Mini-Stories: Volume 13

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

We are back! Happy 2022! 2021 was a weird year full of unexpected twists and turns, but one thing you can count on as we turn the page to a new calendar year are the 99pi mini-stories. This week we have stories about monster dorms, suspicious activity in the tunnels under D.C., the most beautiful and expensive pop record of all time, and jazz cups. Stay with us!

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DC TUNNELS

Roman Mars:
Hey, Delaney, happy 2022.

Delaney Hall:
Yeah, same to you. Same to

Roman Mars:
So you’re back again with another story.

Delaney Hall:
I am. Yeah. So today I want to share the story of someone who, I guess he just seems like a quintessential beautiful nerd. He was born and raised in D.C. He loves the city. He loves the obscure infrastructure of the city. He just feels like he fits on our show. But that’s not the only reason I wanted to introduce our listeners to him. He also intersects with recent history in this very strange and kind of unsettling way.

Roman Mars:
Okay, well, I’m intrigued. Tell me more.

Delaney Hall:
So this guy’s name is Elliot Carter. And when he was in his 20s, he did a Capitol Hill internship. And he said that this internship was quite boring, but that it did come with a perk, which is that they gave him an ID badge that allowed him to wander around the Capitol campus.

Elliot Carter:
And I spent this entire summer after college basically hungry for work from this office that wouldn’t give me any and just filling my time by, you know, disappear for two or three hours at a time when it was slow and just explore the building and kind of… the campus, really.

Delaney Hall:
And he gets really interested in the history of the Capitol complex, like the physical place and especially the tunnels that run underneath it.

Roman Mars:
Oh, I’ve heard a little bit about these tunnels, but I can’t really picture them, and I don’t know what they’re like, but I’ve heard about them. I would totally be in the same boat with Elliot.

Delaney Hall:
Yeah. Yeah, there’s all different kinds of tunnels under the Capitol. They serve different purposes, and Elliot got really intrigued. He started researching the history of them, and he learned that the tunnels started being built back in the Civil War era. So some of them were used to move books at high speed between the Library of Congress and the Capitol.

Roman Mars:
That’s awesome.

Delaney Hall:
I know. I know, I love that. And some of them house these huge underground air ducts that used to be packed with ice. It was like this early attempt at air conditioning.

Roman Mars:
Wow.

Elliot Carter:
But the ones that really intrigued the public are these subways that are for congressmen and their staff members and visitors, and those really started to sprout on Capitol Hill right at the turn of the century, so the early 1900s.

Delaney Hall:
And those tunnels existed to shuttle Congress people back and forth from the surrounding office buildings, which were going up around this time to the actual Capitol building, where they would cast their votes. So they had to be able to get there fast, like within 15 minutes when a quorum was called.

Roman Mars:
Oh, so these tunnels weren’t about security as I was kind of picturing them. They’re more about moving people back and forth quickly. So that, you know, a congressperson could jump on a subway and get to the Capitol in under 15 minutes.

Delaney Hall:
Yes. Yes, exactly. But the public was also really curious about them and kind of suspicious of them, honestly, because they immediately thought it was about the secrecy.

Elliot Carter:
So imagining an unpopular congressman who’s getting berated by his constituents or by pesky reporters who are looking for quotes and imagining these people evading their tormentors by, you know, shuttling across the street and disappearing. That was very much on people’s minds, but on the public side.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, I can totally see that. They really– tunnels lead to conspiracy theories.

Delaney Hall: Yes, they certainly do. And we are going to get into that more shortly. So there’s a lot of interesting history behind the tunnels. Elliot got really into it. He started pulling together all this research, not just on the Capitol tunnels, but on all the tunnels that run under the city. And he put together this really lovely resource. It’s a website called WashingtonTunnels.com, and it’s full of, you know, beautiful maps of these different tunnel systems. As you might expect, it became popular among local history buffs and the D.C. architecture community, like those are his people.

Roman Mars:
Mm-hmm. (affirmative)

Delaney Hall:
But here’s where the story takes a turn because about a year ago, in early 2021 on New Year’s Day, Elliot started noticing some very weird traffic on his site, like not his usual visitors.

Elliot Carter:
I noticed, like, there was a unusually high volume of people who were kind of anonymizing themselves, and they were from faraway locations or using kind of anonymous browsers and search engines. And then a group of these people were being referred to my little friendly, nerdy website from domains with names like AR15.com and mymilitia.com. And these are not my normal friends in the Washington tunnel community, so that kind of immediately raised a red flag.

Roman Mars:
Whoa. Okay, so what was going on?

Delaney Hall:
Well, Elliot started following some of the links back to see what was going on, on these referring websites.

