Amazing! So much purposeful human striving packed into one single frame – the bustling boogie woogie rhythms of daily life…

A fitting intersection, then, for our beloved space shuttle to cross – born of and built by the same energy and industry that powers the streets below. It’s endearing how much affection that ungainly piggyback elicits. The future was not the sleek finned swooped darts envisioned by Alex Raymond or Chesley Bonestell. The future was function begetting form – a spacecraft that looks as it must, to do what it needs to do, more Jeep than Jaguar.

Guided by technology contemporaneous with Centipede, Donkey Kong & Tempest, it broadened the perimeter of our everyday reach out into the edge of space. Because that’s the thing about the shuttle missions… they weren’t shots into the unknown, like Sir Richard Burton setting off to find the source of the Nile, or the Apollo Missions to the moon. They were meant to explore and colonize a frontier, like prospectors setting out westward to California to pan for gold, bend the direction of rivers, to make rockets and movies in the desert.

It’s why the spirit of Hedy Lamarr floats above this scene like a patron saint – a gifted, glamorous actress who, in her spare time, invented new kind of guidance system for torpedos to better fight the Nazis.

This photograph is a profound hymn to Los Angeles and the idea of California. Los Angeles will always be the most American of cities, defined by the lure of ambition and the blank canvas of possibility rather than the grids of Paris or London. Where hidden in the anonymity of deserts and stripmalls someone is manipulating the genome, making planes invisible, or writing Tootie’s dialog for an upcoming episode of Yo Gabba Gabba.

It’s where a young Gene Roddenberry would begin to write a series of TV scripts that used science fiction as a vehicle not only to boldly go where no man had gone before, but to explore the frontiers of the human condition – to muse on love, faith, friendship, and art.

It is no accident that the first space shuttle was called The Enterprise.

[Photograph by Stephen C. Confer]

Underwater Moonlight, gouache on board, 13″ x 7″

Illustration by Victo Ngai for a story by Peter Stamm in the May 14th issue of the New Yorker.

Signage in a local contractors window in fashionable East Passyunk, Philadelphia.

So, where were we? What were we talking about?

Well, get this – a couple of months ago, this turtle I know – Cecil – was walking down an alley, right? Out of nowhere, he’s set upon and viciously mugged by this gang – a gang of snails.

The police are called and a detective interviews Cecil – this turtle I know – about the incident. “What happened?” asks the detective. Cecil sags a bit into his shell – “I don’t really know, Detective – it all happened so fast”

Here’s the thing, readers, happenstance visitors, and information collecting code spiders – the turtle – Cecil – was minding the blog this summer… so – given the gang of snails incident, Cecil didn’t get around to posting that much.

Sorry.

So, anyway, Cecil’s recovering, and the torrential floods of advertising seem to be subsiding. More soon-ish.

Talking Covers, an ace new blog about book cover design, is featuring my artwork for NEVER MIND THE POLLACKS,  with my recollections along with author Neal Pollack’s… Shout-outs and walk-ons abound, including Jim Roll’s amazing record Inhabiting the Ball, my old label The Telegraph Company, and a meandering discursion on the Harvest Records roster… the blog is curated by author Sean Manning.  Neal and I are in ridiculously great company – Ben Marcus’ Flame Alphabet, Francine Prose’s My New American Life, and Love Goes to Buildings on Fire are featured, among others… check it.

Carter Brown? Here, and more here on the blog soon-ish… On Paul Ilton nothing, sadly, but he seems learned and earnest. Not sure the wanton luridness of the cover is what he had in mind. Oh well. The rest are self evident…

Captain Nemo, illustration by N.C. Wyeth from a 1918 edition of The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. (courtesy of Mike Dubisch)

Wonder Woman is really confusing.

Consider the other members of the comic book trinity. Batman: Bruce Wayne, Gotham, detective. Superman: Clark Kent, Metropolis, boy scout. Their essences are schematic. Wonder Woman has been an Amazon and an Olympian. She’s been a god, a mortal, and a mix of both. She’s Diana Prince sometimes, she’s Diana Prince always, she’s never been Diana Prince. She had the invisible plane, gained the power of flight, then gotten the plane back – which I guess she uses when… she…umm… flyes back home? Yes home, which is on the island of Themyscira… or is it Boston, Gateway City, New York? Severe shifts in character and narrative continuity are endemic in comics, sure, but this schizoid blackboard eraser approach is more than a little nuts. It has left her less an icon than a notion of one.

That said, one of Wonder Woman’s most random, and most enjoyable, phases was her 60′s incarnation as a mod boutique owner and secret agent. Pop culture was undergoing a massive collective spy fantasia. Bond movies were at the height of their popularity and surreality. Every flavor of espionage was in vogue – Harry Palmer, Michael Caine’s working class spy, Italian comic book adaptations like Danger: Diabolik and Modesty Blaise, and Dean Martin’s candy colored Matt Helm absurdities. The genre’s high point is probably James Coburn’s peerless set of Flint movies (don’t miss this extended montage of highlights). They all shared a common widescreen Technicolor palette – mod fashions, mid century modern design, a taste for a splashy op art and the occasional dose of the lysergic. On television, Aaron Spelling’s pioneering swinging lady detective series Honey West had just been annihilated by the arrival of a fab new import from the UK – the Avengers.

