March 2008 Archives

Behold the Art of the Business Card. (Thank you Veni Harlan.)

Fold-ins, Past and Present, from the New York Times. (Via Fark.)

(Thank you Matt Monguillot.)

“She took off her dark glasses and squinted at me. It was as though her eyes were shattered prisms, the dots of blue and gray and green like broken bits of sparkle.”

—Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1958. The eyes are those of Holly Golightly, of course.

“‘Listen. You know those days when you’ve got the mean reds?’
    ‘Same as the blues?’
    ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘No, the blues are because you’re getting fat or maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re sad, that’s all. But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, bu you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is. You’ve had that feeling?’
    ‘Quite often. Some people call it angst.’
    ‘All right. Angst. But what do you do about it?’”

—Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1958.

“‘[I]t’s tacky to wear diamonds before you’re forty; and even that’s risky. They only look right on the really old girls. Maria Ouspenskaya. Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds: I can’t wait.’”

—Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1958.

“The morning light seemed refracted through her: as she pulled the bed covers up to my chin she gleamed like a transparent child; then she lay down beside me. ‘Do you mind? I only want to rest a moment. So let’s don’t say another word. Go to sleep.’”

—Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1958.

Biz Barbie, 30"x30", collage, 2008. The fifth in a series of ‘large diamonds,’ I finished this just in time for Recent Works: LSU School of Art Faculty Exhibition, a new show at the LSU School of Art Gallery, at the Shaw Center, conveniently located in beautiful downtown Baton Rouge. The opening is tonight, from 6-8 pm.

“[P]erhaps the Zen doctrine bearing most directly on the tea aesthetic is the emphasis on the mundane as a sphere of action and a source of beauty. The Buddha nature, hence the path to Enlightenment, is to be found in every sentient being and in the most everyday activities. Extending this exaltation of the mundane to the aesthetic realm, Zen describes a fusion of opposites in which the beautiful and the ordinary are no longer distinct. This leads to the aesthetic appreciation of imperfection and poverty, of sabi and wabi. Inasmuch as the qualities can be defined, sabi is the beauty of the imperfect, the old, the lonely, while wabi is the beauty of simplicity and poverty.”

—Dorinne Kondo, The Way of Tea: A Symbolic Analysis, from Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by David Howes, 2005.

“The tea room itself, for example, embodies pure sabi-wabi:

‘The tea hut is extremely bare and almost devoid of color. IF a flower is arranged in a vase, it is usually a single, small blossom of some quiet hue or white. The tea utensisls are not of exauisite porcelain but of coarse pottery, often a dull brwon or black and imperfectly formed. The dettle may be a little rusty. Yet from these objects we receive an impression not of gloominess or shappiness but one of quet harmony and peace. . . .’”

—Dorinne Kondo, in the endnotes of The Way of Tea: A Symbolic Analysis, quoting Sources of Japanese Tradition, 1958; from Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by David Howes, 2005.

“Under the bed I discovered a whole shoebox full of love letters from the blond majorette from Belle Prairie Plantation; I took them in the back yard, arranged them in a neat pile near the place where my dog Skip was buried . . . and put a match to them, gazing down at one phrase not yet burned: ‘I’ll meet you in front of the drugstore at 7:30 in my green sweater.’”

—Willie Morris, North Toward Home, 1967.

“The chairs at the kitchen table don’t match and there are pictures of people taped everywhere on the walls, also, the most pictures of Jesus I have ever seen in one place. I want to ask him does your mother collect Jesus but I figure he would slap me silly. To some people ‘your mother’ is a swear word.”

—Lynda Barry, The Good Times are Killing Me, 1988.

“‘Our street has officially gone to Hell,’ my mother said when the last two pure perfect white families moved out the same week. ‘I don’t know why I bother working on the yard anymore.’”

—Lynda Barry, The Good Times are Killing Me, 1988.

“My little sister Lucy told me one time that she used to think that street light was in reality God. I don’t see how she can even stand to admit that. Nine. You can’t get much dumber than when you’re nine. She’s a lot different than me and it’s not just because I’m older. I could always tell the difference between God and a street light.”

—Lynda Barry, The Good Times are Killing Me, 1988.

