Weekend links 773

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The Tower of Babel from Turris Babel (1679) by Athanasius Kircher, showing how wide the Tower would have to be at its base to reach the Moon.

• The week’s literary resurrection: Penguin announced Shadow Ticket, a new novel by Thomas Pynchon. “Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering…”

• The week’s musical resurrection: Stereolab announced Instant Holograms On Metal Film, their first new album since Not Music in 2010. Aerial Troubles is the new single with a video which has prompted complaints in the comments about the use of AI treatments for the visuals.

• At Public Domain Review: Modern Babylon: Ziggurat Skyscrapers and Hugh Ferriss’ Retrofuturism, a long read by Eva Miller. Previously: The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferriss.

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: Ben Wickey is selling some of the original art from his Lives of the Great Enchanters pages.

• At Wormwoodiana: The Golden Age of Second-Hand Bookshops is now. Mark Valentine explains.

• “Alvin Lucier is still making music four years after his death – thanks to an artificial brain.”

• At Colossal: Hundreds of fantastic creatures inhabit a sprawling universe by Vorja Sánchez.

• Coming soon from Radiance Films: A blu-ray disc of Essential Polish Animation.

• Pattern design and illustration by Gail Myerscough.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Homage Script.

• New music: Sabi by Odalie.

• RIP Max Romeo.

Babylon (1968) by Dr John | War In A Babylon It Sipple Out Deh (1976) by Max Romeo | Babylonian Tower (1982) by Minimal Compact

Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta

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These pages turned up when I was searching for (and failing to find) a specific set of calligraphy capitals. Sixteenth-century calligraphy books commonly present their texts and alphabets in collections of engraved plates. Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta stands apart from its peers with coloured inscriptions and page after page of illuminated embellishments—fruits, flowers, insects and other animals that have nothing to at all do with the calligraphic exercises. The reason for the illustrations is explained in a note on the Getty website: the calligraphy by Georg Bocskay came first (in 1561–1562), the book being intended as a showcase of calligraphic styles which demonstrated Bocskay’s incredible skill and mastery of a wide range of lettering. The illuminations were added thirty years later (from 1591–1596) by Joris Hoefnagel at the request of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, and an art patron with a celebrated taste for the unusual. Rudolf’s court was filled with alchemists, John Dee and Edward Kelly among them; he commissioned paintings from Giuseppe Arcimboldo, had his own zoo, and his Kunstkammer was one of the largest ever assembled. Hoefnagel’s embellishments have nothing to do with penmanship but the book was only one of a vast number of exquisite or curious objects that Rudolf either commissioned or collected.

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Looking through the book I wonder what Georg Bocskay would have thought about all the superfluous additions to his meticulous work. I’m also reminded of a pair of equally odd volumes: the Voynich Manuscript (which Rudolf II was reputed to have owned, although there’s no evidence for this), and Luigi Serafini’s Codex Serafinianus, both of them books which combine their pictures of plants (and many other things in Serafini’s case) with unusual scripts. Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta is available today in facsimile reprints but most people will see the pages via the Getty’s scans. The Getty website isn’t the best place to browse the pages, however. You’re better off going here where the entire book may be seen on a single page.

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As for my calligraphic quest, the search continues to be a fruitless one although in this case it did turn up a quantity of painted fruit. The capitals I’ve been looking for are in a book I bought in the 1990s, a guide to alphabet design through the ages whose pages offer little information as to the source of their lettering designs. It’s not a great problem by any means but things like this often nag at me. In the past I’ve borrowed letters from the enigmatic alphabet for my own designs. I like to know the origin of a thing when I’m using it myself. The search will continue…

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Continue reading “Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta”

M-A-N-C-H-E-S-T-E-R

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Presenting a new item for sale at Redbubble. I was intending to upload this quickly then get on with other things, but after examining the artwork it became apparent that the piece would benefit from an overhaul in order to make something that worked well at poster size. The original design dates from 2004 when I was asked by friends at the Manchester District Music Archive to contribute to a limited run of postcards they were putting together based on Manchester’s music history. Since I was working for postcard size I didn’t finesse the artwork as much as I would have done had I been working for a larger printing. What you see here is a replication of the original design at a much larger size, with a couple of details adjusted and a more substantial change in the substitution of the black-and-white photo (see below).

The original postcard set appeared two years before I began writing these posts so I’ve never had the chance to compile a list of all the references. Some of these will be familiar to Mancunians (and many Britons) of a certain age but I was trying to be allusive rather than obvious while also following three simple rules:
1) Ten panels, each one of which contains a different letter of the city’s name in a different typeface.
2) Each panel referring to a different musical trend, a notable group or venue.
3) The whole design to proceed chronologically, from the 1960s to the present day.


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The music: Psychedelia.
The type design: Decorated 035.

