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The Casual Optimist Posts

Published September 10, 2013

The Heads of State: The Great Discontent


Designers Jason Kernevich and Dusty Summers talk about their work, inspirations and starting up their own studio The Heads of State (10 years ago now!), at The Great Discontent:

Dusty: I remember looking at album covers when I was 13 and can recall the smell of the ink on the booklet for In Utero. I knew that was graphic design, but it was more about the album and the beautiful artwork. I think that’s where my interest in design started.

Jason: Yeah. I made this fateful choice of wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt to a guidance counselor recruitment. It had a Raymond Pettibon drawing on it and my recruiter said, “That’s Raymond Pettibon. He’s in the MoMa.” That made a connection for me that something could live in the punk and fine art worlds at the same time. Then, when someone at Tyler made a statement that the record covers Pettibon did for Black Flag were graphic design, that connected it even more for me.


I talked to Jason and Dusty about their book cover design and other work way back in 2010.

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Published September 10, 2013

Frame By Frame: The Art of Stop Motion

The latest episode of the PBS documentary short series Off Book takes a look at the painstaking art of stop-motion animation:

I’ve always loved stop-motion so it’s nice to know that it’s undergoing something of a resurgence in the digital age.

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Published September 9, 2013

Jonathan Lethem: The Author Looks Inward

Jonathan Lethem talks about writing his new novel, Dissident Gardens, with Brian Gresko at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Of course, in the writing, Dissident Gardens couldn’t bear much of what I’d learned. Novels don’t want to be crammed with factual stuff. I mostly left it aside, including some astonishing truths, which when you first come across them, you think, holy shit, I’ve learned this crazy thing and now I’ll blow people away by revealing this knowledge in the book! But at the juncture where you’d insert such a thing, you flinch, seeing the cost is too high. The facts will intrude — either on the reader’s experience, or my own relationship to the page, to the dream. You’ve heard of killing your darlings? You’ve got to kill plenty of the world’s darling’s too

Dissident Gardens is out this week in the US & Canada (I believe you have a bit longer to wait in the UK). The book was reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.

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Published September 6, 2013

Close Not Touching: Penguin Designer Gerald Cinamon

Close Not Touching is a beautiful short film by DILLONROSE.COM about the work of designer and typographer Gerald Cinamon.

Born in Boston in 1930, Cinamon moved to England in 1960, eventually becoming chief designer at Penguin Books. Strongly influenced by Swiss design, Cinamon utilized a combination of bold colour, clean lines and sans serif typography that was unique in British book design at the time. Now an influence on a new generation of type-inspired designers, the film includes a conversation between Cinamon and David Pearson:


An exhibition of Cinamon’s work, Gerald Cinamon: Collected Work Since 1958, opened at the ICA in London this week, and new book Graphic Design Gerald Cinamon, designed by Danny McNeil at SEA design, is available here.

Although a live appearance by Cinamon has had to be cancelled, Pearson will be discussing text design at Penguin at the institute on September 13.

A full-length feature documentary about Cinamon by DILLONROSE.COM will be available to download from iTunes in February 2014.

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Published September 5, 2013

Robert Walser: The Monotony of Things

Colors fill up your mind too much with all sorts of muddled stuff. Colors are too sweet a muddle, nothing more. I love things in one color, monotonous things. Snow is such a monotonous song. Why shouldn’t a color be able to make the same impression as singing? White is like a murmuring, whispering, praying. Fiery colors, like for instance Autumn colors, are a shriek. Green in midsummer is a many-voiced song with all the highest notes. Is that true? I don’t know if that is right. Well, the teacher will surely be so kind as to correct it.

At The New Yorker, Ben Lerner considers the writing of Robert Walser:

There is the typically Walserian statement “I love things in one color, monotonous things.” Praise for the monotonous, the uniform, the mundane, the insignificant—such sentiments are everywhere in Walser’s work, and maintain a crucial ambiguity. On the one hand, they are expressions of poetic attunement to those aspects of the world we too readily overlook, and for which writers concerned with heroic exploits often have no time. On the other hand, Walser’s celebration of the monotonous or uniform returns us to his fascination with subservience, with relinquishing all personality to imposed order: “Modestly stepping aside can never be recommended as a continual practice in strong enough terms.”

The force of Walser’s writing derives from this simultaneous valorization of irreducible individuality and of sameness, smallness, interchangeability.

Lerner has written the introduction to a new NYRB collection of Walser short stories, A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories, translated by Damion Searls.

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Published September 4, 2013

Paul Rand’s Book Jackets and Covers

Steven Heller’s fascinating School of Visual Arts lecture on the book covers of Paul Rand:

(via David Pearson)

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Published September 4, 2013

Forward, Fantagraphics!


Seattle Weekly profiles local independent publisher Fantagraphics:

Fantagraphics was founded in 1976 to launch The Comics Journal, a very opinionated annal of the trade that made Groth and Thompson high-profile critics of their industry. As both editors and writers for the Journal, the two young men had an outsize impact on a moribund business, often disrespecting their elders and picking up many enemies along the way.

