09:45 am - Balearic graphic design We've all heard of Balearic Beat, the jubilant, incessant 4/4 thump that makes people living in Valencia yell at people in Ibiza: "Keep that bloody racket down!" But what about Balearic graphics? Just back from a weekend in Vilanova i la Geltrú, I'd like to present a portrait of the town through its graphic design. Inevitably, we'll come back to Saturday's topic, Microsoft's Comic Sans, which has ravaged and reduced this town's once-rich graphic heritage. But let's start with happier sights.
These chemist's shop and hairdresser signs date, I'd say, from the 1940s, though I may be wrong. I really adore the letterforms here, Modernist but still quirky.
The tiled street signs are magnificent. I'd date these to the 1890s; they're clearly influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec theatre posters, the Paris metro, and Art Nouveau.
Train and restaurant graphics from the 1920s and 30s. High Modernism is all mixed up, in Italy and Spain, with Mussolini and Franco. It must be difficult for Spanish to admire Modernist graphics without thinking of these dictators.
Then again, I can't look at Comic Sans -- woefully popular these days in Vilanova -- without thinking of contemporary "dictators" and their "evil empires".
Even worse than Comic Sans on a Spanish cafe blind is Comic Sans condensed on a van or a supermercat Staff Wanted sign.
Microsoft paranoia began to set in at this point: could the writers of political graffiti also be using Comic Sans?
Here's a fascinating example of uniformity in the service of diversity: the same paper, with the same Helvetica graphics and the same stories, but two different language editions, a Spanish and a Catelan one, distinguished only by the red and blue tops. The lead story is about linguistic diversity, but the paper's title is wonderfully generic: The Periodical.
No Parking graphics from "the age of the car".
Some nicely-fatigued signs at the train museum, demonstrating that even where mechanical type systems strip a town of quirk and diversity, the weather can bring it back.
Our hotel had a splendidly non-harmonised series of monograms on towels and sheets.
Some nautical references in a fish shop and a block of flats on the seafront.
Finally, postmodernism gives us some big, bland drive-in graphics and a half-hearted attempt to revive the kind of hand-lettering -- and therefore the kind of personal, local, quirky charm -- its reductive uniformities of global logistics and standardization threaten.
But let's not forget that when it's fatigued, discontinued, safely historical, all this -- and even Comic Sans -- will take its place in the rich tapestry of graphic design's endless diversity. The rehabilitation of Comic Sans, as we saw the other day, has already begun. The dictator becomes, in the end, just another citizen, the crushing weight just another geological layer.
12:26 pm - quote of the day ackerman (google cached), via yglesias: "the Germans must have a word for the heartbreak you experience when you see that some of your favorite music is on sale at Starbucks."
"A new generation of dirigibles is being considered by governments and private companies as the price of fuel rises and concern for the environment grows. (...) The new dirigibles benefit from new materials and means of propulsion, as well as entrepreneurs who are taking another look at the behemoths of the air."
12:27 pm - happy 232, america! yesterday was the best day i've had in months.
met up in the morning with a bunch of folks, piled into an enormous passenger van and drove down to a fantastic beach on rockaway island, played some frisbee, poured some vodka into a watermelon (awesome!) pickled my body in the foaming brine, and made some progress on my base burn.
then we piled back into the van and drove back to brooklyn for a fantastic rooftop barbecue replete with local amateur fireworks displays going off all around, and a fantastic view of the (fantastically expensive) macy's 4th of july fireworks. even got a ride home after.
i've been going through a bit of a patriotic phase lately. not lapel-pin wearing, flag-waving, republican-style amerika-uber-alles patriotism; i think i just got to a point where i was sick and tired of feeling like i had to be ashamed of being american. and, you know, our government is undeniably involved in some scandalously shameful shit; but both individually and collectively, americans are involved in and responsible for some seriously awesome shit, too. i refuse to believe that americans on the whole conform to the obese, burger-chomping, jingoistic, disinterested, under-educated stereotype that's so easy to buy into.
i'm an american goddammit, and i love my country, warts and all.
