Madolan

AUSGEZEICHNET!!!!

These two German nerds dressed up as Victorian Janeway and Lady Data for a sneak preview of Star Trek Into Darkness. Why? I don’t know. And not because I don’t read German, because I DO. She talks about how they saw the sneak preview, and how she did her hair, and how the insignia on the skirt doesn’t exactly match the uniform but there is not really an explanation of why this happened.

BUT DOES THERE NEED TO BE??? 

Thanks, Amy, for the heads up!

The tombstone of Constanze Mozart’s second husband calls him “the husband of Mozart’s widow.”

In the photo series “2D or not 2D,” the faces of models are transformed with strikingly colorful face paint designs that are intended to appear two-dimensional. The series is a collaborative project by photographer Alexander Khokhlov, make-up artist Valeriya Kutsan, and photo retoucher Veronica Ershova. Last year we posted about Khokhlov and Kutsan’s collaborative series of black and white face paint designs. Khokhlov talks about his work with Kutsan in this 2012 interview with Thrash Lab.

via Visual News

Penguin, 2009. Photo by Lisa Johansson.

Having recently re-read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) I thought it was about time I read her final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), and I’m very pleased that I did. I was less pleased, however, with the cover of the current edition from Penguin which, like many of the recent Penguin Classics, aspires to a kind of evasive blandness. There are recurrent problems in designing covers for books of exceptional quality: the more the writing opens itself to interpretation, and refuses to be easily categorised, the greater the challenge of finding a single design or image which might represent the book. It’s this that leads literary novels, classics especially, down the road of the text-only cover.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle may be of exceptional quality but it’s also very strange, dark and disturbing, something which the Penguin cover does little to communicate. The opening paragraph doesn’t match the justly celebrated opening of The Haunting of Hill House but it still sets out its stall in no uncertain terms:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

Merricat (as her sister calls her) neglects to mention that they live with one other member of the family, Uncle Julian, a wheelchair-bound survivor of an unresolved poisoning that killed the rest of the family six years earlier. Julian devotes himself to obsessively writing an account of that fatal day while Constance works equally obsessively in the kitchen of the house they share. Mary does little except run errands to the nearby village (whose populace she hates and fears), and play outdoors with her cat, Jonas. Mary is the focus of the novel, a character as painfully introverted as Eleanor in Hill House but with more self-possession and some dangerous obsessions of her own. Joyce Carol Oates in the afterword to the current Penguin edition calls her a witch, which she is in a very diffuse sense. She protects the house with objects that she turns into charms, buries other significant objects, and selects words at random which she believes will protect her. Unlike Hill House there’s nothing at all supernatural in We Have Always Lived in the Castle but Merricat successfully predicts that change is going to disrupt the happily insular household which it does with the arrival of boorish cousin Charles.

First edition, Viking Press, 1962.

What’s notable for me when looking at earlier cover designs is seeing how much more successful the original covers are compared to later editions. The drawing of Jonas on the jacket of the first edition is suitably wary and even baleful, as Merricat is where strangers are concerned. The lurching, uneven script reflects the skewed lives of the novel’s characters. The cover could have been the work of Merricat herself.

Popular Library, 1963. Illustration by William Teason.

And it’s Merricat who appears on the first paperback edition. I tend to disapprove of the depiction of central characters on book covers but this addresses the challenge brilliantly: the wild hair, the suspicious eye, the charred wood (there is a fire in the second half of the book), and the spikes which give her cat-like ears.

Viking Books, 1970. Cover by Gail Garrity.

Foreign-language editions have shown the isolated New England house on their covers but this is one of the few US editions to do so. (Note the cat-head door-knocker.) This is surprising considering that the house is the “castle” of the title, and the narrative hardly leaves its grounds. The more common trend, as shown below, is to try to depict the two sisters, with varying results.

Popular Library, 1982 (?)

This edition is from a set of Jackson paperbacks with uniform covers. If you have to show Merricat then this one works well enough. Whoever the artist was they seemed to have looked at William Teason’s cover: she’s holding a plant (a raspberry branch?) and has two ear-like fractures poised above her head.

Penguin, 1984.

This edition, on the other hand, gives the wrong impression where the characters are concerned. Constance looks too old, and wouldn’t go near the window like this.

Penguin, 2007. Art direction by Herb Thornby, illustration by Thomas Ott.

This is the kind of careful, detailed design and illustration I hate to dismiss but I don’t think it works for this novel. It may be the only one to include the crowd of angry villagers—the malevolence of crowds was a recurrent Jackson theme—but the drawing style is too light and cartoony for the subject. I’ll damn it with faint praise and say it’s better than the bland 2009 edition.

