If you are a regular here at Ultrasparky, then there’s a good chance you’re either a type nut, or kind of a homo. (Those are both wonderful things, and I applaud for either. You may still be lovely even if you are neither.) If you are either of those things, there’s a chance you’ve heard this song. If you are both of those things, than I would be horrified if you were not aware of this beautiful moment in time when Towa Tei (formerly of Deee-Lite) got Kylie Minogue to sing a song about a typeface.
Not to brag or anything, but I have been obsessed with this song since the moment it was released in 1998. It may have been the first time I ever encounted Kylie Minogue, and it’s still the only thing of hers I really love. [Note, added 11/27/2024: What the hell was I thinking? Kylie Minogue is iconic and it pains me that I didn’t think so at the time.] The original CD shipped with a font called German Bold Italic, but as you can see, it was dreadful:
My pal Dan (at ultrasparky.tumblr.com and pinkmince.tumblr.com) told me over the weekend that Justin Bieber and John Waters met on a talk show in the UK, and that somewhere out there was a picture of the little guy with a John Waters mustache drawn on. I had to go looking…
Here’s the full story, if you’re interested: http://bit.ly/hqDiDb. All you really need to know, though, is this:
Not long after the shrieking died down from Bieber’s introduction, the 16-year-old asked if he could say something. He leaned across to Waters’ end of the couch and pronounced as only a teen could: “Your ‘stache is the jam.”
“Thank you. Thank you very much,” Waters replied, a big smile on his face. He then pulled an eyebrow pencil from his pocket and handed it down to Bieber, saying, “If you want to try it…. Can I draw it on you?”
Bieber took the pen but declined Waters’ offer of artistry. “I’m good,” he demurred. “Maybe later.”
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 Spence 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.
One of the intrepid designers who have purchased a license for Sodachrome (perhaps you recall me mentioning that lovely typeface designed by the talented Ian Moore and me?) is my pal Todd Macfie, a designer in Vancouver who I got to know at Type Camp India last December. After seeing some of the early print samples of Sodachrome when we visited our screenprinter in Chennai, Todd thought it would be a good fit for a project he was developing about self-reflexive literature and hybrid forms of the book. At last, he finally sent me a quick video of his completed prototype book, which features many pages of big, vibrant silkscreens of Sodachrome.
[You know, you can get a license for Sodachrome, too, if you like. Just get in touch.]
One of the points I try and make when I talk about “bad” type (let’s just say it’s of dubious quality, for whatever reason) is that a good designer can do brilliant things with almost any typeface with enough imagination and care and balls. And when I say stuff like that, I envision amazing things like this (warning: may cause seizures, but that’s a small price to pay):