05:21 pm another hour taster session at the sixth form. the drive got me today and i'm wondering whether i'll cope come september. i'm reassuring myself i'll be driving at times with little/no traffic (hopefully) and that will not only reduce the time, but ease the stress. i don't mind driving but after clocking around 500 miles in three days i'm starting to feel it. i just want to give the driving a rest for the next day or so, then i'll be refreshed for driving to the sixth form tuesday followed by the 5-6 hour drive home later that day.
not sure what the plans are for this evening. drinks perhaps?
07:50 am - Ideology is alive and well and living in syntax We're often told we live in an age where grand narratives and ideologies are dead. This is rubbish; ideology is all around us. But it's mostly our own ideology. What's dead -- or at least endangered -- is alternative ideology and narratives, those consistent and clear ideas which challenge our way of thinking.
If you want to find ideology, just read any piece of journalism. Pay particular attention to the sense, the semantics, the syntax, and what it implies. You'll soon come up against words like "but", "however", "despite", "even though" and "paradoxically", words which tell you how to read the relationships being described in the piece.
Last month I was reading a piece in the Times of India. Entitled Poor India makes millionaires at fastest pace, the article -- datelined Washington -- said that "Despite having the world's largest population of poor people living on less than a dollar a day, India created millionaires at the fastest pace in the world in 2007... India, with the world's largest population of poor people living on less than a dollar a day, also paradoxically created millionaires at the fastest pace in the world in 2007 even though the world grew such "high net worth individuals (HNWIs)" at the slowest pace in four years... In contrast, developmental agencies put the number of subsistence level Indians living on less than a dollar a day at 350 million and those living on less than $ 2 a day at 700 million. In other words, for every millionaire, India has about 7000 impoverished people."
Now, despite, paradoxically and in contrast to the syntax of this article, I would argue that nothing is more natural than that millionaires and poor people co-exist, and that there is an intimate relationship between them. Furthermore, we could argue that the speed at which HNWI are created probably matches the speed at which LNWI are created. Follow the money: where is the rich people's money coming from?
But because Marxism "has been discredited", people have no useful way to account for this relationship. The result is this absurd "it's a mystery why these completely unrelated phenomena are happening simultaneously" phraseology. Only the headline "Poor India makes millionaires" suggests a direct, causal relationship between the poor and the rich. Everything else in the article is skewed to present this as a mysterious paradox, something counter-intuitive. The implication is clearly that millionaires trickle down wealth through the whole population, and that the emergence of millionaires ought to co-incide with everyone getting richer.
Here's another example of ideology masquerading, by using presumptuous syntax, as common sense. This is conservative art critic Brian Sewell on Big Brother, upbraiding contestant Amy, an artist, for the conceptual nature of her work:
"I just wonder where art comes into it," says Sewell, looking at Amy's photographs. "If you showed this photo of a filthy sink to Michaelangelo and said it was art, would he believe you?"
"Perhaps he wouldn't," Amy replies, "but art, to me, is born out of the social context of the period in which you're living."
"This, to me, is the trouble with contemporary art," says Sewell, getting to the nub of his ideology. "It is all about an idea which may or may not make sense. Art must surely be the most direct form of communication, a straightforward pictorial or sculptural "something", whereas yours requires a program to elucidate it. And so I don't understand why you distance yourself from the public that might be interested in art."
The ideology here is really all packed into the "whereas". Sewell's idea of art is of something "direct and straightforward", in other words non-ideological. Whereas the conceptual art he dislikes requires a conceptual apparatus, an instruction manual, an art education, an ideology, to make sense, the "pictorial or sculptural" art he endorses apparently doesn't. Sewell's problem -- his basic philosophical error -- is that he doesn't see that Michaelangelo's work also requires those things; that it needs to be understood within the highly ideological program of Michaelangelo's main patron, the Catholic church, as well as within all sorts of visual conventions like the conventions of perspective.
Sewell's syntax -- his whereas -- is therefore completely spurious. He also fails to see that today's public may well be better plugged into the post-1900 conventions Amy's working within than the 16th century ones Michaelangelo was. Amy understands art's dependence on social context, Sewell doesn't. He wants to present art from an alien and remote social context as "timeless" and "natural" and "direct". But this, in itself, is the most noxious ideology of all: the ideology that fails to see itself as ideology, fails to nail its colours to the mast, and presents itself in the form of the syntax of "common sense" rather than the program of presuppositions, presumptions and personal beliefs it actually is.
