An Argument About A Top Shot Caused Me To Make A Joke So Obscure I Think I Pulled Something : Tales From The Slack

You know the expression “inside baseball?” I’m sure you do, a smart, well-read go-getter such as yourself. In the off chance you don’t or perhaps just took a 2×4 to the face and temporarily forgot, I’ll remind you: it refers to things that are only of interest to a small group of people in a very specific sub-community, and would be boring to anyone else. It’s a dive too deep. These Tales From The Slack posts likely border on inside baseballdom, but let’s pretend that’s what makes them fun, somehow! Anyway, this week I want to tell you about a little altercation that was had over a top shot, and the follow-up joke I made in the discussion that is so stupid and obscure there is literally no way the audience for that joke includes anyone but myself, making it all a callow masturbatory use of my otherwise pretty useless Art History degree.

I should explain some stuff here first so you have a bit of backstory: when I say “top shot” I’m referring to the main image at the top of every post. We think these are very important, and we generally try to make them as good as we can, time permitting. There’s usually not much time, but we have a pretty well-established look for these things.

I’m the Art Director of the site, so I defined the fundamentals of the look, which includes things like color and typography but also some guidelines for visual style and tone. One of the important elements of our visual style is that I like it to be a bit playful and break some expected “rules.” This is usually expressed with how parts of images will often obscure the large text we use in our top shots, and images and photographs may appear to obscure or be in front of graphic elements like banners or other elements. You’ve definitely seen this sort of thing all over the place here, and, I’m flatterannoyed to note, even on some other sites I could mention that seem to have bitten off a bit of our style.

Anyway, topshots are generally made by Peter and myself, but almost everyone pitches in and makes their own topshots every now and then. Matt is capable with Photoshop, and sometimes makes some, like he did for a Morning Dump recently, which started all of this. Here’s the topshot Matt made:

As you can see, Matt was having some fun by covering up nearly every important bit of that THE MORNING DUMP banner with engines and tires and transaxles so it was all ridiculously obscured. He was poking fun at our own tendency to obscure the banner by taking it to an absurd extreme. I got what he was going for but I’m the Art Director or Chief Creative Officer or whatever that title is. I better fucking get it. But that by no means means anyone else will, which was David’s point:

David is not getting the joke, and I don’t blame him. It’s a weird mix of too obvious and too subtle, and while I think it’s sorta funny, I do not actually think any of our readers will really get it. It’s extremely inside baseball.

David, our advocate for the readers here, says as much, and I know he’s absolutely right, but I’m feeling sassy, so I type-blurt out the first thing that popped in my head when thinking about this: the Palazzo Del Te. Not sure why I used that accent over the “e,” like that reference wouldn’t be pretentious enough.

Here’s the thing: that’s genuinely what I thought of when I thought about what Matt was doing there. Look at the time stamps; I didn’t have time to Google just the right thing, this was just some weird shit I remembered from Art History class and thought about here. I say this because I wasn’t trying to find the most absurdly pretentious and obscure way to think about this, it just happened.

See, the Palazzo Del Te is an example of Mannerist architecture, and it known for being oddly playful and whimsical and, as far as architecture can be, jokey. Giulio Romano built it between 1525 and 1535, and he included lots of strange little details in the architecture that, if you know what to look for, are basically visual jokes. Which is what Matt was going for, too, as he tries to explain:

So, when I mentioned “broken pediments” that’s what I was referring to, though I didn’t quite use the right words. And, David wasn’t buying it, dismissing this all as “wack,” which, again, he’s right about, but it made me kind of want to double down on the whole thing more, just for fun. I took a moment to think more, then went back to my ridiculous analogy:

I meant to say “frieze” instead of “pediment” but I think the concept gets across. You see, on that frieze, or I guess it’s really an entablature, the triglyphs – those rectangular vertical three-lined things – appear to be broken and slipping down:

This is supposed to be funny, see, because if it was really happening, everything would be on the verge of collapse, but it’s not, so you know, big laffs.

Of course, the idea that somehow this is what people would associate with Matt covering up the Morning Dump banner with an engine is, of course, deeply and richly stupid, and the act of trying to pitch this as a justification to David or implying that somehow this bullshit is what Matt had in mind cracked me up in ways I can’t fully explain. I tried to explain it to a friend of mine, but she just said, basically, okay, as long as you’re having fun, I guess and she’s right.

I think I find it funny for the same reason I always found this joke from The Man With Two Brains funny:

It’s the assumption that everyone somehow knows obscure shit they can’t be reasonably expected to know squat about that’s funny, I think? Whatever it is, it made me, and only me, laugh for a moment there. And now I’m telling you, because, I don’t know, I think I want to feel vindicated in some way?

Also, again, David was in the right here, and I’m glad Matt changed the topshot. I would have helped, but as you can see, I was busy.

UPDATE: LOL

Pete here, this just happened:

 

Ha ha, wow Matt. Chef’s kiss.
(Pssst, if you tap on the pic, you’ll see the original album cover.)