The Avengers featured the espionage escapades of dapper Victorian John Steed and incomparable hepcat Emma Peel. In Peel, played by Diana Rigg, the genre had found it’s female icon. She was a stone cold fox, a brain box, a wit, and singularly, unforgettably stylish. (Peel’s wardrobe is virtually a case study in 60′s mod fashions – saturated pop colors, geometric patterns and cuts)

Emma Peel became the explicit model for the 60′s manifestation of Wonder Woman. She shed her powers and permanently adopted her mortal alter ego Diana Prince. She opened a fashionable clothing store. She rebuilt her fighting skills under the tutelage of her new sidekick, the wise, blind kung fu sage, I-Ching. The art was fantastic – a perfect blend of 50′s Romance comics, Good Girl Art, and Dan DeCarlo’s Josie and the Pussycats. The result was derivative, obvious, and absolutely delightful. (DC has recently reissued 3 volumes of this era – all are worthwhile, all easily found).

This feels about right, this vignette on the cover of this old HeathKit manual, when I think about my dad, about him being my dad, being his son, and being me. We did a lot of this kind of stuff – building things, kits, electronics, etc… the dynamics of the scene feel very familiar, a working sketch of many genuine memories.  There’s a lot of each of us woven up in the idea of HeathKits.

For him it was a part of his love of understanding the underlying mechanics of how things worked. In this case the project was an Automotive Engine Analyzer. He also build a Vacuum Tube Volt-meter. It’s apt that he liked to put together devices whose purpose was to evaluate other devices. A profound pleasure for him, I think.

For us, then, it was a bridge, a dense lattice that bound us in the moment, and bound us thereafter. Making, doing, building, learning, understanding, crafting. Many of my fondest, most deeply held moments with him, in retrospect felt like this – like the cover, like HeathKit moments.

Below is a metronome we built together. It’s been with me for decades and it’s still one of my absolute favorite objects – built well, simple, natty looking, reliable, and steady – always steady…

Some recent mannequins… the first and third were side by side in a dealer’s pen in an antiques mall in Coxsackie. It was such an odd assortment, incongruities caroming from object to object. Treacly, homespun tchotchkes mixed with genuine posessions, weathered with age and use, saturated with soggy history. In the middle, cast adrift, two buoys in the Sea of Pizazz, one in the pale, empurpled waves of the 70′s, the other in the sharper currents of the 80′s. But then you notice the clerical sash. And the Grand Ole Opry hat… like I said… caroming incongruities. The second one is installed in a window on Jay Street in Schenectady. The last one haughtily surveys a corner of an antique shop in Burlington, New Jersey.

two dudes taping box image lo res
the width of the images/photos are not the same -
1st wider than the second / third same as first
promo area here circle has lorum ipsum

Maybe it’s just me but once you’ve gone into get inspired
or get organized how do you get back to the home page
of the microsite, the main “step by step”?

Calendar has lorum ipsum in it.
Also, once there how do you get back?

Curated lists have tons of lorum ipsum

Is create a facebook event just supposed to send you to facebook
it’s not clear what you are “signing up” for…
the site is a guide site – that’s clear.
What is the “sign up” offer exactly?

More “stranded” moments —->
when on “packing” and you click on pre-move shopping list,
how do you get back to the main “step by step”

why is “get packing” the next page after “get settled”
shouldn’t it be “get together”?

written, as is, May 18th, 2012, with a single word removed. Carriage returns added.

Active Ingredients #1, #2, digital
Shot in the basement of an antique shop just north of Dagsboro, Delaware just about a year apart. The grease can was new. The moth crystals were gone. Wonder who bought the moth crystals…?

I wish some moments could last forever…, 2012, Masha Darmanskaya

Blue Box of Death, 2011

This masterwork of smartaleckery comes courtesy of Styron Lundberg, a Parisian designer. More work here, all smart, but this one here’s a homer…

Every time I look at these photos they light up my noggin like a pinball machine. I linger over them, careening from detail to detail, setting off little bright explosions of nostalgia, recognition, longing and sheer delight.

Some context… They’re snaps taken at a Sam Goody’s record store in mighty Paramus, New Jersey from about 1976 until 1980. They were taken by a friend of an old acquaintance of mine, and I spotted them one day out on the more distant orbits of the Facebook. The photographer, one of the employees of the shop, kindly gave me permission to post them.

I was transfixed the instant I saw them. Aesthetically they’re amazing – the pale yellow cast of the film encasing the era as if in amber. A wistful melancholy sets in when you start to weigh what we lost as a culture when we lost places like this. But it’s the people, finally – this wonderful, quirky, ramshackle cast -  that really bring these photos to life.

I’ve tried many times to describe their effect on me – jury-rigging metaphors that do justice to their peculiar spell. It’s weird. I’m just old enough to recall when the texture of life felt like this. So sometimes they trigger deeply felt, familiar, yet sketchy, memories. Other times they read like fiction – especially vivid stills from a movie that one the one hand I desperately wished existed and on the other I feel like I’ve already seen. Like I said, weird.

This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of music for the next 15 years. – Brian Eno

With disco albums, we started using themes…I was always the ideas man, and so for Love Trilogy I came up with the idea of having three separate songs and then a fourth song consisting of those three songs linked together, all combined into one. Four Seasons Of Love was a double album, with each side featuring a season, and my next idea — having just read Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Music Of Time, which is 12 novels inspired by the painting of that name by Nicolas Poussin — was to record an album that chronicled popular music up until the present and on into the future. So, we started out with a ’50s song, ‘I Remember Yesterday’ — I was rather peeved when the album was changed to that name, because I really wanted it to be called A Dance To The Music Of Time — and continued with a bit of rock, a Tamla Motown number and so on, and then brought it up to date with disco, before the final, futuristic song was ‘I Feel Love’. – co-writer Pete Bellotte

Blondie: I Feel Love (Donna Summer Cover) / Live [download]