Category: ultrapolitical

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?

First Mention Of AIDS In Print: 30 Years Ago Today

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Thirty years ago, on June 5, 1981, AIDS was first acknowledged in print.

The article from the Centers for Disease Control wasn’t widely read, and it didn’t give a name to the disease. (It would be another year before scientists found one that fit, after giving several a try, including the terrible GRID, for “gay-related immune deficiency”.)

The paper certainly didn’t talk about HIV, since the virus wasn’t discovered until later. In fact, the article was mostly about the unusual appearance of Pneumocystis pneumonia in five young, gay men in Los Angeles. For all scientists knew, they were dealing with a superstrain of Pneumocystis that could eventually threaten the entire planet.

Well, they were half right.

At first, HIV and AIDS were a major setback for the burgeoning gay rights movement. Things had been moving swiftly for the community until then: the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of diseases in 1974 — just five years after Stonewall — and we were being treated more fairly in the media. We were even featured on popular TV shows like Dynasty and Soap, and although those representations weren’t perfect, they were far better than the psychopathic killers and suicidal maniacs we’d played before.

AIDS took the lives of many who campaigned for those achievements, and even people who weren’t ill were dumbstruck for a time. But grief is an unparalleled motivator, and soon, the LGBT community and its allies had formed sophisticated, efficient activist groups, pushing for treatment and prevention programs, destigmatization, and equal rights. We did as the ACT UP slogan said and turned our sadness into rage.

Over the course of the epidemic, roughly 30,000,000 people around the world have died from AIDS, and another 32,000,000 live with HIV/AIDS today. Treatment has gotten much easier and more bearable for those living with HIV, and there have especially promising developments in recent years, particularly in the area of stem cells and genetic therapy. But there is still no cure.

Take a moment today to think of your friends, family members, and neighbors who have died from AIDS or who are living with HIV/AIDS. Renew your commitment to wiping out this disease. Contribute to a local hospice, sign up for a charity walk, send a letter to your elected officials — whatever fits your style.

Everyone thought that AIDS would be cured by now. Let’s make certain that happens within the next 30 years — or hopefully, far sooner.

[Reposted from the lovely Sturtle. For those who have time, here is the original article from June 5, 1981 (or on the CDC website).]

Continue reading “First Mention Of AIDS In Print: 30 Years Ago Today”

Photos officially OK in NYC

Finally, common sense prevails over security theatre and knee-jerk paranoia:

Faced with complaints from photographers and tourists alike, the NYPD has issued a department order reminding cops that the right to take pictures in the Big Apple is as American as apple pie.

“Photography and the videotaping of public places, buildings and structures are common activities within New York City . . . and is rarely unlawful,” the NYPD operations order begins. [From the New York Post]

[Click the image above to enlarge and print for yourself to carry around, if you’re so inclined.]

Let’s hope they finally drop the anti-photography here in the UK one of these days.

Two Left Hands

Best part of the conference so far? The on-stage battle between Rep. Barney Frank and John Hockenberry about, effectively, which of them is more liberal than the other. Barney Frank has the impassioned viewpoint of a long-term public servant, Hockenberry has the impassioned view of a long-time public commentater. Drama! And big ideas that are not navel-gazing design ideas, which is what I like best at these conferences.

Two huge liberal with big opinions battling out the nuances of what’s the most liberal stance to take on important issues? That feels so Dutch, don’t you think?

Illegal Loft Living? Shocking!

The Times just ran an article about all the illegal lofts in East Williamsburg, especially those in the immediate area of my former residence, the Brooklyn Home for Wayward Bloggers. If you live (or have lived) in the area, you’ll notice that every photo in the article and every street mentioned is within Frisbee distance of the Morgan Ave. L station. Kids, maybe it’s time to get organized again if you want your interests protected. Shockingly enough (and this is where I wish there were some kind of punctuation mark to indicate use of sarcasm), the city is annoyed that landlords defy zoning regulations, yet residents area want to live in cool old buildings even if the circumstance is shady and there’s no recycling. Also, I’m not surprised that realtors never mention that the living situations are totally illegal, but I’m a bit more stunned that people moving into the area are so naive that that don’t realize it within about 5 seconds.

