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What it is

What I’m reading: John Crowley’s The Solitudes (first in his 4-book Aegypt cycle) and Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha series

What I’m listening to: Angela McCluskey’s The Things We Do

What I’m watching: the first season of The Wire

What I’m drinking: Miller’s gin

What I’m happy about: the Giants reached the Super Bowl

What I’m sad about: the Giants will likely get destroyed in the Super Bowl, similar to their 2000 experience against Baltimore, which Jay Mohr characterized as “like when a white high school team from the suburbs faces a black inner-city school”

What I’m pondering: how to finish writing a post about Charles Schulz that really doesn’t support my initial thesis (that is, how Schulz and Andy Warhol exemplify certain trends in postwar American views of celebrity and art)

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Cheap Novelties

Sure, Bobby Fischer’s death got all the press, what with the worldwide reactions and reminiscences of his chess-playing genius, his uncomfortable relationship with celebrity, and his later hatred of Jews. But let’s also take time to mourn Richard Knerr.

I’d never heard of Mr. Knerr till I opened the NYTimes on Friday morning, when I learned about the demise of the co-founder of Wham-O. Yes, the man who unleashed the Frisbee, the Super Ball (inspiration for the Super Bowl), the Hula Hoop, and Silly String on an unsuspecting public has shuffled off this mortal Slinky coil.*

I found his obit absolutely fascinating (which is probably a sign that I need to get out more), especially the part where we find out that Wham-O sold 100 million Hula Hoops, but managed to make only $10,000 in profit by fad’s end. And, being a fan of cheap novelties, I chuckled over the penultimate paragraph:

Not all of Mr. Knerr’s brainstorms succeeded. Among them were mail-order mink coats for $9.95, a $119 do-it-yourself bomb shelter and Instant Fish, an African import whose egg-laying ability could not keep up with product orders.

For the rest of the day, I found myself humming Joe Jackson’s “I’m the Man” and wondering if I’d appreciate The Hudsucker Proxy more than I did when I saw it in 1995.

(That’s Mr. Knerr on the right. The NYTimes didn’t provide a photo credit, so I guess I should just write, “Photo: New York Times.”)

* Slinky was not marketed by Wham-O.

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Conference Call

As the editor of a (trade) magazine, part of my job involves finding pertinent topics for articles and good writers to cover them. One way to do this is to look through brochures for conferences and call presenters who are speaking on subjects of interest. Sometimes they’ll be able to adapt their presentation into an article. Other times, they have a suggestion for another writer, or are available for an interview on the subject.

And today, this happened:

“Hi, [X], I’m Gil Roth, the editor at Contract Pharma magazine. I was going through the brochure for [conference Y] next week and noticed that you’re speaking on [subject Z]. I was wondering if we could talk about adapting your presentation into an article for an upcoming issue.”

“What conference?”

“[Conference Y].”

“Really?”

“Yeah. They have you listed as a ‘distinguished speaker’ and you’re scheduled to speak at 2pm on the second day.”

“Hmm. Where is this conference?”

“[City A]. Ringing any bells?”

“Nope, but at least it’s not far from here. What’s the URL for the conference?”

“[Website B]. But that’s just the main site for the company.”

“I’ll look it up. Next Friday, huh?”

“That’s what the brochure says.”

“Well, thanks for letting me know. I’ll start adapting my basic presentation.”

“Sure thing!”

Amazingly, I actually did ask him to adapt the presentation into an article for the March issue. And he accepted! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to set up my e-mail to send him a reminder every 36 hours until the deadline. . .

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Belichick Chemicals?

Yes, clients occasionally put me up in fancy-pants hotels (where amenities include loaner laptops and goldfish) for press briefings.

Yes, clients occasionally take me out to dinner in fancy-pants restaurants.

No, this hasn’t stopped me from hitting a halal street-meat cart for lamb & chicken rice platter.

* * *

Best line from the press briefings: When asked about about the rigorous process his company has for suppliers of chemical ingredients, one of the VPs told us, “One supplier sent us the chemicals in a cut-off sweatshirt sleeve.”

Evidently, the supplier didn’t want to bother filling out proper certificates or taking care of traceability requirements, so they just . . . wrapped the chemicals in a cut-off sweatshirt sleeve and shipped ’em off to a global provider.

“The supplier was based in an, um, evolving economy,” we were told.

* * *

Here’s a picture from the staircase in the restaurant:

Staircase at Amalia NYC

And here’s a picture of Greene St., running north of Canal:

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Scenes from a weekend

Sorry for the lack of a post on Sunday; I did resolve to post something every day, although I didn’t make any resolutions about the quality of those posts.

Anyway, it was a pretty relaxed weekend. Amy & I drove down to Manalapan on Sunday for her friend Naomi’s wedding. It was a traditional Jewish wedding, with various celebrations that I sorta figure were traditional to Russian Jews. I’m sure Amy’ll write about it this week.

Me, I’m gonna send you over to a small set of pix from the weekend, including Santa In Chains:

Santa in Chains

And, for your edification — or your imagination — the secret and partially fictive history of the revolving door.

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Maps and Legends

One of my favorite recent essays was about a subway map. The original version of it was published at Design Observer in 2004, but the author expanded it for that book I keep mentioning all the goddamn time, which I read last year. The great thing about the online version is that it has reader comments, including a neat exchange between the author and one of the 2Blowhards about visual poetry and the utility of design.

Bierut’s essay was the first exposure I had to the work of Massimo Vignelli. That is, it was the first time I’d read his name; it turns out I’ve seen his work all my life, in various corporate logos and other pieces of design: Bloomingdale’s, American Airlines, Bennetton, and others.

This morning, taking a break from playing around with the iPhone (a.k.a. one of the finest pieces of design I’ve ever seen), I caught up with New York Magazine‘s issue on Design Revolutionaries, which I’ve been saving for a while (for some reason, the website refers to it as “Home Design”). It turned out that its feature on Vignelli and his wife Lella was minuscule — Martha Stewart received a much longer piece — but it did include a large replica of the (in)famous subway map, so that was nice to see.

More importantly, its splash-photo shows that the Vignellis’ home on the upper east side is the greatest apartment I’ve ever seen in my life:

Vignellis apt., photo by Dean Kaufman

(Photo by Dean Kaufman)

Seriously: those windows are TWENTY FEET HIGH.

So, even though it’s not like he needs my money, I ordered a copy of Vignelli From A to Z off Amazon today.

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Unrequired Reading: Jan. 11, 2008

It’s my birthday, dear readers! So I’m taking today off to celebrate!

Still, you deserve some Unrequired Reading, so here’s a neat article detailing the history of the development of the iPhone, because

a) it’s a really neat story about how the wireless industry works and how Apple has tried to shake it up with this device, and

b) my wife just got me one for my birthday!

Thanks for enabling my geekiness, darling! (more Unrequired Reading after the break)

Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Jan. 11, 2008”

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Hero with a Thousand Typefaces

A book that didn’t make my “best/worst/weirdest” list from 2007 was Michael Bierut’s 79 Short Essays on Design. I adored it but couldn’t come up with a decent joke award for it. Looking back, I should’ve gone with “Most fonts used in a good cause,” since every essay is set in a different font, to great effect.

Virginia Postrel writes about the profusion of fonts and includes a neat 8-minute video interview with Mr. Bierut.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to laying out my magazine. Which uses Palatino for body copy, Helvetica Black for headlines, Gill Sans for author/contributor copy, and Univers 55 for sidebars.

(Oh, and Mr. Bierut has a new essay up on Design Observer, but I haven’t read it yet.)