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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) imomus | |
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 Eighty Years of Book Cover Design by Faber & Faber -- as previewed in a multimedia feature in The Guardian -- jogged a few memories for me. Faber is probably the publisher I've owned the most books by, after Penguin and Picador. Seeing the covers laid out in this way made me think of Emily Jacir's artwork Material for a Film, which displays the books owned by a Palestinian poet assassinated by the Israeli secret services. The two Lawrence Durrell covers visible in the glimpse below of Jacir's piece were designed by Berthold Wolpe, a long-time Faber designer. We had them on our family bookshelves in the 1960s, so when my mother and I met and drank a pastis with Lawrence Durrell in Avignon in 1985 it felt like meeting an old family friend. (My mother embarrassed me by saying "My son Nicholas writes too!" Which totally wasn't true.)   Of the Faber covers, I found the ones designed by the books' own authors the most interesting. T.S. Eliot's design for Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats looks like a zine -- surprisingly light and scrappy, twee and pungent.  David Jones' Anathemata almost reminds me of a Peter Saville Factory Records design. Letting this poet-painter design his own jackets was totally the right thing to do -- as with the great Alasdair Gray, the effect is to create the impression that the artist has a personal stylistic universe which can be extended into any medium. That can be a welcoming and charismatic thing; the feeling that an artist's vision is immersive and comprehensive, different from everything you know.  Looking at the cover for Crow by Ted Hughes reminded me of how this book of visceral reports "from the life and songs of the crow" influenced my debut record The Man on Your Street ("songs from the career of the Dictator Hall", whose thoughts are described in The Courier as "hovering on like rooks as he wings his way below"). The generic postmodern Pentagram design that wrapped all Faber poetry titles from the early 80s onwards made me start thinking of Thomi Wroblewski, the designer I befriended and worked with from 1987 on. Thomi -- employed by Mike Alway to do the least el set of el single sleeves ever -- was known for his Talking Heads and Siouxie and the Banshees sleeves, as well as William Burroughs jackets for Picador:    When we started collaborating, Thomi had a big studio above the office of maverick Scottish publisher John Calder, in Green's Court, just off Brewer Street in Soho. I ended up spending a lot of time there, meeting Calder and some of his unlikely hangers-on (the Jewish doctor from Eastenders!). Thomi shared my taste for refined erotica (he designed an edition of Apollinaire's 1907 smut classic Les Onze Mille Verges, which publisher Peter Owen had to paraphrase, so subversive was it still considered to be in 1980s Britain), and liked to photograph you naked, writhing like a dancer. So it was up in that Soho studio that I posed, naked and masked, with various pretty girls for the Murderers, The Hope of Women sleeve. Thomi even dressed me up as dandy barfly Julian Maclaren-Ross, and put me on the cover of Memoirs of the Forties, his book about Fitzrovia. I'm seen from behind, toasting Soho.  What I notice about Thomi Wroblewski's 1980s book jacket work now is that while it often transgresses against the standards of good taste, it has an interesting maverick diversity -- exactly the sort of quirky zing that Wolpe-period Faber books had, but Pentagram-period Faber had lost by the time they standardised their poetry line with the tight-assed, Laura-Ashley-like "pomo ampersand classic" design. This period of 1980s late pomo design is now coming back with a rush; the stretched typefaces on Thomi's 1988 Quick End anthology, for instance (The Quick End was a collection of short stories by Michael Bracewell, Don Watson and Mark Edwards, a writing group formed under the tutelage of Kathy Acker -- I faithfully attended all their readings) look rather like what Mike Meiré is doing now at 032c magazine. There's an awkward, ugly energy here which suddenly looks interesting again.