01:23 am - my american life i've been going on a bit of a This American Life binge this past two or three weeks, consuming between 1 and 3 episodes every night, and its a hell of a ride so far. i used to listen to TAL when i worked the front desk of my building giving out toilet paper, and thereafter, when my job was to sit in a small, unventilated room and melt plastic (no kidding, i've actually done this professionally), but since then i haven't listened regularly untill just recently, and i'm finding it intoxicating and wonderful.
i had a conversation with someone close to me last night that prompted a bit of an internal existential crisis, and i don't know yet how it'll resolve itself. i'm looking at a period of flux in my life; i have a regular job which i love (for those of you who don't know, i get to be a video editor in manhattan) with a reliable paycheck and a full benefits package, but at the same time, i've lately been dealing with a lot of fundamental questions about who i am, who i want to be, where i'm going, and what i want my life to be about. am i amidst a quarter-life crisis? no answers thus far, but i'm sure i'll keep you posted.
in the meantime, i'm headed to the beach tomorrow to celebrate our nation's independence, but i'll leave you with a few highlights from my recent This American Life ride.
the giant pool of money, a fixating and narrative exploration of the current mortgage and economic crisis
leaving the fold, which includes the fascinating story of jerry springer's once and future political career
return to childhood, a set of reminiscences of the things we did as kids, and their relevence to ourselves
10:23 am - Flickr and Disco What does it mean to art-direct your own life? I don't know, all I know is that it's a hell of a lot of work captioning and rotating something like a thousand photographs (it felt like a thousand, anyway) documenting the last month of your life. Not the last month, I mean, just the latest one. The past month. Argh, words! Anyway, to see my selections from the thousands of digital images I've snapped in various locations over the past month, go to my Flickr page or load up the slideshow.
Meanwhile, if you understand Spanish you can read the first of a new monthly series of music columns I'm writing for Playground, a new Spanish webzine. Con el disco, como con la música Disco means "As with Disco, so with the disk", and it's a piece about how records, as physical objects, are going underground now, just as Disco did at the end of the 70s.
Since the piece appears on the site only in Spanish, I'll provide an English translation here. But before I do, a reminder that I play the Faraday Stolichnaya Festival at Vilanova i la Geltrú (approximately midway between Barcelona and Valencia) tomorrow night.
AS WITH DISCO, SO WITH THE DISK
The official story of Disco sees the genre spinning through a cycle:
1. Disco starts life as something almost secret -- the party music of urban American black and gay subcultures.
2. Disco goes overground thanks to the success of Donna Summer and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.
3. Disco experiences over-exposure, burn-out and backlash.
4. Disco returns to the same underground subculture it emerged from.
5. Disco reappears, a few years later, in the form of Detroit and Chicago house music.
Most commentators see the underground and overground parts of this story as a sort of dialectic, each as necessary as the other. Disco's marginality, before and after its mainstream success, gave the genre a kind of laboratory in which to concoct the startling originality we hear both in Donna Summer's first hits and, ten years later, in Kevin Saunderson's. Commercial failure, then, doesn't have to be -- in the words of those infuriating falsetto Bee Gees -- "tragedy". Like crop rotation, it's part of a fruitful cycle.
The story of Disco has become the story of the disk -- that is, of the plastic-oriented music industry itself. The internet has made selling mainstream music in physical formats, and enforcing copyright, unprofitable. As a result, major parts of the record industry are doing what Disco did at the end of the 70s: going back underground, back to the lab. Far from dying, pop music is going underground, entering a period of exciting experimentation.
What is undoubtedly dying is the landscape of 20th century pop music. Almost all the seemingly-megalithic, seemingly-immortal institutions of commercial pop music -- as I knew them as a British person growing up in the last century -- have vanished. There's no more Top of the Pops, the TV chart show that dominated my childhood. All but one of the British weekly music papers have disappeared. John Peel died and wasn't replaced. Huge retail chains like Tower and Virgin shut up shop. Richard Branson sold his British and American Virgin stores, and this month it was announced that the two New York Virgin Megastores would close.