Don’t miss eXtreme Type Terminology, Part 1: The Detection of Types, the first of a five part series on typographic terminoogy at ilovetypography.com, penned by me!

“The Yellow Jade Mushroom grows on Mount Penglai. Its color is yellow, and its taste bitter. Dongwanggong ate it and became immortal, and lived for 90,000 years. The yellow tiger and yellow fish guard it. It consists of three levels; the lower level has three branches.”

“Miss Abbott’s religion was Christianity by fear and by rote—so tenacious it got you by the extremities and never let go; it was a thing of interminable monologues, crazed soliloquies; she wanted you to believe she herself was in radio contact with the Deity, and had hung the moon for Him on day number six. . . .
    [A]t Christmastime one year, when my feeling against Miss Abbott were running strongest, I went looking for the biggest, darkest, foulest dog turd I could find. I took it home in a paper sack, and when no one was around I put it in a small box and gift-wrapped it in beautiful red paper. I put the box, containing its Christmas cheer, in a larger box and gift-wrapped that one, in fine green and white paper—then a larger box still, then two or three others, each one more elaborately wrapped and ribboned. When I had finished, I put all the six boxes in wrapping paper and, using my left hand, I wrote out Miss Abbott’s address. Then I took the parcel to the post office and mailed it. I felt good for days.”

—Willie Morris, recalling his Yazoo City, Mississippi childhood in North Toward Home, 1967.

“The only thing I want to be famous for is inventing a nervous-breakdown gun. You could just shoot it at someone and they'd have a nervous breakdown and start sobbing, in fetal position. Someone like Slobodan Milosevic—we don’t have to kill him. Just give him a nervous breakdown.”

—Lynda Barry, Barefoot on the shag, an interview at Salon.com, May 18, 1999.

“I do not wish to by cynical; but if a stone is thrown into our garden, is it not sure to knock off the head of our most valuable tulip? If a cup of coffee is to be spilled, does it not make a point of falling on our richest brocade gown?”

—Emily Eden, The Semi-Attached Couple, 1859.

“The best games were at night. There was something about the pools of street light and the way the darkness surrounded us. Sound seemed to bounce. A couple of us might burst out singing, might do some dance moves. I believed the people in the airplanes passing over could see us and thought we looked cool. This was long before I grew up and found out you can’t see very much from an airplane window. Big things, yes, but the little things are lost.”

—Lynda Barry, One! Hundred! Demons!, 2002.

“The histories of vampires and people are not so different, really. How many of us can honestly see our own reflection?”

—Lynda Barry, One! Hundred! Demons!, 2002.

“The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body—a rational soul and an animal soul, a rider and a horse, a good guy with better instincts and finer feelings and a rascal with rapacious lusts and unruly passions. Hence the marvelously involved hypocrisies of guilt and penitence, and the frightful cruelties of punishment, warfare, and even self-torment in the name of taking the side of the good soul against the evil. The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its inseparable shadow, and the more it disowns its shadow, the more it becomes it.”

—Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, 1966.

“Otoko went out on the veranda and kicked a cage of fireflies into the garden with her bare foot.
    All the fireflies seemed to glow at once. A greenish-white light was streaming out as the cage landed on a patch of moss. The sky was clouding at the end of a long summer day, and an evening haze had begun to hover faintly over the garden, but it was still daylight. It seemed unlikely that the fireflies could have glowed so brilliantly, perhaps she had only imagined the light streaming out of the cage, perhaps it had been conjured up by her own feelings. She stood there rigidly as if paralyzed and stared unblinkingly at the firefly cage lying on its side on the moss.”

—Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty & Sadness, translated by Howard Hibbett, 1975.

“Oki was standing on a low hill, his gaze held by the purple sunset. . . . A purple sunset was most unusual. There were subtle gradations of color from dark to light, as if blended by trailing a wide brush across wet rice paper. The softness of the purple implied the coming of spring. At one place the haze was pink. That seemed to be where the sun was setting.”

—Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty & Sadness, translated by Howard Hibbett, 1975.

“No life was now in sight: even no ship upon the pale blue sea. The great globe of the sky was unblemished and royal in its blueness and its ringing cerulean light.”

—D.H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 1923.