There are many more Shirley Jackson covers at The Shirley Jackson Book Cover Project, and more covers for We Have Always Lived in the Castle at GoodReads. And now I want to read some of her earlier novels.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

The classic Stanley Kubrick horror film The Shining gets a tongue-in-cheek musical makeover in the upcoming stage play Redrum: The Unauthorized Musical Parody Of The Shining. The play is written and directed by Joe Lovero and stars Marc Kudisch as Jack. There’s no word on a premiere date, but in the mean time you can watch this teaser.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Artist Sal Giliberto has designed a fabric pattern based on carpet seen throughout the hallways of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 psychological horror film The Shining. The pattern is available to purchase online in many different fabric choices and sizes from Spoonflower.

image via Spoonflower

via Seth Porges

Mythbusters has posted the trailer for their “Zombie Special” which was filmed on the grounds of Alameda’s retired Navel Air Station using many zombies from the Bay Area. The episode will explore zombie myths with the help of Michael Rooker who played “Merle Dixon” in AMC’s The Walking Dead. The Mythbusters zombie special comes out […]

The post Bay Area zombies invade Mythbusters appeared first on The Shared Universe.

geekcubed:

8bitmonkey:

Rey Arzeno | DA

This is awesome! 

Artist Ariana Page Russell has hypersensitive skin that allows her to create art on her body in angry-looking red welts. Russell has dermatographism, a condition that causes her skin to break out in short-lived painless welts when it is scratched. In her art, she scratches patterns and even lettering on her body and photographs the inflamed welts that result.

via Razorshapes, My Modern Metropolis

sfmola:

All the great reasons why books should and will never die

Follow Bookshelf Porn on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Pinterest.

kurtbusiek:

He’s the Best There Is at What He Does.

Art by Miller & Rubinstein, logo rearrangement and paste-up by me, colors by…Paul Becton, I think. Done back in my MARVEL AGE days, on a slow afternoon.

mollycrabapple:

Things we draw at night when we think about Yeats and burning things down

He gasped so violently — shocked that the bar’s tonic water wasn’t made in-house — that he threw out his back.

(Photo: We Are The Rhoads)

Feel free to use these insults. They make you sound mean and well-read at the same time (from How Not to Read):

“Last time I saw a mouth that big, it was dragging Captain Ahab to his watery grave!”

“I haven’t seen a face this ugly since Perseus killed the Cracken!”

“The only thing sadder than you is a Joycean epiphany!”

“You’re as weak as a passive sentence written in negative form. And probably not considered by anyone to be worth more than an adverb.”

“Is your Dewey Decimal number in the 521s, because you’re fat enough to be listed under ‘celestial mechanics.’”

“Last time I talked to someone this brain-dead, he was walking out of Room 101.”

“If ignorance is strength, then you must be going after the ‘strongest person in the world’ award!”

“Last time I saw someone this brain-dead, I pity-smothered him with a pillow and escaped the psych ward.”

“The only person who would enjoy being near you is Oedipus. He’s blind and only hangs out with the inbred.”

“Yo Mama so fat when Atlas shrugged, it was so she would fall off.”

“Hey, Harold Bloom called. He cited a number of Shakespeare quotes that describe you, including: ‘a wretch whose natural gifts are poor,’ ‘thou bloodier villain than terms can give thee out,’ and ‘cock-face.’”

“Last time I saw a guy this ugly, he was calling on his father Poseidon to punish Odysseus.”

“Why don’t you make like a Tolstoy character, and kill yourself?”

“When your mom was pregnant with you, she said she would treat it like the best Coleridge poem: She was going to end it prematurely while on opium.”

“If my dog were as ugly as you, I’d bury it in a magical cemetery and wait for it to come back to life and kill me. That’s how ugly you are. Just seeing you makes me want to die by the fangs of a ghost-dog.”

Find out more ways to sound smart by reading How Not to Read!

Cleopatra’s Feast, after Jordeans (detail)

“Museum Anatomy” is an ongoing project by art duo Chadwick & Spector (Chadwick Gray and Laura Spector) to recreate paintings in museum collections by painting reproductions on a most unusual canvas: the human body. The elaborate process begins with a photograph of the work, after which Spector spends 5 to 18 hours reproducing the image on a body (usually Gray’s) with special effects makeup. The final artwork is a photograph of the completed body art. The duo has been working on “Museum Anatomy” since 1994. We previously posted about the project back in 2010.

Chadwick & Spector’s work will be on display at “The Big Show” at the Lawndale Art Center in Houston, July 12 to August 10, 2013, and in a solo show at the Georgetown Arts and Cultural Center in Seattle, October 4 to November 3, 2013.

