So far this weekend: I taught some of our volunteers on Saturday about the joy and wonder of handset type. Letterpress is all about controlling chaos, I explained, demonstrating how to keep small pieces of metal from flying into the air.
Tonight I ate dinner alone and came home to read this here. Huzzah!
Raise your hand if this was your wish. I need to know who was responsible.
Yesterday while walking away from the Hudson along Chambers street, a nice young man came up to me and announced that he’d been given a deformed avocado by a pair of Turks and he thought it was a bad omen, or no, not a bad omen, he just didn’t want it, so would I take it? I live in Brooklyn, right? I can plant it in my garden? He thought this was all the deformed avocado would be good for. I told him I unfortunately had no garden to plant it in, and he said, but you can throw it at a taxi? Or a cop car? And I said, well, no, no thank you. And he said, But I want you to take it! Please!
I didn’t take it. I’m difficult like that. But I think he was just kidding.
This is why I like the longer hours of daylight in the summer: so I can wander around the city after work and collect stories like this one.
I almost bought this today, in honor of my brother, who Must Rise Above It, unfortunately. It’s one of Penguin’s Great Ideas series, which all have these fake letterpress covers, which I’m a little mystified by. You can read the essay that gives this book its name here. It’s a fun rant.
Martha Clippinger‘s work wound up in my lap yesterday and I think it’s charming. She’s a current resident in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program, which is having an open studio event this weekend. See here for details.
I spent a long time today looking at Diana Cooper‘s work, like this one, isn’t it lovely?
My favorite book in the current exhibit at my place of employment is this one:
by Christien Meindertsma, which indexes the myriad of products and processes a single pig can be used for- products ranging from ammunition, paint, glue, heart valves, brakes, chewing gum, to porcelain, cosmetics, and conditioner. There’s a great graphic in the beginning which diagrams the part of the pig each product comes from, and the book as a whole is organized around the various parts-bone, blood, meat, etc, with some satisfying die-cuts to mark each section. I love that it is about the uses of a specific pig, and not just pigs in general, and that the introduction talks about the traditional food uses of every part of the pig in Sicilian cooking, and how the global industrial approach to a pig takes that to an extreme you could never have imagined. But mostly I just love the replica of the ear tag on the spine that identified Christien’s particular pig.
You can see more of her work, and more images of the book here.
