…Oh, and Saturday night? Sure… It’ll be the usual crowd. Cliff & Vera. Rosa’s pals… Some champagne, some dancing… some ditties around the piano, and yea, Pamela’s bringing the cheetahs again. At the very least, stop by… (Charles Copeland, original interior illustration for Men, May 1960)
I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life buy vicodin with online consultation itself” – Claes Oldenburg, 1961
For your pleasure, an oddly charming, earnest, hippy-dippy photo recreation of Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass from an old 1970 photography annual.
Just fabulous… Photo by May Lin Le Goff for Test Shoot Gallery / Singapore; Everybody’s got their predilections, yes? Well, one of mine is a soft spot for supermarkets as photoshoot backdrops.
A moment’s rest at the Rochester Institute of Technology, between two immense murals by Joseph Albers meant to evoke the equally brilliant Kodak logo. Aces.
Fashions, Bill Blass… Trimline® phone, your Bell Telephone business office – reads the tweaked out copy on this gem of an advertisement http://www.cheapambienpriceonline.com obviously composed during a brief moment when the entire country was on an epic cocaine bender…
This age needs [artists] who are filled with the strength of their cultures and do not transcend the limits of their age, but, working within the times, bring what is peculiar to the moment to glory. We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic. — John Updike, 1951
We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
– Steve Jobs, Playboy Interview, 1985
Steve Jobs changed my life three times. In 1982 the Apple II was the tractor beam (along with D&D) that pulled me into my first encounter with counterculture – the edges of the assembly language writing, phone-phreaking, copy protection cracking, dip switch flicking homebrew computer scene. It was the first time I really discovered something covert in culture. It was electric.
In 1985 I went for a routine visit to the Computer Connection outside of Albany, NY. There I saw a strange looking beige appliance looking thing. I remember, vividly, seeing a “folder” dragged into the “trash” with a “mouse.” And MacPaint. The Macintosh was the tool I would end up making my living on over the past 18 years.
My affection for older household appliances and everyday objects comes from the fact that I genuinely think they were far more attractive back then. You could sense aesthetics as a fundamental part of their design. They were also, in many cases, incredibly well manufactured. Nowadays, Apple’s products are among the few heirs to that tradition. I use them everyday to work, to read, to talk to people, to listen to music, to relax, and to look up how Nigella Lawson would make scampi with anchovies.
It’s woven up in who I am, what I do and how I live. Thanks Steve.
Hello reader! Ah, welcome indirect referral. Greetings to those here for the Mucha drawings, or that bat shit-masterpiece of a poem, Cleopatra. Hey, hi to the odd monthly reader of my ode to a tincture of iodine. Looking for Henry Yan – right here. Or was it a watercolor of Terri Nunn?
In any case, a bit of news –we’re molting. Shedding a few layers, slowing things down a bit. After three years of publication the blog is returning to its original, more modest agenda – a place from which to transmit my occasional, but passionate, enthusiasms, and a home for my portfolio of professional and personal can i buy vicodin over the counter artwork.
Time to turn inward, re-calibrate to analog rhythms, to settle back into the longer view. There are projects that need attention, like a book on Ukrainian book design that’s drifting in its fragile, nascent stages. More articles for Uppercase. Books, comics and records to absorb. Mainly, though, to paint, to collage, to make.
Really, it’s mostly a shift in pace, frequency. A true occasional, published as the mood strikes. Which will be often-ish. Please do keep stopping by, and, as always, help yourselves to anything.
(image: Vija Celmins, Studio)
Hot damn. Everything works here, everything – the framing, the tint, the grain… From a recent New York Magazine piece on Bernadette buy.synthetic.vicodin Peters. The shot is by Pari Dukovic, a young-ish, RIT trained Turkish photographer. More of his excellent work, here.
Delightfully designed opening credits for the 1971 film Mrs. Pollifax – Spy. They were done by Don Record, who also did titles for flicks like Downhill Racer, Flareup, and the magnificent Cleopatra Jones. Among his oeuvre is a personal favorite – Smile, the 1970 California beauty pageant mockumentary featured in a post in the first few weeks of the blog – here.
