go forth and multiply

My lurking obsession with typefaces periodically surfaces on this blog in one form or another, and we’re overdue for a sighting. So thanks to Serious Eats for catching a story in Print magazine in which typeface designers Nick and Adam Hayes marvel at the discovery of a NYC street food vendor — in this case, the Calexico cart in SoHo — using their font: 

“We’ve also found this strange use of Monark for a street vendor selling Mexican food [in Soho, New York City]. They used Monark for the menu and the logotype. I have no idea why a street vendor would use Monark to promote their services, because it was a typeface originally designed for a magazine. We love waiting and watching for our typefaces to pop up in the strangest places. This has got to be one of our favorites!”

My obsession with type doesn’t stem from its mathematical principles. Or the aesthetics of typeface design (serifs! spacing!). But rather in how typography is so different from the other creative arts: once a typeface is finished, the artist largely relinquishes control. 

… and it’s how they meet again that’s the interesting part: In the Print magazine article, type designer Mark Simonson talks about how he receives junk mail in Felt Tip Roman, the typeface he designed after his own handwriting. His reaction? “It doesn’t fool me for a second.”

‘bad’ or ‘amazing,’ it’s all relative

Photo: Courtesy Judah Friedlander / NYmag.com

In an interview with Flavorwire earlier this month, Judah Friedlander, the trucker hat-wearing dude on 30 Rock and host of the recent charitable Bad Art Auction, set the record straight on the subjective nature of taste and art: 

“… for the record, I don’t call bad art “bad art”, I call it “amazing art”. Because by calling it “bad”, you’re basing your description of it on another institution’s criteria of what makes art good or bad (a museum’s or gallery’s or art critic’s opinion).

I’ve been collecting art for over 20 years. And I really think the bad art that I collect is amazing. It interests me. If art doesn’t interest me, I THEN think it’s bad.” 

To which I say, “touché.” Or, alternately, “you go, boy.”

‘that ain’t my nature, to be honest’

Whole lotta love for Common’s interview with Time Out NY. For his kneeding, plumping (i’m looking for a baker’s metaphor here), yes enriching of the English language. Which is alive (yeast!). Because of this interview, “freshest” ought to be nominated as a new entry to the OED. It even has an antonym:

EXCERPT TONY ISSUE #664 (JUNE 19-25, 2008)
…
What did you think of Angelina Jolie?
All around, she’s just the freshest, man.

Could you define freshest?
Someone who’s fresh has a lot of good qualities. When I describe Angelina as being fresh, I’m saying, like, she’s beautiful, she’s creative, she’s cool, she’s funny, she’s real, she has style, she’s a good mother. It’s like being a good tree. A good tree don’t bear no bad fruit. Angelina is a good tree.

What percentage of people you meet are fresh?
I’d give it 5 percent—and I meet a lot of people.

Who else is fresh?
Obama is fresh. John F. Kennedy was fresh. With certain people, it’s just about what they do. It’s about their aura, about who they are, the choices they’ve made.

So I take it that you don’t think George W. Bush is fresh?
Are you saying that you think that he is?

No! Do you?
Nah—he’s the opposite. He’s wack. Or, as N.E.R.D. says, “He so anti, he don’t even matter. He’s antimatter.”

—
luv.

street haunting

Couples coupling, hands groping, bodies in various states of undress. On benches, behind bushes, tangled and horizontal on the grass. I would have believed it on blind faith, sure, but Kohei Yoshiyuki’s etheral black-and-whites certainly remove any doubt about the lively night scene of various Tokyo parks in the 1970s. Allegedly, after a gallery show in 1979, Yoshiyuki destroyed most of the photos and disappeared. (The plot thickens: supposedly Kohei Yoshiyuki is a pseudonym.) A first-rate sleuth at Yossi Milo gallery in Chelsea managed to track down the elusive artist and convince him to make a new set of prints. It’s the first time these photographs have been publicly shown since disco died.

Bemused, dreamy-eyed, nostalgic for a decade in the way only someone who’s never lived through it can be. Walking East on W. 25th Street, another instance of an unreal reality. Framed within the rolled-up gate of a corrugated steel facade, there’s a man in an off-white lounge lizard’s suit, playing a candy-apple red electric guitar, crooning that part of a song that isn’t quite words but always builds up to something… He is standing on dirt, on a narrow lot, underneath a rusted section of the future-fab highline park, accompanied by a mic and an amp, a spotlight, and a theatrical grouping of forlorn-looking leafless tree props. A small sign says that he’s an Icelandic performance artist, and he’s going to play the same riffs in the same spotlight for six straight hours a day, ten days in a row. It’s a project by CCS Bard, Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies (and Art in Contemporary Culture).