As for the record labels, those 80s icons Prince and Madonna know which way the wind is blowing. Prince released his last album, Planet Earth, as a free CD on the cover of a newspaper. But giving the plastic disk away wasn't a sign that Prince's career was over; far from it. He immediately sold out 21 nights at London's 02 Arena. Madonna's last record deal wasn't just a record deal -- it included slices of her concert and merchandising revenue too. As a recording and performing musician myself, I know it very well: live shows used to be ways to promote records, but now it's the other way around.
One reason concerts are alive and records are dead is that there's a new value in things which can't be uploaded as digital content to the internet. I call this phenomenon "the post-bit atom". It also explains why the art market is booming. Art and music have become social occasions. An art opening or a concert (or, even better, an art opening with a concert included) is a chance for people who spend all day in front of computer screens to see their fellow human beings and share an intense, loud, colourful, real experience with them.
Art and music are also "distinction machines": efficient ways for people to sum up complex clusters of values -- social, political, aesthetic and ethical -- and connect with like-minded souls. None of this is going to become less important any time soon.
Like Disco at the end of the 70s, the disk is going underground. Where it does survive, music on plastic is elliptical, obscure, artisanal. We all thought they would go out of business first, but it's the little shops which are surviving. On New York's East 4th Street, Tower Records used to tower over specialist independent shop Other Music. It's the indie store which has survived; the gigantic Tower fell two years ago. In London, the Virgin Megastore may have disappeared, but funky little indie Rough Trade is flourishing: last year it opened Rough Trade East on fashionable Truman's Yard, and this year the new store won the British High Street Retailer of the Year Award. Which is extremely ironic, considering that Rough Trade has always been the very opposite of "high street".
Disks now survive as a kind of underground art form in their own right: limited edition box sets of high-quality 7-inch vinyl with hand-painted sleeves, fetishistic souvenirs of a vanished age of mechanical reproduction. If they ever do return to the mainstream, the way Disco did in the late 80s, it'll be due to some radical reinvention, some apocalypse. Perhaps electricity will become incredibly expensive, and the wind-up gramophone will return. Perhaps it'll emerge that iPods and too-loud live shows have made a whole generation deaf, and perhaps atavistic copyright lawyers and legislators will succeed in banning online music distribution completely. Yes, and perhaps pigs will fly.
We should probably just accept that the disk -- though certainly not music -- is underground forever now, dead and buried. Let's dance on its rotating plastic grave! Wearing lab coats!
Our friend Bill was struck low with the fever and fatigue that come with Lyme disease last week, so I arrived at his door to build a small bog garden, in the hopes it might cheer him up.
12:34 pm - Morag, the Fab Four, and the Metrosexual Two Morag Hood, my mother's cousin, was the TV celebrity in our family; at boarding school my brother and I were given special permission to watch her playing Natasha Rostov alongside Anthony Hopkins in the 1972 BBC TV production of War and Peace. Later, when I moved to London, I'd go to dinner at her house on a leafy street in Stoke Newington. At that point -- in the late 80s and 90s -- Morag drove a Citroen 2CV, appeared in plays at the National Theatre, and wrote literary docu-dramas for BBC Radio 4. She'd always stay with my mother when she came to the Edinburgh Festival, and she became a sort of role model for my sister, also an actress.
Morag died of cancer in 2002, but I remember her as a fine-boned, Kylie-like beauty, even into her late 50s. She'd had affairs with famous actors, but never quite ended up marrying them or having children. Morag had an interest in Eastern spirituality, and was always off in India at an ashram, meditating at the feet of her guru. She was super-sharp, super-playful, always on the edge of laughter. Once, at the Hayward Gallery cafe, Morag told me one of the best dirty jokes I'd ever heard. It was about a little girl who answers the phone to an obscene caller, and dutifully takes down a long, incredibly filthy list of things he plans to do to her mother. I actually included this joke in the first draft of my forthcoming Book of Jokes, but cut it later because it disturbed me too much (which is saying something). But it was a great defense against accusations of immorality to tell members of my family that the worst, dirtiest joke in my Book of Jokes was told me by Morag Hood, a kind of family saint.
