I’m very excited to announce that tomorrow I’ll be a guest on The Career Clinic, the radio show hosted by Maureen Anderson about that endless quest to find out what we all really want to be when we grow up. I’ll be talking about my circuitous (and hopefully entertaining) path to becoming a freelance writer. You can tune in here, www.am1100.tv, to hear the show starting at 11am Central/9am Pacific. And the best part is that it’s a call-in show! Call 1-888-598-8464 or send an email to maureen [at] thecareerclinic [dot] com to ask me your most personal questions!

Also be sure to check out Maureen’s book The Career Clinic: Eight Simple Rules for Finding Work You Love, which was reviewed by my friend, the great Colleen Wainwright. See you on the radio!

Update: Thanks so much to Maureen, who asked some really amazing questions. She posted a great thank you on her blog. Here are all five parts of the interview!

The Career Clinic Part 1

The Career Clinic Part 2

The Career Clinic Part 3

The Career Clinic Part 4

The Career Clinic Part 5

The top photo, for those who are interested, is Charles Bukowski’s typewriter, radio and well-used wine glass, which was part of the show Charles Bukowski: Poet on the Edge at the Huntington Library. Check out more Bukowski book covers in this awesome post by Keith.

I’m still buzzing from the amazing response to last weekend’s City Listening II (and the success of the Dwell on Design conference, and the fun of emceeing the LABC’s Los Angeles Architectural Awards…I’m telling you, it was quite a week!). We’ll have a full recap of the evening, including photos, very soon, until then, you can read this review by Mike Neal at Architizer.

But before all that, I just wanted to show you this beautiful photo by Monica Orozco, which was taken at the very end of the night, and take a quick moment to thank my two lovely co-hosts—or as you can see from this photo, maybe three lovely co-hosts—Marissa Gluck and Haily Zaki. These ladies are two of the smartest, hardest-working, most creative forces of nature in this city. Over the last two years they have organized and strategized and materialized dozens of events with huge smiles on their faces and strong cocktails in their hands (except, you know, when Haily got knocked up). And in the process, they’ve also become two of my dearest friends. I can’t wait to see what the future will bring! And on that note, here’s what I read at the event to open it up:  Our de LaB manifesto, in rhyme, of course.

The de LaB Manifesto

We were tired of PowerPoints and panels and pretense
Sick of working the room at lame-ass design events
Tired of the stodginess that came with such happenings
We wanted to know what our neighbors were making

La Brea was picked as an arbitrary line,
But we knew wherever we drew it someone would mind
We welcome the Westsiders, they’re not ostracized
As long as they don’t lie about not crossing the 405

What began as a drinking club quickly turned civic
Our visions for the city became more optimistic
Don’t get me wrong, we still like the drinking
Alcohol is liquid innovation to fuel design thinking

de Lab gets people out of cars and into their city
Introduces neighbors and promotes collaborativity
I know that’s not a word, I invented it myself
de LaB is DIY: We do it ourselves

For design in LA we will walk and ride bikes
We take buses and trains and take LA River hikes
We’re a committed gang of creators who can make a difference
We’re raising a new generation of Los Angeles urbanists

Your support has been amazing for the events we’ve had before
There’s a whole LA out there we haven’t begun to explore
All we need is your support…
…actually, no, we really need your money

By drawing a line through the city, divided
We ended up making it feel more united
We love LA so much it makes us feel giddy
Now sit back, have a drink (that part is important!) and listen to your city

Thanks to everyone for coming and for supporting de LaB!

We don’t celebrate Black Friday in my family. It’s Craft Friday around these parts, and believe me, there’s nothing like some heavy crafting to jolt you out of a persistent tryptophaniac state. It’s been an especially busy 24 hours at the Walker workshop this year since we are all creating protoypes for the robot ornament workshop I’ll be teaching at Unique Los Angeles on December 6!

If you haven’t been to Unique LA, the fantastic biannual design, art and craft extravaganza curated by my good friend Sonja Rasula, it’s honestly the best one-stop-shop for your holiday shopping. Almost everything made by the over 300 vendors is manufactured in Los Angeles, and it really runs the gamut—this is the only show like this I’ve ever been to where I’ve found appropriately cool gifts for guys, gals and babies of all ages, all under one roof.

