{work} – Page 105 – { feuilleton }

Further back and faster

Mick Jagger by Cecil Beaton (1968).

Donald Cammell thought Mick Jagger to be a more provocative rock star than Elvis Presley because Jagger was willing to experiment with his masculinity. Elvis, although extraordinarily erotic to a generation of young women, never did. What this difference suggests, among other things, is that Mick Jagger’s appeal is not Elvis’s—and never was. Critic Greil Marcus has argued that what Elvis did was to purge the Sunday morning sobriety from folk and country music and to purge the dread from blues; in doing so, he transformed a regional music into a national music, and invented party music. Elvis popularized an amalgam of musical forms and styles into “rock’n’roll,” a black American euphemism for sexual intercourse. What the Rolling Stones did to rock music, some years after Elvis made sex an integral part of its appeal, was to infuse rock with a bohemian theatricality, at first through Brian Jones, who was the first British pop star to cultivate actively a flamboyant, androgynous image. For a time, Brian even found his female double in Anita Pallenberg. Brian Jones and the Stones thus re-introduced into rock music its erotic allure, and hence made it threatening (again).

From an excellent piece by Sam Umland for PERFORMANCE: A Photographic Exhibition featuring the work of Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg at the Drkrm. Gallery, Los Angeles, opening on January 20th. Umland wrote the recent biography of Donald Cammell with Rebecca Umland (published by Fab Press) for which I designed the cover. Featured in the exhibition are prints from the Del Valle Archive, including eleven photographs of Mick Jagger taken by Cecil Beaton when Performance was being filmed.

“When are Warner Brothers going to do the right thing and release Performance on DVD?” I asked in April last year. Well now they are, although it remains to be seen which version of the film has been used; several exist, some of them shorter than others. Release is scheduled for February 13th in the US and March 12th in the UK.

PERFORMANCE: A Photographic Exhibition
featuring the work of Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg
January 20-February 24, 2007
Drkrm. Gallery
2121 San Fernando Road
Suite 3
Los Angeles
CA 90065

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Quite a performance
• Borges in Performance

Calendar sale

Let’s start the new year with some traditional commercialism. My CafePress calendars are now reduced in price to $17.99 which means I make all of $1 on each sale. Still not much of a bargain for purchasers but that’s the way it goes with all CafePress products, their own starting price is always high. I’ll probably keep these up for sale until the end of February at least, in the past I’ve had late buyers send requests for them after I’d closed the shop.

Atelier 2.3

It’s just over a year since I refashioned the main site with a better, all-CSS layout. I’ve made some cosmetic changes to this design over the past week that are now complete and uploaded, the new look being a variation on the old, presented in the style of pages from a layout application. I’m sure I’ve seen this done this somewhere before but I forget where so don’t go thinking it’s wildly original. Still needs testing properly across a range of browsers but I’ve not played with the underlying structure very much so everything should work as it did previously.

High Priorities 2

I didn’t win but I made the second round apparently (along with 120 others…middle row in the above picture, second from the right). Congratulations to Spencer Fruhling whose winning design you can see at the bottom of this page. An interesting choice, there were a number of pastiche-based entries which I thought might be rejected in favour of something more abstract. You can see the rest of the entries here and my attempt in larger form here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• High Priorities

High Priorities

In which your humble narrator enters a contest…

Speak Up, in collaboration with New York magazine, is proud to announce the first-ever open contest to design the visually acclaimed, graphically exhilarating, by-invitation-only “High Priority” feature illustration in the magazine’s year-end, December 18, 2006 double issue.

High Priority highlights five activities, suggested by New York writers, that are not to be missed. Every week designers and illustrators from around the world are invited to create an interpretive typographic illustration to open “The Week” – the listings section of New York Magazine. New York readers place great weight on these five recommendations, and this page is a regular destination for many.

For examples of past editions of High Priority please visit:
New York‘s High Priority archive
Design Observer’s Variations on a Theme: New York‘s High Priorities

I knew about this listings feature from having read the Design Observer piece (I’ve never seen a copy of New York), and liked the idea for what amounts to the design equivalent of a “standard” in jazz, with different designers having to present a riff on the same brief in each issue. The restrictive nature of the problem is part of its appeal; only two colours are allowed (red and black), the box must be the shape it always is, and the design has to incorporate five categories—Movies, Theater (sic), Art, Nightlife and Restaurants—with the date, the words “High Priority” visible somewhere, and the accompanying critics’ recommendation for each category. Aside from that, anything goes.

My attempt can be seen above. I was going to do a couple of different designs then pick the best one but in the end I ran out of time. The initial idea was to do something along the lines of the cover for Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin (below) but—as is often the case with first ideas—making it work wasn’t so easy.

Led Zeppelin’s building is a great photograph of a New York brownstone (the original vinyl sleeve had slots cut in the windows through which the lettering and various pictures on the inner sleeves could be seen); mine had to be pieced together from separate pictures of New York in the 1930s. It doesn’t quite work because there’s not much justification for having the category lettering arranged like rows of birthday cards on the window sills. But maybe I’m being too hasty in pulling it apart when the winner won’t be announced until December 4th. Until then you can browse the 186 other entries. I have to say that the quality of these is really exceptional, if I were one of the judges I’d have a hard time choosing only one. Most of the time I wouldn’t give a second glance to an online contest but this one was fun and the high standard of the other entries has made it worthwhile.