Elliot Carter:
So I clicked through these links and I’m looking at comment threads where someone will have screenshot of my website and then they’ve annotated it, you know, with like the iPhone markup or the Snapchat kind of markup, with these arrows and text saying “patriots form here,” “block this entrance,” “look for escapes here.” Like annotated like a, you know, a civil war battle plan with like arrows and unit positions and stuff.

Roman Mars:
Mm-hmm. (affirmative)

Delaney Hall:
Yeah. So he can actually immediately see what’s happening. This was people who were planning the January 6 insurrection, and they were using his maps to talk about how they were going to surround and infiltrate the Capitol.

Roman Mars:
Oh my goodness. So, what did Elliot then do with that information?

Delaney Hall:
He was disturbed enough that he sent a tip to the FBI’s Washington field office, and he never heard anything back. And then a few days passed and it was January 6th.

Donald Trump Archival Tape
[AND WE FIGHT, WE FIGHT LIKE HELL. AND IF YOU DON’T FIGHT LIKE HELL, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO HAVE A COUNTRY ANYMORE. OUR EXCITING ADVENTURES AND BOLDEST ENDEAVORS….]

Delaney Hall:
And so that day, you know, just as a quick recap, there was a rally near the White House. Trump spoke at it and repeated his lies about election fraud. And then thousands of attendees walked over to the Capitol building, and hundreds of people actually broke in and went inside where Congress was beginning the electoral vote count. You know, it was terrifying. I mean, we all watched it happen.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, absolutely terrifying.

Delaney Hall:
And Elliot says that everyone in D.C. that day knew that it was going to be chaotic. They had basically been warned by the mayor to stay home, if at all possible. And Elliot was up on the rooftop sunroom of his apartment building, doing a Zoom call for work.

Elliot Carter:
Kind of watching this insurrection out the window a couple of blocks away and then opening up like Google Analytics and seeing in horror that there are like 600 people actively on this website right now. This is a quiet, sleepy website. So like, if you see 600 people in there like there’s something wrong.

Roman Mars:
Wow, that sounds very unsettling, but that he was somehow part of this thing that he completely objected to. That’s terrifying.

Delaney Hall:
Yeah. I mean, regardless of his intentions when he built the site, he said he felt just afraid that he would be perceived as complicit.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, I mean, he did report it. I mean, so…

Delaney Hall:
He did.

Roman Mars:
And clearly that wasn’t his intention. But like, so what happened after January 6th?

Delaney Hall:
Well, so Elliot watched all the news coverage that unfolded after the attack and was kind of stunned by it, like the fact that the organizers were sharing tunnel maps was one of the things that the press and law enforcement were holding up as evidence of the advanced planning in this attack.

Elliot Carter:
Any time they were talking about the capital tunnel maps that these people were sharing, they were talking about this obscure project that I had labored on.

Delaney Hall:
And so Elliot ended up pulling down the site for a time just so he could have time to look back through it line by line and think about the information he’d shared and if any of it, you know, should be changed. And he ultimately concluded, no. He felt he’d presented the information responsibly and had all been stuff in the public domain. And so he put the site back up.

Roman Mars:
And so did anyone ever follow up with him, like from the FBI or anything like that about the maps?

Delaney Hall:
He was never contacted by the FBI, but eventually the Senate Rules Committee published their first investigative report into the attack, and it had a couple of footnotes that referenced the tip that Elliott had submitted before the insurrection happened.

Roman Mars:
Mm-hmm. (affirmative)

Delaney Hall:
Then after that, he was contacted by the House Committee investigating January 6th and actually had a conversation with them about the tip that he made. So they’re trying to suss out if law enforcement groups like the FBI dropped the ball at all in their response to January 6th.

Roman Mars:
Wow. So where does that leave Elliot today? I mean, he mentioned that the website was back up. Is it still up right now?

Delaney Hall:
It is. Yeah, it’s still up. It’s a beautiful site. You should go look at it. And I think Elliot feels more strongly than ever that there’s kind of a public service element to his site. He wants people to know about these tunnels, about their real history. And this actually gets back to the conspiracy theory point you made earlier.

Roman Mars:
Mm-hmm. (affirmative)

Delaney Hall:
And he says that for as long as they have been around, the tunnels have been a subject of conspiracy and speculation and mistrust. Like he gave this example of back in the 1930s, there were these wild ideas about how people were getting raped and mugged in the D.C. tunnels. And then more recently, like today, they’re a source of fascination for Qanon believers who think that Democratic politicians are involved in, you know, all sorts of completely fabricated stuff related to sex trafficking and kids. And they think the tunnels are part of that plot.

