The Eagleman Stag by Mikey Please.
"It might be suggested that men could be given political wisdom by a suitable training. But the question would arise: what is a suitable training? And this would turn out to be a party question."
—Bertrand Russell
—Bertrand Russell
I'm Daniel Harris and this is my personal blog. You can also visit my home page, send me email, or find me on twitter.
John Coltrane at the Guggenheim in 1960, photographed by William Claxton.
I read most of Richard Brautigan’s books about a decade ago. He was one of my favorites. I like it that he had a simple formula for his covers: photo of a pretty hippy girl, some enigmatic text that includes the title, and maybe a single color frame. All very memorable.
I think it’s pretty remarkable that the great jazz albums have consistently great cover art. Apparently a lot of lesser-known (to me, anyway) albums have great cover art as well. Here are two of my new favorites, both of which graced albums by Jimmy Rushing, who was famous for being fat in addition to being an excellent jazz vocalist.
The paintings were done by someone named Tom Allen (about whom I can’t seem to find any information), and the covers were designed by the great designer of Jazz record and book covers, S. Neil Fujita.
I’ll be presenting this poster at the Pacific APA Meeting in Seattle later this week. The poster is based on some work I’ve been developing for the last year and a half, on a Gricean alternative to Lewisian Conventionalist foundational theories of meaning. It will eventually become a pair of dissertation chapters.
Aside from copious Helvetica Neue 77 Bold Condensed and HFJ Whitney Book, there are two interesting design features: Doodles of me, David Lewis, and Paul Grice that Margot created using Adobe Ideas on my iPad last night, and isotope speech communities modeled after the work of Gerd Arntz (about whom I’ll write more soon!).
“It’s called ‘Sex and Car Crashes’. I’ll be checking that nobody’s rented it.”
That was Ken, my Junior High basketball coach, in the spring of 1998, while I was staying with a dozen other fourteen and fifteen-year-olds at a Best Western hotel in Truro or New Glasgow or somewhere like that. He was laying down the laws governing our conduct at the hotel. It was out our first road trip of the season, and my first ever. The hotel had a VHS vending machine and there was a list of movies we weren’t to experience. David Cronenberg’s extremely sexually explicit interpretation of J.G. Ballard’s novel, Crash, had been released a couple of years earlier, and had become infamous in Canada. Ken put special emphasis on it, conflating its name with its unimaginative tag line.
To the chagrin of overly protective parents and chaperones across Canada, and to the delight of the teenage boys they were vainly trying to shelter, the CBC was more than willing to indulge in the fantasy that all of the sensitive members of their audience were in bed by midnight. Combined with their mandated lust after critically-acclaimed Can Con, this led them to broadcast Crash regularly, seemingly about once a month on Friday or Saturday nights when I was 14, 15, 16 years old. Parents and educators tend to lie to young people about topics like weird kinky sexuality; luckily we had Canadian public broadcasting to tell us The Fascinating And Creepy Truth. Who knows what kind of boring person I’d be now if that weren’t the case.
All of this came to mind because I’ve just finished reading two great articles by Rick Poynor about the unique challenges of designing a cover for Ballard’s novel (here and here). The pictures above are some of the missteps he catalogues. Poynor’s thoughts on the many botched attempts at visual representation are worth pondering.
This beauty is again due to Matt, who aptly refers to it as a “conventionalist rainbow”. (Given the frequency with which Matt has send along suggestions, I’m starting to think that he should just start his own blog for philosophically-oriented design weenies.)
The typeface seems to be (Neue) Helvetica 63 (Medium Extended), or something very similar to it. (The wide gap between the uppercase C’s termini give rise to my only misgiving.) The stretched-out-looking character of the typeface lends itself to the psychedelic space rainbow flavor of the image, and the colors nicely model the visible EM spectrum, suggesting a very tall stack of infra red above and ultraviolet below.
The kung fu training sequence that makes up the core of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is a near-perfect depiction of education at its most romantic. As someone who has always romanticized education, I think this is what makes Chamber one of my favorite films.
