afrojet

Pam’s Drunken Dogs of Judgement

Got over to the Portland Art Museum (Pam) yesterday. Checked out the new Mark Building which houses the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art. Got followed around way too closely by a security guard that looked like Buddy Holly. He looked determined to catch me shoving a Rothko down my pants, so I played along and made many furtive movements, darted around corners quickly, and generally just stood excessively close to paintings and statues. It was a real post-modern cat and mouse game.

If I was indeed going to steal a piece from Pam, it would definitely be Jean Baptiste Greuze‘s ‘The Drunken Cobbler‘. This painting just sings with moral judgment. I’m surprised it never ended up on a straight-edge album cover. Anyway, I love it. It’s so melodramatic and over-the-top.

Over-the-top drama really belongs to the Baroque paintings – most of which I find very creepy; it’s like watching reality television with it’s distorted reflection of culture and the use of drama for the sake of aesthetic ornament (note: America’s Next Top Model, for reasons I can’t really explain, falls hypocritically outside this critique).

Perhaps it’s the pervasive use of dogs in these Baroque paintings that really creeps the crap out of me. Seriously, next time you go to an exhibit of Baroque, check out the dogs. They’re ubiquitous and they’re fucking evil as hell. Usually tucked into one of the peripheral corners of the painting, sometimes half-transparent, mostly sporting a countenance of cruelty, and always rabid, these dogs look like they have the hunger for the flesh of man.

Skelton’s Alphabet Workbook

Boy am I excited when I make a discovery like the one I did last night. I was just settling in to read Eric Gill’s An Essay on Typography when I noticed that the introduction to the volume was penned by Christopher Skelton. Immediately, I was curious. Another Skelton interested in Typography? I jumped on the glorious internet and embarked on a grand journey. The Press Archives at the University of Reading note that Christopher Skelton was a printer, typographer and nephew to Eric Gill. Christopher Skelton ran a small press called Skelton’s Press located in Willingborough. From the looks of it the press specialized in limited edition runs of books about typography and the printed arts. Searching through many of the rare book dealers I found several editions like ‘A Mortal Craft‘ by G.R. Davis, The Book of Quiet by Michael Harlow, and Mid-Week Period Return, Home Thoughts of a Native by John Wain. This book looks especially interesting for its “reminiscences and reflections of the author on a train ride from Oxford to Stoke-on-Trent, with drawings by Arthur Keene”. There is also a book at Powells called ‘Variations on the Theme of 26 Letters‘ by David Kindersley. It’s only $44 and I’m very tempted to go get it.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. I also found a book published by Skelton’s Press called Skelton’s Alphabet Workbook. The author of the book is John Skelton! Whoa. How cool is that? John Skelton’s obituary from The Guardian notes that he too was a nephew of Eric Gill’s which would mean that Christopher and John were brothers. John Skelton also learned sculpture under the tutelage of Gill, “A vociferous member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors from 1955, and sometime vice-president, his opinions were steadfast, and his dedication to his artform, and its base in traditional craftsmanship, obvious…Skelton believed in the importance of craftsmanship and drawing as the starting base for all artists.” Check out a small sample of John Skelton‘s work.
He also founded his own workshop called John Skelton’s Workshop (what a great name, eh?). John’s daughter, Helen Mary Skelton now runs the workshop, teaching classes on lettercutting. Check it out at Skelton Workshops.

Craftsmanship
My daily inspiration for getting work done comes from this gigantic spider and his (her?) daily web slingin’ creations. I felt pretty good about the nice laminate flooring I installed in the downstairs bathroom last night but after catching a glimpse at the fog infused architecture my spider buddy rocked over night, I feel like the bar has been raised to an unattainable height. Of course my first gut instinct was to take one of the left over pieces of laminate flooring and give that spider’s playground a little taste of imperialistic ‘Shock and Awe’. You think you got the upper-hand, Wünder Spider? Fuck you. I could dust your whole village with one good swing!

What’s the point tho, whatever I tore town today would be built back the following day – bigger and deffer. No, I made my peace with this spider weeks ago and the spider now serves as my daily reminder to get shit done. Kind of like a living, evolving version of those ‘I-never-graduated-high-school’ successories poster.