Roman Mars:
So it sounds like Elliot, in keeping WashingtonTunnels.com up and keeping it full of, you know, relatively mundane information about how these tunnels work is trying to just combat the lunacy that people associate with these tunnels.

Delaney Hall:
Yeah, he just wants people to know the true history of the tunnels. You know, in all their mundane glory.

Elliot Carter:
You know, if they’re conspiracy people who are going to visit this website, I want them to leave with the most idiot-proof, unambiguous take away of “this isn’t secret, this is not nefarious, this is not a sex trafficking tunnel” like this is both more boring and more interesting and more complex than I had given it credit for. I’ve appointed myself as the spokesman of these tunnels now.

Roman Mars:
I don’t know if you can ever make it idiot-proof. But I appreciate his effort. Well, that’s a fascinating story. Thank you so much for bringing it to us.

Delaney Hall:
Yeah, thank you.

——————————————

DORMZILLA

Roman Mars:
If you follow architecture news, or just use social media at all, you may be familiar with Munger Hall — a proposed building for the University of California in Santa Barbara. The project is being sponsored in part by billionaire Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway. The exterior design is not exactly ugly — it’s plain and boxy, nothing to write home about, but also nothing to get worked up over. It was the unusual and cramped interior layout that led to headlines like “All Hail Dormzilla, the Monster Dorm the Internet Hates” Our own Kurt Kohlstedt came across an unexpected angle on this story, and is here to tell us more about what he found.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Yeah and what I found was pretty cool. There wasn’t much press around this project until someone leaked this letter that really ripped into it. And as it turns out, the leaker of this letter — the guy whose intervention sparked this whole cascade of viral media coverage — is a 99% Invisible fan.

Roman Mars:
Hell yeah!

Kurt Kohlstedt:
I love it.

Roman Mars:
So Mark’s on this committee, and this project comes up for review while he’s on the committee.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Well, okay, technically, no. I should clarify that he wasn’t officially still a member at this point. He had just graduated, but he still got the meeting invites. And so he went to this meeting and the meeting felt really different to him. He recalls the committee basically being told, “your feedback isn’t going to matter.” It seemed to him that the Munger Hall review was more about rubber stamping the design. And after a slideshow, he recalls the organizer saying something like–

Mark Vukcevich:
“Any feedback that you guys give will be taken as suggestions and will likely may or may not be incorporated in design.” You have, “this meeting is not to have any up or down vote on this project.” So it is a radical departure of what previous procedures were and how a building gets designed and come about.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
And so after this meeting, he sends an email to the whole review committee’s member list, expressing his frustration about how the meeting went and he wasn’t the only one with strong opinions. This other member responded to the thread, explaining that he was actually quitting the committee entirely because of this project.

Mark Vukcevich:
When Dennis McFadden, the architect, sent his resignation letter, he sent it in reply to my email that I sent the entire committee.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
And McFadden was this consulting architect on the committee. He’d been there for over a decade, but his resignation letter went into a lot of detail about issues he had with the building and the review process. And some of the stuff is pretty damning. Like “the basic concept from Munger Hall as a place for students to live is unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent and a human being.”

Roman Mars:
Okay.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Right. So Mark saw this, and he basically agreed with the sentiments and decided to post McFadden’s letter online. And he had no idea this was going to become this huge story.

Mark Vukcevich:
I posted his letter on the UCSB Reddit, thinking it would get attention of some alumni and maybe get the attention of some, like, local journalists, nothing more than not.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
But of course, it went much bigger than that, and after it went viral, he had some regrets about not asking for McFadden’s permission first.

Mark Vukcevich:
I feel bad about that, and I do feel bad about at least not asking for consent to Dennis before I leaked this letter because I’m sure it destroyed his phone and his email for a few days.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
In any case, it’s all out in the open now, and Mark agrees with critics who have pointed out the lack of natural light. A lack of air circulation, but he also thinks that there hasn’t been enough coverage about some other important issues, like how the building might impact student health. Needless to say, overall, he has this very negative feeling towards the project. So it was actually a bit of a surprise to me to learn that his position isn’t entirely one-sided on it.

Roman Mars:
So what is he? What is he like about dormzilla then?

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Well, it’s not so much about liking the building itself, but it is about liking the fact that there’s an attempt to address a huge student housing crisis on campus. And just to put the scale of this in context, the whole UC system had to put more than 15,000 students on a housing waiting list this past fall.

Roman Mars:
Woah.

Mark Vukcevich:
It is really like a worry of mine that this might derail 4500 units, which are severely needed in the area.