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) urban_decay
lafinjack | |
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Underneath the colors of the Tent of Tomorrow was the world's largest roadmap. Sponsored by Texaco, this giant facsimile of the Rand McNally map of New York state was composed of large squares of polished Terrazzo. The Map was one of the most popular features of the World's Fair, especially among residents of New York, who"walked the map" looking for their home town. For the 1965 season, many more towns were added to the map at the request of fairgoers who noticed their town missing during the 1964 season. The layout:
( The decline. )
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mandy_moon | |
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Today I went clothes shopping- clothes shopping often makes me feel drained and vaguely wistful- wistful because I know that people of my gender are supposed to have a flock of lady friends to go clothes shopping with and this is supposed to be an enjoyable thing to do. But for me I want to be finished with clothes shopping as soon as possible, I only enjoy *finding* the clothes so I can leave rather than enjoying the process of shopping. Most of the times I've gone clothes shopping with a friend, I get impatient because it takes much longer and I get bored. And whether or not I'm with a friend, not finding anything I like or can afford during a clothes shopping excursion makes me feel defeated and as if I've wasted a lot of time. Sometimes I can be fun while doing other things, but don't go clothes shopping with me- I'm a real stick in the mud. However, there is one part of clothes shopping that I really enjoy- the mannequins. I love mannequins or most any automatons. I love anything that is the same size and has roughly the same form as a human, but is not alive and not a human. The last time I went clothes shopping at the Cambridge side Galleria I found this at Macy's:  I wasn't the one who pants-ed her, but I wish I was. Also odd that somebody bothered to put shoes on her but neglected her pants. That day in Chile when Jon and I still had no luggage and had been wearing the same clothes for three days we finally ended up going to the mall for clothes and found these:  Since they're naked they're obviously not showcasing any of the clothes at their store and so they must be trying to sell bagpipes to the Chilean teenagers. I wish I had plaid skin. I liked her, the happiest mannequin in all Greece-  I've heard that the Thai mannequins have the same expression as she does. I think it's commendable! Why do people in the US think that mannequins have to look so ticked off all the time, anyway? I've been searching on craigslist and eBay for many months now, off and on, for a mannequin of my very own, but I haven't had much luck because so many mannequins seem so standoffish and resemble the sort of girls I would never be friends with. If I'm going to adopt a mannequin, she needs to look like she and I could be compatible. Today at Macy's, while clothes shopping and hoping I would be done with it soon, I found these mannequins-  I would never buy one of these- they have no heads! Not only that, but there's something else wrong with their basic anatomy. They look like the Padaung Hill Tribe women visiting a western shopping mall for the first time after their brass neck coils have been removed. Though maybe these wouldn't be such a bad choice for me. I could make heads for them! I could make them as friendly and approachable as I wanted to! Or if I was feeling lazy, I could just take the giant eyeball Residents heads I made for Jon and myself for Halloween. How lucky would I be to have my own Residents mannequins? To cheer myself up after clothes shopping, we went to the zoo. Today was the day that they were unveiling some shaggy French mammoth donkeys, which I hear are >800 lbs and aren't terribly amenable to moving out of their shipping carts and will be jackasses about it for hours on end. Nevertheless, they were very friendly to us, the zoo visitors. What I never noticed about the zoo before was that at some point somebody decided it would be fun to pepper a series of CLUES all over the zoo. I love finding clues! My favorite clue was this one- look in the tree:  I thought this was a surprisingly macabre clue for a family zoo and I fully approved. Using this clue, you were supposed to deduce that a leopard had dragged his prey up into a tree to keep it away from competitors.
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jwz | |
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Obviously the workaround is to stay away from Fisherman's Wharf. Zipping past Fisherman's Wharf, Chris Paget's scanner downloaded to his laptop the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians' electronic U.S. passport cards embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. Within an hour, he'd "skimmed" four more of the new, microchipped PASS cards from a distance of 20 feet. "There's a reason you don't wear your Social Security number across your T-shirt," Albrecht says, "and beaming out your new, national RFID number in a 30-foot radius would be far worse." But Gigi Zenk, a spokeswoman for the Washington state Department of Licensing, says Americans "aren't that concerned about the RFID" in a time when "tracking an individual is much easier through a cell phone." Tags: big brother, computers, doomed
Listening to: Emergency Broadcast Network -- Station Identification
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lulong | |
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I'm ahead of myself this morning, so I have lots of time.
And the power just flickered. . . That was really weird. If the phone downstairs, in the laundry room, and something else hadn't beeped at the same time, I prob'ly wouldn't have even noticed! The sky is clear as crystal, too. Hmmm.
Either way. Regular short sunday at work coming up. And with this loverly weather, it should be a nice, busy, quick day!