“There are fascinating dark eyes in Sicily, bright, big, with an impudent point of light and curious roll, and long lashes: the eyes of old Greece, surely. But here one seen eyes of soft, blank darkness, all velvet, with no imp looking out of them. And they strike a stranger, older note: before the soul became self-conscious: before the mentality of Greece appeared in the world. Remote, always remote, as if the intelligence lay deep within the cave, and never came forward. One searches in to the gloom for a second, while the glance lasts. But without being able to penetrate to the reality. It recedes, like some unknown creature, deeper into its lair. There is a creature, dark and potent, But what?”

—D.H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 1923.

“Usually . . . the peasants of the South have left off the costume. Usually it is the invisible soldier’s grey-green cloth, the Italian khaki, this grey-green war clothing. How many millions of yards of the thick, excellent, but hateful material the Italian Government must have provided I don’t know: but enough to cover Italy with a felt carpet, I should think. It is everywhere. It cases the tiny children in stiff and neutral frocks and coats, it covers their extinguished fathers, and sometimes it even encloses the women in its warmth. It is symbolic of the universal grey mist that has come over men, the extinguishing of all bright individuality, the blotting out of all wild singleness. Oh, democracy! Oh, khaki democracy!”

—D.H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 1923.

It didn’t make the preceding top 100 list, but here’s my best schrift, my only schrift actually: Alien Radio, a font that I designed about ten years ago with a lot of help from Tal Leming. It was inspired by the Warner Brothers cinematic w logo, but at least I admit it. Functional? Probably not. A.R. takes the fun right out of functional. When a precise literal rendering of a text is essential to your communication, Alien Radio will probably not be your best font choice. But when you want to be cryptic and cool, post-modern to the point of invisibility; when you want to suggest communication without referencing anything specific, when legibility hardly matters anyway—consider A.R.

Die 100 Besten Schriften aller Zeiten.

“You CAN go to the beach. Farkitrol® can help.”

“Peasant women, sometimes barefoot, sat in their tight little bodices and voluminous, coloured skirts behind the piles of vegetables, and never have I seen a lovelier show. The intense deep green of spinach seemed to predominate, and out of that came the monuments of curd-white and black-purple cauliflowers: but marvellous cauliflowers, like a flower show, the purple ones intense as great bunches of violets. From this green, white and purple massing struck out the vivid rose-scarlet and blue-crimson of radishes, large radishes like little turnips in piles. Then the long, slim, grey-purple buds of artichokes, and dangling clusters of dates, and piles of sugar-dusty white figs and sombre-looking black figs, and bright burnt figs: basketfuls and basketfuls of figs. A few baskets of almonds, and many of walnuts. Basket-pans of native raisins. Scarlet peppers like trumpets: magnificent fennels, so white and big and succulent: baskets of new potatoes: scaly kohlrabi: wild asparagus in bunches, yellow-budding sparacelli: big, clean-fleshed carrots: feathery saldas with white hearts: long, brown-purple onions, and then, of course, pyramids of big oranges, pyramids of pale apples, and baskets of brilliant shiny mandarini, the little tangerine oranges with their green-black leaves. The green and vivid-coloured world of fruit-gleams I have never seen in such splendour as under the market roof at Cagliari: so raw and gorgeous. And all quite cheap. . . .”

—D.H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 1923.

“The lemons hang pale and innumerable in the thick lemon groves. Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they are touching one another all round. Solid forests of not very tall lemon trees lie between the steep mountains and the sea, on the strip of plain. Women, vague in the orchard under-shadow, are picking the lemons, lurking as if in the undersea. There are heaps of pale yellow lemons under the trees. They look like pale, primrose-smouldering fires. Curious how like fires the heaps of lemons look, under the shadow of foliage, seeming to give off a pallid burning amid the suave, naked, greenish trunks. When there comes a cluster of orange trees, the oranges are red like coals among the darker leaves. But lemons, lemons, innumerable, speckled like innumerable tiny stars in the green firmament of leaves. So many lemons!”

—D.H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 1923.

“Some light penetrated very weakly into my consciousness again, a tiny ray of sunlight, making me ecstatically warm. More sunlight flowed in, a gentle delicate silky light, which brushed so sweetly against me. Then the sun grew stronger and stronger, blazing brilliantly on my temples, piercing with heavy and burning heat into my emaciated brain. At the end a mad open fire blazed up before my eyes, a heaven and an earth ignited, men and animals of fire, mountains of fire, devils of fire, a chaos, a wilderness, a universe on fire, a smoking final day.”

