taxing the light fantastic

Apparently, there was some sort of "foot-ball" game played today?

To continue imposing my grossly un-American lifestyle on the rest of you, I will be posting about some pretentious postmodern art consisting primarily of stuff you can buy at hardware stores.

In a curious case, a British court has ruled that, while some Bill Viola video installations and a Dan Flavin light piece could be regarded as "art" when it came to assessing their value, they were to be regarded merely as "electrical devices" when it came to deciding tax rates and whether customs duty needed to be paid (artworks are exempt from the latter and pay lower rates on the former). This seems both contradictory and rather nakedly self-serving, as obviously a collection of fluorescent light tubes, plugs, switches, and the like are worth relatively little in themselves but become much more valuable once they are assembled into a Dan Flavin piece. I'm at a loss as to exactly when that collection of objects - "electrical devices" at the moment they were subject to the higher tax rate and customs, "works of art" when it came time to assessing their value to determine those tax rates and customs duties - magically was transfigured.

Perhaps it's sort of like Heisenberg's cat: the objects both were and weren't art simultaneously, until the proper authority ruled.

The real problem pointed out by the article is that, as in many other areas (intellectual property being an obvious one), the categories defined by the law lag behind actual practice. By now, many artworks cannot readily be defined as either "painting," "print," or "sculpture" - and it is this fish/fowl issue that flummoxes the British courts and led them to their rather metaphysical flourish.

Or maybe it was some sort of curious scientific/legal pun: light, after all, is both particle and wave, and both artists' work involves light.

Adam Sandler's gonna make a movie about all this, I'm sure.

auto-portraiture

Via How We Drive, Vladimir Nikolic's "car-face" portraits... Brilliant, hilarious stuff.

from the slightly confused art dept.

Uh, Jared? That's not how a shark works.



(From a new CD for which a publicist sent me a couple mp3s. I haven't had a chance to listen to them...but I'm just amused at the cover...)

most...boring...cover...evar

A few weeks back, I picked up a free paperback copy of a P.D. James mystery via the UWM English Department's informal book exchange. I didn't really pay much attention to the cover of the book (despite my belief that "don't judge a book by its cover" is a ridiculous aphorism, at least taken literally), but it's a good thing I wasn't relying upon the designers' marketing skills to sell me a copy, because this has to be the lamest, most generic cover design I've ever seen:



The typography for the author and title are generic but serviceable...but there's something about the placement of the promotional quote and "also-by" tag that irritates...maybe because all the text is centered? And I don't like the "Queen of Crime" tag in the red band - I don't like the spread-out letter spacing, nor the needless quotation marks, nor the fact that the asterisk indicating the source of the quote is crammed up against the closing quotation mark, defying the spacing of the rest of the text in that red band.

The perspective of the space is just bizarre - either that, or someone hired a German Expressionist carpenter to do the fenestration for the room. We have a generic-looking woman in a minimally-defined room, with what look to be some papers or envelopes and a glass on the edge of the frame. Outside the open window, a man in dark clothing is walking. This only barely even suggests the notion of "mystery" - it would perhaps be more effective if the man were looking toward the woman, but no - he's apparently caught in the midst of merely passing by her window, and given that the trimming of the foliage in the background implies that there's a path of sorts he's walking on, he can't even be accused of sneaking or lurking. The woman can't be placed in any clear relation to the papers: are they on a desk? Is she seated, looking off to the side of them? Or is she standing, in the foreground, looking just to our right? And that perspective plays havoc with scale, as well: the room appears to be sunken in relation to the path outside the window, unless the woman is seated and we're intended to be a dwarf standing nearby.

The quality of the drawing is pretty weak as well: I think they were going for a sort of stylized, clean-lined pulp-fiction look, but instead everyone looks carved from wood, particularly our black-clad, hatted gentleman - who, now that I look more closely, might be just a cardboard cutout, like those promotional statues of Jar-Jar Binks used to sell Star Wars novelizations that were usefully non- flame-retardant (not that I'd actually know that and the statute of limitations has expired anyway).

gee baby g

I've always found it curious not only that lower-case "g" has two rather distinct formal variants (as does lower-case "a") but that the variant generally found in serif fonts (and in many sans serif fonts) is quite possibly the most elaborate typographic form in the Roman alphabet. Take a look: the loop of the top part of the letterform extends from the top of the letter's x-height to between half and two-thirds of the way down to baseline (depending on typeface), after which a rather indecisive descender cuts left, veers right, then closes in on itself (or nearly so). Oh, and if that's not enough, the upper right portion of the top loop has grown an ear.

Unsurprisingly, even this particular variant form varies quite a bit from typeface to typeface. (My example is Bodoni.) The relation between the two loops, in size and relative position, the elaboration of the "ear," whether the lower loop is open or closed - all differ depending on typeface.

In some typefaces, the "double-story" lower-case "g" rather resembles a face in profile, with glasses and hair flowing back from the forehead and the mouth open. What is this character saying? It's obvious: "Yo, G."

baby car logos!