I miss living in Brooklyn a lot, and I miss living in a loft even more. I don’t miss, however, constantly worrying about the threat of eviction or runaway gentrification. (I also don’t miss the asshole who lived across the hall from me who yelled at everyone he didn’t recognize and possibly locked his Yoko-Ono-ish wife inside their loft when he went to work, but that’s another fistful of stories altogether.) Those were the days, eh? I’d still take them back so I could have enough elbow room for guests and photo studio.

A Dirty Raspberry

John Waters and Alan J. Wendl
Tracey Ullman, Selma Blair, et al.

I curated my own double-feature this weekend, checking out two movies about sexual revolution (more or less): The Raspberry Reich, the latest rump romp from Bruce La Bruce, and then A Dirty Shame, the latest farce fest from John Waters. I didn’t intend a themed afternoon, but part of the way into Raspberry Reich it was clearly going to be one, since most of the movie was a tedious rehash of stuff that John Waters has done more successfully (and certainly with better jokes) in the past. It was also a self-described “agit-porn” movie, so it wasn’t much of a leap to consider its kinship to a Waters movie about sexual deviance upsetting a quiet neighborhood in Baltimore.

The Raspberry Reich is the tale of a group of aspiring German revolutionaries aping the gimmicks of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, and they happen to screw each other a lot and quote a lot of radical propaganda along the way. I wanted to stab pencils in my eyes most of the time. No, I take that back: it would have been pleasant enough to watch the gay sex and the punk/camp art direction if I could be spared the wooden dialogue, the pedantry, and the terrible sound quality. I always want to like Bruce LaBruce movies more than I do because I get what he’s doing (and I like subversion and gay porn), but his movies always strike me as being so blunt, with so little energy. Yeah, there’s some good camp, but it falls flat. It’s interesting to watch pornography and philosophy collide, but not when it has to rely on the comic timing or acting chops of porn stars. “Gay is not enough,” as the saying goes, and neither is punk. It still has to come together somehow, and hopefully do something a little more interesting.

John Waters has handled the clichés of revolution before (and more adroitly) in Cecil B. Demented (and even flirted with it in Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble), and even though his humor can be pretty blunt — sight gags and one-liners — he and his casts always revel in the material. Everyone always has fun and plays their parts to the hilt, and often that zeal makes for better performances than traditional acting skills might. His films are like a celebrity roast, somehow managing to spoof and celebrate at the same time. They’re famous for being shocking, but shock always fades over time, and even the earlier, cruder ones still work because they’re smart enough to hint at more than they show. They lampoon both sides of any argument (with more than a touch of sympathy for the underdog), but pretty much leave it to you to figure out who the real freaks are, who goes further over the top in defense of what they believe.

And A Dirty Shame does it again. Sorry, Bruce, it’s not so shocking to show sex in this day and age, especially if you have a jaded audience. What’s pretty outré, though, is to take a subject as highly charged as sex and make merciless fun of it. It’s a movie that’s relentlessly showing, cataloguing, and laughing at every perversion it can think of, and taking the erotic charge out of all of it. It’s not salacious in any way — it’s just having fun with how much we sexualize everything around us, regardless of whether we think all that sex is bad or good. And it’s having a lot of fun with that. The revolutionary part of all this is that it’s daring a jaded audience to take itself less seriously. Do what you want — and as much as you possibly can — but you’re not necessarily any more outrageous than the guy down the street. The revolutionary idea, of a kind that always lurks around and under all the jokes and the gags and the camp in John Waters’ universe, is that we’re all kinda freaky, and that’s good. We can all be sexy, as long as we believe we are. Your perversion isn’t bad, but your interference with someone else’s perversion is. Why shouldn’t we laugh ourselves into epiphany? It’s probably more effective than trying to badger or seduce us into one. Enjoy the ride, and let the dangerous ideas creep up on you later when you least expect it.

