Alrighty! MT is now running against MySQL, which I was hoping would improve rebuild performance.
Alas, no.
Could I even do brute pforce category reassingments? Well, maybe; but sadly the fields under “entry_category” are … null. So; hm, still pluggin’. I guess I’ll have to, like, RTFM and find the schema.
Always always the tradeoff b/t the convenience of access and speed, especially in large-scale operations, in server-oriented apps. Always.
All I can say is, I’m sorry it took so long. I don’t know what I was thinking. Click the pic and a larger image which will be perfect for printing as a sticker will appear.
Let’s all do our part!
UPDATE: Just to make things easy for you, here’s a 337k .gif which you can simply print off and run down to Kinko’s with.
And a nod to the originator of the “giant” stickers seems in order.
Still working the kinks out, but I’ve added topical archives to the link area to the right of the main page.
There’s some div nesting problems to be worked out on the archive pages, too; but hopefully this will make finding a particular entry or reading within a given subject area (hi, Matt!) somewhat easier.
I think I can stuff the archive lists into drop-down menus; would that be helpful?
The most onerous task is properly categorizing the “special” entries into the new categories: I’ve added a category for “Blimp Week” and of course one for your Ken Goldstein of the week.
BTW have your printer ready for tomorrow’s Ken.
Now on ebay: Own your own blimp!
Someone else’s loss is your gain. We found this SEA DOO blimp hung up on one of our fences on our ranch (in the middle of nowhere). It was fully inflated with helium and flying a couple of hundred feet in the air, so there are no holes in it. It has at least 200′ of cord (which was how it hung on our fence) so it can fly high over your place!
This thing draws a lot of attention!
The only damage that we could find was that the seam has come apart on one of the fins and it had duct tape around the edge. This doesn’t affect the part that holds the air, and would not be noticeable while “flying”.
We have it tied to our jeep in the picture, so you can see the size difference between the jeep and the blimp and the loader.
The object in question is an inflated 20-25 foot advertising buoy-blimp, the kind of thing one sees tethered over car dealerships. There is no mention of shipping details.
Oops!
I was so involved with my Wired piece I forgot about the Monday art.
In a few days I’ll fudge the dates of publication so it’s neater.
This image is a photo of a no-longer surviving copy of a large, 18″ by 24″ or larger poster I made for a party/show in the basement of the house I lived in during college, the Litter Box. As I recall, the bands were Too Cooland also the Truckadelics. Too Cool was this too short-lived postpunk power rock band – sorta glam. As I recall they were great but I only saw them twice that I can remember.
The Truckadelics were a long-lived Frankie Camaro project. I have video of Andrew Wagner singing an original Frankie number, “Unlucky Highway”, in the basement of the Litter Box at a party, possibly this one. The parties in the basement with bands at this house remain epic in scope – I recall one in particular in which the keg was tapped and completely consumed in less than thirty minutes. Occasionally, I am introduced to someone here in Seattle who happened to be in Bloomington during this era and recalls the parties at the house.
I cut the stencil at full size into a piece of heavy drawing paper, and used a variety of spraypaint colors and on-the-fly paper masking to accomplish the variant color effects. This is one of the most ambitious stencil pieces I did. For many years I would attend punk rock shows with no money in my pocket and hang out by the front door of the show, selling a stencil to be sprayed on whatever people were wearing for a measly buck.
I would clean up, and usually had money for beer after the show. I still have almost all of the stencils I cut – there were thirty or so as I recall, some as elaborate as this image.
I actually got a “real” job from a promoter who worked for the University Student Board from this flyer – he came to the show and asked me to make a flyer for a Replacements show he was booking. I did the job for free plus four tickets to the show, but I don’t think he liked the flyer I made for him.
Good pal and inexplicable focus of my weekly “Ken Goldstein of the Week” feature Ken Goldstein did the only sensible thing a single man of 30 summers can do when presented with a four day weekend in the United States: he took a road trip.
He drove east to near Nashville, and then southwest into Georgia and South Carolina. Why, if I’d known, I could have had my parents feed him when he drove north through North Carolina!
Day One: Gatlinburg, Tennessee concludes a long, hard day of minor league baseball and Pigeon Forge, TN.
Day Two: The wonders of Pigeon Forge roll on and on, and so does Ken, down to Georgia, in search of a hotel room.
Day Three: What better way to spend the fourth in Appalachia than at the 7th Annual Redneck Games! This is one hilarious anecdote, yessuh.
Day Four: Mecca: Ken arrives at world-famous South of the Border, where instead of actual Mexican culture and Mexicans, you can see a peculiar, mid-century American imitation! Trivia question: which came first, Seattle’s Space Needle, or S.O.B’s Space Sombrero?
Why, I feel as though I’ve just spent four days peeling my skin off the broiling vinyl of my family’s 1973 Dodge Dart, reading, sweating, and bickering with my sister.
