This Saturday in New York City, the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (whew) presents Helvetica: Typography and Literacy: a free screening of Helvetica and all-star roundtable discussion. The film will screen at 1pm, followed by a roundtable at 2:30pm with myself, lettering artist Christopher Calderhead, New York Times Magazine Art Director Arem Duplessis, calligrapher Elinor Aishah Holland, and artist Elaine Lustig Cohen, moderated by SVA design god and man-of-a-thousand-design-books Steven Heller.
Four big reasons to go:
1) It’s free (first come, first seated)
2) This roundtable is going to be crazy
3) It might be the only public Helvetica screening I’ll be participating in this year
4) The Philoctetes Center got burned in the Madoff scandal, lost their funding, and could really use your support
It’s impossible to cram a full film’s worth of people, ideas, and images into 90 seconds. But we tried to, sort of. Get an advance peek at the first trailer we’re releasing, this morning at 9am EST on Gizmodo. We’ll be posting it here later in the day.
Dutch design activists and musicologists Experimental Jetset have (finally!) updated their website and online archive, which gets us caught up on the last three years of their output. Why the wait? A) They’ve been busy, uhm, designing lots of things, and stressing out about it. And B) They write detailed essays about the process, design strategy, and philosophical underpinnings of every project, with meticulous photos. I like the preview mode, where you can view thumbnails of their entire archive on one page. Great stuff, guys!
And I really want the “I Want Less” T-shirt. Yes, I appreciate the irony of the preceding sentence.
I’ll try to put aside my reservations about wasted electrical power on this one. Not to mention unnecessary material consumption (what did they do with all those microwaves afterwards?). Happy Holidays!
As part of the build-up to Helvetica’s US television debut, PBS has launched a fairly extensive mini-site with loads of info, clips, and other treats. Helvetica will be broadcast nationwide on Tuesday, January 6th, but check your local PBS listings for exact date and time in your area.
Play the What Font Are You? game… I did, and apparently, I’m Times New Roman!
Attention graphics geeks: Graham Wood, a founding member of design group Tomato and now with JWT in New York, will be doing a Q&A with director Stephen Kijak at this Friday’s screening of Scott Walker: 30 Century Man. Graham did the motion graphics and animation for the film.
Graham and Stephen will be doing a Q&A after the 7:40pm screening. Get tickets.
As a lot of you know, I’m a big music documentary fan. There’s an excellent one premiering here in New York this week: Scott Walker – 30 Century Man. Walker was a teen heartthrob in Britain’s swinging ’60s pop scene (with hits like “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”) but then completely withdrew from the fame game and for the last 40 years he’s been making dark, dense, complex solo records. Oh, and did I mention the movie stars David Bowie (who also executive produced the film), Radiohead, Jarvis Cocker, Brian Eno, Damon Albarn, Neil Hannon, Marc Almond, Alison Goldfrapp, and Sting? All big Walker fans. If you don’t know his music, you need to. Now.
It’s playing at the IFC Center Theaters for one week only, starting tonight. If you’re here in NYC, check it out… it’ll also be playing in a dozen other US cities in the next few months. Here’s the trailer. I love the snippet from his Jacques Brel cover Jackie. I remember when I first heard it, I thought he was singing, “…about the time they called me Shaggy.” Heh heh.
I did some street shooting here in New York over the weekend, getting some b-roll footage of shopping/consumerism. I took a break to get some lunch, and when I sat down at a table, I stood my camera tripod up and leaned it against the wall of the restaurant. While I was eating, a little boy probably three years old walked up to my table, staring at the tripod. It was about the same height as he was, and he was really fascinated by it.
Then, cautiously, he asked the tripod, “Are you a robot?”
The tripod did not respond.
“Hi there,” I said.
He looked up at me for a second, then back at the tripod.
“Are you a robot?” he asked it again.
“Yes, he is a robot,” I told him. “But he’s taking a nap.”
“Ohhhhh,” the boy nodded. He stared very intently at the tripod-robot for another minute, then his dad came over and got him and they left.
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