English Lit classes brainwashed me forever: I see forest, actual or allegorical, any shape or size—hell, you could say I see trees and I have flashbacks to scenes from King Lear, Walden, the Scarlet Letter. But there is something to it, the forest being a place apart from a society of likeness, apart from conventional rules, apart from judging, peering eyes. To find two such escapes in the middle of Manhattan yesterday felt good because I, for one, need to disappear sometimes and it’s not easy here.

Post Script: I confess, I procrastinate. Meaning that the Yoshiyuki exhibit has closed and Kjartansson’s sun has set. I wound down my day at a screening of Helvetica. It’s an amazing documentary with the premise of being about a font but is really about the arc of graphic design ideology over the last fifty years (that I also blogged about in March). If you runrushgo!, you’ll probably still be able to catch Helvetica at the IFC Center—although it’s been there long enough that it’s due to disappear any day.

history a la carte: Gold earns Pulitzer for food criticism

I don’t remember when I picked up Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles . I think I bought it as a gift, and doubled back to the bookstore a few weeks later to pick one up for myself. Or maybe I gave away my first copy, edges slightly tattered from months (years?) of riding in the passenger’s door pocket of my Honda Civic (truly, the only book I’ve ever granted permanent status in my vehicle), to a new friend, who also happened to be a new Angeleno. Revise that. Not the permanent status part. Same new friend, who was new. I drove to three different bookstores between La Cienega and Third Street Promenade to track down a fresh, new copy of Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles to give to her for a gift exchange around the holidays. Several years after it was first published, Gold’s book was sold out at two of three Border’s locations.

I’m not even sure how I found Gold: book or column (of the same name), and which inspired a devoted allegiance to the other? But as two visual memories stand out sharply against the rest, I’m hedging my bests that I first saw, and bought, Counter Intelligence, the book, in the UCLA bookstore, shortly after it was published because I can remember what it looked like on display there. And I’ll hedge my bets that I first read Gold (at least, with any association of him being Gold), when I first opened the book to the first page of the introduction, because the second starkly visual image I can see now in my mind is of Pico Boulevard, that vast Los Angeles artery, stretching from the Westside towards downtown, neighborhoods changing, languages changing, and a few things remaining essentially the same: the sense of community, and the food.

In the introduction, Gold looks back to his pre-Weekly days, when he was a young copywriter (editor?) at a downtown newspaper. He describes driving down Pico Boulevard, his wonder at the many varied cultures. And he describes the monumentous task he set for himself: I decided I was going to eat my way down Pico Boulevard.

And so he did. Little did Gold know where Pico Boulevard would take him. He transferred to a job at the L.A. Weekly, and, a couple of years later, the debut of his weekly food column, “Counter Intelligence.” Now, twenty years later, the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded a food critic. And with good reason. To pull from two examples the Pulitzer committee has posted of his ’06 columns, Gold is equally at home chasing down his favorite taco truck for the ephermial ecstasy of a couple of tacos al carbon as he is a $120 kobe steak at Wolfgang Puck’s white-on-white-on-white minimalist venture at The Regent Beverly Wilshire (yes, the Pretty Woman hotel). The brilliance of his writing is, yes, he always gets around to talking about the food in critic-terms—and it’s some of the most spot-on food writing you’ll ever read—but his columns are woven with stories of cultures and traditions and Los Angeles nostalgia and travel, all within the one address on Pico Boulevard.

I always knew you were good.

starring

I have a soft spot in my heart for typography. We can “feel the difference when sommething is set in one typeface,” rather an another, says says Ina Saltz, a professor in Electronic Design and Multimedia at City College NYC. “There’s a visual distinction that sends a visual message.” Saltz was one of more than a dozen interviews that I spent more than a month on (just prior to starting this blog), for a story exploring the rising trend of typographical/word tattoos. I interviewed several “words” in Shellly Jackson’s Skin project, a typeface designer in Las Vegas whose whole torso is covered in Latin tattoos in antique typefaces, Saltz, editor of Body Type, the first photographic book of word/typographic tattoos, among others.
So I was thrilled to read unBeige’s blog report on the world premiere of the feature-length documentary film, Helvetica, held at SXSW last week. The film “just might be the best history of graphic design we’ve ever seen,” reports unBeige. Helvetica, that [in]famous font, turns 50 this year.

Festival organizers had to turn away more than 150 people at the SXSW premiere. I think that’s going to be the precident as the film begins touring the international film fest circut. It’s coming to New York for a screening at the New School on April 6, and guess what? Yep, sold out. The film’s website has the complete—and oft updated— tour schedule. In the meantime, I’m gonna try to get into the screening, guerrila-style.