While You Were Out
Still giddy from the sunny weather of the west coast, I prematurely broke out the bike Wednesday and took my inaugural bike commute of 2003. The first one is always the hardest. Your ass hurts for a day and your heart feels like it’s going to explode. I was also faced with a fierce wind that made each peddle rotation a biblical event. Needless to say, I was jumping the gun a bit. Yesterday it turned prohibitively cold and today the snow has returned.

I missed a few things while unplugged in Portland. Most notably, the crushing protest song, March of Madness, put out by DJ Shadow and Zach De La Rocha. It’s times like these that I realize that Audioslave just doesn’t cut it. Short of bringing back Rage Against the Machine though, March of Death will do just fine. Let’s have some more of it. Blake, from Jet’s to Brazil laments in his new post from the bands web site that he’s unable to put his feeling on the war into a song so he just wrote a good long piece.

Also while I was out Frank Heine, released a beautiful new font through Emigre, called Tribute. I am a huge admirer of Mr Heine’s revivalist style fonts. The current Afrojet logo is set in Dalliance, another of Frank’s creations. Tribute is based on a 1596 type, designed by French typesetter, Francois Guyot . The new digital homage is highly readable and looks great in smaller point sizes (5 to 7). The Roman Capitals and alternate characters are also very unique. I really dig the off kilter capital N. But my favorite character of the whole set is the whimsical number sign set in italic ligatures. I have to find a reason to use that!. In connection to the release of the Tribute font, John Dower wrote a fine piece on how to name and discuss revivalist type.

A good time waster for a friday is this collection of gig posters and some spot on war analyses from the Onion. Peace.