Author: Chris Barrus

Cover stories

1930vogueMy copy of Cover Story: The Art of American Magazine Covers 1900-1950 arrived this morning and the outside world disappeared for a bit while I flipped through it. I was tipped off to the book by a feature over on PopCult’s site which details the decline and eventual fall of western magazine design. An excerpt (but you should really go to their site and see the cover design face off)

Take a look at your local newsstand and here’s what you’ll see: racks upon racks of magazines that look almost identical. Whether they focus on music, fashion, cigars, fitness, women, or men, most magazines typically feature a grinning celebrity on the cover peeking out from behind squadrons of coverlines. It wasn’t always like this.

From the “golden age” of magazine popularity in the 1920s-’30s and on through to the early ’60s, even the most mainstream of magazines tried to lure in readers with distinctive design, original typography, and striking artwork. The cover was considered a canvas–rather than merely a billboard–by groundbreaking art directors like Mehemed Fehmy Agha (Vogue, House & Garden, Vanity Fair), Alexey Brodovitch (Harper’s Bazaar), and Eleanor Treacy and Francis Brennan (Fortune). These and other designers of that era transformed magazines into works of art in themselves. As Owen Edwards writes in The American Magazine, these designers and their magazines of the ’30s “exerted a visual influence on Americans no less potent and persuasive than that of Hollywood.” They commissioned covers by the finest artists, illustrators, and photographers of the day, such as Diego Rivera, Antonio Petruccelli, and Margaret Bourke-White (among many, many others). The design principle of that era seems simple enough: create the most ravishing covers possible. That was the way to distinguish your magazine from its competitors.

Today, the art of the magazine cover has been vanquished by celebrity worship and bad taste. Designers are simply fulfilling the dictates of their industry, not unlike the paint person on an auto assembly line. Innovation, creative expression, or even cleverness has been mostly abandoned. Artistic considerations are limited to how much retouching the celebrity headshot requires in Photoshop and how many headlines can be crammed in before the cover looks too “busy.” The result: A world in which it’s difficult to tell the difference between Playboy and Harper’s Bazaar without cracking them open.

What I find amazing is the quality of design standards across all of titles – not just the iconic Life photo covers, Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post, the New Yorker cartoons, and countless crime and science fiction pulps that most folks think of. A forgotten theater art magazine called Shadowland had a beautiful neo-cubist deco cover every month. Cover Story is a good start, but damnit, I want more now!

My predictions for tomorrow morning’s Macworld keynote

I predict the following will happen during tomorrow’s keynote.

  • I’ll drink an ice latte from the nearby Peet’s Coffee
  • Steve Jobs will wear something black.
  • Something will be announced that will be immediately hailed as genius, moronic, or both.
  • FireWire 2 and 802.11g will be talked about, possibly with a product announcement of some sort. Perversely, Steve will get to talk and brag about speed without once mentioning CPU megahertz
  • Folks will ultimately be disappointed which will engender another round of genius/moronic/both flaming.

Anyway, I’ll be watching it from the AppleStore at Fashion Island. Say hi if you’re there!

Some Joe anecdotes

Couple of cool Joe Strummer anecdotes that have been making the rounds. The first is from Give ‘Em Enough Rope producer Sandy Pearlman:

When the Clash got here, the first thing they did was go out and see Animal House five times. They claimed to think Animal House was a documentary, and they thought John Belushi was the greatest living American. That was great. I think that actually created a lot of bizarro energy. The other thing they wanted to do was to see Michael Bloomfield play. So they went to see him a couple times and talked to him, and he sort of knew who they were or pretended to. That was their first couple days in San Francisco, doing that and discovering that the Holiday Inn they were staying at in Chinatown had probably been the place where a lot of Dirty Harry was shot. Belushi, Bloomfield, and Dirty Harry represented their trinitarian introduction to America.

