Please visit the active Ultrasparky blog to browse the for the content that has accumulated since this all began in 1996.
November 2010
My style
I totally want these. No lie. Especially the jacket.
Scanned from a Summer 1969 Sears catalog. Usually I hold back on the judgment and editorializing about things I post on Public Collectors but these patriotic shopping list ensembles just can’t possibly be real. No one bought those right? I refuse to believe that men were walking around on the beach looking like fucking idiots wearing red, white and blue get ups blaring such catchy slogans of the 1960s as: “MILK”, “POTATO CHIPS”, “SHRIMP”, “PIZZA” and “CHEESE.” No way. This shit did not exist. Not a single purchase was made.
This season's colors
Spring 2011 here I come!
For your Black Friday shopping mania, some selections from the 1969 Sears Summer catalog time machine. I’m guessing this incredible look never quite took off. More scans from this publication here.
Grateful Grapefruit
Grateful Grapefruit: The “zine for horny nerds” (the other one besides Pink Mince, of course) gives us a little love.Â
The Everyday Experiment
The Pink Mince astro-buddies, as featured in Andew Slatter’s journal The Everyday Experiment
Sina Evil speaks!
Check out this short but great interview with my beloved pal Sina Evil, whose illustrations were featured in Pink Mince #5 — The Louche, Limp-Wristed Lifestyle — and Pink Mini #2 — Boycrazyboy
Times Modern and the modern Times
There's a tendency when talking about typefaces to focus on the little details. However, this is a story about the life cycle of typefaces, specifically the way typefaces have been a crucial part of the life cycle of The Times of London, a trusted brand that has carefully cultivated its use of typography for decades.
I recently gave a talk at the Click series of conferences in New York, San Francisco, and London, which were partly sponsored by my employer. My talk was about the history of custom type used by The Times of London, particularly the Times Modern family that they currently use for headlines and other display stuff in the paper and in their digital versions.
Someday there should be a video available of the version I delivered in San Francisco, but until that surfaces you can also get a more refined version of the story (including a bunch of photos I took of the The Times offices here in London) in the sleek new issue of Linotype's bilingual Fonts in Focus magazine, available now for just the price of postage.
Hipsta-Michi
It's a terrible shame that I won't actually be in London to see it, but I was delighted to find out that the photo above is going to be part of a show of Hipstamatic images at the Orange Dot Gallery in London in January.
Perhaps the folks putting together the exhibition had a simoiar reaction to my pal Norm, who once said of that photo: "It looks the way I want to feel." For me, I’ve always loved how that image captures captures the mood of a relaxed, uncomplicated summer day with friends — a rare instance of proper, perfect vacation — in a little Austrian village called Streifing.
From the scrapbook
The Stilla “Z” really IS kind of great, which is why I have a tattoo of it.
Back issues of U&lc have been made available for download from fonts.com. Page 15 from volume 1 number 2, first printed in 1974.
Designed by Herb Lubalin.
Sparky in exile
So, yeah, I’m leaving the UK for a bit. I’ve been here for the last four years on a series of visas, and my current work permit expires in a little under two weeks. We haven't been able to get the right paperwork for my next visa in time, so I’ve got to be out of the country before the stroke of midnight on the fateful day. Now my only option is to stay away until all the paperwork is sorted, and then reapply from within the United States.
It sucks, hugely. Although I’d already planned to travel for most of December anyway, suddenly I have to buy extra plane tickets, exploit the hospitality of friends for longer than I’d planned or wished to do, and scramble to fill that time with extra work when I’d been planning to take a break after the completion of my job. And instead of settling into the new year with a new job, new opportunities, and the return to solvency, I’ve got to head back to New York and float from couch to guest room to couch while I deal with bureaucracy, burn through what little money I have, and just hope things work out.
The sudden change in plans is one thing, but the uncertainty is the bit that’s doing me head in. It's likely, yes, but not certain that I'll be allowed back. The Home Office has been really difficult about my sponsorship so far — the main reason it's taken so much longer than anticipated — and I have to throw what I can fit into a suitcase and just hope the final details fall into place. If they find fault with any part of my application, than I could really be stuck an ocean away from the life I’ve been slowly building for myself for the last four years. Even if all goes well, I don't know how long it will take to come back and for things to settle down. This is already screwing upplans to travel and teach in January, and may even screw up another trip to India I was starting to plan. I’m rattled that the stability I’d been holding out for has been snatched away for a while more.
Even if things go well and I can get myself back to England by the end of January, there's another problem. This will probably throw off my plans to apply for permanent settlement, since the interruption in my visa status may invalidate the time I’ve spent here already, leaving me with another five years to go before I can stay without any trouble.
So that’s that. I'll be living out of suitcase for at least two months — hoping for the best, trying not to be a burden, working when and where I can, and waiting to see if things fall apart of fall into place come February or so. Wish me luck!
Life on Mars
For the record, in case any of you are or know eccentric billionaires, I would ABSOLUTELY be willing to go to Mars, regardless of whether or not there were a way to get back. In fact, that would be a certain part of the appeal. Surely the need for this fatalistic derring-do of mine is of vital importance toward future colonization, right? Surely a Mars mission needs an introspective (yet appropriately sociable) designer/zinester to document the journey and the inevitable decline of the first colony, right? How else would future generations learn? I already have a thing for space suits! SEND ME TO MARS, DAMNIT!