The Luxury of Knotty Pine

Just returned from a relaxing retreat in the upper most point of the State of Washington. The beautiful Semiahmoo Resort was our destination. Highly recommend this spot if you’re looking for a getaway. They got one hell of a cheese plate you can order up to your room. The resort is situated on a peninsula in Semiahmoo Bay. If you stand on the porch and look across the bay you can see the shores of Canada. When the wind is just right you can actually smell the Universal Health Care rolling along the border.

In anticipation of the road trip up to the resort, the Skelton family bought a new car. The old one was dying and seriously pissing me off. It was time to take it out behind the shed and hasten its demise. The best thing about the new car, besides the fact that it’s new and not broken and gets insane gas miles (after owning a few older cars, I didn’t even know that kind of gas milage was an option!), is that it came with three free months of Satellite XM Radio. Hot Damn, I must be contemplating cheese plates too much these days cause this Satellite Radio business was completely off my radar. No commercials, tons (and tons) of stations, great reception, and most importantly I guess – great music. And not just music. I was gassing myself up on this road trip listening to the comedy station that plays all stand up comics. Classic Eddie Murphy, the one where Eddie impersonates Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor? Still Funny. My favorite station on the XM dial (insert a chorus of boo’s from the misses) was the Audio Visions station. It advertises itself as the “Soundtrack of the Galaxy” and if this is true then I would expect an angry alien invasion any day now, “Attention people of earth: please turn off the soundtrack of the galaxy or we will destroy your planet. Also, tell us where we can find this Enya women as she must be neutralized!” This is also a very dangerous station to have on while driving a motorized vehicle at 80 miles an hour. It’s true that Audio Visions does indeed “create a place you can escape to when the world seems all to real”. Unfortunately that place is better known as, ‘sleeping’, and one shouldn’t escape there while hydroplaning in the passing lane.

Customize Your Friday
A wet Portland Friday is upon us. Flapjacks are sitting heavy in the belly and it’s time to get down to some work before we throw in the towel on this week. Portland welcomes the Fucking Champs tonight at Sabalas. Massive amounts of guitar pyrotechnics are what’s need to round out the work week and jump start the weekend. Can I get an amen?

Some fab custom lunch boxes are up and up at lalalandgallery. Or if dolls are what you’re after, create your own munny with your own design. Or buy one from someone famous for charity. I like ’em just plain white.

Also, someone’s got a cool pad in Portland.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
My stepfather, while on a recent trip to Los Angeles, visited the Justice Brothers Museum and took amazing photos of some of the old race cars that they had on the museum floor. He emailed me a few of the cars and I was loving the type styles on the numerals. I asked if we would collect for me the numerals 1 through 10. Sans-serif, slab-serif, crazy serif, they’re all there. My heart fluttered a bit when I saw that gold ‘9’ with its devilish tails. It’s so top heavy it looks like it just wants to roll over.

Here are some fine type photos from flickr: wood type, 2 (this ‘two’ comes from the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Wisconsin and hangs on the wall measuring something like 4 x 6 feet), 4 (a hard life).

Andy Clymer has captured a beautiful ‘the‘.

The Walker Art Museum has a discussion about the new Walker identity and font Walker Expanded, designed by the ineffable Eric Olson of Process Type Foundry. Check out his new grotesque font called ‘Maple‘, as in, “Let’s all go hang out at Maplewood Mall ya’ll”.

Poltergeist
n: a ghost that announces its presence with rapping and the creation of disorder

This morning, in the space of one minute, these three events happened in quick succession:

1. the power went off and then on causing my computer to shut down, the lights to flicker and the smoke alarm to squeal,

2. a Golden-Crowned Kinglet flew into my office window and fell to the ground,

3. one of the cats threw up.

I was very unsettled for a bit. Outside, I found the small bird after searching for a long time. It was alive and tending to a wing. I was afraid that I was going to have to ‘deal’ with the bird somehow. But, when I prodded it with a stick, it hopped around for a bit then promptly flew away. I went back inside and cleaned up the cat vomit.

Chemical Slow Down
Looking for a new hair texturizer with unlimited styling possibilities and long lasting hold? Put away your fancy Aveda hair control granules with marshmallow and flax, cause I got a homemade recipe for hair gel that will have everyone at the office asking, “How does Johnny get his hair to look so good?”.

Simply take four parts drywall dust (freshly sanded with superfine 360-grit sandpaper). Add a generous amount of oil based primer/sealer. Now finish it off by twisting the tips of your hair follicles gently with a bit of orange peel spray texurizer (set to fine). Tada! Not only will you have manageable hair that you can contour and build into any shape Eero Saarinen could have imagined, but your hair will smell terrific.