Roman Mars:
4500 units is a big chunk out of 15000 on a waiting list.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
It is. It really is, and so you can see why this is not exactly a clear cut case of just, you know, like, let’s just stop this project. And Mark himself, he’s got a lot of personal familiarity with this housing crunch. You know, he knows students who have been put in crisis housing, and he’s seen other students trying to figure out how to effectively live out of their cars.

Mark Vukcevich:
Hey, if I live in my car, can I use your bathroom? You know, I’ll pay rent for just the bathroom and the kitchen.

Roman Mars:
I mean, that situation just sounds terrible.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Yeah, it does. And it isn’t just an informal or a one off-thing at UCSB. There’s one California university that has actually put up a parking area for students who can’t find housing. So they’re basically encouraged to, you know, go and take their car and sleep there on campus.

Roman Mars:
Wow. I mean, I guess that’s better than them sleeping someplace that isn’t secure and might be more dangerous, but that is not a long-term solution. I mean, that’s terrible.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Yeah. Not at all. And so in light of all of these housing issues, you know, Mark still hates the design, but he has concerns about the side effects of this story that he helped break.

Mark Vukcevich:
There’s another part of me that understands the housing crisis that we’re in.

Roman Mars:
So I can see now why he is of two minds about this. So what’s his take on this larger crisis?

Kurt Kohlstedt:
So in part, he blames the university, you know, for not spending on housing sooner, for waiting this long, for letting it become a crisis. But he also points to the role that the ultra-rich have in shaping academic institutions. In this case, not only is Charles Munger the largest single donor backing Munger Hall, but he’s also been the driving force behind its architectural design. And remember, Bunker is an investor like his boss, Warren Buffett.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t seem like he has an architectural expertise in that case.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
That’s right. And so part of the issue here is that he put up this, you know, fraction of the amount needed to fund the building, which did get the project started, which, you know, on some level is good. But somehow, despite only putting up some of the money, he’s getting this — essentially a controlling interest in the design. And obviously, this kind of influence, you know, amateur sort of architects designing buildings, you know, like having this kind of level of control over our academic institutions. You can see how that would create some problems.

Mark Vukcevich:
Our institutions of higher learning are, like, essentially guided now by not, like, just millionaires and rich people. We’re talking about, like, billionaires, people who have enough money that they can play God. That, yeah, it worries me.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
And Mark sees this economic and political moment we’re in as a factor in the story blowing up like it did. You know, a lot of people are concerned with wealth inequality and who has power via money in America?

Mark Vukcevich:
I really think this is like a testament to what billionaires are doing in our society that this story from a little area of Santa Barbara would go this spiral.

Roman Mars:
I mean, I think that’s why this story had so much resonance with people was that it was the Charlie Munger part of it that really made it viral as much as anything else. I understand that you need dense student housing and that needs to happen. It seems clear that this building is not the proper holistic solution to that problem. So like, I’m not sure what is the most important part of this.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Anybody who’s sort of interested in the pros and cons in the debate over this, I really encourage you to read McFadden’s letter. It’s really powerfully written.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you, Kurt. It’s a great story. I’m so glad we got a little bit more perspective into it, and I’m so glad that somebody took the sort of 99p spirit to examine — deeply, examine the built world and then realize that there was something that they could do about it. And that’s just, that pleases me to no end.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Yeah.

Roman Mars:
Well, thank you, Kurt. Appreciate it.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Any time.

——————————————

BLUE MONDAY

Roman Mars:
Chad Clark is a longtime friend of the show, and eagle-eared listeners may recall that I have talked about his band Beauty Pill a couple of times over the years. I love them. Beauty Pill has a new 12-inch single called “Instant Night.” It has four songs, and they’re all available as digital downloads on Bandcamp. But what is particularly notable about this release, and one of the reasons Chad and I were talking about it on the phone one day, was because they decided to create really striking and beautiful vinyl and CD packaging for the songs.

Chad Clark:
It is an entirely translucent, basically invisible – I’m putting that in quotes – record. It’s a design experiment. It doesn’t look like other records.

Roman Mars:
The designer, Nora McKelvey, created a clear vinyl record in a clear plastic sleeve with silver foil typography. It is a gorgeous thing, but the economics of a 12-inch single are complicated, particularly when they’re made to be beautiful design objects. So bands don’t tend to release a lot of them.

Chad Clark:
But I love the idea of the 12-inch single because I love New Order.

Roman Mars:
Which brings us to Chad Clark’s mini-story about the bestselling 12-inch single of all time, which legend goes, was also a complete financial fiasco because of its design. I’m talking about New Order’s “Blue Monday.”

Chad Clark:
“Blue Monday” for people who don’t know it — actually, I’m going to just be bold enough to say you do know “Blue Monday” whether or not you think you know “Blue Monday.”

Roman Mars:
That’s exactly right. You’ve heard it in some way.

