Books, Design and Culture
Designer, and former art director of Pantheon, Louise Fili discusses her work with Debbie Millman on Design Matters:
Design Matters With Debbie Millman: Louise Fili Interview mp3
Elegantissima, the first monograph of Fili’s work, was published earlier this year by Princeton Architectural Press (who are, for the record, are distributed in Canada by my employers, Raincoast Books)
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Thrills — As part of British Comics Week, Colin Smith looks at the success of science fiction comic 2000AD, for The New Statesman:
The past year has been a remarkable success for 2000AD and its publisher Rebellion Press. The transformation of the entertainment landscape means it’s no longer able to rely on a mass audience of young readers inculcated with the habit of reading comics. But Rebellion has responded by nurturing new markets for its huge library of characters and stories through book collections, digital distribution, films, gaming, audio plays, and more… The content itself is typically a touch more measured now, aimed at an older audience. But the comic’s never lost its signature fusion of out-there excitement, ever-ambitious craftsmanship and smart, challenging content.
And if science fiction art is your thing, take a look at the 2000AD Covers Uncovered blog. The ABC Warriors cover above is by artist Clint Langley.
Also at The New Statesman: Alex Hearn on comics journalism; Seb Patrick on British football comics; and Laura Sneddon on kids comics.
And on a somewhat related note… Ian Jack’s memories of the The Dandy at The Guardian are interesting (if you can get passed his ridiculously prim “get off my lawn” dismissal of modern comics):
Nearly 40 years ago, the writer George Rosie compared Desperate Dan to the works of Magritte and appeared in Pseuds Corner for it, and yet, as Rosie pointed out, what could be more surreal than a town, Cactusville, which combined hitching rails and wild west saloons with tramcars and pillar boxes, and where a cow pie with two horns poking through pastry could be bought from a corner shop that looked suspiciously like a Scottish bakery.
And finally… an interview with Tony Fletcher, author of A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of The Smiths, at Salon:
Part of Morrissey’s personality that I found liberating was growing up in Britain — and I’m sure it’s true in America — at 19 years old and you don’t have a girlfriend, people are going to say to you, “What’s wrong with you, mate? You a poof?” And maybe you are, but you can’t come out and say it because you’ll get beaten up. And maybe you aren’t, but it’s just not working out in your life. And maybe you just want someone to say, “It doesn’t matter.” I think that that was a genius element. So whether or not he didn’t have the confidence to come out, I think there was also a sense of, “No, I refuse to let you identify me.”
Quite.
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Down the River — An interview with Sean Howe, author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, at The Phoenix:
Marvel is this narrative tapestry that all of these people have worked on and passed on. It’s sort of like television soap operas, but there’s something about that creative ownership that somebody has that’s not lasting, and the proprietary feeling that they have when something that they are a collaborator on doesn’t belong to them at all. It’s due to the way that Marvel ’s storytelling worked — Marvel Comics was this river that rushed by all these people, and they would throw their ideas into this river, and the river would just keep going on without them, it was bigger than any of them. And I think that Marvel is just an extreme example of that kind of thing which exists in the comic book industry.
See also: Sean Howe interviewed at Publishers Weekly; a review of the book at the A.V. Club; and for the (even) nerdier among you, a more critical review at The Hooded Utilitarian.
And on a semi-related note… Chris Ware interviewed by Tavi Gevinson for Rookie Magazine. It’s a little different from all the other interviews I’ve read with Ware recently:
Our memories are all we have, and even those we think of as “real” are made up. Art can condense experience into something greater than reality, and it can also give us permission to do or think certain things that otherwise we’ve avoided or felt ashamed of. The imagination is where reality lives; it’s the instant lie of backwash from the prow of that boat that we think of as cutting the present moment, everything following it becoming less and less “factual” but no less real than what we think of as having actually occurred.
Dead Comrades — D. J. Taylor on the writer Julian Mclaren-Ross, for The Guardian:
In strict category terms, the author of Bitten by the Tarantula (Maclaren-Ross’s titles nearly always leap up at you from the library catalogue) is a classic English literary bohemian in a tradition that goes back at least as far as Marlowe: one of those people who really do live their lives out of suitcases, whose books are ground out in a procession of rented rooms with the landlord’s boots resounding on the carpetless stair and whose best work appears in a brief window of opportunity before the milieu in which they operate rises up and drowns them. Certainly the form of Maclaren-Ross’s fiction seems intimately connected to the circumstances in which it was composed: written at night, Benzedrine tablets (“My pills”) to hand, in seedy west London hotels after a day spent bar-propping in the Soho drinking dens.
And finally…
Little Sun — Jon Gray on his cover design for The Yellow World by Albert Espinosa, at Design Week:
The brief was: ‘read this amazing book and please give it an interesting cover’. I’m really lucky in that Jim Stoddart, the art director, gave me pretty much free-reign. .. I thought that there was something appealing in the big yellow ball. Rather like Olafur Eliasson’s giant sun at Tate Modern a few years back. It’s warming and comforting on the eye. I also thought it would stand out against other books and without type would make you want to pick it up and find out more.