As noted in my previous entry, on May 14, I inaccurately dissed Wired’s new house body and headline font as Helvetica. on June 28th, Wired Creative Director Darin Perry dropped by to set the record straight. It’s actually Aksidenz Grotesk.
Prompted by this unexpected turn of events, I’m taking the opportunity to write more thoughtfully about Darrin’s recent changes to the magazine in the context of its’ design history. First, it should be recognized that I have a more emotional relationship to the magazine than I do to any other mag that I read. Wired’s first couple of years, before the website opened for business, were a magnificent – and frankly transgressive – reading experience.
Editorial direction was wide open. Contributors wrote about the infinite possibilities for change that the developing new technologies opened up. Everything from alternative, technophilic non-capitalist economics to the impact of the new technologies on democratic decisionmaking processes were written about. It was inspiring, exciting, and fired my imagination.
The look of the magazine during these years reflected the excitement of the content. Graphic design was the first industry to be powerfully affected by the emergence of personal computers. Just at the time Wired debuted the first round of really committed, highly technologically literate designers were hitting their stride.
The magazine, during this time, acquired the reputation of being ‘illegible’ (unfairly, in my opinion), mostly due to the use of flourescent inks for captions or body copy in some cases and for a willingness to experiment with layering and unconventional ink choices (silver captions printed on top of duotone photos, for example).
To the public at large, these looked as radical and confrontational as the subject of the magazine, which at the time was the utopian possibilities inherent in the development, exploration, and exploitation of the new technologies.
As Wired entered middle age, around the third or fouth year of publication, there was a distinct shift in editorial tone. An initial redesign may have accompanied this shift. Articles critical of international global capitalism were nevermore seen; fifty-something white guys dominated the cover; advertisements for the status toys of our overlords predominated in the pages. I regularly become enraged while reading it, and dropped it as a subscriber.
The redesign de-emphasized some of the wilder aspects of the early years but kept, in a somewhat tamed fasion, many of the others. Flourescent inks, for example, were still used on a regular basis. However, the era of wild exploration was past. Interestingly, the magazine kept the reputation as a wild design leader long after the spark of these experiments had dimmed, and the look of the magazine actually employed a combination of conventional magazine layout approaches and evolved design solutions that descended from the earlier experiments.
At about this time in the magazine’s history, I was involved in a long discussion on the Graphics List concerning, oh, I guess the semiotics of both incarnations of Wired. The conclusions I reached from this discussion were:
In effect, Wired created a myth of an exclusive club, and then turned it into a tourist attraction without letting the tourists become aware of the change in status. While the editorial change (not the design change) drove me out the door, cursing and muttering imprecations, I must say I found the excercise admirable and informative.
Today’s Wired, beginning with the issue that first featured the current look (it had Steven Spielberg on the cover), gives some evidence of an editorial shft away from celebrating wealthy white corporate leaders. In all fairness this is predictable in light of the onging economic tragicomedy we are all observing daily. I certainly hope they’ll pick up a bright pen and run it through each and every one of the companies we’ve watched melt away – beginning with Enron and Andersen and moving up through Xerox and WorldCom. Wired could choose to assign, for example, Bruce Sterling or (now this I like) William Gibson to cover the fraud and theft which are currently wrecking the economy. But I’m not gonna hold my breath.
Although an outcome like that is unlikely (and in all honesty I don’t think Sterling could be critical enough to meet my desires for such a piece; Gibson’s dark glasses would be just right for me, I think), so far since then both the Spielberg issue and the current “Nike project” issue had a sufficient amount of interesting material to hold my attention. The intermediate issue, in which the Wired Index was re-introduced, was, not successful in so doing. In the current issue my favorite piece was the “Infoporn” on nulclear material, and I must say a part of my enjoyment was derived from the presenation of the piece: phosphor green on black, very nice.
The redesign, which employs Aksidenz Grotesk (Thanks, Darrin!) to effectively do away with the early-nineties visual noise while still employing layered printing, da-glo colors, and other signature elements of all of Wired’s looks, also reflects the direction street design has taken over the past five or six years, on rave cards, club flyers, and the like.
This school of design combines a retro-seventies futurist esthetic in the use of understated sans-serif fonts with softened, regular geometric shapes such as squares or rectangles with rounded corners to convey a cool, polished sensibility.
This mode of presentation is derived from the work of Swiss designers on the eve of World War Two, and became very influential in American design in the late sixties and early seventies, when it projectd a ind of intenational, eurocentric futurism. Think of Kubrick’s “2001” and Woody Allen’s “Sleeper”, and you’ll know what I mean.
It’s interesting to note that each time this high-modern approach to design becomes predominant (and Wired is not the only mag to undergo a retro-mod restyle of late – a href=”http://www.macaddict.com/”>MacAddict just unveiled a similar, sans-all-the-way look in print if not online), it was in times of economic turbulence, with no clear upturn in sight and a great deal of uncertainty in the air.
