August 11th
In their radness, these covers speak for themselves. What’s striking is that what they had to say was once considered, while sophisticated, utterly mainstream. Oh well… just another thing to blame on the Beatles I guess…
July 27th
Categories: Design, Technology
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.
June 28th
Absolutely stunning Japanese movie poster for Pasolini’s bewildering art house head scratcher, Teorema.
June 9th
Sometimes, self evident magnificence needs no further elaboration. This is one of those times. Curious? More info here…
June 9th
Beauty, right? I found this a few months ago rifling through files at DuPont’s Hagley Museum, doing research for my Nylon article for Uppercase Magazine (which I previewed recently, here.) A wonderful example of something so basic, so dashed off, so ordinary – some corrections on a galley proof – that happen to merge, by chance, into something really artful.
June 7th
I was upstate recently, visiting family HQ, and while combing though the bookshelves I found these beautiful music sheets for Scott Joplin’s ragtime classic The Entertainer (you know, the opening credits to “The Sting” – and the infernal refrain from a million confounded ice cream trucks…) I especially love the sheer Apple ][-ishness of the Dan Coates version. And it does get me thinking about how much great 70′s design I must have marinated in at the time, scarcely aware. (Incidentally, it also occurs to me now that my piano teacher at the time had a white long haired cat that looked exactly like Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s cat and that during instruction, it too occasionally sat in his lap. Hurm… go figure.)
May 27th
I like my Modernism with club soda and two limes… Which is why I am so taken with the work of Erik Nitsche; it is positively effervescent.
My affection for his work is rooted in repeated sightings of the same thing – his poster for the Betty Davis showbiz melodrama All About Eve. It’s one of my favorite pieces of design… the cutout photos, clean but playful layout, and the signature Missile Command-esqe fusillade of arrows. I’m struck every time I come across it, and it has been big influence on my aesthetic, especially my collage work.
I finally did further research and discovered a wealth of amazing, brilliantly composed and crafted design that has since slipped under the waterline. Nitsche worked for a broad spectrum of clients including General Dynamics, Decca Records, Revlon, Saks Fifth Avenue, MOMA, 20th Centrury Fox, and the Container Corporation of America. Or to put it another way, across virtually the entire cultural landscape.
Poring over his work made me think of the title of a famous Mondrian – Broadway Boogie Woogie. It’s the painting whose emanations border on music, where the grid begins to pulse and shimmy. Piece after piece of Nitsche’s had this almost musical vitality – a backbeat of patterns and repetition over which he improvised variations punctuated with perfectly deployed grace notes and accents.
There doesn’t seem to be a published monograph or survey of his work, but you can cinch one together from across the inter-web. U&lc and New York Times Book Review art director Steven Heller wrote an excellent short biography and career assessment for Typotheque called the Reluctant Modernist that is well worth reading. BustBright, the after-hours studio of Los Angeles designers Katie Varrati and Derrick Schultz, maintains an excellent and growing Flickr survey of his work… and below you’ll find my own homage to Nitsche from a few years back:
Risk, 12″x 12″ Collage on board, 2008
May 26th
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!
May 18th
Near as I can figure, the only way to explain the frequency and quality of 70′s designs that kept turning up as I was trawling the antique circuit of Bethany Beach, Delaware this past weekend is this…. Someone in my vicinity with wizardly control of time was struggling mightily to conjure a temporal shift back to 1978. Billy Joel’s wretched My Life crackled through the ectoplasm as they wrestled to control their magic. Occasionally time would tear, and when it did, prime pieces of Carter era ephemera would slip through the rift…
May 3rd
My goodness, I don’t remember these being so damn good looking…..
April 28th
In retrospect, the album cover designs of the early releases by Public Image Limited constitute one hell of a brilliant run. By his own admission John Lydon’s music has been basically a big conceptual media prank, playing with, subverting, and looting the whole notion of the public image. Therefore it’s no surprise that packaging and design figured so heavily in his work from the very beginning.
Arguably British tabloids were the closest things in the cultural landscape, both aesthetically and attitudinally, to punk rock, so it was fitting that Never Mind The Bollocks was designed like a cross between a tabloid and a ransom note (which, incidentally is an apt description of the record itself.)
With Public Image Limited, those influences and themes became more sophisticated and overt. The mock slick magazine design of the debut was an ironic riposte to the expected image of Lydon as a young savage. This was followed by the unprecedented, and justly celebrated, configuration of 1980′s Metal Box – 3 12inch singles in a, um, metal box. After that came the aggressively sexy glamorous cover for 1981′s Flowers of Romance. Among other things, it strikingly prefigures the the snapshot aesthetic of current fashion and nightlife photographers like Nikola Tamindzic and, ugh, that skeezy doofus Terry Richardson. The sleeper of the bunch is the cover of 1983′s cynically bland cash-in Live in Tokyo – shot and composed perfectly. Dig the way the commercial riot of neon signage converges and perfectly frames the iconic PiL logo, interrupted only briefly by Lydon’s fab shiny suit.
What ties it all together is the same tension that animates the music – a constant flickering between art and commerce, sincerity and fakery, and, ultimately, what is false and worthless and what is true and enduring.
Public Image Limited: Public Image: [download] Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Public Image Limited: Careering (astonishing BBC version): [download]
April 26th
Categories: Design
Found a small sack of vintage fuses in my basement a few weekends ago, a long neglected flea market score. Regret is just another name for forgetting to continue collecting vintage fuses. Rats!
