SEDUCTIVE AND intoxicating, playfully surreal and inexplicably moving, "Jellyfish" is almost impossible to pin down or even categorize. Artistic, daring, surprising, it resists fitting into words at all.

Underlying "Jellyfish's" sense that the world is a more remarkable place than we may imagine is its willingness to embrace surrealism as a story element. Working with a remarkable sureness of touch, the film's directors understand that what's imaginary and what's real can be made to look exactly the same on film, and that what makes logical sense is less important than deeper emotional truth. Yes, "Jellyfish" says, it's a wonderful life, not in that old-fashioned style we've perhaps tired of but in a surprising new and magical way all its own.

'Jellyfish'

One of the great aesthetic legacies of the Soviet Union is the great wealth of magnificent propaganda posters it left behind. In this post, I present some personal favorites.

Propaganda Design & Aesthetics: Soviet Retro Posters

Dorothy clearly knew, as the entry for October 4, 1802, indicates, that life would change irrevocably once her brother began to share his bed with Mary. The business of the wedding ring, which she wore on her finger for the night before he was married, and the trance into which she fell, “neither seeing nor hearing anything”, while the ceremony was performed at the church down the road, betray her abnormal state. Wilson disagrees with Dorothy’s biographers Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, who said that her words here are of “transparent truthfulness”: I half suspect that by “transparent” they may have meant “unwittingly revealing”, but were too kind to say so. Wilson is, rightly, more overtly suspicious of double motives and meanings, but I find it impossible to tell whether Dorothy knew how strange her emotion might appear to others, or whether she found it strange herself. Neither Wilson nor Gittings and Manton comment on the fact that Dorothy, in her letters, usually referred to the latest Wordsworth child as “our baby”. One wonders what Mary made of that.

Poor Dorothy Wordsworth

Scarlett Johansson's inspired Atco Records debut album ANYWHERE I LAY MY HEAD features her distinctive interpretations of ten songs by Tom Waits plus one original selection, "Song For Jo." Johansson co-wrote the track with TV On The Radio's David Andrew Sitek, who produced the album and lends his multi-instrumental talents throughout as well. She is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration and others.

Scarlett Johansson: Anywhere I Lay My Head

Nora hates Times New Roman. She blogged about it awhile back, and lots of people chimed with in their take on favourite and despised fonts.

Virginal Postrel likes Times New Roman, but Nora forgives her. Virginia is a writer for The Atlantic Monthly Magazine and she's the author of The Substance of Style. Virginia wrote a great piece earlier this year about fonts and why they are so hot right now. She delves into the cultural and business trends that are driving our interest in typefaces.

Virginia appears on this week's episode of Spark.

See also:

DVNO by JUSTICE: Typography from the 1980s.

Virginia Postrel on fonts

Typography from the 1980s.

DVNO by JUSTICE

Six Authors. Six Stories. Six Weeks.

We Tell Stories

using the process of organic information design to visualize the changing structure of a web site, juxtaposed with usage information

movie | anemone | ben fry

While hanging out with the folks at Harvard's student radio station for a story about a long-running specialty show, Phoenix music editor Michael Brodeur was shown a shelf filled with grade-school-style composition notebooks dating back to the early 1980s. Since first coming on the air in 1984, DJs at WHRB's Record Hospital have been keeping meticulous records of every night, every playlist, every song (or non-song) they've ever played. (And let's face it: any radio station that can go 24 years without playing "Sister Christian" deserves a closer look.)

The hand-written journals, which were kept in the studios and became the primary means of communication between dozens of DJs, reveal that many of the tropes that we tend to associate with message boards -- the snarky put-downs, the punning screen-names, the long-running flame wars -- were actually alive and kicking at least a decade before the Web browser. It's kind of like finding AIM chats in a cave painting.

Ancient Pre-Internet Message Boards Unearthed at Harvard

The booklet 2063 A.D. was published by General Dynamics Astronautics, and placed into a time capsule in July of 1963. It is believed that only 200 copies were ever printed. The 50 page book contains predictions by scientists, politicians, astronauts and military commanders about the state of space exploration in the year 2063. This edition is a reprint made from scans of the original 1963 book.

2063 A.D. by Matt Novak