Via Brand New: the site's in Portuguese, but you don't really need the text.

this year's music design trend

Here are the covers to the forthcoming new releases from Clinic (Do It!) and R.E.M. (Accelerate):
(both images courtesy Stereogum)

thieving bastard

Okay, I have officially anticipated an idea used by an actual conceptual artist: see this entry (and note the date), and then read the last paragraph of this entry from Lord Whimsy.

I really should do something other than sit around typing, apparently.

a compromise

So they're going to build a bronze statue of Fonzie in Milwaukee. There's been some opposition to this statue from folks who don't want yet another reminder of the outmoded Happy Days/Laverne and Shirley image of Milwaukee...but the decision's been made, and we'll have to live with it.

My suggestion is that occasionally, we put the statue in a cheap suit and tie and proclaim it a Barry Zuckerkorn statue. That'll give it a hipper, more contemporary image, I think.

sheer genius!

I'm fairly well-persuaded that graphic design in concert promotion and flyers is at a bit of an ebb right now - or at least, the kind of poster designs you see miniaturized in ads in venues like local print editions of The Onion or in alternative weeklies tends toward the dull.

Often, it seems the images are sort of randomly chosen, sometimes with an arbitrary connection to the artist tossed in. A few months back, Iron & Wine came to town, and the poster image promoting the show was a creepy illustration of a barren tree whose branches had sprouted numerous iterations of Sam Beam's bearded face. Uh, okay - I can what that has to do with his music...

On the other hand, while being obscure can be annoying, frustrating, or an easy way out (i.e., can recycle image for other artists with no one the wiser), being literal is also a problem. Witness this image: The sound you just heard was the collapse of that image's designer's brain, sucked into the black hole-like gravitational vortex created by the image's mindbending obviousness. I mean, wow: I can imagine the thought process, the meetings, the endless e-mails that went back and forth until someone finally came up with this one: "Hey, the band's called 'The Walkmen' - let's use...a Walkman! And the opening act is called 'The White Rabbits' - how about...a clip-art rabbit image, and then we can just flip it horizontally so there's two white rabbits...geddit? Huh? Huh? Geddit?" SPLUSHHH! and they had to use a shovel to remove what was left of his brains from the office floor.

I'm only surprised the backdrop isn't a whitewashed denim texture - presumably, the band White Denim didn't have enough clout to get their name illustrated with such ox-stunning literality.

(PS: The Walkmen are still a great band.)

I don't want to know where graphic artist Jack Horner stuck his thumb to pull out this pie

I think the time has come for the formation of a new organization: Citizens Against Pie Charts. I have no idea why the media seem so addicted to them - because quite often they're eminently unsuited to their apparent task, to show the relation among various quantities of related items. And that is because people really are not good at determining relative scale between two "pieces of pie" at odd radial angles within a pie chart. A pie chart does one thing well: it shows that the various components of whatever it's measuring add up to a whole. How often is that really what needs to be known? A lot less often than pie charts are used. Probably nine times out of ten when you see a pie chart, a column graph would convey the desired information far more clearly and cleanly. But America's infographics editors have a smutty passion for the pie chart - and so its pointless reign in newspapers, business reports, and websites continues.

Here, for example, is a pie chart showing the relation among six different items. I chose the quantities somewhat arbitrarily, only making sure that some of them were rather close.

Which is larger: quantity 4, or quantity 5? Is the sum of quantities 2 and 3 larger than quantity 1? Pretty damned hard to tell, isn't it.

Now try answering the same questions, this time looking at a column graph built from the same data:



Much easier, isn't it? And if I'd wanted to, I could have color-coded those columns (I blame Excel) to make the graph a bit more interesting and the distinction among the various items more clear.

If for some reason it was also necessary to see how those items parsed out as a proportion of the whole, why not put small pie charts, each one oriented with its particular quantity's left margin straight up and down, at the bottom of each column, to show the way each item fits into the overall numbers? The graphic would be more complicated, but still much clearer than the pie chart.

a perhaps more pervasive meme than is desirable

I have no formal training in graphic design...but it seems to me, if you're going to use two very dissimilar sizes of type, necessarily the text in larger type will be emphasized. And it would seem to follow from that, that such text ought to accord with the overall message of the image. And finally (and maybe this is me as English teacher), it seems that if those emphasized words aren't just a list of nouns, say, but if they appear to form a sentence, that sentence should be a well-formed sentence.

All of which goes to explain why this ad for United Way - seen here in a quick and dirty snap of the back of a bus, but also used on billboards - bugs me.WE RAISE IS EXPECTATIONS is not a grammatical sentence. What's more irritating is that it would have been so very simple to make everything work, just by making that "is" smaller (the same size as the other type), possibly moving it.

Could be my inner proofreader is taking over my brain - but that ad just makes me cringe every time I see it.

Unless...