The second is from Bauhaus / Love And Rockets bass maven David J:

The following night we played at The Roxy Theater on Sunset Strip. Strummer was there again. Post show he invited us back to his hotel to meet with his ‘cousin Jose’ (neat tequila gold.) We became well acquainted and before long Strummer was imparting wise words of advice concerning instruments. He strongly objected to my choice of guitar, an Ovation acoustic with a plastic back. “The thing is Dave, you’ve got no bassist so you really need that bottom end, yer know?” All yer hear with that fuckin’ Ovation is, ‘thwackey, thwackey, thwackey’ and that ain’t no fuckin’ good! What yer need is The Big Wood! Do yer know what that is?” No? Well, I’ll tell yer! The Big Wood is like a big old fuckin’ Gibson or a Gretch or a Guild, something with a bit of soul to it, a big jumbo chunk of fuckin’ wood and none of that fuckin’ plastic shit! You look at any of yer serious guys, Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Van fuckin’ Morrison, they all got the Big Wood. Now Barry!” (our tour manager at the time. ) At this point Stummer is literally on his knees. “Barry, will you promise me something? Tomorrow morning I want yer to drive down to the fuckin’ river, then I want yer to take those fuckin’ shit Ovation guitars and throw ’em in it! Then take him down to Sunset and get him sorted with the Big Wood! Right!”

Right! We did and it made all the difference in the world.

That last time I saw him in San Diego, the first thing he said to me was, “You
got it, right? You got The Big Wood!” (I had’nt seen him since ’89! ) I gladly answered in the affirmative.

 

Feds cut back California water supply

First it was manipulation of California’s electricity, now it’s manipulation of California’s water. Water officials have shut off three of eight massive pumps on Lake Havasu that transfer water from the Colorado River to California after the federal government called for a suspension of the state’s use of surplus water from the Rocky Mountains. Is California just using water stupidly? Probably, but there’s Republican political fingerprints all over this…

Interior Secretary (and ex-Colorado Attorney General) Gale Norton and Assistant Secretary Bennett Raley, a Denver water lawyer before joining the Bush administration, are, in the words of the Denver Post, “directing the most punitive measures in the history of Colorado River politics.” After California water agencies failed to meet a December 31 deadline to reach an agreement to reduce its withdrawals from the Colorado River, Norton and Raley ordered an immediate reduction of California’s withdrawals from the river. California had been overdrawing the river by over 800,000 acre feet a year, or enough water to serve 1.4 million people — although much of the overdrawn water was being used to grow fruits and vegetables in the Mohave Desert.

…

From up here, the California water cutoff looks like pure politics. Cutting off California’s irrigators will undoubtedly help Bush in Colorado and the other Colorado River Compact states (AZ, NV, NM, UT and WY). While the electoral votes of these states combined do not equal California’s, the thinking could be that California is a lost cause and anything Bush can do to hold the mountain states (and pick up New Mexico) is worth doing. And if Gale Norton ever decides to run for state office again, you can bet she will be trumpeting how she stood up for Colorado’s water rights when she was in Washington during the great drought of the early 2000s.

Our numbers grow stronger

I’m happy to see that long-time friend Nicholas Corwin has a ‘blog up. He’s one of the few folks whose erudite emails are very much in the old and near-dead tradition of Letter Writing, unlike the non-punctuated, non-capitalized emails that folks toss off. Plus there’s a free German lesson with each one.

An excerpt…

It is very tiresome to listen to half-educated and unread people who persistently dub “Orwellian” any architecture, especially that of public facilities such airports, train stations and the like, which features stainless steel or a sleek, stark look. In aesthetic terms, this sort of design is anything but Orwellian. The world of 1984 was anything but sleek, cool, modern or efficient: it was an impoverished, totalitarian state in which all the resources were plowed into the military and the secret police apparatus. As a result, everything was old, shabby, and dilapidated; Orwell’s Winston Smith gazes out upon great expanses of rotting nineteenth-century houses, shored up with corrugated metal and plywood. Nothing gets repaired, rebuilt, refurbished or renovated; elevators don’t work; people manage to survive increasing entropy and decrepitude.

The Lying Game

Everyone is blogging-wide on this, so I’m obliged to make note of this. One part reality television and many parts Sartre, Kafka, The Prisoner, and good old-fashioned social paranoia, Mafia has become the parlor game of choice in the convention scene. Mafia has now hit the NYC literary set and as they say, hilarity ensues.

Novelist Jonathan Lethem has become an evangelist in literary circles for a party game called “Mafia” that involves lies, deceit, and heavy doses of social paranoia – all of which are readily available at any serious Manhattan cocktail party. The game is played with twelve people, three of which, unbeknownst to everyone else, are designated “mafia.” The mafia attempt to turn the rest of the group against each other as mafia suspects are voted out of the group. People that have played with Lethem find it a little disconcerting. The skill at psychological manipulation required to play well (“social torture,” The Observer calls it) greatly exceeds that of the average Manhattan-variety social climber. The true protagonists are not to be trusted.

Can’t wait for this to hit the LA entertainment industry folks.