Book with typographical gimmicks

[jd]

Graffiti is good stuff, when it's done right.  Anyone in Boston seen
Lifer tags around?  I think he's been around since 86.  It's simple,
easy to miss, usually small, but for some reason its simplicity
resonates with me more than the full-wall burns I see every once in
awhile.  Even more impressive when you ride out on the Orange line and
see that Phoner tag way up on top of some building (it's my belief
that Phoner / Foner / Lifer are all the same person)... going the
extra mile even for something so simple.  I have other theories about
*er.  They're the only tags that really stick in my mind (that I've
seen in person, Banksy is quite stunning, and I did see a Nasty Neck
Face out in Roxbury once but it wasn't much, see link)

http://www.wescac.org/spgm/gal/photography/10-13/neckface.jpg

I hope that this is but a phase in American history, one that will be
looked back on with scorn in times to come.

And Maus was great, but In the Shadow of No Towers was horrible.
Considering I've seen nothing but those two from Speigleman, makes me
wonder what's really in his head: self-consumation or some sort of
clarity?

On 9/16/06, pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> --- pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
> [...]
> > I liked the Maus books, comic books in general, the
> > new crop of graphic novels (there's a fine graphic
> > novel version of the first part of A la recherche,
> > from Delcourt, I think, in French; yes, I liked
> > Classic Comics too when I was a kid), illustrated
> > novels (something new from Japan coming called
> > "light
> > novels" I read about the other day).  I think this
> > is
> > where some creativity is to be found in publishing
> > these days (and admittedly a lot of crap, too),
> > especially that part of it that's still bubbling up
> > from underground or obscurity or whatever to call
> > that
> > space, handmade magazines and books, art books,
> > comics, zines, I like the Web stuff, too, and like
> > that better when there's a hard copy or other
> > fleshworld component.
>
> For the record, I also like street art, grafitti,
> conceptual and performance art, online musical
> experiments, and new music made with computer-based
> tools, all that stuff, and of course a lot of it is
> going to be crap, but in the moment (and with the
> appropriate herbal assistance, or, just 'high on
> reality' if that's your thing) it's often fun, and
> sometimes interesting things do emerge, one thing
> leads to another, trends develop, somebody recombines
> it all and it spirals up a notch, and on it goes.
> Networking technology makes it easier to do this stuff
> as a group, and that pushes it along, amping the
> collaborative element that's been a component of every
> major art scene for the past several hundred years.
>
> Yeah, I'm an optimist.  Kind of.  Will people be able
> to get their heads out of the crap that Bush and his
> ilk and the marketeers and the consumptionist
> technoids  have shoveled onto and into them the whole
> time they're growing up?   Many won't. Some will.
>
>
> >I'm not a gamer, but there
> > seems to be some fun geeky stuff going on in places
> > online like Second Life, which is all of a sudden
> > getting press it seems, guess they're mounting a pr
> > campaign.  A lot of the stuff that got going in the
> > interactive multimedia scene (on CD-ROM, then on the
> > Web when it became available in the early 90s) is
> > now
> > bearing fruit online, where relatively easy to use
> > tools (blogs, photo manipulation & sharing, music
> > creation & sharing, games & etc) and interfaces hook
> > into powerful back-end engines that grow out of the
> > work done in the 80s and 90s with rich media
> > databases, interactive authoring tools, C++, Java,
> > networking protocol stacks, all that boring stuff
> > that
> > the computer science folks were cranking out for
> > love
> > and stock options, there it is on Google and Yahoo
> > and
> > MySpace and flickr and digg.com & etc, and other
> > places online where people share what they write,
> > photograph, video, I think something good's got to
> > come out of those places because so many people are
> > doing it and encouraging each other - a very hopeful
> > sign, I think, and from this kind of environment I
> > believe art worth spending time with will emerge.
> > Fewer people may be going into novelwriting because
> > these other creative outlets exist, while some
> > writers
> > explore how to use these new tools, venues, etc. and
> > may be less interested in the 20th century get
> > discovered by an editor and become a literary lion
> > romance.  Keef's kid, my 19-year-old, Matt Foremski
> > (son of my buddy Tom, the guy who got the lonelygirl
> > scoop this week, mentioned in the NY Times, heady
> > stuff for a kid about 19, I forget exactly how old
> > Matt is), the ones who have grown up immersed in
> > these
> > technologies (whether they're watching TV at home or
> > not, they're immersed, because they hear all about
> > it
> > from their friends and watch at their house), they
> > are
> > the ones who will figure out more elegant ways to
> > use
> > these tools and do amazing things with it.   Again,
> > I'm an optimist on this score, maybe because I was
> > there as some of this was coming together in the 80s
> > and 90s here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley -
> > despite the dreck that inevitably emerges, cream
> > rises, too. My two cents.
> >
>
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