Chad Clark:
Yes, it’s the song that goes ba-da-ba-da-ba-dump-ba dump-ba-dump….

Roman Mars:
Yeah, if you’ve been in a dance, a school dance, you’ve been at a club, you’ve heard it, in some way.

Chad Clark:
Honestly, if you’ve been to the supermarket, you know? You’ve heard the song.

NEW ORDER – BLUE MONDAY
[HOW DOES IT FEEL TO TREAT ME LIKE YOU DO?]

Roman Mars:
The 12-inch single for “Blue Monday” came out in 1983, and the cover was designed by the brilliant Peter Saville.

Chad Clark:
He designed the Blue Monday cover to resemble a floppy disk. People who are younger won’t know what that is, but a floppy disk was the way the data was beginning to be stored actually at that time. When he used the floppy disk as an iconic image, it was actually cutting edge at that time. It was a new thing, and it was considered very futuristic.

Roman Mars:
The story goes that Peter Saville was visiting New Order in the studio as they were just beginning to experiment with electronic music, and he saw a five-inch floppy disk on the table and he was like, “What the hell is this thing?” But it totally inspired him.

Chad Clark:
I don’t think he even understood what it was. He just knew it was something exciting and odd-looking. Floppy disks are square, but they have little cutouts, and that actually brings to a really important part of the “Blue Monday” fable. Peter is a very exacting designer, and he insisted that the form of the 12-inch had to mimic a floppy disk exactly. And floppy disks have what they call die-cut holes in them, basically, where you can see the data exposed. In this case, in his design, the data — being the vinyl record — which is, I’m sorry, that is just genius. I mean, take a moment to really… No, for real! But just take a moment to be like he is essentially one of the semiotics of this design is he’s saying, there is data in this music.

Roman Mars:
Yeah.

Chad Clark:
And that’s just heavy and beautiful to me. As an artist, that’s very inspiring. But so, in insisting on the die-cut, it was a very unusual cut. The pressing had to be custom designed, and it was expensive to produce.

Roman Mars:
In addition to the custom cuts, it also has a full color banding on the edge, which added to the expense.

Chad Clark:
It was so expensive to produce that the label ended up selling the record not at a profit at all. There is a significant loss of money attached to “Blue Monday,” which is part of, to me, the romance of its fable. These people cared so much about being specific about the design of what they’re doing, that they forgot the bottom line. And for me again, as an artist, I just find that very inspiring and very cool and very romantic, I guess.

Roman Mars:
But it wasn’t meant to be a romantic gesture. It was just an oversight. And it’s been reported that the label lost about seven cents each time a copy of “Blue Monday” was sold.

Chad Clark:
What I’ve seen of them talking about it, I think they feel a little embarrassed or maybe a little bit sheepish about the mistake that happened. And I think Factory Records was a notoriously chaotic business operation and there was a lot of drugs and debauchery and all sorts of craziness.

Roman Mars:
I presume that label adjusted the manufacturing cost or the price to get it all into balance eventually.

Chad Clark:
But still, there’s just something beautiful to making a statement, even when it hurts financially. And so when you hear the statistic that this is the best selling 12-inch of all time, that statistic has an asterisk to it, which is like it’s one of the most money-losing records ever. And just speaking as an independent musician who has made a lot of choices, artistic and otherwise, that have not led me to getting rich, there’s just something really just, I don’t know, just something kind of beautiful about it. So that’s my “Blue Monday” take.

BEAUTY PILL – YOU NEED A BETTER MIND
[LET ME IN YOU COWARDS, LET ME IN. I SWEAR YOU’RE GOING TO LIKE ME. LET ME IN YOU COWARDS,, LET ME IN. YOU DON’T KNOW NOBODY LIKE ME. MAYBE I CAN BE YOUR FRIEND. COULD YOU SEE ME AS YOUR FRIEND? LET ME IN YOU COWARDS, LET ME IN. YOU NEED A BETTER MIND.]

Roman Mars:
Chad Clark is the chief songwriter of the band Beauty Pill, the new 12-inch single is called “Instant Night.” I’m really partial to the B-side. It’s called “You Need a Better Mind.”

BEAUTY PILL – YOU NEED A BETTER MIND
(continues)

Roman Mars:
Coming up after the break, an indelible design featured on disposable cups. Stay with us.

[BREAK]

JAZZ CUPS

Roman Mars:
Okay, Christopher Johnson, what do you have for us?

Christopher Johnson:
The late 80s, Roman, how well do you remember the late 80s and early 90s?

Roman Mars:
I would say I remember them very well. That was prime Roman time. It was, like, kind of 13 to 17, you know.

