Meanwhile, all the school kids so sick of books
Hello hello.
Here’s some good stuff made by humans. Do with it what you will.
This week I am mostly looking for an excuse to use HVD Bodedo on a cover (via Kottke). This is all the backstory and naming rationale I ever need from a typeface:
“We had the idea to make a Bodoni interpretation with potato stamps, so we bought 8kg of potatoes, some knifes and carved a long, long evening in the kitchen. When we finally had the full aphabet we stamped it on paper, made a font out of this and called it Bodedo.”
Ever so slightly related: This is a Gardening Show on Netflix is jolly nice. Just simple, bitesize episodes of Zach Galifianakis learning agrarian skills (including stuff about potatoes!) while making children laugh with poop jokes.
I’d kind of forgotten that music videos were still a thing, so it’s great to see Romain Gavras’s video for Storm by Gener8ion (with choreography by Damien Jalet) doing the rounds this week. Yung Lean’s pugnacious, brutal central performance is captivating. All it’s missing is a sausage on a fork and we’ve finally got our Grange Hill reboot.
This month is the 40th anniversary of Oink!, one of the greatest comics to ever plop from these shores. If you’re unfamiliar, picture the exact midpoint between Viz and The Phoenix and you’re almost there. Phil Boyce’s oink.blog has some scans of that first issue, with more celebration posts coming soon.
Couple of covers that caught my eye this week: Jenny Volvovski’s design for Jack Zipes’ Once Upon a Time There Was Truth and Alex Merto’s jacket for James Gleick’s The Telephone.
A wonderful new collection of unglamorous celebrity portraits from London’s Passport Photo Service. Blurb:
“Since opening its doors in 1953, Passport Photo Service, an unassuming studio on Oxford Street in London, photographed thousands of people for passports, visas, and green cards – and some of them just happened to be famous. It was a family affair run by professional boxer turned photographer Dave Sharkey, his wife, Ann, and, eventually, their son Philip. Conveniently located near the US embassy and directly opposite the department store Selfridges, Passport Photo Service became the go-to place for passport photos thanks to word-of-mouth and its 'Ready in 10 Minutes' slogan, offering instant service before anyone else in the city was able to provide such a quick turnaround. This charming book is a collection of more than 300 never-before-published portraits taken over the course of six decades, including actors, writers, musicians, politicians, athletes, and more.”
The Gentlewoman talk to Lynne Ramsay, currently working on her next project with Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara, a film about about a photographer at the turn of the 20th century “who goes to Alaska, taking photographs of the Inuit, and meets the devil in the Arctic … It’s an epic production, my 2001.”
The Art of Cover Art on the history of black and pink album covers, in which Kassia St. Clair (The Secret Lives of Color) pinpoints the specific, stationery genesis of punk:
“In 1972 Crayola introduced a special-edition box of eight fluorescent crayons, including the ultra pink and hot magenta colors, all of which glowed brightly under a black light. The strident brashness of the super-bright colors perfectly suited the aesthetic of the emerging punk movement too. Highly saturated fluorescent-style pinks were used to paint Mohawks and the lettering of many classic punk albums of the era.”
MUBI’s Andy Curry asks contemporary film poster designer Caspar Newbolt about his favourite work by the legends he looks up to – some stunning sheets from Hans Hillmann in his selection.
It turns out if you play a Chipmunks records at 16rpm, the music slows to something dreamy and gothular, while the already slowed-down vocals return to almost normal speed. That’s what Brian Borcherdt did to a bunch of the cartoon trio’s covers from the eighties, and they’re great. The Bangles’ Walk Like an Egyptian is particularly doom-laden and a fine way to start your weekend.
That is all.
