Recently I agreed to make a website for a friend, something I hardly ever do any more. I am a web artist, not a web designer. Everybody knows that the worst thing about doing design work is dealing with the clients, and that the best of friends make the worst of clients. My friend, who shall remain nameless here, is that special bread of visual artist who doesn’t verbalize well. He works with found and natural materials. He can do amazing things with toothpicks and twigs and bottles and buttons, but he’s not the most technically savvy person I know. He also happens to be Chinese and in his sixties. He has a formidable design aesthetic, an imprecise grasp on the English language and naturally he’s one of the most stubborn and particular people I know. Not counting myself of course. So why on earth would I agree to make a website for him? Because I knew I could. And because I knew if he went to a web design agency he’d wind up paying way too much for a website that could not possibly reflect him, how he lives and how he works. I would charge him for my time of course, but I knew money would be the least compelling part of the equation.
Making the website would be the easy part. I wasn’t fazed at all when he had nothing to say about what the site should look like other than: Something simple that looks good. I knew I knew what he had in mind. Or what would make him happy, at least. Years ago I wrote a catalogue essay about his work. That’s how we met. And we’re still friends.
The best compliment: once the site was up another friend said she thought he’d made the site himself, it looked that much like something he would do.
The real challenge was yet to come. My friend insisted I teach him how to update his new web site himself. We climbed up into his attic studio to spend an afternoon huddled around his antique iMac. Imagine trying to remember everything you’ve now forgotten that once you never knew. Like, there is a right-click button on the mouse. No spaces in file names. You have to save a file before you upload it. You have to put the images inside the images folder. Don’t think for one minute that I’m making fun of my friend here. I’m mean to say it’s quite wondrous, in this WYSIWYG world of Web 2.0, to spend an afternoon answering questions tantamount to Where do babies come from? and Why is the sky blue?
As far as I was concerned, the tutorial was part of the bargain. I had promised to teach him but had not promised that he’d learn. But in the end he turned out to be quite a good student. We just kept doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same way over and over again, which is, after all, the sad secret behind most web design. He filled half a scribbler with notes and arrows, sketches and scrawls and by the end of the afternoon I was fairly wowed by his tag-editing prowess. I was also in bad need of a drink.
We stood and stretched and turned of the computer. Here, he said. And handed me a stone. A cool oval of Tibetan turquoise the size of a quail’s egg. I told my friend Camilo about this exchange later in an email and said: “J. R. you certainly know how to get paid, Tibetan stones are hot in the stock markets of the soul, and to be valued much more than shit smelling, mind polluting money.” I couldn’t agree more.
The next day my friend and I went to the market. I took this picture of him on the long walk home. And didn’t noticed until after that the sign on the lamppost was advertising $99 WEB SITES. Fortunately my friend didn’t notice it at all.
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