Mrs. Pollifax is a oddball spy spoof about the recently widowed Mrs. Emily Pollifax of New Jersey. Restless and idle, she shows up at CIA headquarters looking to volunteer for spy duty. Technicolor, wood-paneled, skinny-tied hilarity ensues…
All languages contain terms for white and black. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both). If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue. If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains a term for purple, pink, orange, gray, or some combination of these.
– Berlin & Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, 1969
– Illust: Antique color wheel; Color Chart, Gerhard Richter
So anyway, where were we? Over the past two months or so, out and about, etc…stopped to admire a swatch of an old calendar in the motley basement of an antique shop in Bethany Beach, Maryland. By the way, the unfamiliar holidays on the 12th and 22nd? Lincoln and Washington’s birthdays, respectively. Consolidated in ‘71.
Mesmerized by the upholstered sensuality of Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s painting Florinda (1852) at the Met. Based on a lusty Spanish legend this florid masterwork once hung directly opposite Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s writing desks. The queen described it, in a parody of decorum, as “a most lovely picture containing a group of beautiful women, half life size” – which is certainly one way of putting it.
Abruptly struck one evening by the the type on the back of Bowie’s Station to Station – what a perfect expression of the record itself – stark Teutonic cool shot thorough with a hotblooded stream of consciousness. Had never seen these Cy Twombly Polaroid prints of flowers – gorgeous, a real mix of modes from swatches of painterly realism to scratchy color fields. The Brush-Up Stole, now in Bernat Mohairspun! What a regal, atmospheric image, yes? Saw it poking up from a brace of vintage woman’s shoes in the walk-in closet of a shop in Ballston Spa, New York. Hey, look at that clock… Returning to our regular, daily-ish broadcasts, then. Welcome back.
Selections from a series of presidential mistresses by Annie Kevans.
Sally Cary Fairfax { Washington }
Ellen Randolph { Van Buren }
Nan Britton { Harding }
Kay Summersby { Eisenhower }
Marilyn Monroe { Kennedy }
Gunilla Von Post ibid
Jill Cowan ibid
Madeleine Brown { Johnson }
Snapped in Toronto a few months back. Yes it’s strange… that’s what makes the first couple of reads so gobsmacking… Then you start noticing the details, and the photo blooms into symphony of errors… and every subsequent read takes on the cadence of poetry (of a sort.)
Reader! Visitor! Information collecting robotic code spider! And, dare I say, friend!?: An announcement: We’re keeping summer hours ’round here ’till Labor Day. Or, more accurately, adopting a intermittent, drinks on the porch, as the mood strikes publishing schedule. Do continue to stop by, new work and occasional enthusiasms will pop up here and there. If you’re here for the first time, help yourselves to anything. Daily-ish posts resume in earnest September 1st.
Room 125, Westbank Motel, Idaho Falls, Idaho, July 18, 1973, Stephen Shore
Now these are a blast. Superman’s girlfriend Lois Lane in the late 60’s and early 70’s underwent a kaleidoscopic recombination of her character. It was a result of a desire by DC Comics to extend the line of superhero stories to girls who were captivated by romance comics. What they arrived at was an exuberant pop cultural mashup.
The comics are a swirling melange of styles – the overheated emotional sakes & teary cliches of the romance yarns; the can-do spunky mystery vibe of Nancy Drew. Light moments of the basic superhero world blow in and out, and sometimes there are gales of sci-fi weirdness. Compositionally, it’s the classic Lichtenstein/pop art configurations, and the art is as fine an example of va-va-voomish good girl art as you could hope for.
Wonder Woman was swept up in these currents as well – reconfigured as an Emma Peel-eque Mod avenger. Also, great fun. I wrote more about that era here, and the books were recently collected by DC. For Lois Lane, you’re still gonna haunt long boxes.
(Also to those interested in this confluence of styles and sensibilities there’s a great site that explores them – Sequential Crush, which is a blog devoted to preserving the memory of romance comic books and the creative teams that published them throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The woman who edits it, Jacque Nodell, also published a PDF of a lecture she gave on the topic. It’s called The Look of Love – The Romantic Era of DC’s Lois Lane, Supergirl and Wonder Woman. It’s a great read, smart, and replete with well chosen art. The blog is just as ace. Go, poke around.)