Tedious hostage scene
Tedious masturbation scene

IMHO

IMHO

Those wretched “Peaceful Political Activist” buttons aren’t the only alternative to making a ruckus in protest of the Really Nasty Convention next week. The first annual Imagine Festival, of Arts, Issues and Ideas is putting on a number of programs all over the city which may not be expressly partisan, are certainly leaning to the left quite a bit.

My event of choice, naturally, will be on Tuesday, August 31, at 7:00 p.m., when the WYSIWYG Talent Show gathers together an amazing braintrust of bloggers/pundits for what promises to be an incredible panel discussion on blogging and politics. Seriously, check out the details I think this is gonna be great.

Also in WYSIWYG news, I’ve finally responded to the numerous pleas to set up a blog (http://www.wysiwygtalentshow.org/blog/) on the site for news and reviews about the shows, as well as news about other cool things being done by WYSIWYG alumni. In particular, you may want to peek at this entry for our preliminary list of show dates and topics for the next year. After all, we’re always looking for new talent…

The Great Blackout of Aught-Three

The Great Blackout of Aught-Three, as experienced by me:

  • Frankly, I enjoyed it. I have many blessings to count, I realize I live within a feasible walking distance from home, I was wearing comfortable shoes, the iPod was fully charged and loaded (and it also makes an excellent source of light in a darkened emergency stairwell), my apartment’s not that stuffy so I had a much easier time of it than a lot of other people. Still, it was a nice enough day and it was pretty interesting to see what was going on during the hike uptown and over the bridge. I have to admit that at times I had to stop myself from breaking into song along with the iPod, because I was so nonplussed about the whole experience, and I was finding so pleasant to just walk and watch people and stuff.
  • I LOVE NYOf course, it all would have been so much worse if the rest of the city hadn’t been so laid back about it all. Compared to that other time, no one was was freaking out that I could see. We calmly climbed down the 20 stories to the street, where people were hanging out talking to others, deciding what to do. Walking up Lexington Avenue toward the Queensboro Bridge, people were waiting calmly on lines at pay phones, delis, and ice cream trucks, and the only ones being assholes were the fat-cats sealed up in their SUVs who were pissed off that they didn’t have the right of way anymore. And for once, no one was greeting their hostility with more hostility. People were just rolling their eyes at the temper tantrums. Every truck driver with extra room was telling people to hop on, and at the bridge there was a human chain lifting others onto the upper roadway for the trudge home.
  • If I had to be stuck in a major city during a massive power blackout, I’m sure as hell glad it was this one. New York’s active street-level culture is normally a plus from a social standpoint, but it’s also useful in a crisis. It’s a pedestrian city, so if you’re forced to hike across it, there is no shortage of places to get water, food, or alcohol. There are lots of payphones, in case the cellular networks are down or overloaded. People are used to regular contact with strangers, so it’s not a big deal to interact with your neighbors or other people on the street. It becomes much more of a shared event.
  • I’m very grateful that delis and greengrocers stayed open long enough to let people stock up on provisions for the night. All we had at home was a half-gallon of milk and some wheat bread, so I was lucky to grab some fruit to snack on during the night.
  • Even with my rose-tinted view of life in New York, I was amazed at the lack of street crime and looting, especially after living through the blackout of ’77, and then later living in the middle of the neighborhood (Bushwick) where most of the looting and the fires took place. I guess it was part of the relief that this was just a blackout. Also, I have to give our charisma-free mayor some credit for telling everyone the power would be back by midnight last night. By letting everyone think it would get back to normal soon, those announcements probably prevented a lot of mayhem during the night.
  • I’d always believed the party line about this problem being solved after ’77, but I guess a certain vulnerability is the nature of any interconnected system. Even if safeguards had been put in place since ’77, I suspect that power usage has increased enough to leave us back in the same position. Bush is already yapping on about how the system needs to be modernized, but I bet he’s thinking along the lines of lucrative contracts to his pals in the petrochemical and other traditional power industries. I’m thinking more about the sensibility of alternative power sources, especially fuel-cell networks that would allow cars to dump excess fuell-cell power back into the grid, rather than letting it burn off while the car is idle.

