Crazy 8's

Happy 08/08/08 – and have a good weekend from ye old Pacific Standard. I'm headed out of town for a camping trip with my brother and his FDNY cronies and I'll be back at it next Wednesday.

Enough about magazines already

I know, I know, but one last thing. I just subscribed to the ANP Quarterly (ANP = Artists Network Program.) It looks pretty great, if a little more L.A. than I'm normally into. Go here if you want more info and here if you want to subscribe. And now I will give it a rest with all the magazine talk, I mean, what is this, 1967? No... no, it's not.

Domino Effect

Seattle-based design blogger stilldottie asked a bunch of different people (including me) to choose three or four magazines they can't live without. Seems Domino is the winner—almost everyone but me had that on their list. Check the whole thing out here.

My dad makes custom furniture, and my mom was a weaver and textile designer–so various home magazines (I refuse to call them "shelter" magazines) were always floating around—House & Garden, Metropolitan Home, Architectural Digest, Interiors—but I haven't picked them up much since. (Actually, scratch that, we did subscribe to Dwell for awhile but didn't renew when they re-designed it last year.) Anyway, I guess moving time is as good a time as any to check out some home magazines, so maybe I'll do that and report back.

[One I really miss is the color-forecasting magazine View On Colour. We used to have it around the office when I was at Martha Stewart, and the Parsons library had a subscription, but I haven't been able to find it anywhere for the past several years...nothing on eBay, very little around the web. Snap it up if you see it—they had really imaginative ways of displaying different color palettes.]

Retrospect

I just ran across the Flickr page of photographer Tom Palumbo, who shot extensively in the 1950s and '60s for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, among many other publications. There are so many great photographers out there whose work sort of falls through the cracks (either that or I am just ignorant for never knowing his name—I do recognize some of the work). Here's a small selection:

Hammock IV (probably taken around 1959-1960)

Jack Kerouac circa 1956

And the girls get drunk...

An experiment with glass and graffiti

Smoke Curls

Anne St. Marie, Harper's Bazaar, 1957

Vogue, early 1960s

Outtake for Harper's Bazaar, 1958. Taken in New Jersey at some kind of industrial plant. I'm going to steal this idea for a shoot at Gasworks Park in Seattle some time.

Harper's Bazaar, 1954. Critical Mass fashion story, anyone?

Miles Davis. Palumbo's archivist notes that "The Miles Davis are remarkable because they show Miles laughing and smiling, something he never seems to have done later. Perhaps the reason the negatives were not printed at the time was that Tom knew that Miles would not have liked these pictures, which most definitely conflicted with that 'cool guy' persona that we see in most images of him."

More info at tompalumbo.com and on his Flickr page.

Evening Activities

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J. Ralph Phillips will be all up in the building tonight, strumming, twisting, looping and letting loose with his one-man allegorical southern gothic medicine show. I will be there, buy me a beer.

9pm
The Annex
152 Orchard Street (Rivington/Stanton)
$10 cover

J. Ralph Phillips Breaks Like Broke mp3

Playing with Toys

I love this poster. My good buddy Joe Newton produced it earlier this summer—it's hand-carved letterpress with old metal and/or wood type, and was printed at Woodside Press, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. If you click to enlarge you can see the texture in the printing. The imperfection is really nice.

Working on Leaving

Over at Monitor Mix Carrie Brownstein has been writing about moving (and more specifically about moving her music collection). This is of interest to me because I have less than six weeks to get my shite together and do the same. I remember when I was a kid my mom had some Goethe quote on the bulletin board (I will not attempt to paraphrase it here) about life, errr whatever, being the process of figuring out what to let go of and what to hold on to. It's easy to get rid of everything in one fell swoop, or to get rid of nothing at all, but how do you decide what has lasting value and gets to stay in that middle part of the venn diagram that is you?

I'm not just talking about records. The shit is complicated.

Brownstein writes that "Memory is as good of a storage space as anything." I'm going to repeat that to myself a bunch over the next couple weeks and then I'm going to get to work on re-curating my life.

Want My Compost?

In case you never saw it:

A Closed Mouth Gathers No Foot

That was the message on a church sign Emily and I drove past in southern Missouri, making our way across the country several years ago. We still laugh about it. Good church signs, whether intentionally funny or not, are some of the brightest gems of the road. Via SLOG, there's a website that has started to collect them in one place, under the headline Church Signs That Won't Make You Go To Church.

Click here for many more.

Shadowboxing

The Sunshine & Shadow Spring/Summer 2009 lookbook shoot was yesterday, some of it on a Bushwick rooftop with a beautiful blue sky and clouds overhead. Definitely my favorite collection yet and a great shoot. You'll have to wait to see the clothes till next Spring (it's a secret, never teach the Wu-Tang), but check out current and past seasons at sunshineandshadow.com.

This Charming Man

This morning I woke up to find an email waiting for me from my old buddy Pierre Consorti. We worked together at Visionaire for three years or so, until he took a job in Paris as art director at Work in Progress (now known as Petronio Associates). Founded by Ezra Petronio and Suzanne Koller, the firm produces possibly the best fashion magazine in the world, Self Service, as well as campaigns and identity for Chloé, Miu Miu, Prada, YSL, Bottega Veneta, Emilio Pucci, Colette, and many others. Pierre has a preternatural understanding of typography, and it would be difficult to overstate how much I learned from him. He is also one of the funniest people I have ever met.

Click here to check out some pictures and videos on Self Service and WIP's other work.