{design} – Page 288 – { feuilleton }

Jack Rose returns

And speaking of American folk music, guitarist Jack Rose returns to Manchester this month and I’ve once again been asked to design the poster and flyers for the event. I was hoping to do something a bit more elaborate and original for this but overruns on other work meant I ran out of time; sticking type over a scanned picture is the lazy solution. The picture in question is an engraving of cavorting witches and warlocks that originally illustrated Robert Burns’ poem Tam O’Shanter. No idea who the artist was for this but it’s from an 1822 printing of Burns’ poetry and one of the best illustrations I’ve seen for that particular work.

Red Deer Club / Friends of Music presents
JACK ROSE and special guest LIZ GREEN
Friday 18th may 2007
@ Jabez Clegg (small back room), Manchester
8PM : £7 ADV (plus 50p booking fee) £8 DOOR

• Red Deer Club
• Jack Rose
• Liz Green

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jack Rose in Manchester

Fantastic art from Pan Books

Fantastic Art (1973).
Cover: Earth by Arcimboldo.

I’d thought of writing something about this book series even before I started this weblog since there’s very little information to be found about it online. I can’t compete with the serious Penguin-heads, and I’m not much of a dedicated book collector anyway, but I do have a decent collection of the art books that Pan/Ballantine published in the UK throughout the 1970s. These were published simultaneously by Ballantine/Peacock Press in the US and nearly all were edited by David Larkin, with Betty Ballantine overseeing the American editions. Two of the series, the Dalí and Magritte, were among the first art books I owned. Over the years I’ve gradually accumulated most of the set, and I always look for their distinctive white spines in secondhand shops.

Continue reading “Fantastic art from Pan Books”

The Reactable

An amazing tabletop synthesizer with some fantastic demonstration videos here.

Via Boing Boing.

The reactable is a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

The reactable hardware is based on a translucent round table. A video camera situated beneath, continuously analyzes the table surface, tracking the nature, position and orientation of the objects that are distributed on its surface, representing the components of a classic modular synthesizer. These objects are passive without any sensors or actuators, users interact by moving them, changing their position, their orientation or their faces (in the case of volumetric objects). These actions directly control the topological structure and parameters of the sound synthesizer. A projector, also from underneath the table, draws dynamic animations on its surface, providing a visual feedback of the state, the activity and the main characteristics of the sounds produced by the audio synthesizer.

Penguin Surrealism

Design by Germano Facetti with a detail from Europe after the Rain by Max Ernst.

Is this the start of a new meme? Ace Jet 170 features a number of posts about the history of Penguin and Pelican book cover design. (I won’t link to any specific page as the site is full of other good stuff which you really ought to go and look at.) Now Dan Hill at City of Sound has followed suit, inspiring me to dig out a few choice volumes connected by theme, in this case the use of Surrealist paintings for cover art.

Continue reading “Penguin Surrealism”

In praise of Cormac

So I finished The Road finally, relishing its ash-strewn bleakness at my own sluggish pace. It’s worth noting (since I missed the event) that McCarthy’s novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for best fiction earlier this month, and deservedly so, I’m sure. As if that wasn’t enough, we’re also awaiting the bizarre spectacle of the man who shuns interviews granting an audience to Oprah since The Road has been chosen for her latest book club title.

It’s difficult offhand to think of another writer that can command critical and popular acclaim in this way, although it should be said that if Oprah’s book hordes are looking for an easy or a light read with this one they’re in for a shock. The Road is a dark and desolate tale that makes most contemporary horror novels look anaemic by comparison. That black cover design with its retreating, corroded type suits a story where the sun shines fitfully, if at all, and all is burned, ransacked or destroyed. This is also (as Beaumaris Books and others have noted) a work of speculative fiction—if not full-blown post-apocalypse SF—which is something the book world conveniently ignores. Science fiction has been offering up devastated landscapes like these for decades but for many of McCarthy’s readers this will be a new experience. The belated flush of attention won’t do anything to bring people to SF but it may enlarge the audience for McCarthy’s other work which can only be a good thing.

• John Clute examines The Road from an SF perspective

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cormac McCarthy book covers
• Another masterpiece from Cormac McCarthy
• Cormac McCarthy’s venomous fiction