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Tag: new yorker

Sergio García Sánchez’s “On the Same Page”

Sergio García Sánchez‘s cover illustration, coloured by his partner Lola Moral, for the recent fiction issue of The New Yorker is lovely.

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R. Kikuo Johnson’s “Perennial”

It feels like we are right on the cusp of spring turning into summer here in Toronto (rain all day Saturday, beautiful sunshine Sunday) so I enjoyed R. Kikuo Johnson’s latest cover illustration for The New Yorker. There are so many lovely touches.

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R. Kikuo Johnson’s “Delayed”

R. Kikuo Johnson’s latest cover for The New Yorker is remarkable.

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American Uprising

Inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’, artist Kadir Nelson explains how he illustrated the July 2020 cover of Rolling Stone to accompany Jamil Smith’s cover story on Black Lives Matter.

Nelson also illustrated the cover of June 22 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine has an interactive version of the cover, entitled “Say Their Names”, on their site.

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Chris Ware’s “Still Life”

“Having lived in Chicago for thirty years, I’ve only ever been a visitor to New York, but I love it like no other city. Teeming with unpredictable people and unimaginable places and unforeseeable moments, life there is measured not in hours but in densely packed minutes that can fill up a day with a year’s worth of life. Lately, however, closed up in our homes against a worldwide terror, time everywhere has seemed to slur, to become almost Groundhog Day-ish, forced into a sort of present-perfect tense—or, as my fellow New Yorker contributor Masha Gessen more precisely put it, ‘loopy, dotted, and sometimes perpendicular to itself.’ But disaster can also have a recalibrating quality. It reminds us that the real things of life (breakfast, grass, spouse) can, in normal times, become clotted over by anxieties and nonsense.”

Chris Ware has created another brilliant cover for The New Yorker to illustrate April 15th, 2020, “a kaleidoscopic account of a single day in New York” during the pandemic. 

Its densely packed grid and the juxtaposition of mundane, ‘snapshots’ reminds me — perhaps more than some of his other covers for the magazine — of Ware’s comics.

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Reasonable Goals…

Or maybe just go back to bed…?

(From The New Yorker, of course…)

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Christoph Niemann’s “Critical Mass”

After posting Chris Ware’s pandemic cover for The New Yorker earlier this week, I remembered I had also meant to post Christoph Niemann’s “Critical Mass” cover from two weeks ago. It may not pull at your heart strings the way Ware’s cover does, but it’s a brilliant and prescient illustration of the pandemic.

I believe that the best concepts develop in the process of drawing. I don’t usually have ideas pop in my head fully formed when I’m not at my desk. Yet the genesis for this image, the idea of a sneezing domino standing on top of a globe packed with other domino pieces, came to me when I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep… I got up again and sketched down the idea. Only the next day, when I sat down to turn the concept into a proper art work, did I realize that the globe and the pieces actually resemble a virus. In the end, it still proves my theory that all decent ideas come together when you actually draw them.

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Chris Ware’s “Bedtime”

“As a procrastination tactic, I sometimes ask my fifteen-year-old daughter what the comic strip or drawing I’m working on should be about—not only because it gets me away from my drawing table but because, like most kids of her generation, she pays attention to the world. So, while sketching the cover of this Health Issue, I asked her.

“ ‘Make sure it’s about how most doctors have children and families of their own,’ she said.

Chris Ware’s heartbreaking cover for the New Yorker‘s Health Issue arrives in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic.

I was reminded of his 2009(!) cover for the New Yorker‘s from Halloween edition in which parents all look at their phones while their kids trick-or-treat. It’s an interesting contrast…

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The French Dispatch

I thought I read somewhere that Wes Anderson’s new film The French Dispatch was based on the Paris Review, but the New Yorker is saying no, actually, it is all about them. IDK. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(The poster is by illustrator Javi Aznarez by the way. You can read about it at It’s Nice That)

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Fiction / Nonfiction

Joe Dator for The New Yorker.

(I feel like this is a variation on a gag that has been going around independent bookstores for a while now, but it gets more accurate by the day. I guess we have to laugh or we will cry, right?) 

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The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey

Dan Chiasson takes a look at the making (and meaning) of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ for The New Yorker:

Kubrick brought to his vision of the future the studiousness you would expect from a history film. “2001” is, in part, a fastidious period piece about a period that had yet to happen. Kubrick had seen exhibits at the 1964 World’s Fair, and pored over a magazine article titled “Home of the Future.” The lead production designer on the film, Tony Masters, noticed that the world of “2001” eventually became a distinct time and place, with the kind of coherent aesthetic that would merit a sweeping historical label, like “Georgian” or “Victorian.” “We designed a way to live,” he recalled, “down to the last knife and fork.” (The Arne Jacobsen flatware, designed in 1957, was made famous by its use in the film, and is still in production.) By rendering a not-too-distant future, Kubrick set himself up for a test: thirty-three years later, his audiences would still be around to grade his predictions. Part of his genius was that he understood how to rig the results. Many elements from his set designs were contributions from major brands—Whirlpool, Macy’s, DuPont, Parker Pens, Nikon—which quickly cashed in on their big-screen exposure. If 2001 the year looked like “2001” the movie, it was partly because the film’s imaginary design trends were made real.

Much of the film’s luxe vision of space travel was overambitious. In 1998, ahead of the launch of the International Space Station, the Times reported that the habitation module was “far cruder than the most pessimistic prognosticator could have imagined in 1968.” But the film’s look was a big hit on Earth. Olivier Mourgue’s red upholstered Djinn chairs, used on the “2001” set, became a design icon, and the high-end lofts and hotel lobbies of the year 2001 bent distinctly toward the aesthetic of Kubrick’s imagined space station.

I have to confess that I’m with Renata Adler — I’ve always found 2001 to be simultaneously “hypnotic and immensely boring.” I think I just like reading about Kubrick’s films far more than I actually like watching them. 

Chiasson’s essay reminded me Keith Phipps great series on science fiction films ‘The Laser Age’ for late and lamented film website The Dissolve, which started with 2001. Someone really should collect those essays together into a book if they haven’t already, 

The cover of Michael Benson’s book on the making of 2001, Space Odyssey,  was designed by Rodrigo Corral and was featured in this month’s book covers post.  

 

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