In partnership with the great folks at my favorite time travel emporium, 826 LA, myself and Stefan Bucher will be on duty to entertain kids and hipsters alike who want to turn an hour or two into their own handmade gift. Stefan will, of course, be schooling everyone in monster-making, while I will be helping guide each of you through the design and production of your very own robot. Each robot will be pre-programmed to help with basic tasks around the house during the holidays. But they’ll also look really good hanging in a tree or a window when they’re powered down for the evening.

Unique LA is at the California Market on December 5 and 6, and my workshop is December 6 from 12-1pm. Stefan’s workshop is right after mine, so you can stay for both! Hope to see you then, and so do these guys, made by my mom and dad:

A few weeks ago, I posted that I got a private tour of the school being built on the site of the nearly-totally-demolished-but-not-totally Ambassador Hotel. I was absolutely astounded at the measures that the architects took to make sure the hotel’s legacy was preserved, and extremely impressed with how the K-5 school on the same site (which is already open) had transformed the community. I wrote about the school, other great schools in LA, and the Ambassador’s history, in an article for GOOD right here: “A School That Deserves Extra Credit.” And be sure to check out other deliciously-designy stories in my column for them, Design is a Verb.

Update: Not a day after I posted this, KPCC is reporting that Steve Barr, one of the awesome educators I cite, is leaving his Green Dot Schools to “focus on national educational issues.” Hmmm, sounds like someone got the Obama call…or at least I hope so.

Tonight at the Art Directors Club in New York they had a ceremony honoring a group of people they call GrandMasters: “four distinguished educators who have inspired generations of creatives and whose legacies are a far-reaching network of industry leaders and professionals…” One of those people was Hank Richardson, president of a little school called the Portfolio Center that I attended for two steamy years in Atlanta.

This amazing photo of Hank and I was taken by my very good friend Liz Danzico but until I just did a search for Hank on Flickr, I had never seen it before. It’s of Christopher Simmons, Mick Hodgson, Hank and me walking over the Roberto Clemente Bridge in Pittsburgh on the way to the Andy Warhol Museum during an AIGA retreat (in…2005? OMG). Anyway, it could not be more fitting: Those are just two of the dozens of people who I have now become close friends and collaborators with thanks to Hank’s many, many generous (and always on-point!) introductions over the years.

For the ADC show, a few PC grads were asked to send along something that we’d worked on in our professional careers. Of course I sent “Real World Studio,” a story I wrote for GOOD about John Bielenberg’s Project M (yet another Hank connection) but also to honor the way that Hank always taught us to infuse our work with purpose and meaning (way before social responsibility was cool). But I also wanted to send something that honored, well, Hank. So, I sent the ADC a poem I wrote. And here it is:

HANK

He wears the designers’ uniform, lest you forget
A black t-shirt, black turtleneck, beneath a black jacket
Accented by his mustache, a clipped strip of snow white,
Offset by Pantone 1767 cheeks, eternally bright

Holding court at our school in Atlanta
(Which according to him was called “Port-foll-ya Cen-ta”)
Hank was the president but also head cheerleader
We pushed X-Actos and pixels, he pushed us further

Cowboys or Hotrods, we each knew our places
There were chairs to be made, or posters of typefaces
Ethos and rigor were drilled into our brains
We were simply too busy to find time to complain

James Victore! Sally Hogshead! Stefan Sagmeister!
These were the names we were expected to master
But these stars, they all seemed to drop by each week
Hank had a Rolodex one-million names deep

Does the man sleep? It is difficult to tell
His 5am class is subtitled “Introduction to Hell”
If you live in LA, you might also experience
4am phone calls when he forgets the time difference

Hank Richardson is a teacher, a Grandmaster of flash
An AIGA Fellow, a designer with panache
A trusted friend, a conspirator sweet,
Our Sturdy Magnolia of Bennett Street

But to me, he will always be just plain old Hank
And for my career, it’s he I can thank.

-Alissa Walker

I’ll be moderating this very exciting event named Designing Obama on February 19. The evening will feature Sol Sender, creator of the Obama logo (and recent staff addition to VSA Partners), and Scott Thomas, designer of the Obama campaign website. These men and their teams, I think it’s safe to say, have changed the face of political advertising. Ye olde stars, stripes and serif type just ain’t gonna cut it anymore.

