Total Eclipse of the Heart

L’EclisseIn the next few days I expect — or at least I hope — we’ll see a lot of thoughtful remembrances of the life and work of the great Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who died on Monday at the age of ninety-four. Here’s the Times obituary and critic Stephen Holden’s insightful appraisal, plus an article at Slate that tackles this great loss from the doubly unfortunate angle of having also lost Ingmar Bergman the same day. What a tragic day for film.

These and other articles will give you a much more well-rounded idea of Antonioni’s career and impact than I ever could. Still, I want to add one thing: his 1962 masterwork “L’Eclisse” is among my favorite movies of all time. Few more elegant, exquisitely crafted or beautifully populated essays on alienation have ever been committed to film.

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Don’t Ever Leave the Airport

While my trip to New Mexico was thoroughly enjoyable — you can now see my pictures posted to Flickr — I’ve just about had it with traveling.

Thanks to a combination of inclement weather and corporate incompetence, my return trip from Albuquerque, NM to New York City took a total of twenty-four hours. My original and re-scheduled flights were delayed, canceled or, through airline mismanagement, never properly booked no less than six times, causing me to spend virtually all day yesterday sitting on my rear at airport gates. It felt like a miracle when I limped home at 1:00a on Tuesday morning after first setting out for the airport late on Sunday evening.

For me, there are two take-aways from this misadventure: first, I’ll never again violate my personal rule of avoiding layover itineraries when traveling across the continental United States, especially if I’m flying into or from relatively small market destinations like Albuquerque. It’s just too risky; when a scheduled flight is canceled or delayed, the paucity of flight alternatives can be disastrous. Direct is the only way to go.

Second, I’ll never again fly the airline I flew to and from Albuquerque — whose name, in the interest of discretion, I won’t reveal here. That’s right, I’m not saying who it was that squandered an entire day of my life. Not even if you call me names, put a curse on my subway line, or even if you acronym-ize the title of this blog post.

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Way Out West

This weekend I’m in the beautiful state of New Mexico visiting my good friends Gong and Bonnie, who live in Santa Fe. It’s my first trip here ever, and it’s beautiful. The light, in particular, is unnaturally gorgeous. Or, at least, that’s how I’m explaining the photos I’ve been taking today.

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One Book to Specify Them All

FontBookSome people find it hard to believe, but I do in fact like to use typefaces other than Helvetica. Recently, for instance, I’ve been really feelin’ Apex Serif, a beautiful, contemporary typeface that, as the name suggests, even has serifs. I like it so much that it’s the primary typeface for a side project I’m working that’s currently in ‘coming soon’ mode.

It’s not that often that I come across typefaces that I like as much as Helvetica, or even as much as Apex Serif. I probably wouldn’t have found it, though, if I hadn’t been flipping through the FontShop’s massive, nearly comprehensive tome, “FontBook.” It’s billed as “the largest typeface reference in the world,” and just a single flip through its 1,500 pages leaves one with no reason to doubt that claim.

The book is most directly a product of the mad mind of Erik Spiekermann and co-edited by Jürgen Siebert and Mai-Linh Thi Truong. But I was first turned on to this new version by Stephen Coles, author and editor of the wonderful Typographica blog. Stephen was a long-time user of the previous edition of the book, and was so persistent in sending his notes and corrections to the editors, that they hired him to help with this edition, fact-checking, editing and working on cross-references. In the interview that follows (conducted over email), I asked him about who would take on an outsized project like this and why.

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