Christopher Johnson:
I like that. Prime Roman time. So do you remember how everything was like all bright and poppy and neon or damn near neon, right? Electric and busy with squiggles and squaggles and shapes? And you saw it on skater shoes and music videos, company logos.

Roman Mars:
I remember Jams shorts.

Christopher Johnson:
Right.

Roman Mars:
You remember those from like the mid-80s.

Christopher Johnson:
Absolutely.

Roman Mars:
You know, like very bright shorts with lots of stripes.

Christopher Johnson:
Absolutely. And so nothing was safe, right? Everything had this aesthetic on it, and nothing says to me late 80s or early 90s more than this paper cup design that was called “Jazz.” So I’m going to show it to you. And how… so take a look at this. How would you describe this Jazz cup?

Roman Mars:
Well, I know this cup very, very well. So it is a broad wide turquoise kind of zigzag stripe, and it’s overlaid with a sort of thinner purple zigzag stripe. And it is just — it is something else. But you really…. it is, like, ubiquitous.

Christopher Johnson:
These cups are everywhere. They’re a staple at conferences and in break rooms all across America.

Roman Mars:
So where does the Jazz Cup come from?

Christopher Johnson:
So design geeks have been obsessed with figuring out that question, and they want to know who came up with the Jazz Cup. For years, no one could figure out who designed it. It was this big mystery. And then in 2015, a reporter at the Springfield News Leader in Missouri tracked down the woman, believed to be the creator of this iconic piece of disposable tableware art.

Gina Ekiss:
My name’s Gina Ekiss. I’m the creator of the Jazz Cup design. Just recently became another sensation.

Christopher Johnson:
Gina lives in Aurora, Missouri, and she’s been doing art since she was a kid.

Gina Ekiss:
As far back as I can remember, I’ve been drawing and painting and getting into trouble because of it. Just things like that. My mom, when I was five, she painted the bathroom cabinetry white, and to me, that was an open invitation. So I drew pictures all over it, and she was not very thrilled. So when my dad got home, he pulled me aside and he said, “Well, here’s your options. I can either give you a spanking or I’m going to take your crayons away for a week.” I said, I’ll take the spanking.

Roman Mars:
It’s a woman who loves her art, a girl who loves her art and a woman who loves her art.

Christopher Johnson:
And she stuck with it. In the late 80s, she graduated from college with an art degree and she landed her first job at Sweetheart Cup Company in Springfield, Missouri. And she became what was called a general line artist. That’s someone who designs their cups and bowls and plates and stuff like that. And they had clients that included Taco Bell, McDonald’s and even, you know, little mom and pop stores. The company was doing really well, but there was one area where it was struggling a bit. See, Sweetheart also put its own designs on paper products, and those designs weren’t very interesting. And in the late 80s, Ekiss says that the company decided that it was time for a new look on its own products, which makes sense. You know, it’s about to be a new decade. Let’s kick in the door of the 90s with something that’s fresh for the picnics and the office parties of the computer age. And she says that first, Sweetheart hired outside contractors for this makeover, but the company wasn’t getting what it wanted. So Sweetheart turned to its own internal art department and they made it a competition, and the winning design would become the company’s brand new signature stock art.

Roman Mars:
Whoa. Okay, so how did that work? Like, were their common rules for the competition?

Christopher Johnson:
Yes, the specs were – make it a one or two color design, something that was fairly clean, right? But also something that could be easily reprinted without any mistakes. And it’s got to fit on curved surfaces like plates and bowls and stuff. But Geithner says that even inside of those parameters, she felt like Sweetheart was willing to be a little bit adventurous.

Gina Ekiss:
I thought immediately they’re wanting to do something fresh and different. They’re wanting to kind of hit on a younger crowd of either vendors and/or customers. People were wanting something a little livelier.

Christopher Johnson:
So she pulled out some of her old college portfolios, and she found some old designs that she could experiment with, and she started tweaking them, playing with chaulks and charcoals and pastels and paints.

Gina Ekiss:
And so I just, I sat there for hours and just made different swatches with this piece of charcoal until I got one that I liked. And then I got another type of charcoal – smaller piece – and experimented with the purple. Then I overlaid them, and that’s how it came together.

Christopher Johnson:
Gina’s flying freehand sketched out those two zigzags, the skinny one in purple and the big fat one in turquoise blue. Those were two of her favorite colors.

Roman Mars:
I mean, you know, the zig zag turquoise purple is like, that was everywhere. That color, that was a real favorite of the moment, for sure.

Gina Ekiss:
At that time, it was peaking everywhere. Everybody had wild colored jogging suits and sneakers and things like that. And I just thought, I want to pull this color. It’s so different than anything that the corporation had printed before, and they were really saying they wanted to go in a new direction and draw in a livelier crowd or clientele. So I thought, well, if we’re going to go all out, let’s just go all out.

