"Linotype: The Film" is a documentary about Ottmar Mergenthaler's amazing Linotype typecasting machine and the people who own and love these machines today.
See also:
The txtBOMBER is a one-hand-guerilla-tool - a machine not much bigger than a pressing iron - that generates political statements on the fly and immediately prints them on any flat surface.
From the archives:
Typography is not simply a frou-frou debate over aesthetics orchestrated by a hidden coterie of graphic-design nerds. You need only imagine a STOP sign that utilizes the heavy-metal typefaces favoured by bands Dokken or Krokus to realize that clear, clean and direct typography can save lives, or at the very least prevent drivers from prolonged bouts of confused squinting.
From the 2008 presidential campaign:
Consider typography to be the window into the soul of the candidate's campaign. The depth, the breadth, the good, the bad and the ugly is all there for us to witness and assess in one clear and telegraphic manner.
It's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for.
Christopher Alexander:
A building or town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed by the timeless way.
The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person ... It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.
It was as if the gods of world history had asked, 'Does somebody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?' and this place had raised its hands and said 'Yeah!'"
Lily Allen:
Hi. Um, I'm just wondering, have you got any kind of like, sort of punky, electronica, kind of grime, kind of like, new wave grime, kind of maybe like more broken beats, like kinda dubby broken beats, but a little bit kind of soulful ...? but kinda drum and bassy, but kinda more broken drum and bass, like sort of broken beats, like break-beat broken kind of drum and bass ... do you know what I mean? No?
See also:
The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing.
Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross's (Hailee Steinfeld) father has been shot in cold blood by the coward Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), and she is determined to bring him to justice. Enlisting the help of a trigger-happy, drunken U.S. Marshal, Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), she sets out with him -- over his objections -- to hunt down Chaney. Her father's blood demands that she pursue the criminal into Indian territory and find him before a Texas Ranger named LeBoeuf (Matt Damon) catches him and brings him back to Texas for the murder of another man.
Jim Jarmusch:
Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.
John Donne:
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.
Morgan and Destiny's Eleventeeth Date - The Zeppelin Zoo
Topic: Arts
7:49 am EDT, Oct 6, 2010
Our man Morgan and his lovebuddy Destiny, along with Mssr. Foodpenguin and that dastardly dip-stick Lionel premiered to two jam-packed houses in Austin.
Jonathan Lethem:
Bob Dylan's originality and his appropriations are as one.
The same might be said of all art.
Stanley McChrystal:
You have to not lose confidence in what you are doing. You have to be able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope.
It starts with Software, where rebel robots bring immortality to their human creator by eating his brain. Software won the first Philip K. Dick Award.
In Wetware, the robots decide to start building people -- and people get strung out on an insane new drug called merge. This cyberpunk classic garnered a second Philip K. Dick award.
By Freeware, the robots have evolved into soft plastic slugs called moldies -- and some human "cheeseballs" want to have sex with them. The action redoubles when aliens begin arriving in the form of cosmic rays.
And with Realware, the humans and robots reach a higher plateau.
On the internet:
I just hope the public won't ever be bullied or bamboozled into letting the bosses bottle up the genie. That's something we need to keep an eye on.
On "Infinity and the Mind":
It is in the realm of infinity that mathematics, science, and logic merge with the fantastic. By closely examining the paradoxes that arise from this merging, we can learn a great deal about the human mind, its powers, and its limitations.
Like every great science fiction novel, "Frek and the Elixir" is really about the present -- about the power of corporations, about media and entertainment, about bioengineering, about quantum mechanics, about your wife or girlfriend, your next-door neighbor, and your boss, and about you, at age twelve, and now.
On "Spaceland":
Spaceland challenges readers to imagine what life might be like in a world with four spatial dimensions.
1-Bit Symphony is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip. Though housed in a CD jewel case like his first circuit album (1-Bit Music 2004-05), 1-Bit Symphony is not a recording in the traditional sense; it literally "performs" its music live when turned on. A complete electronic circuit -- programmed by the artist and assembled by hand -- plays the music through a headphone jack mounted into the case itself. The project is set to be released on Cantaloupe Music on August 24, 2010.
David Hajdu:
Guitar Hero and Rock Band involve musicianship in the same sense that chess involves military service. Rocking, like rooking, is the thematic action; but the content is the form, the rules.
Brian Eno:
It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate -- history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber.
When she sang for The Curfew, Hollis Henry's face was known worldwide. She still runs into people who remember the poster. Unfortunately, in the post-crash economy, cult memorabilia doesn't pay the rent, and right now she's a journalist in need of a job. The last person she wants to work for is Hubertus Bigend, twisted genius of global marketing; but there's no way to tell an entity like Bigend that you want nothing more to do with him. That simply brings you more firmly to his attention.
Milgrim is clean, drug-free for the first time in a decade. It took eight months in a clinic in Basel. Fifteen complete changes of his blood. Bigend paid for all that. Milgrim's idiomatic Russian is superb, and he notices things. Meanwhile no one notices Milgrim. That makes him worth every penny, though it cost Bigend more than his cartel-grade custom-armored truck.
The culture of the military has trickled down to the street -- Bigend knows that, and he'll find a way to take a cut. What surprises him though is that someone else seems to be on top of that situation in a way that Bigend associates only with himself. Bigend loves staring into the abyss of the global market; he's just not used to it staring back.
Stanley McChrystal:
You have to not lose confidence in what you are doing. You have to be able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope.
It is ironic: people don't notice that noticing is important! Or that they're already doing it. It's much easier to recognize more "outbound" activities like brainstorming, testing, designing, refining. But noticing is just as important -- it's really where everything begins.
"Don't just do something, sit there."
It's a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them.
