Category: ultramedia

Hideous porn

Okay, while I’m thinking of John Waters, let me mention that time that I was able to catch up with my oldest pal, filmmaker and Oscar nominee (GOD, how I love just tossing that in) Eddie Schmidt when he was back in New York for a couple of days in 2005.

Eddie and I have shared and mutually encouraged an appreciation for John Waters for over 25 years now, and he was bubbling with excitement with news that he couldn’t talk about openly. He confessed that when he left New York the next day, he was off to spend an afternoon in Provincetown with John, interviewing him for his latest documentary about the MPAA. While I died with envy a little, I was also deeply excited that Eddie had scored such a great subject for his film, and I knew that he would be able to draw out some great thoughts of John’s on the subject.

That little clip above is a tiny segment of the footage of John (captured during the hours he and Eddie spent together) that made its way into This Film Is Not Yet Rated, directed by Kirby Dick and produced by Eddie. (It’s great, by the way, and you really should see it, and not just to catch the rest of the John Waters interview.) Of course, I would love to have been a fly on the wall for Eddie’s entire visit so I could catch the rest of their conversation, but I have to be content with the footage in the film and what Eddie’s told me.

John, if you’re out there: Are you interested in typefaces? Queer zines? Comic books? Call me!

Type choice and type use

I’m still getting back into the swing of things after an extraordinary one-week trip to Iceland for this year’s ATypI conference in Reykjavík. Although I’ve attended ATypI before, this was the first year I’ve been a speaker, and one lucky enough to be allowed two presentations. The first of them was a variation on talk I’ve been doing lately about typographic issues that should be considered when working with webfonts. Luckily, one of my colleagues was able to record it:

Given at ATypI in Reykjavík on 15 September 2011.

The slides themselves are here, in case you couldn’t see them clearly in the video:

The Dap-Tone Super Soul Review!

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings at Pori JazzTake a minute and picture that woman working as a corrections officer at Rikers. The fact that an incredible singer like Sharon Jones languished in obscurity for years doing jobs like that is part of the tragedy of her background and the triumph of her finding success now. It’s terrible to think of that voice being wasted for so long, but I guess it took the right combination of people and opportunities — and perhaps enough time for a renewed interest in soul music to swing around — for Sharon to finally connext with Daptone Records and bust out once and for all.

Daptone’s whole commitment to an authentic late-60s/early-70s soul sound would be a grating gimmick if they weren’t in earnest and didn’t get it all so right. They have such a good touch for showcasing incredible talent that perfectly channels the spirit of the original experience.

I’v been listening to Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings for a few years, but had never had a chance to catch them live until last night, when they played with a few other artists from the Daptone stable — Charles Bradley and the Menahan Street Band — at the Barbican Centre. As much as I was looking forward to the show, it turned out to be so much better than I expected. There was so much energy on stage, and such a rich, tight sound. Sharon is much, much funnier than you’d guess from the soulful intensity of her singing voice, and she commands the stage with personality and dance moves that would put a woman half her age to shame. I just wish I had nearly as much energy as she’s got.

Hand-Painted Type

Hanif Kureshi

It’s been a treat to see Hanif Kureshi‘s completely awesome HandPaintedType project getting a lot of attention and praise during the last month or so. I met Hanif back in March, at Typography Day in Ahmedabad, and immediately took a shine to the painted lettering he put on display, and it’s no suprise that I was all for the idea of documenting and supporting the efforts of those artists. Hanif showed this short film he made as an introduction to the situation that inspired this project:

Handpainted Type is a project that is dedicated to preserving the typographic practice of street painters around India. These painters, with the advent of local DTP (Desktop Publishers) shops, are rapidly going out of business with many businesses and shops switching to the quicker, cheaper but uglier vinyls. Many painters have given up their practice altogether.

The project involves documenting the typefaces of road side painters across India, digitizing it and archiving it for future generations.

I had a lot of discussions about the sign painters with a lot of designers while I was in India. It’s a difficult bind for the artisans whose livelihood is giving way to the production of cheap digital signage. They can’t match digital sign shops in terms of price or speed, but the work they do is both more charming and more likely to last for a long time. Of course, style and longevity are probably low priorities for customers who are also trying to eke out a living in a difficult economy.

I think the key to survival for the sign-painters may lie in the hand of designers and other tastemakers who not only appreciate the work, but are also more likely to have the market savvy to shift the perception of the lettering trade from being “just” a trade to acknowledging the artistry. A similar thing has been going on in the West with the explosion of interest in crafts and the handmade object, and I think it could certainly happen in India, where everyone seems so quick to see the vibrancy of the handmade letter in comparison to the glut of poor typography. The fonts will improve, though, and what then of the lettering artists (and the art of lettering itself) if they can’t find a place for themselves elsewhere in the culture?

Opulence! You own everything!

For a while now, I’ve been joining some pals for a monthly movie night and last night we had a selection of mine, the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning. Every time I come back to this film, I love it just as much as the first time, and it strikes me as more and more poignant as time goes on. It captures a moment, but the further we get from that moment it’s easy to see how much of an impact the whole ball culture has had as it leaked out into pop culture at large. As well-received as this was at the time, its success was a bit of a bitter pill for the subjects of the story, who weren’t able to share in as much of that success as they thought they would. Time has secured a legend for them outside the world of the balls, but the outcome only reinforces what many of them say in the film about their lot in life.

Continue reading “Opulence! You own everything!”

It’s Madison time. Hit it!

Although it’s not the most thrilling clip, it’s cool to see this version of the Madison Time from Baltimore’s Buddy Deane Show, the inspiration for Hairspray’s Corny Collins Show. (And it’s worth looking for other Buddy Deane clips to get a better idea of where the Hairspray aesthetic came from. The hair looks a little flat in this one.) The dance is done with a little more pep in the film:

The Madison sequence has always been a favorite moment in the film. It’s not the funniest or the craziest, but it’s warm and sweet, and a pivotal moment in the story. Really, it’s the part that exposes the sentimental streak that underlies the film. It always catches me off-guard to get a reminder that it was a huge smash with a life of its own outside the John Waters bubble.

The quality of this clip is awful, but here’s the second version of the Madison I ever saw, when it was played on a reel of old music clips between shows at the Somerville Theater some time in the early 90s. I never figured out the context at the time. Most of the other clips turned out to be Scopitone films, and perhaps this was as well, even though it’s not specifically French. It’s the Ray Bryant Combo doing their version, set in a bowling alley:

Timeless

I hope these Youtube videos stay online for a while, so you can all see this British documentary about John Waters, made around the time Hairspray (the first, non-musical one) was released. It’s a little annoying to listen to Jonathan Ross‘s voice-ver, but it’s so charming to see the interview with Divine in the first section:

Divine died only a week after the release of Hairspray in 1988, and this is the only footage I’ve ever seen of him enjoying the well-deserved praise for his work in the film. It also makes me sad all over again to think that he never got the chance to see how big Hairspray eventually became.