The event is, as I mentioned, free, you just need to RSVP, and it takes place at 6:00pm at The Morgan Auditorium at the Academy of Art, located at 491 Post Street. I hope to see you there, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear what you might want me to ask these two creatives. This review of a previous event moderated by Steven Heller in NYC just might provide some food for thought. See you then!

So when my friend Ashley informed me yesterday that one of our high school teachers, Larry Matthews, died suddenly last week, you’ll understand why I’m so sad. Doc, as everyone called him, was not only one of my favorite teachers of all time, he taught math. So he must have been extra good.

Although it sometimes made me cry, up until 8th grade Algebra, Math and I were basically cool. I could think of myself like a number sleuth; we were looking for x, and sometimes y. We found x, we found y, end of story, check your work. But when I got to high school we started dealing with all these “what ifs.” I stopped doing well when the solution itself included an x and looked more like the Gateway Arch. Infinity as an answer? Impossible to grasp.

It also didn’t help that high school mathematics required us to come to class with a major distraction:  a TI-81 graphing calculator. For the next four years we would spend half of our time coaxing the sine, cosine and tangent waves into displaying the most authentic-looking butt and boob shapes along the x-axis. And the rest of the time using the letter-typing feature to draft notes to our fellow students, who we then pretended we needed to trade calculators with. (To my younger readers: We didn’t have cell phones back then, this was our only way of text messaging.)

I suffered through Honors Geometry, Honors Algebra 2 with Trig, and Honors Pre-Calculus until somebody had the sense to put me out of my misery. Finally, senior year, I was released from the custody of my beloved nerdherd and dropped to the b-track, Calculus AB. For people who are smart enough to take the AP Calculus exam at the end of the year but also smart enough to know they don’t want to make a career out of it.

I won’t ever admit that Doc Matthews made math fun, but Doc was fun. He ran the class like it was Letterman, and we were the studio audience. My enemies x, y and z evolved into stick figures with full heads of curly hair and curious beards. If we got a question right he’d run back to the board and scribble the answer with a dry erase flourish like he just got the answer to Final Jeopardy.

His energy and enthusiasm were magnetic. Explanations of limits, functions and differentials were lumped into easy-to-remember 70′s rock lyric parodies, sports metaphors and Doc-authored rhymes that had jaded 17-year-olds chanting “related rates <desk thump> related rates <desk thump> don’t need no dates <desk thump> to do related rates.”

If we talked to our neighbor during class, our names were placed in the Chit-Chat Box on the board, a clever way of both acknowledging and embarrassing us.

Fridays were the best. Those were reserved for extravagant Donut Parties, where someone was charged with making a Dunkin’ run before school. We’d spend the first 15 minutes of class engaged in a casual and quite civilized early morning cocktail party (only with orange juice). It was an amazing gesture that made us feel, you know, like grown ups.

But for all Doc’s ability to explain formulas in terms of the University of Tennesee sport currently in season, for all his musical talents, for all his custard-filled allowances, I was failing.

My low point was a 12% on a test. My friend Lisa—another Non-Mathlete Left Behind—remembers getting a 6%. Doc pulled me aside for my come-to-Newton moment.

“I know you hate this,” he said, his eyes still oddly smiling even though he was being stern. “So let me put it another way for you. If you pass the AP test, you will never have to think about math again.”

No one had ever put it in perspective like that for me. Other teachers had lied to us, told us that we’d better learn the quadratic equation because we’d need it to balance our checkbooks (another thing I’ve never had to do—liars!). But he knew me and my non-number-crunching brain well enough that he knew exactly how to motivate me to do better. My eyes lit up at the thought of a math-free life. Cue the study montage!

I honestly busted the books until that fateful day in May. And well…I’d love to say I tested out of Calculus forever right then and there, but the truth is all my cramming wasn’t enough to unearth me from four years of math deficiencies. When I enrolled at the University of Colorado that fall, my schedule included one final, hopeful semester of math. But Doc was half right. Not only did I breeze through it, I got my first 100% on a math test. Ever.

And after that, Doc was absolutely right:  I never had to think about math another day of my life. Until today, when writing this piece and I had to Google all the terms I supposedly learned in his class and have long since forgotten. But I’ll never, ever forget Doc.

For him, I’ll even accept the infinity sign as his final answer. Which he, of course, has added a nose and a grin to and turned it into a smiley face.