Finito
Thesis complete (1st edition). This got me thinking about the 2nd ed.
Now I have letterpress on my mind...
In the meantime, I'll be uploading a PDF.
Ut pictura poiesis
"as is painting so is poetry”
(Ut pictura poiesis--Horace, Ars Poetica)
Jacopo Ramonda (songwriter-poet-musician) and I met because he was looking to have a better pronunciation. Being from Texas he had no idea that my accent is standard, American that is. Now thinking back, it would have been rather cool to add a southern twang to his indy grunge rock sound. I approached him to help him on his new cd, but this time with the visuals. I felt I had first hand knowledge having spent a good part of my life in a place where grunge isn't just a style of music but a way of life, albeit mostly Saturday or Sunday brunch at Guerro's South Congress in Austin,TX.
Jacopo's needs were centered around the word "naive", and I was then left to materialize it. As early 20th century Surrealists, Dadists and Futurists' affinity with poetry, my inspiration for his cd and subsequent website was a hand drawing of a boy playing off a graphic design piece I had done some years back. The concept behind it was The Morton Salt Girl, you know the girl with the umbrella vintage 1968--the girl's umbrella that connotes the boy's forever wistful haven. I had found an equally dreamy poem about a tender hearted boy that wrote it for her that goes like this, "I'm in love with the Morton Salt Girl. I want to pour salt in her hair and watch her dance. I want to walk her through the salt rain and pretend that it is water. I want to get lost in the Washington Cathedral and follow her salt trail to freedom..."
Conceptually it made sense to use this tender hearted boy yet again to make leaps and bounds and offer up the chance to enter his private world juxtapose reality--Jacopo's play on words in his song lyrics and poetry being somewhat akin. Oriental artists must have had something similar in mind when using calligraphy as a means of expressing painting and poetry in the late 19th c. Technically, hand drawn text and sketches in the design mirror the low-fi quality of Jacopo's music.
Ezra Page's website has original poetry by Jacopo too, one of which was recognized by the reader's poll of The Rolling Stone Magazine.
Marco Missano from Rome, also intrigued, approached Jacopo and spun out an award winning woolgathering video for his song entitled "Joy Machine", which won Best Music Video at London Independent Film Festival 2009.
http://www.ezrapage.com/
Lackadaisical: adjective-lacking spirit or liveliness; lethargic; listless; languid.
It's June, a September thesis deadline, and that word deadline is starting to sound strangely ominous. My research has taken me away from producing art work for this project. Love my title though: How to Make a Band Dangerously Cool, but there won't be anything close to dangerous (not to mention cool) if the cover is lackadaisical. Face to face with what the creative process means and how it works (at least for me). I've always found it sterile, without inspiration, to just sit in front of a piece of paper (or document) and expect genius to pour out. Instead, it happens when the light shines on or out from those unexpected places at those unforeseen times. Can't tell you what was shining at that moment, but I had an idea for my cover that has to do with vintage guitars, Johnny Cash and a symbolic gesture.
Before and After: Paper bag Album Covers
Hungarian Pathé Record Cover before Alex Steinweiss came on the scene; the covers were paper bag plain (much like the ones some of us carried to school before those metal boxes came along), which has a straight forward appeal (it's time to eat), but doesn't say a thing about what we're about to listen to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%C3%A9_Records
Alex Steinweiss's eloquent expression began in 1938. An exercise I gave myself was to look at the cover and imagine the music within before actually hearing it, a lovely exercise I found in the case of Zino Francescatti.
http://www.alexsteinweiss.com/as_index.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSx37Ounv98
American Classic
"It’s the first time I’ve thought about what an important American archetype the diner waitress is, almost as ubiquitous as the cowboy, the cheerleader and the policeman. Sometimes she’s beautiful and sometimes she’s motherly - but she’s always street smart and careworn." --Mike Haggerty
There's something startingly familiar in this woman's smile and illusory landscape (look-closer) behind her. They are encounters of this kind that spur funny sensations, perhaps each time, I return to the States.
Graphic Designer Mike Haggery and Art Director Mike Doud took the title "Breakfast in America", Super Tramp's first album after settling in the U.S., and spun it into visual paragrams.
You might consider, it's an accurate way to represent the idea of popular culture by illustrating a chipper face ready to take your order; after all, that is what we choose to think of America, the one we've grown to love since little children, and where all is possible if you don't mind being served up by a pudgy waitress.
At the end of the day, It's America's favorite passtime: to have our coffee cup filled again, refuse desert (because we've had plenty already), and be encouraged to tell nonsense jokes in public.