—Knut Hamsun, Hunger, 1890; translation by Robert Bly, 1967.

“Some flies and gnats were sitting on my paper and this disturbed me; I breathed on them to make them go, then blew harder and harder, but it did no good. The tiny beasts lowered their behinds, made themselves heavy, and struggled against the wind until their thin legs were bent. They were absolutely not going to leave the place. They would always find something get hold of, bracing their heels against a comma or an unevenness in the paper, and they intended to stay exactly where they were until they themselves decided it was the right time to go.”

—Knut Hamsun, Hunger, 1890; translation by Robert Bly, 1967.

“The air was clear and bright and my mind was without shadow.”

—Knut Hamsun, Hunger, 1890; translation by Robert Bly, 1967.

Aspen. The multimedia magazine in a box.

“The fundamental innovation that we see with the Cro-Magnons and their African precursors is that of symbolic thought, and this is something with which language is virtually synonymous. Like thought, language involves forming and manipulating symbols in the mind, and our capacity for symbolic reasoning is almost inconceivable in its absence. Imagination and creativity are part of the same process, for only once we have created mental symbols can we combine them in new ways and ask ‘what if?’ . . .
    [T]here’s little doubt that it is symbolic thought that above all differentiates us . . . not only from every other hominid but also from every other organism that has ever existed. . . . [T]he record seems to show that the early history of modern humans was one of the sequential discovery of the things that symbolic thought made possible. This is, indeed, an ongoing process: even today we are discovering new ways in which to employ and express our unprecedented cognitive abilities.”
   
—Ian Tattersall, The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE, 2008.

“[W]hen [agricultural] people beset by climatic vagaries begin to feel at odds with nature, they begin to lose their sense of integration with it. Life becomes a struggle to overcome nature: to modify it and, if at all possible, to dominate it. It is no coincidence that the founding documents of the Judeo-Christian religions, ultimately derived from the early farmers of the Fertile Crescent, contain what Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History has called ‘the most ringing declaration of independence ever set down.’ This is the passage from the first book of the Bible, Genesis (1: 27), which translates as ‘God said . . . be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion . . . over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’ The independence declared here is independence of our species from nature itself, based on a profound feeling of separateness from the environment on which we depend.”

—Ian Tattersall, The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE, 2008.

“[I]t is already abundantly clear that we have to view ourselves as one twig on a giant branching tree of life, rather than as below the angels on the highest rung of the ladder of being.”

—Ian Tattersall, The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE, 2008.

“The insects on exhibit were huge and gorgeous. People would say to themselves, ‘What colors—amazing!’ and plod on through the drizzle. Eyed wings wide open in wonder, shimmering blue satin, black magic—these lingered for a while, floating in one's vision, until one boarded the trolley or bought a newspaper.”

The people behind Typographica have announced their Favorite Typefaces of 2007. Pictured is Blaktur by Ken Barber. Blaktur is distributed by House Industries, so of course it comes with elaborate packaging and extras, such as four tracks of music by the designer, and the

“He chose to lay aside his hat and wear a scarlet fez of her embroidering, but by superficial observers this was necessarily liable to be interpreted less as a compliment to Lucy than as a mark of coxcombry.”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.

“[D]on’t you be getting too thick with him; he’s got his father’s blood in him. . . . Aye, aye, the grey colt may chance to kick like his black sire.”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.

“[H]er eyes and cheeks had that fire of young joy in them which will flame out if it can find the least breath to fan it; and her simple black dress, with its bit of black lace, seemed like the dim setting of a jewel.”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.

“And does not a supreme poet blend light and sound into one, calling darkness mute and light eloquent?”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.

Recommended for your perusal: Indian Street Graphics, a nice set of pictures from the Meanest Indian.

“The leading horse is white
The second horse is red
The third one is a black
The last one is a green”

—Aphrodite’s Child, The Four Horsemen, from the album 666, 1972.

“‘Bring me that muslin,’ said Mrs. Glegg; ‘it’s a buff—I’m partial to buff.’”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.