(via Theo Inglis)
Comments closedThe latest episode of the PBS Arts series Off Book is all about graphic design. Contributors include Debbie Millman, Emily Oberman, Drew Freeman, and Ecco book designer Steve Attardo:
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It’s Complicated — Gabriel Winslow-Yost surveys the work of Chris Ware for the New York Review of Books:
Ware’s drawings are meticulous, even chilly, with flat, muted colors and the straight lines and perfect curves of an architectural rendering. The panels follow an orderly horizontal grid, but have a discomfiting tendency to occasionally shrink to near illegibility; or they might suddenly demand to be read from right to left, or even disappear entirely, to be replaced by pretty but unhelpful typography (“Thus,” “And so”), complicated diagrams, or plans for a paper model of one of the stories’ locations. Dreams and fantasies invade the story without warning—when Jimmy [Corrigan] first meets his father, we see him brutally murdering the sheepishly friendly man, while their desultory small talk struggles on.
Also at the NYRB: Zoë Heller’s review of Salman Rushdie’s preening new book Joseph Anton: A Memoir.
Chance Art — Rick Poynor on the photography of designer Herbert Spencer, at Design Observer:
As a photographer, Spencer seemed to delight in unraveling the order he spent his days as a designer attempting to create. His most telling and memorable images, those that seem most fully his own, show a world in which things fall apart, signs of official communication fray into visual poetry, and ordinary people assert their presence by inscribing streets, buildings and land with unofficial messages and marks.
And finally…
The Shadow Line — Sean O’Hagan interviews avant-garde filmmaker and founder of Film Culture magazine Jonas Mekas for The Guardian:
Comments closedAt the end of our talk, I ask him what he thinks of contemporary culture and how it compares to the creative iconoclasm that he was part of in 50s and 60s New York. He thinks about his answer for some time. “When the old forms began collapsing and falling away though exhaustion and repetition, a new sensibility is born. That is what happened back then and may be happening now.” He tells me how taken he is with the Joseph Conrad notion of the shadow line: a moment of great cultural change that occurs every so often, sweeping all that is old and exhausted out of the way. “It is overdue.”
In this beautiful short film directed by Gary Nadeau for Dwell magazine, Danish American furniture designer Jens Risom talks about the prefab vacation home he built for his family on Block Island in the 1965:
1 CommentRuined… For Life — Yuka Igarashi on the consequences of copy-editing at Granta:
There is a danger to copy-editing. You start to read in a different way. You start to see the sentence as machinery. You focus on the gears and levers that connect words to one another; you hunt for the wayward semicolon, the unintentionally ambiguous phrase, the clunky repeated word. You even hope they appear, so you can kill them. You see them when they’re not even there, because you relish slashing your pen across the paper. It gets a little twisted.
As with any kind of technical knowledge or specialization, it is possible to take copy-editing too far, to be ruled by it, to not quite be able to shut it off when it ought to be shut off.
(As if to prove the point, the article itself is copy-edited in the comments)
The Undercoat of Modernity — Mathias Schreiber on Berlin in the ‘Golden Twenties’ for Der Spiegel:
Looking back on the period, playwright Carl Zuckmayer… who lived in Berlin from 1924 to 1933, wrote: “The arts blossomed like a meadow just before being mowed. This explains the tragic yet brilliant charm that is associated with this era, often seen in the images of poets and artists who died prematurely.”
The realization that this euphoria could not last undercoats the best works of art of these years with the metallic tone that soon became the trademark of artistic modernity. This applied, quite literally, to the refined simplicity of the anti-plush, steel-tube furniture of Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer and the architecture of the same movement, fashioned from strictly functional steel skeletons… Metaphorically speaking, the tendency toward metallic, unadorned expression also applied to the literature of the period, and certainly to the objectivist collage technique employed by Alfred Döblin in his novel “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1929). Döblin blends together the sound of wind, the rhythmic thud of the steam pile-driver, quotations from newspaper advertisements, stock market reports, soldiers’ songs, nursery rhymes and prostitutes’ patois with expressive, poetic flights of fancy, and injects all of these noises and fragments of language into the protagonist’s stream of consciousness… This first important big-city novel in the German language was also the first great 20th-century novel about the working classes.
And finally…
Purpose in the Wreckage — Simon Hattenstone’s endlessly quotable interview of media-shy musician Scott Walker, for The Guardian:
When [Walker] returned in 1995, it was as a fully fledged modernist composer. On the surface, there couldn’t have been a more unlikely transformation – imagine Andy Williams reinventing himself as Stockhausen. Yet in a way it was all of a piece. His latest album, Bish Bosch, is only his third in 17 years, all of them elaborate, epic and inaccessible. It is a post-apocalyptic opera of sorts, with blasts of rams’ horn, dog barks, scraping swords, machetes. The music nods at Gregorian chant, doffs its cap to Shostakovich, gives a thumbs up to industrial metal, and is uniquely Scott Walker. The lyrics reference sexual disease, brown dwarf stars, court jesters and dictators, all delivered in a strangulated baritone, as if Walker’s testicles were being squeezed. At times there’s a terrible beauty to his poetry (“Earth’s hoary/fontanelle/weeps softly/for a/thumb thrust”) while at others there’s a bloodthirstiness that could be straight out of Jacobean tragedy (“I’ve severed my reeking gonads, fed them to your shrunken face”). It’s brilliant and bonkers. The opposite of a guilty pleasure: a guilty torture.
