This is the best rendition ever of a June 12th, 2006 edition of Quipsologies.
Submitted by James Moening: “David Reese, of Get your War on, preaches to the choir at Columbia about using a pallet of culturally bland clip art to hoist message on the masses.”
Maxim magazine ranks the top 20 chain stores.
6.6.06 went by and the apocalypse never arrived despite the scary newspaper front pages.
The remake of The Omen opens on 6.6.06 with a $12,633,666 intake at the box office. Coincidence, marketing spin or the devil at work?
All new, finally: Emigre.com
You too can be like Picasso. [Thanks to Andy for the link]
Beloved Coudal Parters made a short video about beloved Aesthetic Apparatus. It’s okay to use beloved twice in one sentence, I promise.
The University of Washington’s 2006 BFA class can be viewed online. It’s a tasty collection of design work.
Witness the PDF Battle Royale as Microsoft insists that PDF technology will be a part of its new Office suite. However, Adobe isn’t happy.
For more evidence that Google plans to sweep Microsoft under the rug, check out their plans to crush Excel. And in case you’re wondering, they use the same file format, making it easy to migrate over to Google 100%.
MIT’s media lab now has Open Studio …a unique online intersection of creativity and capitalism in an experimental online art exchange economy. We aim to provide simple, extensible, creative tools for free in an open, web-based environment. Sound confusing? Then let’s just call it free tools for creativity. Watch out Adobe.
Zarqawi portrait sets record price for photography.
Arnold Newman, the photographer who inspired a thousand imitators, passed away last week. Evidence of his influence passes through my mailbox with continued frequency. Above, his seminal portrait of Igor Stravinsky from 1946.
Bob Andelman, co-author of Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, will post new interviews and discussions each Monday at the book’s blog.
Walt Kelly first used the quote “We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us” on a poster for Earth Day in 1970.
Setting type? Beware: the interwebs is killing punctuation.
“…Alice Cooper — once radical, now fully coopted, pop-cultural icon — in his gleeful merger of faux androgyny and hyper-masculine histrionics, actually anticipated some of the most recent and cutting-edge theoretical work on subjectivity: the identity-construtivist view that our subjectivities have always been unitary repositories of an amalgam of subject positions. Thus, a better reading of mass-cultural junk — precisely those phenomena that appear to be coopted, or those “artifacts” that seem to operate unabashedly in service to some marketing scheme — could yield interesting, if not prescient, theoretical claims.” — David J. Alworth on Robert Fitterman’s Metropolis and the politics of appropriation.
“He stayed in his walk to watch a typesetter neatly distributing type. Reads it backwards first. Quickly he does it. Must require some practice that. mangiD. kcirtaP. Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards with his finger to me. Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem. Dear, O dear! All that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage alleluia. Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu. No, that’s the other. Then the twelve brothers, Jacob’s sons. And then the lamb and the cat and the dog and the stick and the water and the butcher and then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills the ox and the dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look into it well. Justice it means but it’s everybody eating everyone else. That’s what life is after all. How quickly he does that job. Practice makes perfect. Seems to see with his fingers.” — James Joyce, Ulysses
Friday marks the 102nd anniversary of a famous walk through Dublin, taken by one Leopold Bloom, advertising salesman for The Freeman’s Journal.
“In the realm of leisure and pleasure, the danger is that people will reject culture altogether in the same way, for similar reasons. The nationwide rise of big-box stores, ubiquitous fast-food restaurants, giant chain bookstores and the like seem as though they efface personal taste, leveraging economies of scale against underground-empire culture — against small-press books, indie record labels, ethnic cuisines, unsigned bands, outsider artists, foreign films, fair-trade coffee, locally grown apples — all the things that for various reasons don’t acquire strong enough constituencies to secure a place in the public square. Sometimes people just aren’t aware of these things, sometimes bigger corporations stifle them to keep their own operations streamlined, sometimes their appeal is limited by sheer eccentricity. At any rate, rigged or not, when culture itself becomes a kind of democratic popularity contest, individuals eventually suffer from the same lack of incentives that keeps them politically illiterate. When the Wal-Marts and Barnes and Nobleses take over, people have no reason to develop an aesthetic literacy, to follow shifts in avant-garde culture, to understand art and have a stake in its being meaningful, challenging, moral, inspiring, and so on. We lose the will to be curious.” — Rob Horning on the Underground Empire
As a corollary to the above sentiment, Sony BMG, nee Sony Music, nee CBS Records — once one of the greatest record labels and a repository for monuments of our artistic heritage — continues its long, arduous slide into the shitter.
“…we began with the original painting by Grant Wood, American Gothic, a somewhat ambiguous image of Puritan integrity, austerity, and rural simplicity. We noted that the critical establishment at first embraced it as a weapon to be used to destroy traditional mid-Western religious values, in the manner of Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, et al, enthusiastically welcoming it as satire. We also saw how the painting later became used parodistically, until, in 2003, after raising the comic ante for decades, the complete inversion of its original moral significance was achieved by substituting Paris Hilton for Nan Wood.” — Grant Wood vs. Paris Hilton
Last week saw the centennial aniversary of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa. Sadly, there’s no one great site with a definitive online collection; but he is worth a Google.
An architectural roundtable discussion on Ugliness. (pdf file)
Recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag.
I have to say, that one of the most beautiful web pages around is now on the Emigre site, on the Ceramics page. Open the browser window up big and wide, and behold a great beauty. Those ceramics would look mighty good over on the new Design Observer site.
On Jun.12.2006 at 10:34 PM