ultrascrapbook – Ultrasparky

A small tribute to James Mosley

In 2007, I had just turned in my MA dissertation at Reading, and spent a few weeks volunteering at St. Bride to help them shift books and boxes around the building so they could renovate. One day, James Mosley and his wife dropped by, because the library had asked James to finally clean out a storage closet he had started using when he had been the librarian. Among the impressive collections of Penguin paperbacks and assorted magazines, he had also saved many of his childhood toys and school notebooks. (He was struggling with maths as a youngster!)

He very kindly let me keep these sweet tin and wood toys of his, which were probably from around 1940. He also gave me a random matrix drawer from the Figgins foundry that had been sitting in a pile of odds and ends, and encouraged me to sit in on his lectures again as long as I was still living in Reading with time on my hands. I have to confess that his rich curriculum of type history was much easier to process the second time around, once I’d already had time to digest what he’d shared with us during the year of MA. James was generous with his knowledge and insights, but it was this small act of generosity with his personal nostalgia that still sits with me all these years later. I thank him for all of it.

Climaxing

I’m quietly obsessed with this dance sequence that kicks in about 10 minutes into Gaspar Noé’s film “Climax”. It is sublime, and there is more to notice every time I watch.

I regularly re-watch the sequence, just trying to follow the movements of individual performers in the ensemble. Sometimes, I just like to let the whole thing wash over me.

I also 🤩 the main title sequence, and that it happens 46 minutes into the film, just as things really start getting freaky.

The “Climax” titles are right up there with the title sequence from Noé’s “Enter the Void”.

Look for the Union Label, part 2

That last post was a tease, because this was in the planning stages:

What We Saw Was What We Got

I missed this when it was first posted, but my old pal Andy wrote a bit about an old project I was a part of: The WYSIWG Talent Show.

Worst Sex Ever and the WYSIWYG Talent Show, or Tales from Blogland

I wish the old web site were still alive and functioning (but you can look through my old posts or browse on the Wayback Machine), since over the course of three years or so we really put on some spectacular shows, and worked with a lot of wonderful and talented people — many of whom have found fame and success in a variety of fields.

As Andy talks about in his article, it all feels like a snapshot of a bygone era of internet culture. Even then, I think we were trying to preserve a personal, organically interconnected version of the online experience before it all washed away.

It was one era, passing onto another. Similarly, I feel like it might be time to shift gears again. For many years now, I surrendered too many of my thoughts and updates and connections to a series of social networks, very much at the expense of the body of work (if you can call it that) I’d been cultivating on this site since 1996. Not only did I offer all that energy to the commercial objectives of big companies, but I got swept up in as many bad habits of being online as rewarding ones. Time, I thing, to return to Ultrasparky and scream into the void from my own place.

Welcome to Bijou Type!

At last, I have finally launched my tiny little type foundry, Bijou Type. To mark the occasion, My distributor/employer Type Network wrote a nice little feature about me and the work.

When Dan Rhatigan joined TN in 2021, he teased a potential return to type design: “If I can manage my time well, there should finally be some more of my own work making its way into the world.” That finally is here, in the form of Bijou Type. With the foundry’s launch, Rhatigan shares how Letraset helps him focus on end users, why Bijou’s fonts look so Dan, and the three meanings behind Bijou.
Type Network