20 May 2009
I’ve been thinking a bit about babies.
UPDATED MAY 21, 2009: Now I know why politicians kiss them & single men will borrow them from friends to stroll around with in public parks. Everyone loves babies!
This post received an unexpectedly high level of offline response. A friend from far away wrote, “I’m hoping to sit down with you over a something, soon, find out why you’re thinking about babies, their little dimply wrists, oh!” Another asked if my biological clock was ticking. (Technically that would be a no, because I don’t have one. Apparently science education in America still really lags behind.) A third person, a two time father who is related to the baby pictured above by marriage, was disappointed that I featured only a photograph and no deep thoughts.
Do I even have deep thoughts about babies, though? Does anyone? The special thing about them seems to be how they inspire not deep contemplation, but instant feeling.
What I wonder is if those feelings differ by gender? By whether you, yourself, are a parent? By age, income level, and experience? Et cetera. Do new parents always look at their baby one way, while a grizzled grandparent always looks to babies with a different set of associations in mind? Of course everyone has a slightly different worldview, but statistically speaking, is there a mean average view on the subject based on where you are in the river of life?
Read more »
Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Babies, Photos, Video, Youth
Leave a Comment
1 April 2009
Media in the Age of Digital Media aka The Cloud, The Book, Shirky & Me
Eight years ago (!?!), while freelancing for an unusually open-minded alternative newspaper called LA Weekly, I started on what I imagined as a triumverate of stories about the death of old music media (vinyl, CDs, etc.) and the birth of…something else in the era of the Cloud. I’ll summarize them in more depth below but essentially, the first effort was about Art in the Era of Digital Media, and the second was about Business in the Era of Digital Media. The third article would have to be about Media in the Era of Digital Media, but I have yet to write it.
There are a number of reasons why.
First the positive perspective: I am pretty good with artists and often able to spot progressive musical memes early on; I have a pretty solid business head on my shoulders insofar as I am pragmatic, if not ahead of the curve, about money matters; I am not, however, much of a technology guy. My hope was that someone else more directly involved in high level thought about publishing might write that third article for me.
Now, the bad news: I haven’t found that person or that article quite yet. Rays of light, however, have begun to shine through. As the collapse of old media institutions becomes more and more apparent, more people in the content industries (journalism, academia, publishing) are making credible efforts at writing my theoretical piece — one that roughly explains how media creation and consumption will look in the future. After the jump, I summarize my pieces, then point toward three recent efforts by third parties to sketch out the future!
Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Clay Shirky, Essay, Internet Fads, Music Business, Youth
Leave a Comment
8 May 2008
Peter Saville explains why he won hearts & minds with his record cover designs
You’ve probably already seen this:
…it seemed a good moment to share it again, though, because it’s a meme that has legs. Check out the new video for R&B singer Erykah Badu. (Annoyingly it’s is not embeddable but you can view it by clicking over to YouTube.)
Why do album covers stick with us so deep in memory, as indelible as old photos of family and friends, if not more so? Well, this phenomenon popped into my head as I was reading Designed by Peter Saville, a book about the British designer most renown for his work with the post-punk scene of the early 80s (Joy Division, Factory Records, and OMD). As his reputation grew he began to do more and more straight ahead pop projects — including Wham! — and this work remains somewhat less appreciated by the hipster cognesceti. But there’s no good reason for that, really. Take, for example, the cover he designed for Peter Gabriel — a piece which, to my mind, pioneers an entirely new sub-genre of graphics: erotic typography. (A detail of Saville’s cover for Gabriel’s So appears to the right of this text. Note the masterful use of two different fonts side-by-side, the “S” and the “o” caught in a push/pull relation as compelling & tense as a pair of foiled lovers.)
In the early 90s, Saville and one of his partners — partnership & collaboration being a major part of his practice — spent a few years in Los Angeles where he produced work like that pictured to the left of this text. While he was in LA, he worked for my uncle for a brief spell. Eventually, Saville was fire because of his disdain for corporate clients; his disinclination to work during banker’s hours (or even a designer’s more lax 11am-to-9pm schedule); and, finally, his gross inability to fit into any kind of standard workplace environment. (I believe he was caught fucking in his office.)
In any case, I guess we should be thankful for Saville’s inability to grow up. Because he is a designer who remained young — his imagination fired by desire and interest rather than pragmatism and professionalism — his portfolio never went to shit. It’s something most of us can only aspire to. This Q&A from the book gets at his philosophy & understanding of why record cover designs can be so unique, so memorable, so poweful.
Peter Saville: On a trip to London in the early seventies, I bought a pack of soap flakes from the Biba shop — they were packaged in art deco dark brown and beige. I thought “Why don’t supermarkets sell groovy-looking soap flakes?” It was about positioning the product in the context of lifestyle. The first opportunities that came to us were a Buzzcocks cover for Malcolm, and a clothes shop for me.
Christopher Wilson: Of all the badly designed products you saw around you, surely many of them — such as soap flakes — looked generally worse than the average record cover?
Peter Saville: Yes, they did. But you don’t get much work to do when you’re young, because you haven’t learned how to do it yet. You certainly aren’t given the soap flakes. You’re given simple, disposable things to design for other young people
…
This is the most important point pertaining to my work: Malcolm and I, and to some extent Neville, were granted an autonomous zone within pop because it didn’t matter. Records were not sold the way soap flakes were sold, so we were given opportunity.
But we got to do that work in service of another work — the music inside. It was made by young people, on its way to other young people, and into their hearts and minds. That’s the key thing. A soap flakes box was never addressed to hearts and minds. But pop music, and particularly subcultural pop music, is a delivery system which goes straight there. It’s the single biggest influence on teenagers. Those covers could have been posters or postcards, and a few people might have quite liked them. But without the music it would not have gone to the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands people.
I don’t know if I’ve ever read a better articulation of why records (covers & all) are so important to me, and why I hope they survive into the digital age. Wouldn’t we all be a little bit less with images like these in our lives?
After the jump, a few more words from Mr. Saville…
Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Graphic Design, Peter Saville, Youth