So why am I talking about my second cousin Morag Hood today? Because yesterday the BBC ran a story on their website entitled Lost Beatles interview unearthed. It's an interview with the Fab Four recorded at Scottish Television in Glasgow in April 1964, and the voice interviewing Paul and John is Morag's. Click the media player and you'll hear Morag asking "How do you write songs?" and "What do you think about people who maybe didn't like you then, or said something nasty, or just didn't bother about you then, but are terribly nice to you now?" (To which Paul and John's answers are "We just bash one out on an old piano" and "We didn't bother about them then, and we don't bother about them now.") You can hear a whole Radio 4 documentary about the recovered interview (and more Morag) in The Lost Beatles Interview. The other presenter on STV's Roundup, by the way -- the one who sat on the floor interviewing George and Ringo -- was also a family friend of ours: Paul Young, who appears on the cover of my dad's first fishing book, Every Boy's Gamefishing (1960).
Once, having dinner at Morag's place in Stoke Newington in 1987 (it must've been 1987, because I remember asking her to tune the radio to Annie Nightingale's show, which was due to play my single "Murderers, the Hope of Women", and did), Morag showed me a record by Duncan Browne, a friend of hers. He'd written a track called "Morag" on a 1984 album called Travelling Man, the soundtrack, I think, to some probably-dismal TV programme.
Now, all I knew about Duncan Browne at the time was that he'd been in Metro, the band who wrote "Criminal World", the track Bowie covered on Let's Dance. Or did I even know that? Sadly, Duncan Browne also died of cancer, in 1993, not long after directing a tribute to Jacques Brel (another cancer victim) at the Donmar Warehouse, featuring Sian Phillips. But I've since heard a lot more of the Metro album he made in Paris in 1976 with Peter Godwin. It's an excellent, neglected sophisti-pop 70s gem, a soft rock masterpiece that sounds like a more refined, laidback Queen or Sparks. You can hear more than half of the hard-to-find Metro album on this YouTube channel. You can imagine Mono Messiah as an Edwyn Collins number, while Black Lace Shoulder has the sensuality of Al Stewart. 1976 was, after all, "the year of the cat", and of a certain feline sensuality -- at least until it got hijacked by the caterwauling Pistols, who cared little for caresses and described sex as "two-and-a-half minutes of squelching noises".
I'll play out with Precious, a piece of aristo-pop which sounds a bit like, well, Momus. Something about the phrasing reminds me of the track I made yesterday, a duet I'll sing with Kyoka Kyoka, entitled Dracula. "Moving through the station in your empty train of thought" is a great line.
This weekend was a bit of a bust as far as tree frogs go. Lady P and I took turns walking ahead of the jalopy to shoo the countless fowler's toads from the trail (the missus likes to pat their little rubbery bottoms), but for all the fowler's toad we saw, we only heard one pine barrens tree frog sounding off. For such a rainy, humid night, we were a bit surprised at the low level of activity, especially after such a hot, dry spell.
We then made our way north to Webb's Mill Bog, which was a little more active, but not on the levels heard in late May. We heard no northern gray tree frog or even the ubiquitous green frog.
We then made our way up 539 to a gas station, where we found this 4.5 inch beauty--an imperial moth--on a trash can. The photo doesn't do it justice: the purple, rose and canary yellow were quite vibrant, and was as large as a polyphemus moth, possibly a bit larger. I would have missed it entirely if some little girl hadn't flipped out over it. We put it into a small bag and then dropped it off at the comparatively dark, quiet Whitesbog village, where we saw two long-tailed weasels bounding across the road as we arrived and left. ( More pictures ) ~W
07:11 am - Marshmallows and Tigers Accounts of our weekend as Tokyo guides in London are now all over the blogosphere, from kineticfactory's description and Flickr page (Kineticfactory is an Australian called Andrew who lives in London) via Ross Hawkins' account on his blog The Ideal Tiger (Ross is an Englishman living in Toronto who makes music under the name Idle Tigers, pay attention at the back there!) to Among the Aisles, which even includes a little video embed of our performance. And in Andrew's photo here you see an amazingly similar idea we discovered at the Royal College of Art on Friday, a London-as-Tokyo piece by Sayako Ishida.
