A design for life | Jon Savage on the history of the Smiley symbol: Watchmen, Acid House and beyond.
Category: {design}
Design
Three today
Three Spheres II (1946) by MC Escher.
Celebrating the third { feuilleton } anniversary and post number 1,438. It’s become customary now to list the most popular posts of the past year so here we go again:
• The Underwater Sculpture Gallery. This has been surprisingly popular for several months now, despite pictures of the artworks in question having been featured on very popular sites such as Boing Boing. Typing “underwater” into Google’s image search provides the answer, revealing that one of the pictures from the post is on the first results page.
• The gay artists archive. This section has also leapt in popularity after the page was linked recently on StumbleUpon. It’s not a definitive archive by any means, plenty of other sites are attempting that already. These archive pages are only a convenience so that people following some of the lengthier visual categories can see at a glance what else is there. At its best this section may introduce people to more recent work which the historical sites omit.
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer. No surprise that this is still popular two years on.
• Bare blade. Part of the new semi-serious Men with swords obsession. I think people like this guy’s bum more than anything. Can you blame them?
• Two guys kissing. Yes, Googlers, when you search for “Two guys kissing” you get this wonderfully sexy photo by Jack Slomovits. He’s great, buy his book.
Thanks for reading!
John x
Darwin at 200
Man is But a Worm by Edward Linley Sambourne (1882).
Happy birthday Charles Darwin. The reaction to Darwin’s work from Punch and other journals was typical. While his studies remain controversial among those who believe there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, his life and work are now celebrated on the Bank of England’s Ten Pound Note (but with the wrong kind of bird, it seems). Dogmatists take note: the Vatican is no longer on your side:
Father Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, Professor of Theology at the Pontifical Santa Croce University in Rome, said that Darwin had been anticipated by St Augustine of Hippo. The 4th-century theologian had “never heard the term evolution, but knew that big fish eat smaller fish” and that forms of life had been transformed “slowly over time”. Aquinas had made similar observations in the Middle Ages, he added.
He said it was time that theologians as well as scientists grappled with the mysteries of genetic codes and “whether the diversification of life forms is the result of competition or cooperation between species”. As for the origins of Man, although we shared 97 per cent of our “genetic inheritance” with apes, the remaining 3 per cent “is what makes us unique”, including religion.
“I maintain that the idea of evolution has a place in Christian theology,” Professor Tanzella-Nitti added.
Edward Linley Sambourne provided Punch with many caricatures of Victorian notables including the famous one of Oscar Wilde undergoing his own process of evolution by turning into a sunflower.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• “Weirdsley Daubery”: Beardsley and Punch
• The Poet and the Pope
Hawk things
The Barney Bubbles revival continues with news of Space Ritual 09, a concert dedicated to BB by ex-Hawkwind members at the Roundhouse, London on March 8th. The headline band is a new version of Hawklords, notably sans Dave Brock who controls the Hawkwind name and hasn’t been too happy recently with Nik Turner’s revisionist activities. Quarrels aside it’s good to see them honouring Barney’s memory and the Roundhouse is the place to do it, being the venue where Hawkwind played a very stoned set in 1972 as part of the Greasy Truckers concert.
All of which had me searching in vain for a double-page ad from the NME for Hawkwind’s Urban Guerilla single; you can see the ad in a smaller vertical version on the original Barney Bubbles post. I was hoping to find the full thing and scan it for display here but it seems to have gone astray for the time being. As it was the search turned up these photocopies of some later Bubbles Hawkwind ads created for the band’s UK tour of winter 1973/74. A pair of typically meticulous ink and Letratone renderings and also another example of what you might call Barney’s interactive design since these instruct the reader to glue the masks to card, colour them in then cut them out and wear them to the gig. David Wills has featured some other examples along these lines, including this cut-out doll birthday card. Did anyone ever try wearing these masks? And if so, is there photo evidence?
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Sonic Assassins
• Reasons To Be Cheerful, part 2
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer
New things for February
More new work appeared recently although as usual this was something I completed a while ago. Einstein’s Getaway is a short album by Stranger Son of WB who play a kind of over-amped muscular harangue which you might call Post Rock if that wasn’t a very tired term by now. Mr Simon Reyonolds should give them a listen. Heavily rhythmic and bass-driven, this is as much Post Punk as anything, bringing to mind bands such as This Heat, The Pop Group and (in the vocal department especially) The Fall. I was responsible for the design of this release only, not the avocado suite backdrops, and you can see the rest of the layout here. This is one of the first releases on a new label, White Box, and I’ve already designed the next release in the catalogue.
Meanwhile, those of you addicted to mobile phones may like to know that {feuilleton} is now available via a mobile RSS feed. There’s a permalink at the top of the third column on this page although if you arrived here using a mobile network there’s a new WordPress plugin running which converts the site to a mobile feed automatically. I don’t browse the web with my phone very much since its capabilities are so limited it’s hardly worth bothering but this page does at least load the posts now without breaking. Not all of them work, however, since the images are far too big. WP creates thumbnails for each uploaded image so I imagine there’s some way of tweaking the feed to deliver thumbnails. iPhone users shouldn’t have any problem and the optimiser creates a feed just for them. Those of us who remain iPhone-less can experience a vicarious thrill here.