Meanwhile #092
Andrzej Pagowski – Lots to be said about the second season of Killing Eve (especially the stunning locations and costumes), but what really caught my eye were the various Eastern European film posters decorating Eve and Niko’s house. Two of them, After Hours and Working Girl, are by Pagowski, a Polish artist who specialises in a particularly nightmarish line of portraiture, somewhere between Bacon and Giger. Posteritati have a great selection of his work for sale, but be warned, this look may cost you dearly.
City Building Education – Wonderful short film from 1971, following Doreen Nelson and her brother, architect Frank Gehry, as they test out an architecture-based curriculum on Los Angeles school children, where they’re set the task of designing their own city. If you know any teachers, send them this link at once.
From punk to Bauhaus – “The chances of me discovering a new land mass in the South Pacific is very slim, but making the connection between an obscure designer, musician, architect or photographer – and how their work relates to modern life – is what drives me”. Great interview with filmmaker Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Objectified, Rams) from the second issue of Vitsœ Voice. Yes it’s a brochure-zine that really wants to sell you some shelves, but it’s really nicely put together and well worth getting your hands on if they still have any copies.
Bag of words – Austin Kleon on planting the seeds of ideas with nothing but pick-and-mixed words. Lovely quote from Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing: “These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull … I was beginning to see a pattern in the list, in these words that I had simply flung forth on paper, trusting my subconscious to give bread, as it were, to the birds.” Open that trapdoor.
Birth of a book – What’s better than watching a book being handmade the old fashioned way? Watching a book being handmade the old fashioned way in Yorkshire, that’s what.
It’s niche that – I’ve mentioned Anne Trubek’s excellent newsletter Notes from a Small Press before, and I’m sure I will again. Always a welcome visitor to my inbox. This week, she explains why she started Belt as a niche publisher, initially only working on books about the Rust Belt, and the sacrifices made in the name of specialism.
Typeset in the Future – I spent my Sunday nose-deep in Dave Addey’s excellent book about type in science fiction (based upon his blog of the same name). Rather than a dry “this one is Futura, this one is Univers” catalogue of observations, Addey explores the cinematic and societal context around the type, while effortlessly managing the tricky task of steering the text back to the matter at hand. I particularly like his swift dismissal of the much-discussed, monolithic final section of 2001: A Space Odyssey – “this act contains no typography and is therefore of no concern to us”.
Stuff about Terrence Malick – A regular visitor/victim of Coudal’s vast collection of Kubrick links, it had completely passed me by that they’d given Malick the same treatment. Slightly disappointed they haven’t underscored all of the links with thin red lines … I’m easily amused.
That is all.