christophe thinks out loud

Fishnet

Yet another project of mine has gone live: Fishnet is Blowfish’s revived e-zine for erotica. The design is mine, and one of the Blowfish staff is the editor. Check it out!

Type

Blowfish is getting ready to publish its first book (not counting the catalogs), and I rather splurged on type from Emigré for it. (Our house standard type faces are Myriad and Minion, both from Adobe, and they’re fine fonts and all that, but you get a bit bored with them after 10 years.)

Along those lines, TypeCon 2004 will be in San Francisco at the end of July, and I’m hoping I can spring the time to get to it.

Wooden Books

Small, well-produced books are a pleasure like no other.

Wooden Books publishes just such books. They have a large series of elegant little books on a variety of interesting, humanistic topics: The Archimedean Solids, Stonehenge, the cycles of the Sun, Moon, and Earth. Each one is full of clear, beautiful illustrations. Even though I used to design musical instruments, it was only after reading Harmonograph that I felt I understood some of the fundamental principles of harmony.

Once in a while, the books veer towards a tweeness that might make one roll one’s eyes. But it is a bit like being entertained by a very intelligent professor who has some eccentric interests . . . you’re more than willing to indulge the flights of fancy in exchange for the fascinating insights, elegantly presented.

Morford Returns

While I was in the UK, Mark Morford’s Morning Fix newsletter was my lifeline back to my home town of San Francisco. Even once I was back, its combination of witty writing, wonderful politics, and interesting features made it a mandatory part of my day’s reading.

Then, a few weeks ago, it just stopped. Bang. Nothing. Horrors. No one was willing to talk about what was going on.

Now, his column at SFGate (the web site of the San Francisco Chronicle) is back. Clearly, he got into some kind of big trouble with Hearst, the publishers, since the header on the announcement says:

We’re currently evaluating aspects of the Morning Fix newsletter and hope to be able to return it to you soon.

This is, of course, management-speak for “We’re not done with the rubber hoses and cigarettes on him, yet.” I hope that it returns soon, and in all its wonderful, irreverent glory.

How to Ruin Your Financial Life

I can’t say that I always agree with Ben Stein, but I always like him. He is erudite and a gentleman in a world in which most pundits are neither.

He has now written a book on personal finance, and in keeping with today being US Tax Day, I picked up a copy. It’s great. The advice (written in his usual, ironic “do this if you want ruin“ style) is spot-on. In a time in which credit card debit has gotten entirely out of control, and most people haven’t a clue how money works, I’m glad that he’s out there, trying to change things.

Of course, the biggest problem is that many people won’t really get the joke, and will just flip through the book, nod, smile, feel smug about all those other people who don’t get how money works . . . and then go buy something they don’t need because they need cheering up after they pay their taxes.

Iain Sinclair is cooler than either one of us

You know that experience of not really understanding a word, or not knowing how it is pronounced, learning it, and then seeing it everywhere, as if all those uses of it were just waiting for your knowledge to expand?

Substitute "cultural reference" for "word," and you have the nonfiction of Iain Sinclair.

I've had Lights out for the Territory sitting in front of the couch for months, now. Every time I dip into it, I find something new that I just learned about, and Sinclair has known about for years. It's as if his moving finger is running ahead, writing things down as I discover them.

Last year, on a whim, I saw a feature of the amazing animated films of Brothers Quay at the Red Vic movie house. Next time I pick up Lights Out, there they are. A flyer for Goldmark Art in Rutland falls out of my copy of RA Magazine. Art galleries? In Rutland? Moo. Sinclair's written up Mark Goldmark, the proprietor, in his own chapter. Read about Rachel Whiteread's House installation? Another chapter. Alan Moore and his From Hell graphic novel? Yeah, he and Sinclair (along with Peter Ackroyd) are old psychogeographic chums.

I've only just started London Orbital, and the references are already starting to pile up like a multi-car M25 crash . . . which, given the subject matter and some of the subjects in the book, seems entirely appropriate.