In the case of Wired, does this affect the sense of exclusivity the magazine still strives for? I’m not certain. I suspect it does; after all I doubt that a subscriber in Chinchilla Flats, Texas has seen as many rave cards as I have here in Seattle; and while I can see the magazine as a manstreaming of this design approach, it probably still looks pretty cutting edge to our imaginary Texan.
At the same time, simply becasue it’s a less confrontational design, it may provide greater accessibility at the newsstand, which in turn might translate into a spike in circulation. So Darrin, I take back my flippant dismissal of your hard work, and hope you enjoy reading my more honest and thoughtful reflections on both your place of work and the specific contribution to it you have made of late.
In my May 14 entry, I flippantly dimissed the new look of Wired magazine with particular attention to the new house body and headline font.
First: a correction. I identified the new font choice as Helvetica. It’s actually Aksidenz Grotesk.
How did I learn this?
Well, Wired’s Creative Director, Darrin Perry, was curious or kind enough to drop by the entry for, um, his fair share of abuse, I guess. He was gracious enough to compliment this site’s primary font choice while pointing out my error.
I see Verdana when I look at the site, a choice which I must confess I inherited from Mena Trott, I believe, the designer half of Movable Type, which each one of you should download, use, and pay for.
So there’s a couple items on the agenda. First, what an interesting, wow-cool moment! Random mutterings concerning events and things that pass though my life have a reasonable possibility of being seen by the most appropriate viewer. Thank you, Google. Perhaps someday Aaron Cometbus will drop by, via Google, and learn about the Gizmos.
I have noticed that a large proportion of traffic to the site comes in via Google search requests for obscurities which I’ve written about here. Common search requests resulting in a site visit include “Aaron Cometbus”, “blimp rides”, “Wreck of the Shenandoah”, and, yes, “Bob’s Java Jive”.
Why “perfect candidate to hire for your high-paying house polymath position” has yet to generate a great deal of traffic remains unknown. At any rate, welcome Googlers – I hope your stay is both entertaining and informative.
Item two on the agenda is a more reasoned review of Wired’s new look. That will be the next entry.
Pursuing the theme of promoting comments by site visitors to entries when it’s appropriate, here’s site visitor Jeff Baker commenting on my April entry concerning the queen of Northwest bars, Bob’s Java Jive:
Bob’s Java Jive was the perfect getaway for PLU students about 20 years ago.
The coffee shaped building was cool. Cozy, but not too cramped. I remember a circular type bar- and patrons enjoying coffee – mostly truckers. While in good shape, the place felt a bit like a dive and had a “dive-like” aroma.
Then, the monkeys were kept in the back area (a building addition that likely was added on to the coffee shaped building at some point). We called this back room “the plastic jungle”. It featured vinyl tiger print booths, a dance floor made of black vinyl tiles (with an occaisional red or blue tile), random flourescent jungle paintings on the wall ( illuminated by a couple black light bulbs). There were hanging plastic monkey head lights too.
You could get food there, and beer by the pitcher. It was diner food and wasn’t too bad if you didn’t try to imagine what the kitchen looked like. Our waitress served up our hamburger and fries, then kept stealing one or two everytime she walked by. At one point she sat down with us and was cracking up for no apparent reason. Then we realized she was drunk!
The juke box was one of the greatest attractions there. Where else could you find “Love Potion #9” or “theme from Hawaii 5-O”. Of course we always had to play “Java Jive” (I think it was by the Ink Spots).
After a while the live music started. The “band” consisted of two men (rumored to be the sons of the owners). One (looked kind of like Steve Buscemi) played accordion, and the other (a large man with a huge, curly afro and big glasses) played organ. Very serious. They mostly played TV theme songs. One time, they played the theme to Gilligan’s Island. When it was over, a group of us laughed. The brothers glared at us, as if annoyed by our irreverance.
After five or six TV tunes, they’d take a break. The organ player would spin around on his bench, and sit with his elbow on his knee, chin in his hand, silent, no expression on his face… for five minutes straight while the accordian player had a beer.
Bizarre! But it was great! I thank God I never got food poisioning.
Thanks for that illuminating tale, Jeff! Seems that things hadn’t changed much in the intervening years, although I’d love to find out more about the TV theme song band. I can vouch for the sons of the owners having played there for a while – it was a part of the history of the place that was related to us when we asked.
Since last fall, I’ve been writing reviews of comics (with occasional Star Trek coverage, working with interviews of people on the crew of Enterprise) for Cinescape, a sort of latter-day Starlog or Fangoria which is much snappier, and broader in coverage, than these precursors.
Anyway, I recently turned in six reviews, and the first two of that batch have been posted.
Both are Fantagraphics books. I have an informal OK from my editor to begin soliciting review copies from some of the other boutique and art comix publishers, which I look forward to.
