Via the always excellent Present /&/ Correct, we were delighted for the introduction and sketching exercises to be found in Ed Emberley’s 1973 Little Drawing Book of Weirdos, the prolific illustrator and graphic designer especially lauded for his children’s picture books. Believing anyone can learn to draw, that not everyone has the calling or necessarilily needs to be an artist but no one should ever feel inadequate in their attempts to represent or convey, Emberley’s style of instruction employs letters, shapes and numbers and titles include Green Says Go, Flash, Crash, Rumble and Roll, Suppose You Met a Witch and Glad Monster, Sad Monster.
Sunday, 30 October 2022
how-to-draw (10. 257)
Wednesday, 11 May 2022
7x7
homo loquax: Futility Closet refers us to an expanded listing for the taxonomical name sapient human with some choice Latinate adjectives to describe us
crate-digging: Jimmy Carter’s grandson is exploring the White House’s surprisingly hip vinyl collection—via Messy Nessy Chic
le bestiaire fabuleux: a 1948 artists’ collaboration of a surreal and abstract menagerie—see also
sabbatical: Jason Kottke takes a break from blogging and poses the questions that probably haunt everyone in this community—come back soon
mรถrkrets makter: the very different (though retaining the epistolary format) unauthorised translation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula familiar to Icelanders
stratification: exploring the historic map layers of London—via Things Magazine
word-horde: daily vocabulary lessons in Anglo-Saxon words
catagories: ๐ฎ๐ธ, ๐ถ, ๐, ๐ฌ, ๐, ๐บ, ๐ง, Middle Ages, networking and blogging
Sunday, 20 February 2022
the shape of things to come
Via our faithful chronicler, we are informed that on this day in 1936, the adaptation of the H.G. Wells’ dialectical novel Things to Come had its cinematic debut, outlining the social and political predictions set forth by his 1933 work from the perspective of a twenty-second century diplomat examining the consequences of a nascent second world war continuing well into the 1960s with belligerents having well forgotten what’s at stake and what they are fighting for. With civilisation exhausted and entering a new Dark Age (with zombie plague included, a generational feud of the Passworthys versus the Cabals), a technocracy of fighter pilots struggle to preserve and advance human knowledge, leaving the confines of this globe for the wider Cosmos.
Sunday, 31 October 2021
7x7: happy halloween edition
robert the doll: Key West’s most cursed object—see also—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (lots more to see here)
zombie jamboree: Harry Belafonte’s actual ghoulish calypso number—notwithstanding the associations with the Banana Boat Song
la calavera catrina: a sugar skull puppet presents a primer on Dรญa de los Muertos
westsonality: enjoy Paul Lynde’s 1976 Halloween Special with a cavalcade of guest stars
respect the sabbath: periodic movements in the US to hold no Halloween on Sundays
main title theme: the score for John Carpenter’s classic horror film Halloween
lovecraft country: welcome to my metaverse—see previously
Friday, 1 October 2021
this ain’t no sunday school picnic
Having garnered quite a bit of experience and reputation in the Pittsburg market making television commercials, industrials and educational shorts with their production company The Latent Image, George A. Romero (previously) and John Russo resolved to make a full-length feature responding to audience interest in the genre of horror, realising their ambitions on this day in 1968—as our faithful chronicler informs, with the premier of the classic featuring a growing horde of the cannibalistic undead surrounding a group barricaded in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania. Though establishing the rules and conventions for future films of this type, zombies are never mentioned, and like all good monster movies allegorically tracks and critiques contemporary social mores including Cold War paranoia, Western hegemony and domestic apartheid.
Monday, 14 June 2021
the incredibly strange creatures who stopped living and became mixed-up zombies
catagories: ๐ฌ, ๐บ, ๐ง, myth and monsters
Sunday, 18 October 2020
the pharmacological merits of apotropaic magic
Just as drills for a zombie apocalypse is a useful heuristic for disaster-preparedness in general, so too are models of the inevitable vampiric saturation of run-away predation verses a more managed approach a tool for understanding contagion and immunity. Deferring to science, Dracula will always best our superstitions and folk-interventions.
catagories: ๐, ๐ง, ๐งฎ, ๐งฟ, myth and monsters
Wednesday, 3 June 2020
bandersnatch
Doubting that their audience would have the appetite for any more dystopian vignettes that depict the hollowing out and collapse of societies, the showrunners of Black Mirror (previously) had announced weeks ago a hiatus for the show. As reality is already starting to feel like an episode, however implausible and with writing not up to their usual standards, the network has put out an advertising installation inviting one to experience the next series, anytime, anywhere—though not the message, running the campaign in Madrid seems particularly tone-deaf and insensitive. I’ve been feeling all our pop culture training with apocalyptic and zombie movies have failed us and haven’t made nimbler and wiser in the face of multiple calamities.
Friday, 8 November 2019
7x7
a gender-neutral zombie: representation is important, via Kottke’s Quick Links
flotsam and jetsam: an ingenious barrier of air bubbles traps plastic waste in Amsterdam’s canals
ok boomer: a powerful and withering epithet
rurikids and romanovs: traditional Russian female garb, via Everlasting Blรถrt
book of dreams: Argos back-catalogues from 1974 on, via Things Magazine
merijรครค: a combination of rare weather conditions converged to cover a beach on Bothnia bay with ice eggs
equine anatomy: rating every horse emoji across different platforms (see also), via Waxy
Wednesday, 19 July 2017
fangoria
For World Emoji Day earlier this week (we’re still on the hunt for whoever is behind these endless and arbitrary celebrations) Apple released a preview of the way it’s rendering some of the cache of newly approved icons from the late June meeting of the Unicode Consortium—in case some of this seems familiar, it ought to. Though it was mostly squeezing some extra mileage out of old news, there was one fine coda to the story that no one could have anticipated by reminding the world that added to our visual lexicon, there’s now a zombie—coinciding with the death of the filmmaker George A Romero who famously gave culture its undead touchstone first directing the independently produced Night of the Living Dead (zombies were never mentioned in that movie, only ghouls) in 1968 and five subsequent spin-offs plus hundreds of homages. Thank you for all the nightmarish inspiration and requiescat in pace (seriously, do that), Mister Romero.
catagories: ๐ฌ, ๐ฌ, ๐ง, holidays and observances, myth and monsters