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Saturday, March 03, 2007

 

Blood moon tomorrow. Beware of zombies.

A new drain on the pocketbook: Thumbtack Press. So pretty! Some favorites: here, here, and here. Oh! -- and here.

And about a dozen more.

posted by Reen | link | ...talkety...0 comments

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Friday, March 02, 2007

 

Slow News Day Results in Exaggerated Headlines.

(To wit, I usually don't consider "getting lost" and "invading a foreign country" to be the same thing).

posted by Reen | link | ...talkety...0 comments

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Thursday, March 01, 2007

 

What do you get for the man who has everything? How 'bout a crocodile-hide toilet seat? Bet he ain't expectin' that.

posted by Reen | link | ...talkety...0 comments

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Wednesday, February 28, 2007

 

Busy in my design workshop, cooking up a new chapbook, and reading tinyside subs. I've been devouring books on book design -- "By Its Cover," a nice survey of American book design and "Penguin by Design," which charts the design of Penguins. Also a book on "Swiss" grid system design -- seems like an awful lot of precise measurement for something that I guess a lot of people would judge by eye, at least until you pretty much knew what you were going to do anyway. Still, given that we do have computers (and their ability to neatly and quickly overlay a grid over whatever the hell you're designing, for reference), the principles are applicable without breaking out the plastic protractor you had to buy for seventh grade geometry.

Here's a book cover critique for you:



This is the cover of Nada Gordon's Foreignn Bodie. No title, no author's name: just this photo, which encompasses the entire front cover. This is still a fairly radical approach to cover design, and has been used, to my knowledge, few times in commercial book design. Chuck Palahniuk's "Lullaby," is the only one I can name off the top of my head, and the design may have been too radical for the publisher's taste -- it was changed in subsequent editions and in the paperback version to incorporate the title and author attribution. Obviously, this sort of textless design it doesn't work unless you have an image that is at once arresting and expressive: it has to do, with no words, at least some of the work that would traditionally be done by the title and author's name. The image here works admirably. It's a beautiful but somewhat disturbing photo: intense, and the purple wash over the entire thing gives it extra luminosity, and a feeling of otherworldiness. I'm assuming this is a childhood photo of Nada, so it doubles as an attribution, as well as an apt visual representation of a "foreign body" -- an intense face staring you down, in a weird purple wash.

Turning inside, we find Japanese brush-style drawings by Gary Sullivan. Titles are set it Visigoth which here looks suitably like stilted hiragana transformed into Roman letters. The text itself is in one of the many versions of Berkeley or Californian.

posted by Reen | link | ...talkety...0 comments

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Monday, February 26, 2007

 

I know that Bank Gothic is just so unutterably cool, but that's all the more reason why it must be stopped.

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Hey, Tinysiders! The submission period for the tinysides closes on Wednesday.

posted by Reen | link | ...talkety...0 comments

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Sunday, February 25, 2007

 

I have been tagged multiple times with the movie meme. The problem is that I hate movies. Really. Two hours is too much investment, too much art (with attendant cathartic craziness), and you could be outside, dammit! Also, I am embarrassed because I really like cartoons.

Anyway. These are the movies that I would actually feel pleased to see on tv or wherever, and might actually cancel doing other things in order to watch:

1. Spirited Away
2. Princess Mononoke
3. Tuvalu
4. Amantes del circulo polar
5. Lady in White
6. Heaven
7. The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain
8. Cold Comfort Farm

I will also, with little prompting, watch Alfred Hitchcock and David Gordon Green movies, movies like El flor de mi secreto, cheesy teen romance comedies and/or "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" I would also probably watch The Lost Boys if I happened to come across it while flipping channels, although I probably wouldn't call you and say, "Oh no, I can't come out tonight; The Lost Boys is on."

There are also movies that are very very good, but once is enough and always will be: Battleship Potemkin, Repentance, Andrei Rublev (can you tell I was a Russian Studies major?), Ay Carmela!, Au Hasard Baltasar (what I took away from that movie is that people really ought to own more guns).

posted by Reen | link | ...talkety...0 comments

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