iPhone
February 4th, 2010
Six minutes to midnight
February 2nd, 2010
This morning, the Board of Directors and the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock would be moved one minute back from five to six minutes to midnight. The group, which contains 18 Nobel laureates, cited “a more hopeful state of world affairs” in their decision to indicate the world is metaphorically one step further away from annihilation. “We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons.”
The stars we could reach were just starfish on the beach…
January 27th, 2010Kieron’s tips for landscape painting
January 27th, 2010
- Go on holiday to where you really want to go, and be inspired.
- Start with acrylics, then watercolours, then pastels and then oils
- When you set out to do a landscape, “start with the sky first, top to bottom.”
- When you do distance, it’s lighter, and when you do foreground it comes darker.
- If you’re doing a figure in the winter, do a brown head, leave a small gap, do a blue jacket and brown legs. Then with the gap get a red pastel and do a flick of red so it looks like a scarf.
- Keep on painting.
biographical information
January 27th, 2010
Je Ne Suis Pas Une Tasse de Papier avec Couvercle
January 27th, 2010
The Church Under the Bridge in Waco, Texas
January 26th, 2010
Teri Lyn Hughes
Homeless
Basically, in the practical sense, you need water to survive and a backpack to carry other survival - or even sentimental items - to survive on the road and on the street.
I’m so careful to keep water with me. I was on the way back to Beaumont where I have a tent. I forgot to fill up and a ride dropped me about 40 miles outside of Van Horn on I-10 and I ran out of water that night. So I woke up thirsty in west Texas and it was 85 by noon.
It was completely deserted and no one would stop. Just myself and my backpack in the hot sun. No water. In West Texas. I was getting sick to my stomach and I prayed to God the father to send someone with a kind heart who would give me a ride. When I finished I was tired and sick and I got up and started to walk again and I noticed a pile of trash and it was someone who had cleaned out their car.
There’s no way to find water in west Texas in a hot afternoon. I walked by the trash and a voice told me to go back. Go back and look a second time. It was an imperative.Under all the trash was a full bottle. It was a full gallon jug of distilled water, never opened. I drank, I filled and I drank and filled it again. Ten minutes later I got a ride. He loves to strut his stuff.
My tattoo says Yehovah, it’s the outward marking of the spiritual.
Quicksilver
January 25th, 2010
I’m Dean Morris, the designer of the typeface “Quicksilver” that came out in 1976 as part of Letraset’s Letragraphica range of rub-down fonts, the stylishly aggeressive ones in the yellow pages of the catalog. I named the typeface “Quicksliver” because it looked like bent thermometers — quicksilver being a nickname for mercury (I never meant it to suggest neon), and because “Quicksilver” had some of the cooler letters such as Q, K, E, and R. The name was my second choice, however. Letraset Englishly felt that my first choice, “Polished Sausage”, would be “rather unpopular iln foreign markets”. I designed it as a 16 year-old kid in John Glenn High School in Bay City, Michigan, and sent Letraset a xerox of a tight sketch of 3″ letters kerned with the heavy outlines slightly overlapping as I originally intended. I drew only the skinny S without an alternate and submitted no punctuation (what did I know?). Letraset must have wanted it real fast (fifties nostalgia and disco were WHITE HOT then, remember), because they did the finished art themselves at 5″ high (they can’t have known my age, maybe they had no confidence in my technical talent), starting with the E as did I in the design stage. And what a gorgeous rendering job they did in the pre-Mac days of ruling pens, straightedges, and handdrawn curves (those aren’t compass curves)! Letraset stayed very close to my tight sketch, designed the punctuation, and suggested an alternate but wierd wide S, which I approved, figuring there was probably no other decent way to design it. I imagined the punctuation would match the stroke width of the letters but they drew them narrower and slightly oddly, but I figured what the hell. If you wondered, “What was I thinking?” when you looked at the A, B, E, F, K, N, Q, R, and Y, I’ll tell you. I was simply trying to describe part of the letter being drawn in the wrong direction. I thought I was so clever. For instance the E cross-stroke goes from right to left rather than from left to right like, oh, any other Roman cap E in history. R and Q diagonals came from waaaaaaaay on the other side, N goes waaaaaaay around the wrong way before starting the diagonal. “Chrome” letters can branch but these “glass tube” letters don’t! Alas, digitization came along eventually and fontographer technology followed. Crash went sales of rub-down type, and control of artwork was pirated without my knowledge and beyond my control, which I don’t condone but I totally understand. The first album cover I saw with Quicksilver was Men At Work’s first smash LP, then punk pioneer Stiff Records’ logo appeared on 45 rpm labels with a clearly Quicksliver-inspired F. For about ten years I, family, and friends collected food packages, posters, took photos of signs, etc. with Quicksliver from around the world. I think it’s about the easiest typeface to mishandle ever. Eventually I stopped trying to keep track of it. Maybe I’m overestimating its popularity now after 30 years (I totally forgot about it for about a decade), but to me seeing it around at all is itself a rave. I can’t remember why I Googled “Quicksilver Letraset” a few days ago and what I found was a whole community of sites for font identification and original name lists (where they bothered to accurately credit me as designer which gets me RIGHT HERE). It makes me feel less forgotten even though I don’t see royalties. BTW, I never did, nor did Letraset ask me to, design a lower case version. Feel free to pass along this modest piece of graphic microhistory to any Letraheads.
Dean Morris, May 2007, New York City.’
Letterheads
January 24th, 2010
Public Service Aesthetics
January 22nd, 2010In the meantime, bicycle-powered irrigation systems have become the latest subterfuge for ambitious grad students who want to be written up in Artforum.
Doug Harvey, There Go the Zeros
________
January 21st, 2010
Dispersion of Sound Waves in Ice Sheets
January 18th, 2010“Is that work or is it leisure? We get work out of it.”
January 12th, 2010Documentary on Dolly Freed, author of Possum Living: How to Live Well Without a Job and With (Almost) No Money. Via Nothing Is New.
Questionsss
January 11th, 2010# I WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH MY COACH?
# IS IT NORMAL FOR A TEEN TO WEAR KHAKI PANTS DURING THE DAY?
# WHAT CAN I DO FOR FIVE HOURS?!?!?!?!?
# SHOULD I STOP BEING MYSELF IF IT ISN’T WORKING?
Questionsss from Flo-dogg.
Radical Friend
January 10th, 2010
Radical Friend via my radical friend Snobben.
fuckyeahcapybara
January 8th, 2010
Fuck yeah, pugs in casts
January 7th, 2010
Is it me, or is there a disproportionate number of pugs* on fuckyeahanimalswithcasts? I’m just sayin’…
*I know, I know, a few of these are pug mixes…
Aristotle
January 6th, 2010We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.