Then in 1981, Fantagraphics joined the industry it so often criticized. The gadflies became insiders. How did that happen? “It was partly happenstance, partly a logical progression,” says Groth. “The Comics Journal was championing a vague but real aesthetic direction for comics, and we slowly realized we could put those theories into practice. The Hernandez brothers’ self-published Love & Rockets was a revelation because it suggested what I had envisioned, in my mind’s eye, the kind of comics I wanted to see. Little did I know that they would mature and in short order create work that was almost the embodiment of what I had hoped to see.”

(The cover is by local artist and Fantagraphics stalwart Peter Bagge of course)

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Published September 4, 2013

The Last Bookstore

At The Paris Review, Casey N. Cep visits  The Last Bookstore in (where else?) Los Angeles :

The Last Bookstore has some of the most beautiful book art I’ve ever seen. You can wander and wander through this wonderland of cuttings, foldings, installations, and sculptures. Some pages are folded, others torn; the books are shaped into birds and windows, transformed into storyscapes independent of their original stories.

Book art might be called an epitaph for our relationship with the printed word. Its power comes almost entirely from the materials that it memorializes. Without the bindings or the recognizable spines, these works of art would cease to invoke their source. And in order to be moved by the work of art, we need to recognize the book, or even the idea of the book.

The setting, the Last Bookstore—apocalyptic, but also an increasingly plausible—makes this association easier, but it still seems clear that none of these works can succeed if they transform the book beyond recognition. The epitaph works only when we recognize its referent. There is both terror and beauty in every work of book art: the printed word mangled, but also memorialized; pages destroyed, but also preserved; books dead, but also resurrected. The Last Bookstore is equal parts mausoleum, shrine, and warehouse.

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Published September 2, 2013

Will Self on J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World


Will Self on J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World at The Telegraph:

To coincide with the 1962 publication of The Drowned World – his own post-apocalyptic novel in which men of the future also venture into a flooded London, intent on looting the city of its treasures – JG Ballard wrote an article for The Woman Journalist in which he explained the mise en scène thus: “On reflection it seems to me that the image of an immense half-submerged city overgrown by tropical vegetation, which forms the centrepiece of The Drowned World, is in some way a fusion of my childhood memories of Shanghai and those of my last 10 years in London.”

According to Ballard, “My own earliest memories are of Shanghai during the annual long summer of floods, when the streets of the city were two or three feet deep in brown silt-laden water, and where the surrounding countryside… was an almost continuous mirror of drowned paddy fields and irrigation canals stirring sluggishly in the hot sunlight.”

There seems no reason to doubt Ballard at his word on this question; one that he proposes himself rhetorically at the outset of the piece: “How far do the landscapes of one’s childhood, as much as its emotional experiences, provide an inescapable background to all one’s imaginative writing?”

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard, with an introduction by Will Self and illustrations by James Boswell is published by the Folio Society.

A paperback edition of The Drowned World published by W.W. Norton, with a cover design by Darren Haggar (pictured above), is also available.

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Published August 30, 2013

Art Spiegelman: Mixing Words and Pictures

Cartoonist Art Spiegelman interviewed at NEA Arts Magazine:

It never occurred to me that comics were anything other than worthy. They were in fact among the most worthy endeavors I could imagine. They were how culture got introduced to me, more than through other media…. I always assumed they were a container big enough to hold whatever I could hold.   

Spiegelman’s somewhat delayed book Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps will finally be widely available in September. (Full disclosure: Co-Mix is published by Drawn + Quarterly and distributed in Canada by my employers Raincoast Books)

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Published August 27, 2013

Stories from the Fold


If you are going to be in London on September 25th, Stories from the Fold, a mini-conference about book design at the St. Bride Library looks terribly interesting. Curated by designer Becky Chilcott, speakers include Jon Gray (AKA Gray318), Clare Skeats, and host of others.

Sounds like a great way to spend an evening to me.

Tickets are £25.00 (£20.00 for students).

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Published August 27, 2013

Chris Ware: An Everyday Genius


The September/October issue of Intelligent Life includes an extensive profile of cartoonist Chris Ware by Simon Willis:

As he worked on “Building Stories”, [Ware] decided he needed a form that allowed the past and the present to co-exist in a jumble, as in our own heads. “Like something you’d see in a dream.” A book wouldn’t do. The answer came to him: lots of little books, in a box.

Ware is not the first artist to use a box to explore memory. The writer B.S. Johnson, “the great lost British novelist of the 1960s” in Jonathan Coe’s view, published a novel, “The Unfortunates”, in 27 fragments of prose about the memories that assail a sports reporter at a football match. But the biggest influence on Ware was the American artist Joseph Cornell, who made artworks out of found objects arranged in small cabinets. Ware fell in love with his work in 1989, and when he got to Chicago he discovered the Bergman collection at the Art Institute, which has several of Cornell’s boxes. One of them, “Ann— In Memory” (1954), contains a few faded photographs and ads for hotels. The box is a physical and metaphorical container. “It’s certainly a good image of the way we recall things,” Ware says. “It has an organisation to it, but also a sort of chaos.”

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