Hello hello.

Here’s some good stuff made by humans.

1. Catching up on a newsletter backlog, I’m loving Mike Monteiro’s Good News. Each week he answers one question about … pretty much anything. His recent post on how to love comics had me frantically nodding along in agreement:

   “Jack Kirby made me want to draw like Jack Kirby. Jack Kirby made everyone want to draw like Jack Kirby. I spent so much time as a kid copying Jack Kirby artwork. Badly. I absolutely loved/hated/loved every minute of it. I was so bad at it. (I was nine years old.) But every failed attempt sucked a little bit less than the previous one. I’d spend hours just trying to draw Black Bolt’s wings. Medusa’s hair (ok, not just her hair). Lockjaw was […] impossible. And I was terrible at it! Until I got, if not good, then serviceable at it. And there’s a feeling that washes over you as you do that. A feeling of … capability. Competence. Achievement. Or as Loki would say … glorious purpose! The idea that you can sit down and try to do something, fail a hundred times, and then get to a point where you realize you didn’t fail a hundred times, it just took a hundred steps to get there. And the journey was worth it cause the current feeling is pretty good. (Yes, this is about what AI is stealing from our children.)”

   And if you want more of that sort of thing, Mike has collected some of his newslettered writings into an actual book-shaped printed book thing, How to Die and Other Stories.

2. A wonderful collection of early twentieth-century posters for imported American silent movies by Eric Rohman, produced for A.B. Svenska Biografteaterns Filmsbyrå (aka the Swedish Cinema Theatre Film Agency). MUBI’s Adrian Curry wrote about Rohman and his signature Linocut designs a couple of years ago, with loads more examples.

3. Alex Hutton’s oil paintings of imaginary rollercoasters. So. Much. Scaffolding.

4. York C20 explores the twentieth century architecture of my home town. Modern design in York tends to get overshadowed by more historical buildings on the tourist trail (and spurious film-tourism – don’t get me started on how much the city capitalises on entirely imaginary connections to the Harry Potter films), so this celebration is very welcome.

5. I’m looking for an excuse to use Joseph Fatula’s Two Slice, a font that’s only two pixels tall. Surprisingly readable.

6. Love this little A Few Good Men anecdote from Noah Wyle’s recent GQ interview:

   “Aaron Sorkin said during rehearsal, ‘Tom, I want to change one of your lines on page 86 to “… and you coerced the doctor.”’ And then Tom Cruise reached into his bag and he had pulled out a very well-worn dictionary and he looked up ‘coercion.’ And I knew that he knew what it meant … but he looked at the definition of it and read it through a couple of times to himself so that he really understood what the word was. And then he wrote the line in the script. I just thought that was a lovely little detail that most people would never see an actor do.”

   I fully endorse this use of a dictionary as handbook curiosity and clarity, but I also really really hope Sorkin immediately put lots of obscure or made up words into the script.

7. Mmmm endpapers. Collected by artist Michael Dumontier, whose instagram Stoppingoffplace is a wonderful scrapbook of found illustrations and images and book covers and bits and bobs. A good rifle through someone else’s drawers.

8. Lovely fan site dedicated to the art of Frank Sidebottom aka Chris Sievey. I mostly remember him from No. 73 and his occasional strips in Oink!, but further reading on wikipedia reveals plenty of “huh?!” moments. Did you know Caroline Aherne’s Mrs Merton originated as Sidebottom’s sidekick? Or that Jon Ronson was his keyboardist? Or that he wrote episodes of Pingu? A truly singular artist.

   (pretty certain non-UK readers will have absolutely no idea what that entire paragraph was about)

9. Dreamlike editorial photography by Elizaveta Porodina, like a smashing together of Man Ray’s surrealism with the celebrity portraiture of Annie Leibowoitz and David LaChapelle.

10. Richard Littler’s ongoing quest to identify/read a “little bastard house” spotted in a photo of pre-slum-clearance Manchester. Be warned, you will fall down this rabbit hole and assign yourself as Richard’s research assistant and lose a day or two and look you’ve been warned okay.

That is all.