It's supposed to be in Lolcat! That's it. I CAN HAS CHARITYZ?

the big red font of dumbness

For some time I've noticed that a certain type of movie - the kind in which fart jokes, it can cogently be argued, reach their absolute apogee - tends to feature gigantic red print, most typically a sans serif, all caps. At first I was thinking this look originated (appropriately) with Dumb and Dumber...but my memory's misled me, because the images of that movie's posters I've been able to find display the type in blue. The font is similar, though.

Anyway, as it turns out someone else has already gone through the trouble of creating a collage of many of the movies featuring the Big Dumb Red Font. It is a nice sort of consumer-alert feature (aside from the presence of Eddie Murphy, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, etc.), in that the promotion for these movies instantly informs viewers that they can park their IQ at home.

Update: And here's another page...

the world according to nouns

A longish tradition, whose most recent heir might be minimalism, holds that poetry (or indeed, language generally) is most piercing stripped of superfluity: adjectives and adverbs come in for particular abuse. Ezra Pound wrote that "the natural object is always the adequate symbol," and William Carlos Williams wrote "no ideas but in things." A recent book explores what its editor calls Evocative Objects (which is the book's title as well): its essays examine their authors' relations with everything from a cello to a laptop to a rolling pin.

It occurs to me that visual art is in some ways better equipped than language to be a vehicle for this minimalism of evocation, and indeed, some illustrators exhibit a fascination with particular objects, objects that recur in their work. I'm thinking of Peter Blegvad (also a musician) and his fascination with milk, for example, or his "amateur" essays exploring "numinosity," or his illustrations of objects such as a "yolk of leather in a tobacco egg" or an "arrow of ice wrapped in surgical gauze." I'll note, though, that Blegvad (with his tongue always hovering in close proximity to his cheek) argues that giving such illustrations evocative titles increases their numinosity - and of course, the words describing such illustrations (as above) themselves tend to be made up of common nouns (or common objects) in unconventional juxtapositions.

Three different approaches to a stripped-down lyricism of nouns in music. Wire's "Kidney Bingos" consists of almost nothing but nouns, and cleverly evokes '80s material excess: its plot appears to involve people who sell bodily organs to finance their clubbing excesses (probably not a coincidence that this song is Wire's most commercial-sounding). In another mood entirely, Syd Barrett's "Word Song" comes close to the spirit of Blegvad's investigations of numinosity, consisting of words that seem evocative or resonant to Barrett. Finally, the Minutemen pop out a raft of words, abstract and concrete, and query: "what's the verb behind it all?"

Wire "Kidney Bingos" (A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck, 1988)
Syd Barrett "Word Song" (recorded 1970; Opel, 1988)
The Minutemen "The World According to Nouns" (Double Nickels on the Dime, 1984)

three...rocks.

About a month ago (inspired by Flasshe: I didn't know it had existed until I saw it at his site), I changed the site's link to my Flickr site to the image you see to the right near the top of the page, which brings up three randomly chosen images (selected from among those of my photos I've labeled "badge"). What's fun about this is the unexpected way the three images interact with one another.

So, a contest of sorts (which I'm sure will draw an overwhelming response): your favorite set of three images, screen-captured from this page. Experience the joy of hitting refresh repeatedly!

look it up!

I have no interest in subscribing to The Economist...but this cover image, reproduced on a look-at-me mailing, is brilliant:

t-shirt for math geeks

No idea why I thought of this...but I set to work making a mockup anyway...click to embiggen

Update: You know what's really awesome here - or really scary if you think that way? I did not realize it when I posted this, but...in fact, this is my 666th post.

animation derby

Naturally, various popular cartoons have inspired websites which allow folks to generate images of themselves rendered in the style of the cartoon. Here are three examples:

Unlike the two Simpsons images below, the site I used to generate this (can't remember where it was, sorry!) has no connection with South Park, as far as I can tell.

This is from the "Simpsonize Me!" website (courtesy yellojkt), which is pretty obviously sponsored by Burger King. It is also slower than Hans Moleman - and it requires you to upload a large-ish image (480x640). It's pretty dumb at recognizing faces as well: of the two images I tried to use, both of which were closely cropped to remove extraneous details like beer bottles and papier-mache aliens, it could find a face in only one of them. (To be fair, that might be my fault. I'm not sure, though, why it thinks I'm Ringo Starr.)

This one's from the site for the Simpsons movie (warning: intrusive sound effects). This site requires no image to begin with (and I should note that the "Simpsonize Me!" site modifies the image so much, it bears almost no resemblance to the source anyway), so it's a bit quicker. As a Bearded-American, however, I'd say its selection of facial hair leaves a bit to be desired...rather amusing since, in fact, I've been told more than once that I sorta look like Matt Groening.

My verdict? The South Park site looks way more like me than either of the Simpsons sites. (Incidentally, I used this photo by Moxiemoo as source for the Simpsonizer site.)

while I'm at it -

I don't remember where I found this one, either - but it needs to be seen!

store this in your list of potential band names...

Going through the archives, I discovered this image, scanned from who knows where:


Opening, perhaps, for the Dead Kennedys?

Anyway, after Robert Zimmerman is safely in his grave, I call dibs on naming my band "The Dead Bob Dylan."