Read on: http://sleevage.com/supertramp-breakfast-in-america/
Listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBYAivyxIDU&feature=related
Album: Breakast in America Artist Supertramp Cover Artists : Mike Doud, Mike Haggerty, Aaron Rapoport
Record Label : A&M Year 1979
How To Make A Band Dangerously Cool
This is a quick read and visual process blog created for the purpose of accompanying a formal written work in the makes, ideally a thesis (a long-overdue one at best), or as I prefer to call it, a coffee table book.
It's an inquiry into how images and words seamlessly compliment and bring about understanding, rather than take on secondary roles to each other. I love design and dig good music, so it made sense to use music album covers and music website design as practical illustration. My objective, however, won't emphasize how musicians rely heavily on visuals to sell their product, but how a visual does that which words try, but sometimes ambigously do.
Hopes you share any of your own experience or knowledge on the subjects to be posted. Hey, I'll even add you to the credits in my coffee table book!
It's an inquiry into how images and words seamlessly compliment and bring about understanding, rather than take on secondary roles to each other. I love design and dig good music, so it made sense to use music album covers and music website design as practical illustration. My objective, however, won't emphasize how musicians rely heavily on visuals to sell their product, but how a visual does that which words try, but sometimes ambigously do.
Hopes you share any of your own experience or knowledge on the subjects to be posted. Hey, I'll even add you to the credits in my coffee table book!
It Takes A Genius To Scrawl
There is plenty that goes along with being the first (and consequently the last). The essence of first experiences are encapsulated and decorated with vivid colors, captions, and even smells in our imaginations, and are placed in a marked space in time. Alex Steinweiss, conceiver of the first album cover, materialized his perceptions at the height of jazz. Before then, paperbag covers with less gusto contained the souls of many musician's work like Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines. This new way to package supplemented (out the gazoo) to the sales of Columbia Records, where he worked as sole designer and illustrator for several years during The Golden Age of Jazz. Still, this only reveals part of his contribution. His extremely imaginative way to display typography (a font was named after his infamous signature the "Steinweiss scrawl"), along side bold illustrations and vivid colors breath yet another dimension which helped further define the experience to come when needle grazed record and situated itself.
The meaning behind X&Y
.jpg)
It was shuttle on full throttle when I had asked friends over for a bite and chat to bring over their favorite cd, and they with an air of mien, declared they had no cds but opt out for easy weezy i-pod or 2000 track memeory stick, which they were happy to bring over (flashback to 8 tracks similar fate). Clearly music was the primary objective of my guests (put aside pizza and wine) and not the booklet containing the symbolical or at times esoteric graphics, photos, typography or color better left on living room walls.
Decoding Coldplay's X&Y is an article on the current demise of significant album covers, but how the nervy ones left still manage to reach some of us today. Tappin and Gofton's modernist cover depicts the future in the form of binary data and simultaneously reaches backwards to reveal how telegraphists used to communicate similarly through strings of code. Semiotics in X&Y are at play and describe the actual state of an industry and those effected. The result isn't static for album covers however, and those printing presses have rolled on to the computer screens. No doubt just how Chicago on 8 track jogs memories playing over and over the buzz of a fan on a hot Texas night lives on in our (or at least my) collective experience, digital or not.
Far-Reaching (Music Websites)
Love Orba Squara's most fitting album title "The Trouble with Flying". Love it because I don't like flying, but I love traveling. How many things can go wrong when flying? I can think of plenty (hijacking and volcano eruptions being two). What are the odds? Call me an optimist--anything can happen, but in the meantime I'm noting where the nearest emergency exit is.
And so, this title touches chords that leave me at once believing there are others like me who prefer to take it slow. Orba Squara in fact points out the average, grotesque, shoddy and beautiful things we miss along the way when flying. They along with Random Collective designer José Ricardo Cabral Cabaco created a lateral scrolling website that takes you on their American tour (10 days in 10 different cities) to capture those fleeting moments through archiving, journaling, photographing and sketching. It's lengthy (as a short film), but in my opinion something we should all do at least once in our lifetime--if you can't get a campervan, this is runner-up.
A highlight, day 4 if I remember right, was Austin, Texas--(love this place like a Palermitano loves Palermo). Funny because, the band had never been before, but like many of us has heard of it as the coolest, smartest, funkiest, hands down where you want to be if you're not somewhere else. Their impressions were so poignant, and reminded me of how easy it is to be in love when there's space in between. Their music rolls in synch as they truck on to the next burg (Las Cruces New Mexico, Flagstaff Arizona, Las Vegas Nevada, Eureka California... final destination somewhere in Oregon) capturing parts of America, that are at once romantic and forgotten.
Far-reaching music website design: orbasquara.com
.jpg)