The first two letters are rather vague attributions since the city didn’t have much of a national musical profile until the late 1970s. Popular Manchester groups of the 1960s included The Hollies, Herman’s Hermits, and The Mind Benders but there wasn’t a discernible Manchester scene the way there was with post-Beatles Liverpool. So “M” stands for the psychedelic era in general, while Decorated 035 is one of the typical mid-century sign fonts that you would have seen around the city.


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The venue/music: The Apollo Theatre/Punk.
The type design: Jackson.

“A” is for the Apollo Theatre in Ardwick Green, the city’s most prominent music venue in the 1970s, although I doubt that anyone would guess the attribution. The Art Deco building is a good venue but here’s never been anything distinctive about its signage, hence the choice of Jackson, another very decade-specific font which has conveniently wide letterforms. The rip refers to torn posters and punk graphics while the opposed green/red colour scheme is borrowed from one of the Virgin label designs of the late 70s, something that might also be taken as a very tenuous reference to the Virgin Megastore in Market Street.


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The music: Buzzcocks.
The type design: A pair of Zs from the cover of Orgasm Addict.

The first Buzzcocks single featured a striking sleeve by Malcolm Garrett (design) and Linder (collage) which provide the graphics here, with the “N” being formed by two letters from the band’s name which was printed vertically on the cover.


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The music: Joy Division.
The type design: A letter from the cover of Substance.

Substance
, the first Joy Division compilation, was released in 1988 so this is a little anachronistic but Brett Wickens’ letter is a more recognisable detail than one from the cover of Closer. The textured sleeve of the group’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures, is referred to by the panel background.

Continue reading “M-A-N-C-H-E-S-T-E-R”

Weekend links 768

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The Mona Lisa as it looks run through the Random Pixelate setting in Glitch Lab.

• “We don’t have enough Dada in this world of too much data. Something is needed to break-through the over-curated simulacrum that is the online world in order to let in a bit of non-artificial light. One way to make a break is through the deliberate cultivation of the glitch.” Justin Patrick Moore on circuit-bending, glitch music and Surrealist composition.

• The seventh installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi). There’s an extract in English at Alan Moore World.

• New music: Remember The Clouds by Philippe Deschamp, and Requiem For The Ontario Science Centre by Tony Price.

• Michael Brooke offers suggestions for where to begin with Polish film director Wojciech Has

• At Printmag: A new book shares the artistic odyssey of Iranian designer Farshid Mesghali.

The Letraset Graphic Materials Handbook for the year 1987.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Cubo.

• Yet more Polish film posters.

A cat’s eye view of Japan.

• RIP Roy Ayers.

Glitch (1993) by Moody Boyz | Glitch (1994) by Autechre | Glitch (2011) by Brian Eno And The Words Of Rick Holland

Weekend links 767

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East Totem West head shop poster, from DJ Food‘s latest delve into the psychedelic poster auctions.

• The week in science-fiction illustration: Joachim Boaz on Rodger B. MacGowan’s “approachable New Wave art”; and Andrew Liptak talks to Adam Rowe about Rowe’s Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s.

• At The Wire: Philip Brophy sets out his intentions for the return of his long running column on film music.

• At Public Domain Review: Gustatory Wisdom: Bruegel the Elder’s Twelve Proverbs (1558).

Though the project’s genesis predated Roeg’s involvement, Cammell said that his codirector “needled” him: “He provoked me, made me focus more and more clearly on what I was trying to say.” It was Roeg’s visual sensibility, Cammell graciously admitted, that “mobilized” and “improved” his own concepts. It’s appropriate that the movie concerns two men who become fully realized only in meeting and merging with each other. Turner, said Cammell, “believes himself to be at the end of his creative life. He’s a man in despair. And then destiny brings him his mirror image, Chas, the man in whom he sees what he was and what he could be again.”

Roeg and Cammell were hardly in despair in 1968; both were novices in the foothills of their own artistry. It is not fanciful, though, to see in their collaboration something like the same lightning connection that forms between Turner and Chas. Cammell said that he set out “to make a transcendental movie.” In achieving that goal, he stretched and challenged not just himself but cinema too. Even as Performance closed the lid definitively on the sixties, it opened the door to a radical new way of making films.

Ryan Gilbey on Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance

• At A Year In The Country: Broadcast and Pathways Through Otherworldly Villages.

• “Pilot is an elegant and expressive display serif,” says Kim Tidwell.

Winners of the 2025 World Nature Photography Awards.

• New music: Forgotten Worlds by Rodrigo Passannanti.

• Janus Rose presents her Digital Packrat Manifesto.

• RIP Jamie Muir and Gene Hackman.

Pilots Of Purple Twilight (1981) by Tangerine Dream | Pilots (2000) by Goldfrapp | I’m With The Pilots (2001) by Ladytron