And why not?
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“I want everything I do to look spontaneous. It’s not that I think illustration should necessarily be like that, but this is what I can do.”
In this short interview for the Tate, illustrator Quentin Blake talks about his new book Beyond the Page. Written by Blake, it chronicles his projects over the past ten years, including his works for the walls of hospitals, galleries and other public spaces:
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Author Teju Cole, author of Open City, in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel on CBC Radio’s Writers & Company:
CBC RADIO Writers and Company: Teju Cole Open City mp3
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In this documentary short, Toronto-based photographer Robert Burley talks about his project documenting the demise of the photographic industry since 2005:
The photographs from the project are collected in the book The Disappearance of Darkness published by Princeton Architectural Press earlier this month.
(Note: Princeton Architectural Press are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books)
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Accidental Effects — Rick Poynor on the street photography of designer Robert Brownjohn, at Design Observer:
Brownjohn tended to include enough of the setting to give a strong sense of the look and atmosphere of the place where he found the lettering or graffiti. The British capital’s dour post-war street texture was fascinating and meaningful to him. As an American and a recent arrival in London, he would have seen everything with the newcomer’s hungry and hypersensitive eye, whether the pictures were taken in a single day touring around town by taxi, as the story would have it, or in the course of several trips. Brownjohn shows the bricks, the stone, the doorways and window frames, the railings, the adjacent fixtures, the surrounding structure… [He] valued the accidental effects wrought by dilapidation, the elements, or human hands, in their own right, as a kind of visual music or poetry, irrespective of the formal design applications that these expressive details might go on to inspire.
Drowning in Film — Movie critic David Thomson, author most recently of The Big Screen, in conversation with Greil Marcus, at the LA Review of Books:
I have become more and more interested in the way different movies are like the water in a river. They’re constantly flowing into each other. Indeed, it’s a form that you can’t actually think of or describe as separate items. It’s the flow, it’s the sequence. And I think that we’re at a point in history where it’s not really as significant who makes what particular movies, it’s the constant flow. And like any flow of that kind, you say it’s like being carried down a river, and a lot of time perhaps you feel it’s on a sunny day and it’s very pleasant, but you can drown in a river. It seems that a lot of the culture, elements that I would hope to see maintained, are in danger of being drowned.
And finally…
Abnormal Activities — Patrick Ambrose interviews Iggy Pop for The Morning News:
Comments closedIggy Pop… obliterated the barrier between the artist and spectator. “I’m interested in being able to do that while maintaining the formality of the dinner engagement,” he says with a hearty laugh. “There has been a tremendous change in the cybernetics of rock and roll over the past 50 years. If you look back to the mid- to late-’50s, you’ve got maybe Elvis or Eddie Cochran playing on a flat-bed truck in a gas station parking lot with presumably 1,200 doomed teenagers dancing, chewing gum and knifing each other while religious leaders burn records and make racial slurs about the music. Now, you’ve got thousands of people obediently shuffling into these concrete civic centers to sponge up something in places where nothing really happens.”
In Search of Lost Time — Jimmy Stamp on Chris Ware’s Building Stories, at Design Decoded:
If there’s a central theme to Building Stories, it is the passing of time – and our futile struggle against it. The comic book is the perfect medium to explore this idea. After all, what is a comic but sequential, narrative art? Unlike a photograph, a comic panel does not typically show a single moment in time but is, rather, a visual representation of duration. That duration might be the time it takes Superman to punch out a giant robot, the seconds that pass while a failed artist chops a carrot, or the years it takes for a single seed to travel around the world. In every comic book, time passes within the panel. More noticeably though, time passes between the panels. This is where the art of storytelling comes in. There are no rules in comics that standardize the duration of a panel or a sequence of panels. In Building Stories, sometimes milliseconds pass between panels, sometimes entire seasons, and sometimes even centuries can expire with the turn of the page.
See also: Mike Doherty interviews Chris Ware for the National Post.
Nuts — Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test, interviewed at The Awl:
the stuff I was gravitating towards at the beginning was people who lived on the fringes of society and funny, absurd stories about the kind of crazy things that see us through. You know, belief systems that seemed kind of completely irrational to me. And I’ve got to admit, at the time, in my early 20s, I probably thought I was better than them. They were kind of nuts and I was, you know, sane and rational. But the older I get, the less I feel that. Now I feel completely on a par of irrationality with them.
And finally…
Cents — Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi on musicians and streaming music services, at Pitchfork:
Comments closedthe sale of recorded music has become irrelevant to the dominant business models I have to contend with as a working musician. Indeed, music itself seems to be irrelevant to these businesses– it is just another form of information, the same as any other that might entice us to click a link or a buy button on a stock exchange.
As businesses, Pandora and Spotify are divorced from music. To me, it’s a short logical step to observe that they are doing nothing for the business of music — except undermining the simple cottage industry of pressing ideas onto vinyl, and selling them for more than they cost to manufacture.