Lies! Lies! Lies! Ye-ah!

AAAAAAARRGH! Again! And again! And again! And again! And again! What the fuck is wrong with everybody? It’s not alien trickery, and it’s more than just media bias. It’s us that’s part of the problem, even if we’re paying attention to what’s actually happening. It’s not even a new problem!

Last night I went to a fantastic AIGA event called Hell No: Designers and The War, where I got to hear an incredible array of people try to express their frustration, their anger, their stupefication, and even a little bit of their hope about the state of our union. Sure, they were preaching to the choir, but the feeling was pervasive that no one was really appreciating how far out of control things are going.

Trying to think of stuff to spread around on stickers or posters or something, I scrawled this stuff in my notebook:

  • If you REALLY loved this country you’d be furious at the people running it.
  • So why CAN’T we change anything?
  • What else do they have to do before we do something about it?
  • America and its government are not the same thing. We’re ALLOWED to disapprove.

Ugh. Feeling powerless again…

High Anxiety

All week long, I’ve been filing away teeny little reminders of what I should write, but it’s been difficult to summon the will to compose lucid sentences during the little free time I’ve had. Italy was wonderful and rejuvenating and extraordinary (and I guess occasional stories will spill forth from time to time), but being back in the States for just a couple of days nipped all that in the bud. Once I had steady access to the media again, all that tranquility was replaced by dread and anxiety. I’m a little tanner, but it seems that I’ve become a fidgety, lethargic, nervous wreck.

Can you guess why? Yeah, I thought so.

I’m not suffering from some kind of liberal, pacifistic, anti-war reflex, though. I can whip myself into an indignant frenzy when I discuss my views on this situation, but in many respects my reaction is more intellectual than visceral. Though I’m grateful to be able to say this, I’m also not very proud to admit that I don’t really have a true sense of the scale of destruction that has been and will be occurring, one which can stir true empathy. That luxury, I think, is exactly what feeds into the thing that really is twisting me into such knots: the way our republic seems to be disintegrating around us, without much effective opposition.

Every day it’s getting worse, this feeling that we’re on a runaway train. The start of the attacks this week just feels like the part of that nightmare where we come around the bend toward the bridge that’s been washed out. We all knew it was there, but now we see it. I fiercely disagree with how our government has been been behaving. I see a concensus about Saddam Hussein being a thug, but I haven’t seen enough compelling arguments to justify what we’re doing about it. There’s a lot of manipulation, distortion of facts, empty rhetoric, and more hypocrisy than I can shake a stick at, but not enough substantial reasoning to convince me that our nation should be behaving this way. I hear proclamations of our commitment to liberty, to freedom, to compassion, but all I see is a reality that belies those things: censorship in the name of free speech, hostility in the name of peace, persecution in the name of liberty, and self-interest in the name of patriotism. I don’t really think any of this is new to America’s history, but it’s getting absurd. I’ve never felt so strongly that we’ve already lost too much ground to make things right again. Our democracy feels all topsy-turvy: are representatives don’t seem to represent us, our freedoms are selectively doled out and rigorously controlled, our corporations have more rights and privileges than our citizens. How do we keep letting this happen?

What the fuck, ya know? Is anyone ever going to convince us that the emperor has no clothes?

I keep saying “us” and “we” because despite all the disagreement that I know is out there, it still feels like discourse is dead. Everyone talks or shouts but no one ever listens. Even if we disagree how things are done, though, we’re still stuck in the same boat together, and it’s still sinking, even if a bunch of us keep trying to do something about it. We’re not really free because we’re all going down the drain together, whether we like it or not.

Feh. It’s making me crazy.