Roman Mars:
I mean, those are words to live by. If we’re going to go all out, let’s go all out. I mean, it sounds like she was encouraged internally to go all out, but I’m still actually kind of surprised now that I think about it. How bold it is.

Christopher Johnson:
Yeah, it’s true. And there was no guarantee that the company was going to go for it. You know, everyone was allowed to submit up to four designs, and Gina did that. She turned in her four sketches, crossed her fingers and then the bosses come by her desk and they say, we want to see you.

Gina Ekiss:
And they just called me into the office and said, you know, this is what they’ve decided to go with. It’s your design. It is?!? I was shocked. I was thrilled, but I was shocked.

Christopher Johnson:
So Gina was standing there in her boss’s office. She’s happy. She’s shocked. And then they hit her with some more asks.

Gina Ekiss:
And then they’re like, now we’re kind of on a short time span here. We’ve got to get this into production, so we’ve got to come up with a name for it because they want to start advertising our new design. And I thought, what?? How do I go about picking a name for a line of cupware? You know, right out of college? I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing.

Christopher Johnson:
So now she’s got to come up with a name for this thing, and–

Roman Mars:
That’s really outside of her area of expertise. I mean, I’m glad they gave her the opportunity to name it, but still, that’s so funny.

Christopher Johnson:
So she does for the name exactly what she did for the design itself. She goes back to her old portfolios and she finds that design that she’d done for college.

Gina Ekiss:
And the name of it had been Razzi, R-A-Z-Z-I. And I said, well, what about like jazzy or jazz? And they were like, yeah, let’s try that. What? Okay!

Roman Mars:
Okay, so she comes up with both the design and the name, and this design is everywhere for, you know, decades at this point.

Christopher Johnson:
Right, right. Yeah.

Roman Mars:
Did Gina get anything for coming up with Jazz?

Christopher Johnson:
Honestly, not a whole lot. I mean, she says she got a $50 gift certificate. She got some swag with Jazz printed on it and she got bragging rights. And that’s it because she worked for Sweetheart. So she says she signed papers that said that the design belonged to Sweetheart.

Roman Mars:
Yeah.

Christopher Johnson:
And so Jazz gets copyrighted in the early 90s and it just takes off. And Gina says she hasn’t been able to escape the design since.

Gina Ekiss:
I mean, I’ve seen, like, fake fingernails, men’s underwear. I mean, it’s just anything you can imagine and a lot of things you can’t imagine I’ve seen it printed on. You know, my son came home for Christmas two years ago. He had the sweatpants, the sweatshirt, his girlfriend had the jazz mask.

Roman Mars:
I think it’s funny that her kids are kind of trolling her with her own design on Christmas morning. That’s hilarious. I mean, but she’s totally right. You’ve seen it everywhere. Even if you’re just talking about cups and plates, you’ve seen it everywhere, and then it has totally transcended that. So she didn’t get any real money for it, and she didn’t get credit for it because it was a mystery until quite recently. What happened to the Gina you know, after she came up with this design?

Christopher Johnson:
So about a decade after the design comes out, Sweetheart gets bought by Solo Cup. Gina’s office in Springfield closes down and she moves on to other jobs. She painted murals. She ran a landscape supply company with her husband. And today she’s got a job at Hobby Lobby, but she’s also making her own art.

Gina Ekiss:
Well, I– it sounds odd, but I collect old cowboy boots and I make them into purses. I’ve had several ladies from all over the United States, like their husband might have passed. They send me his boots and I make them a purse out of them so they can carry it.

Roman Mars:
That is a very specific form of art. So the Jazz Cup is still everywhere. The design is still everywhere. Do you have any idea why you think that is?

Christopher Johnson:
Yeah. Well, I think at least part of it is that this design comes along just as the internet is becoming more and more a part of our lives. And so it’s been that generation that really took that design and ran with it.

Roman Mars:
Right, right. It’s also like that generation got old enough to have nostalgia for things in the late 80s and early 90s. Yeah, they got old enough to go, “Oh, what about that sort of like fun and, you know, salient, but also a little cheesy design from my youth that now I love for lots of reasons, you know?”

Christopher Johnson:
And they were also like, “We will not rest until we find out who is responsible for this piece of beauty.”.

Roman Mars:
Yes.

Christopher Johnson:
And so when it came out about seven years ago, that Gina Ekiss was responsible, adoring fans of the design, they were so thrilled. They lost their minds. And finally, they were, you know, so happy to finally put a name and a face to this flying purple and teal zigzag that so epitomized the late 80s in the early 90s, which was all great. But then there was a problem.