Then I'm, going to come home, make more Faerie bottles (if they are totally dry), and play video games! Nothing else! Well, I might torment the bunny with couch cuddles.
;-)
More laterTags: art, stuff, weather, words, work
Feeling:  here!
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imomus | |
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When I first moved to the northern tip of Neukolln in 2006 there was a funky little record store (it also sold comics, jagged grungy silkscreens, books of pervy photos of wounded Japanese girls by Romaine Slocombe, and copies of FRUiTS magazine) on my street called Le Petit Mignon, run by a frenchman called Guillaume Siffert.  In March 2007 Le Petit Mignon closed its Neukolln shop, moved up to the Torstrasse in Mitte, and merged with Staalplaat, a Dutch record shop and label which started as a cassette distribution operation in 1982. At the time, it looked like Le Petit Mignon was getting "upwardly mobile", moving from a marginal area to hipster central in Mitte. But in early 2009 rumours started to reach our ears that Le Prodigal Mignon was seeking to return to Neukolln, bringing Staalplaat with it. Guillaume spent a couple of months scouting locations, and finally settled on Flughafenstrasse, a busy commercial, working class street that slopes down from Tempelhof Airport to the Neukolln town hall.  The new Neukolln Staalplaat -- called Staalplaat Working Space -- opened in late April. I made my first visit last night, to see a Midori Hirano show in their concert space at the back. I actually missed Midori's set because of a fireworks display at Tempelhof, catching instead the sensuously placid guitar sounds of Rac-ka, a duo from Osaka. It felt good being in there, even if there was something a bit cautious about the way Guillaume had to unlock the door to let us in. On the Staalplaat blog page Rinus details not just the new venue's problems with noise-obsessed neighbours, but their view that "the neighbourhood is turning into a red-light district, with illegal prostitution, women-, drugs-, and arms trafficking, bribery, violence and noise disturbances."  I personally felt a big hippy-alternative vibe of calm. Staalplaat's concert room has sofas. It's very quiet in there (and not just because of the neighbour with the decibel meter) and the only lighting is a couple of candles and some ghostly ambient seep from the backyard. When experimental music is playing, you're instantly in a Wire magazine article, and when the show is over and the audience mills out into the shop area you feel something of the vibe of the old Rough Trade shop in Covent Garden, the one under Slam City Skates. The move back into Neukolln -- deeper into Neukolln, in the developing area around Boddinstrasse -- seems to have given Staalplaat a rush of relevance, a new mission and energy. Whereas, up in Mitte, Staalplaat pretty much blended in, sensibility-wise, with neighbours like Bongout Gallery and Neurotitan, down here in "deep Neukolln" it seems to be back on the cutting edge, joining semi-squat cultural guerilla operations like Loophole (from which I did a livecast back in February at the invitation of the ubiquitous Rinus Van Alebeek). The gamble seems to have paid off; foot traffic into Staalplaat during the day is apparently rather higher down here "in the middle of nowhere" (actually close to happening spots like Weserstrasse) than it was up on tacky Torstrasse, the Oxford Street of Berlin hip.  Neukolln may not have Mitte's buy-yourself-hip clothes boutiques (oh shit, did Best Shop close down already? Maybe Mitte doesn't have them either!) but it does offer less conventional clothing possibilities. I'd recommend a trip to the gigantic Bauhaus store on Hasenheide, directly across the road from Viet-café Hamy, our cut-price version of Mitte's Monsieur Vuong. At Bauhaus you can marvel at gorgeously utilitarian gas cannisters, chipboard slabs, orange-painted trolleys and red nested toolboxes.  Copying Jan Lindenberg -- my personal style guru, who uses them to soften his recycled MDF chairs -- I bought a €4.60 recycled Bauhaus packing blanket yesterday and modeled it for Hisae's camera right there in the store, to the amusement of Saturday shoppers. I run the pictures here so that Twit Opera and the Anons can mock me as if I weren't already mocking myself, and because milky_eyes was complaining yesterday about the absence of photos of me. Packing blankets -- like deep Neukolln -- are where it's at, man. You read it here first.
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Jump back
giddy
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recumbent
