5 Cool Things

To the lazy days of summer’s end, I welcome you. First, over to England for some great black and white photographs. A hot tip on a great little notebook. LARB—dish from Laos or book review website? Baa Baa Black Sheep by Wynton Marsalis is the perfect accompaniment to tour the work of a Portuguese goddess of abstract painting. “At night I would go to sleep dreaming of sea adventures.” – John Claridge

1.

John Claridge, Photographer

{England’s keeper of memories}

 Great story on the English photographer, John Claridge in The Guardian. Looking at this work, it’s as if Bruce Davidson and Helen Levitt had a child and raised him on a strict diet of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Atget.

Chet Baker came in one night in 1986, and I asked him if I could do a couple of shots before he went on. I said: “I’ve got to tell you, when I was 13, I bought the Chet Baker Quartet record with Winter Wonderland on it. Russ Freeman was the pianist … ” And Chet said, “Yeah, he was, in 1953.” He just stopped and stared, going back through his memory. And that’s when I took the picture. Then he went downstairs and did his set. He played beautifully, considering he’d lost a lot of his teeth in the gutter – the emotion and passion still came through. – John Claridge in The Guardian

 

Visit John Claridge’ website >>

2.

Byline from Field Notes

{famous reporter wants better notebook, helps create it}

You love your Moleskin. I know, me too. But if ever there were a worthy competitor, this would be it. Note the “bomb proof” wire binding at top. This is a special Limited Edition Byliner, from Field Notes, so jump now, if you’re going to jump. $12.95 for two notebooks at 70 pages each. Better value than Moleskin. I just ordered mine. Go get yours >>

For years, people have been asking us to make a Reporter’s Notebook. We tried a couple times, but we never seemed to be able to get it just exactly right. After all, the Reporter’s Notebook is an iconic American object. From The Front Page to All the President’s Men to Spotlight, the sight of one being whipped out and flipped open is a sure sign that somebody is about to write down something important. So, when veteran reporter John Dickerson, host of CBS’ Face the Nation, wrote us out of the blue and asked us to make one – and offered to help – we knew our deadline was approaching.

This is very cool:

SPECIFICATIONS:

• 01. Proudly printed by the good people of eDoc Communications, Mount Prospect, Ill.
• 02. Cover: Neenah Environment 120#DTC “Wrought Iron” with a brute force application of “Federal Blue” soy-based Saphira ink.
• 03. Innards: Cougar Natural 70#T vellum ruled with “Double Knee Duck Canvas” soy-based Saphira ink.
• 04. Cover and innards printed on a Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 105 40” 6-color printing press.
• 05. Bound with bombproof Renz “Double-O” Ring Wire, with appreciation to U.S. Patent #2142816, filed in 1935 by W. Walter Grumbacher.
• 06. Bottom corners rounded to 3/8″ (9.5mm) by a Challenge SCM round-corner machine.
• 07. College Ruled Lines: .28″ (7.1 mm).
• 08. Notebook dimensions: 3–3/4″× 8″ (95mm x 203mm).
• 09. Field Notes uses only the Futura typeface family (Paul Renner, 1927).
• 10. All Field Notes memo books are printed and manufactured in the U.S.A.
• 11. UPC 858493003400

More details and a short video with John Dickerson >>

3.

The Los Angeles Review of Books

{my heart belongs to NYRB, but shhh}

From the website: “The Los Angeles Review of Books magazine was created in part as a response to the disappearance of the traditional newspaper book review supplement, and, with it, the art of fun, intelligent long-form writing on everything from fiction to politics, architecture to young adult fiction, academic monographs to genre fiction.” Okay, whatever.

But catch this story below. The Myth of Thumbprints: Reading John Berger in Berlin by Alexis Zanghi.

 

 

From A Seventh Man —“THEY TRAVELED in groups of 100. Mostly at night. In lorries. And on foot.

During the 1970s, migrants leaving Portugal in search of opportunity developed a system to ensure their safe arrival at their destination, and to deter fleecing by people smugglers. Before departing, each man would take his own picture. Then, he would rip the picture in two, keeping one half of his face for himself and giving the other half to the smuggler.”

So begins this startling story that begins with John Berger’s account and leads to today and Berlin’s Museum Europäischer Kulturen where, “a collective of migrant artists called KUNSTASYL (literally “art asylum”) are at work on a “peaceful takeover” of the museum’s east wing.” It’s a tremendous story.

Read the whole thing >>

4.

Baa Baa Black Sheep, Wynton Marsallis

{Crank volume then scroll down to Helena}

5.

Helena Vieira da Silva

{A Portuguese goddess)

I often work at Folio, in downtown Seattle. The private collections are kept in the back in the stacks, where I work. A few days ago, I got up from my chair and spotted an oversized portfolio. I pulled it down and opened it to find a series of reproductions by Portugal’s greatest, most revered modern painter. I’d never heard of Helena Vieira da Silva, but my, oh, my, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like these paintings. I don’t like thinking about why it is that she is not more well known. More paintings and a great read here >>

“I like everything but I just love perspective. Not scientific perspective but the kind experienced, composed of rhythm and music.”

“Sometimes I was completely alone and sometimes I was sad, even very sad. I took refuge in the world of colours and the world of sounds…. I believe that, for me, all that got mixed up into a single thing.”

From Vieira da Silva, or the quest for antimatter: A grid, for example, might lose its sense of solidity as a result of a lighting effect rendered by imperceptible changes in tone (rather than the use of pure colour during her period of development), or by being covered with very fine hatching using the technique called “traitillism” invented in the 1970s, which gives rise to form in a use of space in which the infinitely great is joined with the infinitely small (an echo of the idea put forward by Vieira da Silva’s friend, the poet René Char). The result was the discovery of a new materiality that Diane Daval Béran has termed transparent density.

~

That’s it.
Thanks and have a great week.