April 22nd
Lunchtime score – a promise of many good reads, yes, but what a cover! Love the way the liquid streaks and stains fill the jittery Nouveau pencil sketch… then there is the water-bed-like plinth the puffy “Henry James” type creates for the title above, and man, it all settles together just so…
April 6th
Stills from the fantastic opening credits from the flick Women in Trouble, directed by Sebastien Guterrez, just out on DVD. Very reminiscent of the work of Los Angeles based collagist Alexis Smith. Smith is among my absolute favorite artists – inexplicably examples of her work are really scarce online. (That will be addressed, soon, in a future post. For now, a smattering here.) Basically she’s the Hannah Hoch of Hollywood, using the deadpan Dada grammar of collage to reconfigure and re frame shards of entertainment culture in poignant and profound ways…. which is what I love about the Women in Trouble credits. Gorgeous!
Anyway, the movie follows the intertwining bottle rocket trails of 8 or so LA women in the course of a single madcap day. One reviewer compared it to George Cuckor’s the Women if it were directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Right on, broadly speaking. The debt to Almodóvar is deep, explicit and acknowledged – strong sexy female leads, bracing vulgarity, and genuine pathos, all swirling in a melodramatic bisque. It’s really good – not one for the ages, but a fab, saucy entertainment with heart.
It’s charm, however, is burnished by unexpectedly satisfying details in and surrounding the flick… The design in support of the film is excellent – besides the credit sequence, the title type and the sixties pop inspired poster are particularly good. Oh, and the the soundtrack is by pop-psych legend Robin Hitchcock.
The biggest surprise, however, is this whole Carla Gugino/Elektra Luxx thing. Let me explain. Gugino has had a solid string of TV and movie roles, playing an agent on Entourage, and the lead role in the detective drama Karen Sisco. She’s also known for the small but geek-fave role as the original Sally Jupiter in the Watchmen adaptation… In Women in Trouble Gugino plays blue movie star Elektra Luxx.
So, ostensibly to promote Women in Trouble, she launches a blog behind the persona of Luxx. So far, standard viral promo fare, right? Well, during the past year she’s saluted cats as disparate as Modesty Blaise actress Monica Viiti, Bedazzled director Stanley Donnen, Giant Sand’s Howe Gelb, and synth maestro Geogrio Moroder. She penned a mash note to beloved Rochester garage legends the Chesterfield Kings, and is breathlessly awaiting the release of the new New Pornographers album. She clued readers into the obscure lo-fi psych of the Capstan Shafts. She posted the single best pictures of Linda Carter as Wonder Women ever. And she celebrates every weekend by posting glamour shots of, at first, Anita Ekberg, and now Sophia Loren. And, in an uncanny overlap with this here blog, posted not only about God Help the Girl, the distaff spin off of Belle & Sebastian, but a wrote an appreciation of the obscure Fellini/Manara comic Trip To Tullum.
All in all, a staggering level of hep-ness… As a result, my enthusiasm for her enthusiasms certainly gooses my enthusiasm for the movie. In any case, Women in Trouble is well worth seeing, the credits deserve a huzzah for thier artfulness, and Carla Gugino/Elektra Luxx’s blog is well, well, worth visiting regularly. Good show all around!
March 27th
A fine time to recognize the graphic radness of Ukrainian Easter egg designs, and the steady, crafty hand it takes to make them…
March 26th
Some photographs and art by John Foxx. Foxx, driven to merge his love of the cracked pop art of Roxy Music with the exhilarating rush and tabloid sensibilities of the Sex Pistols, formed the first, and still astonishing, version of Ultravox! He left to pursue purely electronic music, and under the name Dennis Leigh, established himself as a successful graphic designer and artist, working on book covers for Salman Rushdie and Anthony Burgess, among others.
Critic Robert Christgau offered a typically astringent and succinct summation of Ultravox! – “John Foxx’s detached, creamy baritone works against the instrumentation’s electronic cast for a streamlined rocksy music that suits titles like “Dislocation” and “Someone Else’s Clothes.” But unlike Bryan Ferry Foxx talks as if he’s detached clean through, unlike Brian Eno he’s encumbered by delusions of existential significance, and unlike both he’s never funny”
Dead on, yes, but… Foxx’s detachment and existential musings led him to the two great themes that have animated his work ever since – the idea of the Quiet Man and London Overgrown. From these two themes he has build a rich, self sustaining aesthetic world that comprises music, photography, fashion, and in a modest way, philosophy.
The Quiet Man is, in essence, a new wave take on the man with the grey flannel suit which Foxx inhabits, literally. Dressed in a ordinary grey suit, Foxx embarks on long treks where he explores the full texture of urban anonymity. London Overgrown is a sustained rumination on nature subsuming the modern urban landscape. His musings on both, well worth reading, can be found here, on his comprehensive blog/site.
What is worthwhile here are not the themes themselves – as notions they are familiar to any thoughtful person – but the quality body of work Foxx has wrought from them. The first three Ultravox! records, the pioneering solo work like the minimalist synth of Metamatic, the pastoral electronic pop of the Garden, ambient pieces, and his continued and concurrent exploration of these themes in music, video, photography, and writing, are all worthwhile.
He has a great new single out under the moniker John Foxx and the Maths, aptly described by the UK Arts Desk as ” a very deliberate step back into his own past for a couple of songs that sound as if they were minted in 1980… acelebration of old analogue sounds in collaboration with producer and synthesizer archivist extraordinaire, Benge. Both songs are flecked with requisite android moodiness but stand up in their own right rather than sounding like retro pastiches.” Available on itunes here. More selections below.
Ultravox!: Young Savage (Peel Session): [download] Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Ultravox!: Artifical Life: [download]