“The mother was getting fond of her tall, brown girl, the only bit of furniture now on which she could bestow her anxiety and pride; and Maggie, in spite of her own ascetic wish to have no personal adornment, was obliged to give way to her mother about her hair and submit to have the abundant black locks plaited into a coronet on the summit of her head after the pitiable fashion of those antiquated times.”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.

“‘Oh but, Tom,’ said Maggie, her eyes filling with tears. . . . ‘I thought we should never part with that while we lived—everything is going away from us—the end of our lives will have nothing in it like the beginning!’”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.

“Me—a name I call myself”

—Oscar Hammerstein II, Do-Re-Mi, from The Sound of Music, 1965; quoted in The Life & The Work: Art and Biography, edited by Charles B. Salas, 2007.

“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”

—Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit: Selected from the Writings and Sayings of Henry Ward Beecher, 1887; quoted in The Life & The Work: Art and Biography, edited by Charles B. Salas, 2007.

“‘If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for ’em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must make a ball of yourself—that’s where it is. . . .
    ‘The world isn’t made of pen, ink, and paper, and if you’re to get on in the world, young man, you must know what the world’s made of.’”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860. The advice is from Mr. Deane.

“Nothing but long meditation and preconcerted arrangement of effects could have enabled Tom to present so striking a figure as he did to Maggie when she looked up. Dissatisfied with the pacific aspect of a face which had no more than the faintest hint of flaxen eyebrow, together with a pair of amiable blue-grey eyes and round pink cheeks that refused to look formidable . . . he had had recourse to that unfailing source of the terrible, burnt cork, and had made himself a pair of black eyebrows that met in a satisfactory manner over his nose and were matched by a less carefully adjusted blackness about the chin. He had wound a red handkerchief round his cloth cap to give it the air of a turban, and his red comforter across his breast as a scarf—an amount of red, which, with the tremendous frown on his brow and the decision with which he graped the sword as he held it with its point resting on the ground, would suffice to convey an approximative idea of his fierce and blood-thirsty disposition.
     Maggie looked bewildered for a moment, and Tom enjoyed that moment keenly; but in the next, she laughed, clapped her hands together and said, ‘Oh, Tom, you’ve made yourself like Bluebeard at the show.’”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.

Hey kids, get out your red and blue anaglyph 3-D glasses for this fresh and novel illusionary experience: a stereo collage from visionary artist and reluctant earthling Paul Dean! Of course, stereo illusions are nothing new, and even this collage is several years old. I made it in 2004 or 2005, at the tail end of the intensely personal creative exploraganza that I call my Alien Radio phase. (If you listen very very carefully, you can almost hear the aliens singing.)
    Anyway, this piece seemed so nearly finished that I thought what the heck! I tweaked the color a bit, (ok, I tweaked it a lot), I cropped it, and I am hereby revealing to the world a little something I call Space: The Lost Atlantis.

“They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had forever closed behind them.”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.

“‘I told you girls couldn’t learn Latin. It’s “Nomen non crescens genitivo.”’
    ‘Very well, then,’ said Maggie, pouting. ‘I can say that as well as you can. And you don’t mind your stops. For you ought to stop twice as long at a semicolon as you do at a comma, and you make the longest stops where there ought to be no stop at all.’”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.

“‘Jane and me were allays contrairy; she would have striped things, and I like spots. You like a spot too, Bessy; we allays hung together i’ that.’
    ‘Yes, Sophy,’ said Mrs. Tulliver, ‘I remember our having a blue ground with a white spot both alike—I’ve got a bit in a bed-quilt now; . . .’”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860. You might have noticed three semicolons in that snippet. Semicolons were good enough for George Eliot!

“The delicious scent of rose-leaves that issued from the wardrobe made the process of taking out sheet after sheet of silver paper quite pleasant to assist at, though the sight of the bonnet at last was anticlimax to Maggie, who would have preferred something more strikingly preternatural.”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.

“There was nothing to mar her delight in the whispers and the dreamy silences when she listened to the light dipping sounds of the rising fish and the gentle rustling, as if the willows and the reeds and the water had their happy whisperings also. Maggie thought it would make a very nice heaven to sit by the pool in that way and never be scolded. She never knew she had a bite till Tom told her, but she liked fishing very much.”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.