Vintage air raid defense posters

"Asphyxiant Gas: Evacuation and Aid
Do not allow victims to walk. Carry them gently.
Head to a nearby shelter.
Move to a safe location upwind."

• Pink Tentacle

Finger painting 3

Finger painting 2

Finger painting

An series of images I've made using the Brushes application for the iPhone. I call them finger paintings even though not a drop a paint is used to create them but it's all done with fingers. So there. Its a nifty application -- well designed and pared down to just the essentials. I could hardly ask for more. Though I'm hoping the makers give us another brush shape or two on the next go round.

Ex Libris

Here's a find! Seven Roads has posted an amazing collection of book trade labels, stamps and imprints --hundreds of them. "Anyone who handles old books will have come across these small and sometimes beautiful labels pasted more or less discreetly into the endpapers. Publishers, printers, binders, importers, distributors and sellers of books --new, second-hand and antiquarian-- used to advertise in this way their contribution to bringing the books to market" Check it out. Submissions welcomed.

• Seven Roads, Gallery of Book Trade Labels

Vampyr!

Speaking of digital restorations. The good folks at the Criterion Collection asked me to lend a typographic hand to their release of Carl Theodore Dryer's Vampyr-- a wonderful and wonderfully surreal picture. Even though Vampyr is a sound picture it's full of subtitles and written text. Criterion puts it this way: "Subtitling Vampyr presents a special challenge. Dryer relies heavily on written text that fills the frame, and subtitles can be hard to read -or even see- against this background. For this reason, the Criterion Collection, taking care to reproduce the look of the original as closely as possible, prepared a version of the film in which the on-screen text has been digitally replaced with an English translation."

The design of that typeface, as well as the layout, fell on me. That meant, firstly, drawing a font in the style of the original hand-lettered inter-titles. What made it all sing was the fantastic work of the video production crew who added the requisite dust specs and halos around the letter forms.

Thrilled? Honored to be a part of a picture as great as this one? You bet. Purists, don't be alarmed. History was neither harmed or rewritten for this production. Both versions of the film are available in this release.

Click on the image for a larger view.

• The Criterion Collection

My Gang

That's my great-grandmother Aliene and her brother Bud.  -- I think that's his name. I'll have to check -- They lived in Gardena, California when this picture was taken. Their parents owned a flower farm there. I wonder if they knew Stymie and Dickie? If ever a picture could use some digital restoration, its this one. Stay Tuned.

Les Sucettes

For the dog days of summer: pure filth. Aside from mentioning France Gall claimed to have no idea the lyrics of "Les Sucettes" might have had a double meaning, I'll let clip speak for itself.

View the Clip.

Read the lyrics.

Translate the lyrics.

The Amazing Screw-On Head

Hellboy creator Mike Mignola's daft one-off "The Amazing Screw-On Head" has been adapted for television and it's previewing now on SciFi.com. It's too bad the animation doesn't always keep pace with Mignola's singular style —something aggravated further by limitations of online viewing. I suspect the washed-out hues are actually more saturated. Never-the-less, these deficiencies are amply redeemed by some witty writing and terrific voice work by Paul Giamatti as Screw-On, David Hyde Pierce as his arch nemesis and a droll Molly Shannon playing Mr. Head's once and former lady love. The twenty-four minute cartoon opens with a muddled and fitful start —the music doesn't help—but quickly finds it's feet, um, head. The loopy, shaggy dog story manages to incorporate President Abraham Lincoln, a zombie emperor, a parallel universe in the heart of a turnip and even the Homestead Act of 1862 —to name but a few. It's pretty much like the comic and that's says alot. America is a better place for it. And by America, I mean the world.

View The Amazing Screw-On Head