Eye Magazine: I Braved Designer Scorn to Champion the Kings of Californian Airbrush

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Is the commercial airbrush look, once so dominant in the nineteen-seventies and eighties but then quickly discarded as nearly irredeemable, set for a comeback? Norman Hathaway thinks it might be. In this blog post, he gives a brief overview of his forthcoming book “Overspray: Riding High with the Kings of California Airbrush Art,” which looks closely at the work of four giants of the style and the ideas — or lack thereof — underlying their works.

Hathaway notes plausibly if perhaps defensively: “These pictures weren’t beating you over the head with cleverness or conceptualism. Many airbrush illustrations are simply about objects, free of environments or situations included to support a hokey angle or narrative. There’s usually no puzzle to solve, or plot to follow: perhaps that’s why many are quick to brand the work as empty or frivolous.”

For my part, I very much grew up with this visual vocabulary and was surprised to realize that I had neatly swept it under the rug for so long that I had almost completely forgotten about it. Looking at this work is very much like looking at photos from high school (provided one is of a certain age, of course). The work is exquisitely embarrassing, and yet I can’t deny a certain fondness for it. For those like me whose interest is piqued by this leading edge of nostalgic kitsch, Hathaway has more writing on the subject at the book’s eponymous blog.

Overspray

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iTuning Out DRM

iTunesA bit of back-of-the-envelope math shows that it’ll cost me something like US$60 to upgrade all of my iTunes music purchases to the DRM-free iTunes Plus format. I know, I know. A lot of folks out there will wag a finger and say I should’ve stayed away from buying rights-crippled songs in the first place.

In my defense, I was always skeptical of the iTunes Store and, like the old fogey I am, tried to buy physical compact discs whenever I could. But there was a period of two or three years there when well-meaning people in my life kept giving me iTunes Store gift cards. Of course, as we’re all learning even if we hadn’t realized it before, gift cards are a kind of trap, so it was unavoidable that I eventually accrued a stash of the iTunes Store’s hobbled tracks, in spite of my efforts.

Somewhat understandably then, the upgrade fee burns me a bit. This is mostly because of the way songs from the iTunes Store are limited — in an additive method, not a subtractive method. I pejoratively regard DRM’d goods as broken, but not in that the goods are missing anything. The core of what I need is there; it’s just that there’s an extra layer of restrictions added. All Apple has to do is help me remove the offending code, rather than trade the tracks back in for new ones. As various pirate projects have proven in the past, this is entirely doable so long as DRM cops don’t stand in the way.

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Typecasting

No doubt it’ll strike many as suspicious that a guy who pretty much only uses Helvetica would say this, but most of the new typefaces being released today seem very samey to me.

For instance, there’s plenty of good work on display in I Love Typography’s round-up of the best typefaces of 2008, but in my view, not a whole lot of new expression there. Newzald looks like Matrix, FF Utility looks like Klavika, Soho looks like Apex Serif, etc.

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Photographs of the Abandoned Sets for “The Wire”

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

A muted, haunting reminder that the best show ever aired on television is now behind us.

As it happened, last night I started watching the show’s predecessor, “The Corner.” It’s no surprise that it’s just as well-written and vivid as “The Wire,” or that I’ve developed a significant attachment to the characters in just three episodes. But it’s somewhat shocking to me that it’s even more gritty and uncompromising. Recommended viewing.

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