Prairie Avenue Bookshop, the fine bookstore for architecture and design in Chicago, is in midst of their going-out-of-business sale. It is very sad, as they held one of the finest stocks of design books I've ever seen anywhere. But do take advantage of the sale. I was there a couple of weeks ago and everything was 60% off. Now the discount is up to 70%, and I don't imagine the store will be open for much longer.
While certainly picked over, I still managed to score a few remarkable books and magazines. They used to have this one display case table with old European design magazines laid out. They were treated as precious commodities and priced for collectors. But for this liquidation they were all reduced to $5 apiece. So I bought a few issues of this magazine called Der Deutsche Tischlermeister (The German Tablemaster?), which offers an amazing peek into the Weimar culture of modern German design.
Check out the pics. As often is the case with these finds, it is the advertising that says the most.
My friend Chris posted this video to Facebook. Have a viewing. It is quite remarkable how easily nature re-greens itself, given just a little of the correct management. The elegance of the methods described make the mentality in traditional agriculture seem so primitive. I wonder if this kind of natural reclamation will begin to be practiced on a big scale anywhere.
Enjoy this short profile of friend and Smart Museum curator Stephanie Smith, from Chicago magazine. The occasion is the Heartland show, which opens on October 1.
We invited the artist-traveler Mike Wolf to be our house sitter and resident artist for the fifteen days we would be out of the country, traveling.
This is something I have been thinking about for a while, what with the comfortable home and nicely set up letterpress shop I have. It is a shame when we are out of town and the work space could be put to use by somebody else, but isn't. I thought, wouldn't it be nice for an artist to come and make use of the gear while we are away, and keep the house occupied and the cat company, too.
Of course, it has to be the right person, with the right skills, and a schedule that fits with ours. This summer, and for the first time, that person was Mike Wolf. He's got some basic printmaking experience and is a quick learner, has an interest in and history with cheap book and zine making, and, most auspiciously, had already spent a couple of weeks this summer elsewhere in the midwest making paper for the first time. Talk about 'green,' sustainably produced paper–this stuff was made out of garlic mustard fibers. So he biked into Madison with a stack of paper and his ideas for printing (and other projects). After giving him a basic Vandercook and typesetting tutorial, we were off to China.
The printing went well.
On the garlic mustard paper:
Mike says he plans to use these prints as a cover for a zine yet to be assembled. After folding, the front will read "THE WORD hood rural area?"
And here is a pic of his second project, using some of my favorite border pieces, abstractly, and on some scrap end pieces of paper I had laying around. The paper, I later informed Mike, is actually gummed and he printed on the right side, so now's he's got the option of doing some convenient wheat pasting.
So the whole thing was a success. Like when I hand over my guitar to somebody else to play, and produces a different and better sound out of the same old instrument, it is a hoot to see what another artist does with my collection of type and ornaments.
Here is the scan of the first flyer I've designed and drawn for a Madison event. The gig is a benefit show being played by my pal Bill's band, Bonobo Secret Handshake. The beneficiery is the Madison Arcatao Sister City Project, and the occasion is the celebration of the recent elections victory of the FMLN in El Salvador!
The original was hand drawn. Bill caught a typo and made some digital adjustments, which I will correct by hand later (he still has the original!). And he added the WORT logo at the bottom. Next time, I'll hand draw that, too.
If these days it seems that the city of Shanghai is sending a single message, that message must be: We are bigger than Beijing. The particular vehicle for Shanghai’s intercity one-upsmanship is the Expo 2010, an atavistic twentieth century exercise put through the transformative motors of excess only possible in twenty-first century China. As a world’s fair for the age of extremes, it promises to be a humongous, and humongously bland affair. The surprises (ie none) are foretold by the inanity of the Expo mascot, Haibao, a big-eyed blue cartoon form that delivers nothing if not comfort and boredom. The blue humanoid figure, clearly friendly if not exactly exciting, can be seen everywhere in Shanghai now, as image and object.
The preparation of the Expo grounds include a number of massive building projects. They are on display as models at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall. (Which, by the way, is a truly impressive place well worth a time-rich
visit.)
According to the Expo website, upwards of 70 million visitors are expected to pass through the Expo halls next year. After the Expo closes, who knows what will become of the buildings. In the meantime, the enterprising developers jump on the Expo train, parroting the marketing lines for their own ends.
Better city, better life. But what makes a city better? How about a massive water treatment facility instead of more gargantuan space for temporary exhibitions of what undoubtedly will be corporate product of one sort or another, guaranteed to dazzle for a moment, and then leave the spirit empty? The puerility inherent in any twenty-first century expo-like project (and I am including everything from art biennials to the Olympics) puts on display one thing, primarily. And that is a lack of real imagination.
There is also a mini-drama developing in the American pavilion subplot (which you can follow here). Seems that the US is not keen on shelling out big for a deluxe pavilion, and China might take that as a real slight. I say (and I don't say this a lot), good for the Americans. Even if pulling out is only for reasons of budget.
I'm in Incheon, Korea, now. Just for a day. I've been unable to blog from China, where the Great Firewall has Vox (and a whole lot of other web zones) blocked. Will have pics, stories, and observations to come.
But this is how it's gone:
Madison>Chicago
Chicago>Shanghai
Shanghai>Jinan
Jinan>Tai'an
Tai'an>Qufu
Qufu>Jinan
Jinan>Yantai
Yantai>Longkou
Longkou>Yantai
Yantai>Incheon
and then,
Incheon>Shanghai
Shanghai>Chicago
Chicago>Madison
Exhausting? Yeah ! ! ! ! !