On Saturday night we were lucky enough to catch a rare performance by The Idle Tigers, a gig at a private birthday party held at an obscure nautically-themed pub down an alley in the dead London district dedicated to heraldry, yeomanry and inns-at-court. Idle Tigers recently signed with Matt Jacobson's label Le Grand Magistery, releasing a most original electronic vaudeville long-playing record entitled The Spirit Salon, available through Darla and via the iTunes store in America. I believe the Idle Tigers came to Matt's attention via an entry on Click Opera last year which described the band as occupying the intriguing place where "Lewis Carroll meets Brian Eno, music hall meets the avant garde, and the breezy meets the zany".
The show was great, and I videoed "the second best song I've ever written about Lord Byron":
We also met the charming Edine from London / Hong Kong indie band Marshmallow Kisses, and, after quaffing a jug of Pimms fruit punch on the hot South Bank superturf, we ended up dining with her and Andrew and bringing them to see the Idle Tigers show.
Here are a couple of video glimpses of Marshmallow Kisses. This is Everyone Else Is Ahead, Far Ahead:
04:09 am - they are a-changin the new york times reports on swift boat veterans upset with the newly coined verb "to swift-boat," a new (and controversial!) time-, energy-, and water-saving milk jug design, and a "landmark" supreme court citation of bob dylan (too bad they got the lyric wrong.)
now the telegraph puts together 50 songs to make you dance. dance party planners would do well to peruse for inspiration. (i'm absolutely dropping some tlc the next time i get a chance.)
POST SCRIPT to be clear, there's an awful lot to disagree with in many of these choices, (crazy in love at #1? really? and why is soulja boy on there at all? no disrespect, but tellem aint exactly top 50 material.) but there are lots of interesting inclusions
The last and largest of the voodoo lilies has erupted this morning. The stench is not unlike that of a head of rotten cabbage after being unceremoniously shoved up a dead camel for a week. There's a thick, oily cloud of flies around it, and the mothers with baby strollers cross the street to avoid the sight of it. Marvelous thing.
The bloom will quickly wilt, and the smell will be gone in a day.
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Last month I was reading a piece in the Times of India. Entitled 
What does it mean to art-direct your own life? I don't know, all I know is that it's a hell of a lot of work captioning and rotating something like a thousand photographs (it felt like a thousand, anyway) documenting the last month of your life. Not the last month, I mean, just the latest one. The past month. Argh, words! Anyway, to see my selections from the thousands of digital images I've snapped in various locations over the past month, go to 
you write songs?" and "What do you think about people who maybe didn't like you then, or said something nasty, or just didn't bother about you then, but are terribly nice to you now?" (To which Paul and John's answers are "We just bash one out on an old piano" and "We didn't bother about them then, and we don't bother about them now.") You can hear a whole Radio 4 documentary about the recovered interview (and more Morag) in 
Now, all I knew about Duncan Browne at the time was that he'd been in Metro, the band who wrote "Criminal World", the track Bowie covered on Let's Dance. Or did I even know that? Sadly, Duncan Browne also died of cancer, in 1993, not long after directing a tribute to Jacques Brel (another cancer victim) at the Donmar Warehouse, featuring Sian Phillips. But I've since heard a lot more of the Metro album he made in Paris in 1976 with Peter Godwin. It's an excellent, neglected sophisti-pop 70s gem, a soft rock masterpiece that sounds like a more refined, laidback Queen or Sparks. You can hear more than half of the hard-to-find Metro album on 
Accounts of our weekend as Tokyo guides in London are now all over the blogosphere, from 
On Saturday night we were lucky enough to catch a rare performance by The Idle Tigers, a gig at a private birthday party held at an obscure nautically-themed pub down an alley in the dead London district dedicated to heraldry, yeomanry and inns-at-court. Idle Tigers recently signed with Matt Jacobson's label Le Grand Magistery, releasing a most original electronic vaudeville long-playing record entitled 
