Self portrait (2009).
More carved antlers, horns and bronze skulls at Shane Wilson’s website. Via ~Wunderkammer~.
Weekend links: the queer edition
A T-shirt design by artist Daryl Vocat.
• Tove Jansson: Out of the Closet. The unorthodox life and work of the woman who gave us the Moomins.
• Submissions are now open for PANK’s October special online issue featuring Queer prose, poetry & art.
• More new magazines: Zeus and Made in Brazil Magazine, the latter being a spin-off from the justly-praised weblog of Brazilian hotness.
• An old magazine, called, er…Magazine: “Everything about Magazine was new, from the stark photoless cover design with its bold typeface to the way the men were photographed. The pictures weren’t overtly sexual, but proudly confronted the viewer in a different way: “To us, showing a face was the most important thing because back in 1980, gay people still had to hide their faces,” Lestrade says.” A few pictures from Magazine.
• Revealed: The Tradition of Male Homoerotic Art, an exhibition at the Leslie-Lohman Gallery, NYC, from May 12th.
• The programme for the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival which is running to May 16th.
• Scissor Sisters have a new album, Night Work, out next month. The cover picture is a photo of dancer Peter Reed by Robert Mapplethorpe. Antony and the Johnsons have announced a new album (and accompanying book) for October.
• Headline of the week: “Christian right leader George Rekers takes vacation with ‘rent boy’ ”. Rekers took issue with the story; his Rentboy.com escort took issue with Rekers’ issue-taking. Then things became unpleasant. And now another escort has come forward.
• Henry & Glenn Forever, “a love story to end all love stories”. “Who knew Rollins was such a caring spouse? Who knew Hall and Oates were so infernally evil—yet so considerate?”
• This week’s Tumblr silliness: Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber.
• I’m not on Facebook, nor will I ever be. If you are, however, here’s ten reasons why you should quit. The EFF has six things you need to know about Facebook Connections. Wired thinks that Facebook has gone rogue and an alternative is needed. What does Facebook publish about you and your friends? Finally, Gawker has ten reasons why you’ll be on Facebook forever.
• Song of the week: Gay Messiah by Rufus Wainwright.
Gothic alphabets
I have a couple of books with examples of medieval capitals like these, each letter being an amalgam of people, animals or (in the case of the example below) duelling knights. These are from Gothische Alphabete (1897), a book by Jaro Springer at the excellent University of Heidelberg which has the whole volume available as a PDF or as scans of individual pages.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Letters and Lettering
Pamela Colman Smith’s Russian Ballet
Another chance find at the Internet Archive. This small book from 1913 is an appraisal of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes written by noted actress Ellen Terry and with illustrations—which Archive.org doesn’t mention—by Pamela Colman Smith, an artist whose Tarot designs are some of the most successful ever created yet who received little credit for her work while she was alive. It’s a shame that the Internet Archive perpetuates this state of affairs despite her name on the book’s title page. This is a fascinating set of ink sketches all of which are marked by the distinctive monogram familiar from her Tarot cards. One of the drawings in the book is also marked by an obscene doodle; I’ll leave it to the curious to discover which one.
Into the Media Web by Michael Moorcock
Here at last is the book I spent a good part of last year designing. Into the Media Web is a huge volume as befits a huge talent, 720 pages of Michael Moorcock’s non-fiction spanning fifty years of his career from his days writing for sf and fantasy fanzines, through to journalism, reviews and articles for major newspapers and magazines. Moorcock expert John Davey did an amazingly thorough job of compiling, editing and annotating it all, and it’s been a considerable pleasure to design such an important collection. Alan Moore provided the substantial introduction. Savoy Books haven’t announced a price yet but it’s going to be about £45 since it’s another limited edition and weighs a ton. Into the Media Web makes a fine companion to last year’s The Best of Michael Moorcock from Tachyon, also edited by John Davey (with Ann & Jeff VanderMeer) and whose interior I also designed. Details about Into the Media Web‘s design follow below.
The dust jacket is matt white with a spot UV layer which picks out the titles and lines in gloss.
