Phoenixville, PA, digital c-print, 2008
Pick Your Poison
What struck me about both these covers is the promiscuous mingling of elegant design and a proudly trashy sensibility. Slinky, showy, and slightly disreputable, they’re out for the same thing, just in different outfits. The Hunger is sort of a loose-fitted, white on white, billowy, bell bottomed thingy, with a black lacquered wooden bead necklace and head scarf – Susan Pleshette’s look (below, left) distinctly comes to mind. Scandal is surely Joan Collins (below, obviously) in her early eighties prime, shoulder pads, saturated purple dress popping aggressively against black hair, black lace decolletage, and her black heart. (The books themselves? Hunger is unreadable, like machetting through a steamy forest of velour plants. Scandal is much better, a comedy of manners, politics and sexual intrigue, recalling the Perfumo affair and Waugh, although without the high points of either.)
Good only on Secret
As always, it’s the little things… the computer punch card holes, the Morse code perforated edge, harmonious muted color scheme, the springiness of “Secret” and the Dragnet earnestness of the disclaimer. Good show, little coupon!
Our Lady of the Clipping File
Contents of studio clipping tray, happenstance, slightly nudged.
Definitive Prep
The last topic I thought I’d be returning to so soon are the aesthetic charms of William F. Buckley. However the photographs in last week’s New York Times Magazine’s excerpt of Christopher Buckley’s memoir were amazing. Patricia and William F. Buckley charted the murky border where upper class pageantry flows into ridiculous Thurston Howellism and resolutely anchored their yacht just on the inside of it. Each of these photos is the very distillation of arch-Waspdom in the mode of each decade’s prevailing fashions. Pearls and tweeds give way to mod specs, beehives and Vespas, and top out in gilded, frilled, and draped tableaus of over-saturated frippery. If these photographs are representative, the art book they are begging to form is a classic. (the article itself is fantastic, a bracing account of losing ones’ parents as well as a pocket elegy to a lost age of cultural and political camaraderie. Images © New York Times/Christopher Buckley)
Camera Bug
Bought and hung almost absentmindedly, over time this toy camera has become one of my most beloved objects. It exists in a perfect balance between mass production and craft, where the necessities of manufacture result not in cheap buy vicodin for cheap mimicry but inspired abstraction. Chief among its many charms is the yellow spring loaded toggle which strikes the brass flash cup and emits a jaunty sustained ping. Joy incarnate, this thing.
Now, Where Were We?
Hi. To celebrate the resumption of occasional publication, finer weather, and a general bonhomie, herewith, Sparks! Sparks! Sparks!
Happy Hunting Ground:
CLOSED FOR THE WEEK
Hello. Taking the gig on the road. Back next Monday. ‘Til then, then.
(William Eggleston, from 2 1/4, 1999, Twin Palms Publishers)
Crazy, Wonderful Believing
Ex Libris Taras Shepelavy
A selection of covers from lost crannies of my father’s bookshelf. Viewing them as an oblique tribute to his memory imbues their designs, for me, with a profound weight. Each is a flag unfurled in celebration of the bracing shock of the new, and the sheer exhilaration of understanding.
Closing Early
Mimmo Rotella
As with most great pop art, the pleasures of Mimmo Rotella’s decollages are simple ones – expressive technique, flashy subjects, and a lusty joie de vive. Rotella tore away at lurid, glamorous and melodramatic Italian ads and movie posters, ripping and chemically dissolving them into something essential. In each case what is revealed is a burst of pure expression: shards of glamour, rough tapestries of melodrama, and blurts of type. Although critical appreciations of his work are often barnacled with pomo foolishness, they lead to fascinating places. He was a member of a European variant of Pop art called Nouveau Réalisme, which was founded in Paris by Yves Klein. Related philosophically and aesthetically to the Dada and Fluxus movements, it will certainly be a subject of further research… (By the way, what is it with all the Italians around here lately? Boldini, Disco Volante, now Rotella, an upcoming post on Virna Lisi…)
A postcard from a rainy day
Bell Jar Pastoral
Warren, MI, 35mm film, 2008
So strange… This suburban neighborhood was jammed between a cluster of extended stay hotels off a major trunk road in Warren, a suburb of Detroit. It seemed so cut off from its surroundings it might as well have had a glass dome over it. Everything seemed to stop at its perimeter: the pavement, the landscaping, even the weather and ambient light conditions seemed to terminate abruptly. The scale seemed surreal, just slightly shrunken. For the entire duration of my stay in the adjacent hotel I never saw a single instance of human activity. Adding a final ominous flourish to the vignette was the plume of clotted gray smoke rising in the distance.
That plume is the link to another oddity…
oh, and remember…
Secretariat
Secretariat, Graphite and carbon pencil on paper, 2007 / revised 2009
Image Compression Standards
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)
Discarded
Berkshires, Lancaster, Hudson respectively… all 35mm film.