Stephanie Miller:
My name is Stephanie Miller, and I am the original designer of what became known as the Jazz Cup design.

Roman Mars:
Oh no. Okay, so this woman, Stephanie Miller and Gina are both claiming to be the creators of the design Jazz.

Christopher Johnson:
Yep!

Roman Mars:
Wow.

Christopher Johnson:
So when the story came out seven years ago naming Gina as the originator, Stephanie raised her hand on Twitter and Reddit and said, “Hold the phone. That’s my design.”

Roman Mars:
Wow. Okay, so what is Stephanie’s version of this story?

Christopher Johnson:
Okay, so Stephanie lives in Sandusky, Ohio, and I gave her a call and she told me, you know, she started off a lot like Gina. She’d been making art since she was a kid. She went to college for graphic design, and she got a job right after graduation at a company called Imperial Cup in Ohio. For years and years, Imperial had been using a design. It was basically just wheat printed on its cups and plates

Roman Mars:
Wheat!

Christopher Johnson:
Wheat. So there’s kind of nowhere to go but up, you know? And again, it’s now the late 80s, and Stephanie says Imperial was ready to switch things up. So she says she did a few different designs for them, including a paint-brushed thick blue zigzag with a thinner purple zigzag brushed over top of it. She called her design “Brushstrokes.” Imperial Cup picked that design, put it on their products and Brushstrokes was out in the world.

Stephanie Miller:
And then, lo and behold, a design that was almost identical from Sweetheart came out. But basically the only difference between the designs were the materials used to make it. I did paint brush strokes, and it looks like she had used charcoal, but it was exactly the same.

Christopher Johnson:
So Stephanie’s hypothesis is that a salesman at Sweetheart saw an Imperial Cup with her design on it and liked it. They took the cup over to Gina’s desk, put it down in front of her and said, “This is great. Make a version of this for us.” And according to Stephanie’s version of events, Sweetheart who would have stolen the design from Imperial, then sent Imperial a cease and desist letter like “Stop making the design we just stole from you or we’re going to sue.”

Roman Mars:
Okay, I think I’m following this. So if Sweetheart sent Imperial a cease and desist letter, is there proof of that? Like does that show up anywhere?
Christopher Johnson: No. Stephanie so far hasn’t produced any proof. And as for Gina, you know, Sweetheart still has the copyright on Jazz and another company called Dart Container, that’s the company that now owns a Sweetheart, they wrote me to say this: The Jazz design was originally created in the late 1980s by Gina Ekiss, a Sweetheart company employee, as part of an internal design contest for a new stock image. She chose her favorite color turquoise and purple, since it went so well with turquoise.”

Roman Mars:
So it seems pretty settled at this point, unless something else comes out.

Christopher Johnson:
Exactly. That’s exactly right.

Roman Mars:
I mean, so you, you know, so I listen to you talking to Gina and she seems like she’s laughing and enjoying this. And, you know, and doesn’t seem particularly put out that she didn’t make a lot of money from it. Or, you know, it kind of… she seems to enjoy it being seen on, you know, men’s boxer shorts and things like that. Did you get a sense from her that this was anything but a good memory for her?

Christopher Johnson:
Oh my God. What you’re hearing is exactly what our one hour phone call was like. She just seemed so proud of what she’d done and also amused by the fact that it is still getting a lot of attention, that it has sort of found this second life in popular culture. I think that it also just means something to her that the perfection of the design is born out by the fact that other people have picked it up and given it so much love and props. Like as a graphic designer, she seems pretty thrilled just by that. And there is also just something really elegant and beautiful in a certain way about the way she captures a moment.

Roman Mars:
That’s what’s crazy is that it really is of the moment — that design really does center you in 1990.

Christopher Johnson:
True.

Roman Mars:
But it also became timeless because it was so specific, which is the thing I kind of love about a certain type of design is that the soul of it is its specificity and therefore it is universal. And that’s great.

Christopher Johnson:
Yeah, you nailed it.

Roman Mars:
Well, thank you, Christopher. I love this story. This is so much fun.

Christopher Johnson:
Thanks, Roman.

———

CREDITS

99% Invisible was produced this week by Delaney Hall, Kurt Kohlstedt and Christopher Johnson. Mix and tech production by Ameeta Ganatra. Music by our director of sound Swan Real. The rest of the team is Vivian Le, Emmet FitzGerald, Lasha Madan, Chris Berube, Joe Rosenberg, Sofia Klatzker and me, Roman Mars.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building — in beautiful uptown Oakland, California.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me @romanmars and the show @99piorg. We’re on Instagram and Reddit, too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.