This weekend I finally finished repairing and cleaning up this mess. I don’t even want to go into the amount of horrible chemicals that had to be dialed in to bring the bathroom back from its toxic surprise. Suffice it say that today I am feeling a tad under the weather and I have no doubt that even with all masks worn and safety precautions taken that the chemicals got the best of me. But it was worth it. The ‘greenboard’ water-resistant gypsum drywall turned out damn clean and square (if I may brag for a second), and now with everything pulled out of the bathroom and the walls a sparkling white, the ball is in the misses’ court to choose her paint color.

As I toiled this weekend, the metaphor that was continually with me was that of those Russian nesting dolls. You can’t complete one project without a bunch of nested little projects hiding underneath. But you never know what those projects will be until you uncap that first one.

Also, is anybody else watching that Breaking Bonaduce show on VH1? Man is that guy a train wreck. I love it.

Save The Gorillas.

Green Day
Went to the Green Day world stadium tour 2005 last night. Wow. What a strange and wonderful show. Billie Joe is the human Energizer bunny and the band knows how to dominate a sold-out stadium. Punk rock in the 2005 is a heavyset older women wearing a muumuu standing next to you, completely losing her shit while three shaggy haired kids looking like they just walked off the set of Dogtown and Z-boys (who couldn’t have been more than 10 years old) rocked out with total abandon. I was prepared for a younger crowd but I wasn’t prepared for the parade of children. Hoards of ’em. Like it was a third grade field trip. Hundreds of seven and eight year girls, wearing pink Green Day t-shirts, shouting along to the the call and response of ‘F*** George Bush!’ Aggression without violence was the name of the game last night. It was weird to think that a lot of the crowd wasn’t even alive when Green Day’s ‘Dookie’ album came out.

One of the highlights was when the band kicked into a cover Operation Ivy‘s ‘Knowledge’ and then about halfway though the song they pulled three people out of the crowd to play drums, bass, and guitar. Each person quickly learned their part on their instrument and the song continued with the newly formed band. The girl who got to play bass was awesome. And after the song Billie Joe let the guitarist keep the guitar. The kid collapsed right there on stage. The rock and roll moment was just too much for him to comprehend.

Being a big fan of the new record, I have to say I would have been content if they would have just played that record from beginning to end. But just for the record: one song off Kerplunk (2000 Light Years Away) and then of course ‘Knowledge’ from 1039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours.

How Many?
I find it odd that without question the single most frequently asked questions I get asked when someone learns: a) what I do for a living (graphic design) and, b) where I do it from (the comfort of my home office) is, “how many monitors do you use and how big are they?”

The conversation usually goes something like this:

“Awe, that’s a cool job. So do you like have a whole bunch of monitors on your desk all going at the same time?”.

“Umm nope. I just use one” I reply, noting the disappointment on the face of my inquisitor.

“That’s too bad, cuz if I was you I would have at least three. One big one in the middle and two smaller ones on either side of the big one”.

“Hmm, and what would you use ’em all for?”, I ask.

“Nothing really, maybe have a television going on one…I don’t know…but it would look pretty sweet”.

“Indeed. Bee’s knees for sure. I’m going to have to think about that one”.

The question of ‘how many’ fascinates me. You can bet the farm that when ‘how many’ drops by his little brother ‘how much’ isn’t far behind (but first he had to stop at the AM/PM for a six-pack of Blitz). Being the new home owner that I am, I get asked the big three all the time. How many square feet? How many garages? How much did it cost? Frankly, this line of questioning bores me to tears. Yet, I find it extremely interesting that this has become the primary cultural currency.

“Hey man, cool ipod. How many songs do you have on it?”

It’s normal now for complete strangers to meet, have a few ‘how many’ conversations, and walk away – still total strangers but with a sense of how they stack up – like dogs sniffing each others assholes. I assume this is pretty much an all male thing and goes back to some kind of hunter-gatherer instinct.

Man, if only people would ask me about table lamps instead of computer monitors, then I’d be back in the game. Also pendant lamps. I want four of these IQlights. Mostly cause the guy who designed ’em has a great look going. And I also want a handful of these Tom Dixon lamps. And shit, while I’m at it I’ll take this Moonwalk carpet.