I walked past Catholic churches and couldn’t find a reason not to go back. The minute they removed the mask mandate, I went to church the first Sunday after. I realized I’d have to put the dick down for the rest of my life, and my response was, “Yeah, I know. I’ll do that.”
I lead a small existence. My expertise isn’t wanted. If I’m the only person who can solve a problem, they’ll leave it unsolved rather than hire me because of my prickly personality. As a 20th-century eldergay, like the Jews, I’m a repository of knowledge, erudition, and a valourization of beauty. No one wants that in the 21st century.
DIMES: Can you make conservatives good at design, or is the separation between left and right too wide?
JOE: I don’t have grand designs, pun intended. I’d be happy if we produced pretty good small-press books. So much political thought is lost to the ether on Substack, like warbloggers on TypePad [were]. The problem is there’s nowhere to buy them in the real world, and public libraries won’t stock them.
DIMES: When I was in my early 20s, I ran a small press, getting in touch with independent bookstores and libraries. Small bookstores were more amenable. Is there a pathway to create a network of independent bookstores for an actual published culture?
JOE: A real-world bookstall would be besieged by antifa within seconds. There’s nothing wrong with using the Internet to sell books, but they’re poorly produced and presented. Why not a book trailer video for every book? It’s a zero-dollar option.
Centuries of typefaces are non-viable for Amazon KDP’s inkjet printing, but using well-designed 21st-century typefaces, [as] from Jonathan Hoefler, would solve that. I know how to argue to libraries to stock books like Bronze Age Mindset or Delicious Tacos, but it’s extraordinarily difficult. Online bookselling done better would seem to be all we need.
DIMES: Librarians might like the book but ask about the publisher. Some reject self-publishing categorically. Antelope Hill, with Hitler stuff in their catalogue, would have to explain that.
JOE: I had success and failure with Toronto Public Library, getting over 300 titles added, including RoboCop. But I got into fights with them, took them to the Human Rights Tribunal, because the hateful leftist girls refused to stock certain books. They rewrote the selection criteria to eliminate self-published materials. Yet they bought a crate of Jan Wong’s self-published memoir. Bronze Age Mindset is in Cornell, Yale, and Monash libraries, so it can be done.
DIMES: In our first E‑mail, you lashed me for saying something about Bronze Age Mindset. You said, “Shut the fuck up. He’s one of our great thinkers.”
JOE: Bronze Age Mindset is sui generis. It’s experimental literature up there with Kathy Acker and Lawrence Braithwaite. I maintained a samizdat RSS feed of his show, but I’ve tried to help so many people. We get disillusioned with our luminaries when they have unusual sponsorships or put transgenders in their men’s magazine. Eric Gill, who designed Gill Sans, was a monster, but we use his typeface. We have to separate the art from the artist. Bronze Age Mindset is a sui generis work of avant-garde literature, and I’ll die on that hill.
DIMES: You pointed out everything wrong with one of my shirts in detailed fashion, which is why I discontinued a lot of them on the Good Suffer store.
JOE: Merch is a tremendously fertile ground. Everyone knows what a MAGA hat is, an object discernible at a two-block radius. The red hat itself, regardless of what it says, has become totemic.
– The best-selling shirt was “Every Boomer is the Antichrist,” blasphemous but amusing, with bold simplicity. A shirt isn’t a frame for a crazy design – it needs to be stripped down, viewable at a distance. Fashion designers look at the silhouette, like negative space.
JOE: To find what’s wrong with a design, look at it upside down. Your “Bang Bang Beaver Gang” T‑shirt is 80% of the way to an interesting typographic design. Think bigger than T‑shirts – jackets, long-sleeved shirts, bespoke items that cost hundreds of dollars.
DIMES: We planned two branches for the Good Suffer store. Judas has a CNC machine, and we can produce products. My wife wants to move into denim. It requires a lot of runway. We want to be curative, making exciting, limited drops, not slapping logos on stuff. We partner with creators like J. Burden, treating them as clients, giving them 100% of the profit.
JOE: That’s how Comme des Garçons looks at its retail staff – co-conspirators. Limited-edition “drops” are what boutique labels like Outlier do. There’s a market for this. Denim is a terrain overrun by autists, like Naked and Famous from Montreal. There’s a subgenre of elite, recherché denim manufacturers, many Japanese. You could subcontract from small-batch-artisanal makers, buying their offcuts.
DIMES: Our audience talks about discovering beauty but makes meme edits of statues they’ve never seen. They don’t create anything beautiful. I wrote an article, “Utopian Trauma,” describing art as a dimension you can inhabit, a reaction to the history of art. You can’t look at postmodern art without understanding its links in a chain.
JOE: More visually sophisticated people like brutalist and postmodern architecture. I like some brutalist Catholic churches in Japan. Get Charles Jencks’s books on postmodern architecture. Flip through the pictures, read the cutlines.
The online ideology of the dissident right dismisses postmodernism or brutalism as degenerate CIA psyops. That’s not necessarily true. You might not have the eye to discern these differences, and you may never have it. Try to improve yourself with Jencks’ books or John Waters’ Top 10 movie lists. There are cordons sanitaires in the right-wing – nesting circles of contamination. You’re reiterating talking points for in-group allegiance, like putting a black square on Instagram. […]
JOE: I’ve hidden everything because I’ve retired from everything.... I have a private Twitter account – approved persons may follow me.
For graphics and design, people think advertising because of Mad Men. Everyone loves Mad Men, but they’ve forgotten Thirtysomething from 1988–1990, uploaded on YouTube with shitty captioning. It’s an examination of the advertising business with Michael and Elliot, modelled after Chiat/Day, and superb aesthetics. Watch Thirtysomething, correcting for the Jewish neuroticism. That’s where to begin learning about these things.
DIMES: I’ll check that out. Thanks again, Joe.
JOE: Go with God. He goes with you.
DIMES: Bye for now.
Posted: 2025.05.31