Ok. That totally sucked. Here’s the skinny. The site got hacked early this week. Infected with bad code, malware, general hacker obnoxiousness. So the site was chloroformed, quarantined, and branded an “attack site” by Google… arrgh! A few frantic days later, with considerable help from my superb hosting service, pair.com, the WordPress community, and after a total reinstall of the blog, it’s all sorted. phew… Google has released the blog back into the general population…

The whole experience was galvanizing. First off, for anyone with any kind of a Internet presence – seriously – get to know the details of your security, and make sure it’s tight. Slightly paranoid geek tight, not 70′s suburban bicycle chain tight. The weird thing, though, was dealing with Google. !#@!$@! It underscored how much power they have over our online lives and I’ll tell you, it was disconcerting. I’m going to post on this aspect of the magilla in a few days once I have my thoughts together, but it had a real Soviet Logan’s Run Smiling Robot Takeover Westworld kinda feeling… more soon.

Welcome back.

A couple of things here… The design of the gizmo itself has some unusually jazzy touches – The in-line rule and orange drop-shadow of OHMITE. The name OHMITE – so silver age Marvel Comics, the Jack Kirby renderings basically draw themselves. The gutsy outline type of OHMITE MANUFACTURING COMPANY. The Bodoni-ish fat numbers.

It’s just rad to see such a brawny and practical tool have so much swing and style. And the numerical card is sublime… just marvel for a moment at how something so thoroughly determined by accuracy and rigor can pulse with such deft, complex rhythms and hum with such simple grace.

Glockenspiels, graphic patterns on Pyrex bakeware, the Work in Progress Society, cardboard sculpture, and foxes! Fine company for an article I wrote for the fifth issue of Uppercase Magazine – a visual survey of the design and aesthetics of DuPont’s marketing of synthetic fabrics from the 1920’s to the early 80’s. The history of the development of synthetic fabrics is a fascinating nexus of science, industry, design, advertising, fashion and culture. In turn, the same goes for focusing specifically on the promotion of the fabrics themselves. It is a rich core sample of prevailing trends in design, typography, advertising illustration and photography, etc over the decades…

Uppercase Magazine? Let me say again – The clue to what distinguishes Uppercase Magazine lies in its motto “A magazine for the creative and curious”  It’s the “curious” – It accounts for the joyful, inclusive sense of collaboration and sharing that pervades the whole shebang. The magazine reads like a conversation between like-minded folk riffing on the impossibly cool thing they’ve drawn, thought, photographed, collected, discovered, etc. No lofty curatorial snobbishness or hipster veneration of the mindlessly shocking or willfully ugly for these cats – just a democratic spirit and a celebration of beautiful things.

The magazine, as a project and physical object, is the very embodiment of what it celebrates.  It works on a collaborative publishing model, and is designed and produced with great care and craft. Feels great in the hand. The covers so far have been stunning. The whole Uppercase venture, gallery, books, blog etc… seem of all of a piece. Well worth it. Explore here. Subscribe! Subscribe!

Recently I had to decide whether to discard my Apple //e, and found I absolutely couldn’t bear to part with it. Rather, I pulled its disparate components off storage shelves and out of boxes, dusted them off and reassembled it. Something about reconstituting it made me bond with it all over again… Then, just the other night, snowed in by a blizzard, I was watching Royal Tennenbaums for the nth time and noticed among all the other 70s bric-a-brac, an Apple //.

I know it’s playing footsie with the obvious, but it’s worth remembering what an essential artifact of 70′s design the Apple // really is.  Its introductory advert from 1977 captures that perfectly. Look at the context… It’s not set up in an office but on the wood table of a modern kitchen. It’s not stacked like a Hi-Fi system or a fused one-piece like an ordinary computer terminal. It’s spread out like a split level contemporary house. The severe contrasting angles of the case evoke 70′s architecture and furniture design much more than anything especially technological. (It shares this look with some of the better designed calculators of the period – which makes sense, given they first embodied the notion of a computer as a home appliance) The distinct beige putty color leans in nicely against the saturated, plush colors of the era – the ochres, purples, oranges and red browns. In short, the Apple // represents the hight of then-contemporary suburban design – which is why it looks just at home in the Wes Anderson’s idealized 70′s diorama as Bill Murray’s purple turtleneck and burnt sienna blazer.

I sincerely hope that author Maurice L Hartung of the University of Chicago was as impressed as I was with the cover designs to his slide rule manuals. (Also, belated congratulations to Dr. Hartung on the promotion he seems to have received between the publication of the guides.)

from How Things Work, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Technology,
Simon and Schuster, 1967
Original German edition, Wie Funktioniert Das?, Institut AG, 1963

Okey doke. Back. Glad you are too. Not surprisingly, we’re picking up where we left off – you know, in no particular order – art, vintage illustration, glamour, technology, pop, punk, psychedelia, cats, the idea of squirrels, etc….

New stuff? Let’s see, what’s new?. Well, I swear bringing my own Ziploc bag of Fleur De Sel De Camargue Sea Salt to work may be the smartest thing I’ve done since July. I don’t care if it reminds you of Claire’s sushi lunch in the Breakfast Club – it’s magic. Unfortunately, though, it seems Project Donald Sutherland – the goal of which is to slim down to the point that I could flatteringly wear a turtleneck in the style of Donald Sutherland circa Klute, or, for that matter, James Coburn  – is not really happening. Now, Eve Babitz, who’s in that famous photograph, obscured, nude and fetching, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. She’s happening.  Arundel, an off kilter little town in Maryland, a David Lynch by way of Robert Rauschenberg town – happening. Sketches of Jane Birkin. “The Wait” by Killing Joke. Valentina Terashkova. Edwige Fenech. Barbara Tfank. All happening. Estes Rockets have been on my mind a lot lately. And the fact that I used to play badminton with my dad when I was a kid. And finding a vintage shuttlecock made of a thick rubber and real tail feathers – lingering over contrast between the fluffy yet sturdy feathers and the powdery, matte, solid ball. Anyway, more very soon. A sketch of Jane Birkin, very probably.

(Ed Ruscha, Oxydol, Rubbing Compound, Was Seal Car Polish, Turpentine, Gelatin silver print, 1961)

This is a crop of a photo of Lena Söderberg, the centerfold of the November 1972 issue of Playboy. In 1973, engineers at the USC Signal and Image Processing Institute used it as a test image in their research. The data they collected from the image, specifically the red, green, blue color channel data, have become the standard benchmark for image compression quality ever since. That research also built the foundation for the image compression algorithms used in JPG and MP3s. It adds, I think, a nice resonance to know that the quality of much of what we listen to and see online is tuned to this fetching image. (two great geeky observations and articles on Lena here and here)