Home Again

It feels a bit wrong to say New York is home at this point. It’s been four years now since I moved to the UK, and while London doesn’t quite feel like home yet, New York just feels like the place I came from, a place I happen to know.

I’ve only been back a handful of times, but this last trip really felt more like being just a visitor than before. Since I was in town for work, I stayed at a swank hotel in Chelsea — the Maritime. I’ve never stayed in a hotel in New York before, just my own place when I lived here, or crashing with friends since I left.

Coming right into Manhattan from the airport, rather than easing into a visit by seeing friends first, is also a bit of a shock. I got in around 11 the first night, but it was such a perfect clear night that I went for a short stroll through the West Village to unwind before the travel fatigue caught up with me. I’m so used to living in Europe now that it felt so unexpected, so preposterous to hear myself surrounded by shouting, laughing, gabbing Americans. Part if it was that these were regular New Yorkers out on a Saturday night, instead of the blandly accented Americans I regularly hear on TV. I was sure I’d stop giggling and eavesdropping once I readjusted. But it was a delicious shock to the system in my weary state that night.


Continue reading “Home Again”

Blighty

skip_next_door.jpg

Judging from the many, many house renovation projects going on in my area (Leyton — vicariously experience the charms by buying the typeface), people around here are making an investment in their homes. While that’s a good sign overall for the prospects of a pleasant neighborhood where I have a great deal on a room in a super flat with a super flatmate, it leads to some…irritation. Like this GIANT SKIP RIGHT OUTSIDE THAT WILL NEVER EVER GO AWAY as near as I can tell. Sure, it makes it easy to direct people to where I live, but it’s kinda ugly, right?

The builders next door are gutting the former home of a sweet old lady who passed away a while ago, but apparently they do about an hour of work a day, and this damn skip will be eligible for protection as a historical feature soon.

The many faces of Sparky

My career seems to be at the point where I rarely need to tailor or tinker with my CV (or résumé in the American parlance), but I need to rewrite short bios over and over again. That’s a good sign, right?

It basically means I don’t have to look for work all that much, since it tends to find me through more casual channels like momentum, word-of-mouth, networking, yadda yadda. (It’s the actual money that’s hard to pin down, tragically. The work keeps piling up.) The trick is that now I only get a couple of sentences to sum up everything as well as highlight the relevant details for the task at hand, rather than letting a amore complete picture come together from the full details.

For instance, here’s one for my current job:

Daniel Rhatigan, a 2006 recipient of a Monotype Imaging Ltd. scholarship, is working at Monotype Imaging Ltd. as part of the UK’s Knowledge Transfer Partnership. KTP is a country-wide program that allows graduate students to partner with industries to help improve business productivity and competitiveness. Rhatigan is working at Monotype Imaging’s Salford’s design office under the direction of senior designer, Robin Nicholas. Rhatigan is chartered with applying his academic experience to a commercial project, while Monotype Imaging intends to benefit through Rhatigan’s development of intellectual property.

But here’’s my bio for the teaching gig in the Netherlands I’ve had for the last couple of years:

Dan Rhatigan is a graphic designer from New York City, now living and working in London. He has worked as a designer and consultant for arts organizations for over 15 years, and has taught and lectured at the City College of New York, Central St Martins, and the University of Reading.

Dan Rhatigan, grafisch ontwerper uit New York City en woont en werkt op dit moment in Londen. Meer dan 15 jaar werkt hij als grafisch ontwerper en adviseur voor organisaties in de kunst- en grafische branche. Verder heeft hij les en lezingen gegeven aan het City College in New York, Central St. Martins en geeft nu regelmatig les aan de Universiteit van Reading in England.

But I do freelance work, too, now and then!:

Daniel Rhatigan worked as a designer and typographer in Boston and New York for 15 years before coming to study typeface design at the University of Reading. He also lectures on typography and branding in the Netherlands and here in the UK. You can look at some of his previous design work at ultrasparky.org.

And then there’s the occasional bit of writing:

Dan Rhatigan is a typeface designer, graphic designer, teacher, and long-time blogger at ultrasparky.org. He received an MA with distinction in Typeface Design from the University of Reading in 2007, and he’s now working with the Typography Department to research and design non-Latin typefaces for Monotype Imaging.

Once in a while, too, the emphasis shifts to my little side project:

Daniel Rhatigan is a typographer and typeface designer, originally from New York City but now based in London. When not teaching or working on a vast family of Indic typefaces, he publishes a zine called Pink Mince — “for the confirmed bachelor of exceptional taste”.

Root canal!

So much fun, right? Who doesn’t love a nice root canal now and then? Well, maybe it;s not the most pleasant way to pass the time, but it sure beats the hell out of an infected broken tooth that flares up into incredible pain whenever you get on an airplane. Which I tend to do a lot. (Aside: It’s a good thing I don’t have kids or a car and that I recycle diligently, because all the flying I do eats up all my carbon offset points.)

Having a root canal was a lot more pleasant with Teen Dentist back at the NYU Dental School than it is with the NHS. There, you get discounted versions of thorough, cutting-edge dental treatment performed by eager, cute (and thankfully smart and capable) youngsters. Here, my dentist sees me for 20 minutes and explains exactly what corners are cut if you pay NHS fees instead of the exorbitant private-practice fees, and then leave you to ponder how much you;re willing to pay for your vanity. It’s grim.

(And since I am employed but poor, I’m in that uncomfortable middle-range where I still have to pay but can only afford ghetto treatment. Be sure to ignore my silver molar next time you see me, or I’ll cry.)

May Day!

Oh, nothing to fuss about. that’s not “May day!” as in, “Help!”; it’s “May Day!” as in, “It’s the first of May and after a solid four months of working almost every waking hour, money has last started to flow back into my coffers, allowing me to rejoice, pay many bills, and indulge in some long-overdue infrastructural upgrades.” So you can understand the need for the exclamation point, clearly.

So that picture can be considered a bit of a status update. I just took it with a new camera that is making me squealingly happy, now that I can at last retire my trusty but aging point-and-shoot and switch at last to an SLR. In that photo I’m wearing new glasses (well, some 10-year-old frames, but with a new prescription) that allow me to see clearly again for the first time since I smashed my old ones three months ago. And I’m not scowling, despite the absurb workload of the last few weeks, which means I must be in a good mood overall, probably due to the onset of longer days and the seasonal readjustment of my energy levels.

So yeah, it’s Saturday and I’m working, but I think I may be out of the woods soon, and I’m practically starting to function like a regular person again.

Hi-class operations in the ’hood

While enjoying this teeny article about the cost structure behind designer clothes that sell for seemingly unreasonable prices, a little bell went off in the back of my brain as the writer mentioned the Martin Greenfield factory, where they were making manufacturing some designer khakis that eventually sell at Bergdorf Goodman for $550. A quick search confirmed my suspicion: that’s the place across the street from my old loft in East Williamsburg, where I lived for two-and-a-half years. I knew it was one of the few buildings in the area that was still a working factory rather than a dumpy building full of artists in search of cheap space, but had no idea they were doing the high-end stuff.

Sadly, I assume that Tenochtitlan 2000, the tortilla factory around the corner, was not operating with the same profit margins.

[And wow, it’s been a long time since I looked at the online slideshow that I linked to in that old post about my place. Damn, I miss that place, even though the loft — and my life — really went to shit eventually.]