From the scrapbook
Stereo Stack - If only because I’m still a vinyl junkie, even though I don’t have room.
I knew her when
Long before autotune, that Oscar, little baby Apple, and even her duet with Huey Lewis, young miss Gwyneth Paltrow and a few of her chums at the exclusive Spence School on the upper east side of Manhattan planned a small production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown as a senior class project. I, ladies and gentlemen, was cast as Charlie Brown in that production.
Spence was an all-girls school, so just like the all-boys school I attended nearby, they had to recruit from other schools in the area to round out the cast if they put on a show. (This is a big reason why it wasn't considered that faggy to get involved with the theater in single-sex schools: it was an effective way to meet suitors. That also made it good camouflage if you were just a typical teenage musical-theater fag.) After seeing a flyer for auditions at Spance appear in the locker room one day, my pal Neil and I went slightly further uptown and were soon cast as the male leads.
Sadly, the show never made it to the stage. After a few rehearsals held at Spence and in the sprawling 5th Avenue apartment where one of the girls lived, we stopped hearing anything from the girls. One of them had a little brother at our school, and he sheepishly asked us to return our scripts because the show was cancelled.
A lot of the details of this are all very fuzzy now: I can't remember what I sang at the audition, and even though I know Neil was going to be Snoopy, I’m not totally sure what part Gwyneth had. If I’d have known one of us would become famous I might have retained more. But it wasn't until many years later that I connected that chick who was in that movie with the teenager I knew a little who had an actress mother named Blythe Danner whose name only barely rang a bell. I recall Neil saying he wasn't that interested in her, since her classmate Gretchen — the one with the brother in our school — had much more impressive tits. I was convinced all along that I would never see these girls again, anyway, since they were obscenely wealthy and moved in different circles altogether. Spence was, after all, one of the inspirations for the school in Gossip Girl, and I was definitely just a working class art nerd.
Random bits of loosely related trivia that have occurred to me while writing this:
Fellow type designer Jonathan Hoefler — who I only met a couple of years ago — went to another school in the neighborhood at the same time. I don't think he ever met Gwyneth, but he made much better use of his experiences working on the school newspaper and/or yearbook.
Aside from one show my freshman year of college, I never really bothered with performing after that. Neil, however, did go on to try his hand at acting, and it was always funny to see him turn up unexpectedly as a bit character in the occasional film.
I once met Anthony Rapp, who played Charlie Brown on Broadway. It was a totally random handshake sort of meeting, during which I never got the chance to mention that I had been in his apartment earlier that year, helping a mutual friend feed his pets while he was out of town. Anthony was introduced to me by his boyfriend, with whom I had shamelessly flirted some months earlier.
I am not the gayest gay the Jesuits at my high school ever sent forth into the world. That honor belongs to another Oscar winner — Bill Condon, writer/director of Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls, et al.
Do you know who else was a total east-side private-school theater fag who was in a bunch of musicals at my high school (long after my time)? The girl who would one day become Lady Gaga.
It Gets Better
Overall, I’m a big fan of the It Gets Better project. I think it's an incredibly important message to send out into the world, if only because there are so many kids who really, really need to hear it, and get a little strength and encouragement from it. The world isn't an easy place, and I know the truth really is that — as a wise friend of mine expains — it gets complicated. Overall, though, I’m for the effort, and regularly touched by the variety of ways I see the idea repeated, and the variety of people who have taken the time to repeat it. Tonight I found this one by Murray Hill and friends, and it was immediately my favorite:
What I love about this is that it's joyous. Not glib, not maudlin, not too specific — just filled with spirit and energy and good will. This is what would have really reached me when I was young: the site of that huge, happy, heterogenous, homosexual crowd all having fun in one place without it seeming weird or scary or dull or over-the-top. In fact, it captures the spirit of many, many nights I’ve spent out at shows or little clubs over the years, and it makes me happy to see it.
On the whole, I’m not a happy person. Believe it or not, I keep a tight lid on most of my moping and griping. The honest truth is that my baseline emotion is one of frustration and futility, peppered with a generous dose of poor self-confidence. You know what, though? The gay thing has never been the cause of that. Sure there were scattered moments of anxiety during the coming-out years, but never despair about that part of the equation. As the realization that I was gay crept up on me, I never thought I was wrong or bad because of it. It was just stressful to figure out how to change course.
I cling to the few and fleeting things in life that make me feel really happy, and the truth is that a lot of them connect to being gay, and I couldn't be more grateful for that. Whether it's been the love of interesting men, the comaraderie of friends, the link to a variety of subcultures that resonate with me, or even the increasingly outdated thrill of being a little outré, there's a lot about being gay that makes parts of my life good. There's been plenty of pain in life over the years, but the gayness — the sexual identity, the cultural identity, and the permission to figure out my own way in the absence of an established model to follow — has generally been the salve, not the sore.
I’ve been lucky in that I was able to stay below the radar (mostly) before coming out on my own terms, and then I found that no one loved me any less, or thought any worse of me. Because of that fortune, it's a little hard to really and truly understand what it's like for kid trying to figure all this out in worse circumstances. But you know what? That just makes me even more sure that every kid deserves the love and support that I realized was there all along. And they deserve to find themselves — if that’s what they want — in a roomful of energetic, interesting people not just telling them — but showing them — that it gets better.
The Pink Mince mood board
Making a big run to the Post Office today, in case anyone has been trying to decide when would be the perfect time to order an issue or two…