Guernica, after Picasso

Phramatawratneebeepmoipom, (Mother of the Land), Wat Umong

Madeline de France Queen of Scotland, after Corneille de Leon

Water after Archimboldo

Nell Gwynne as St. Catherine, after Sir Peter Lely

Cleopatra’s Feast (detail)

via Juxtapoz

thefrogman:

Moonbeard by James Squires [website | tumblr | twitter]

[h/t: jxnblk]

X-Men Legacy from #208 until #271 are dropping in price on Monday on Marvel and ComiXology apps. #208 was the first issue of the book being called X-Men Legacy – it was New X-Men and X-Men before that. It contains the entire run started by Mike Carey and David Finch and stops four issues before the end of Christos Gage‘s run, for some reason.

Time to get your Rogue on.

X-Men Legacy Hits 99 Cents On ComiXology On Friday

Tim Hanley writes;

Marvel is closing in on a full year of having a higher percentage of female creators than DC, making it eleven months in a row with a slight uptick in April while DC fell. We also check in on three more publishers: Boom!, Valiant, and Zenescope, to see how they’re doing with female creators.

DC COMICS

April wasn’t great for DC, with a notable decline overall and some poor totals by category. In April 2013, DC released 69 new comics with 618 credited creators, 552 men and 66 women. Here are their stats:

They’re down 1.3% overall from March, a relatively sizeable drop. Writers are continuing to do well, though they’re down very slightly from last month, while those miniscule penciller and inker numbers are actually up by a tiny percentage (the raw numbers remain the same, at 1 and 2 respectively). Letterers did great, up almost 3% from March, while editors, cover artists, and colorists all fell a percentage point or two and assistant editors slipped down nearly 5%. All together, the few gains were minimal and the losses added up.

Compared To A Year Ago: DC was at 11% last April, so they’re down 0.3%.

MARVEL COMICS

After a few months of drops, Marvel posted a small gain to retain the top spot among the Big Two. In April 2013, Marvel put out 72 new comic books featuring 630 credited creators, 546 men and 84 women. Let’s look at the stats:

Marvel’s 0.2% gain isn’t anything substantial, but it’s a positive change at least. Cover artists, writers, and pencillers were all up slightly, with writers climbing to a very solid 9.1%. Inkers fell a smidge, when colorists were down almost 3% and assistant editors slid just over 2%. Editors were up a couple of percentage points, though, and all of this slight rearranging by category ended up in a small net gain for Marvel.

Compared To A Year Ago: Marvel was at 12.2% female creators last April, so they’re up 1.1% since then.

ELSEWHERE IN COMICS

Back in November, we went further down the market share list and looked at the numbers for Image, Dark Horse, and IDW, with mixed results. Now, and for the next few months, we’re picking up where we left off. This month we’ll look at Boom!, Valiant, and Zenescope.

But first, a programming note. It seems that Dynamite got lost in the shuffle somewhere because they don’t get listed as a separate publisher in the market share charts. My best guess is that they get rolled in with Dynamic Forces. So they should have been included in this month, but aren’t. We’ll look at them next month, along with Archie, Aspen, and Avatar.

Carrying on, Boom!, Valiant, and Zenescope are interesting in that they’re small publishers with a limited output, but this limited output really says a lot. Let’s go through them:

BOOM! STUDIOS

Boom! has an interesting mix of comic books, and while there are certainly pockets where the numbers for female creators are especially strong, they’re quite good across the board. In April 2013, Boom! released 15 new comics with 154 credited creators, 114 men and 40 women. Here are their stats:

There are far and away the highest numbers for female creators that we’ve ever seen. It’s massive across the board, dwarfing the best that DC and Marvel had to offer this month at every turn. Their 26% overall nearly doubles Marvel’s “winning” total, and their LOWEST category total is better than 11 of the 16 categories at the Big Two this month.

Some of the strongest numbers came from books that are quite different fare than what we get from DC and Marvel. The Adventure Time, Bravest Warriors, and Peanuts titles all had substantial numbers for female creators, but Boom!’s more conventional books were solid as well, with 13 of the 15 books featured at least one female creator. For example, Planet of the Apes: Cataclysm was co-written by Corinna Bechko, and Steed and Mrs. Peel was drawn by Yasmin Liang, along with numerous other female cover artists, colorists, letterers, and editors across the line. Ultimately, Boom! is a fantastic example of using female creators in a range of styles and genres, and the Big Two would be wise to look there for up and coming talent.

VALIANT ENTERTAINMENT

Valiant, on the other hand, is not so good. Boom! posted the best numbers we’ve ever seen, and Valiant swung firmly in the other direction. In April 2013, Valiant released 6 comics featuring 58 credited creators, 57 men and 1 woman. Here are their stats:

Yeah, they didn’t have a ton of books to work with, but ONE lady? That’s embarrassingly low. Valiant’s 1.7% overall is the smallest number we’ve ever seen, and by quite a margin. I think the lowest we’ve ever hit is in the 7% range, so Valiant’s set the bar to an impressive new low.

However, as much as this is clearly terrible, Valiant had as many female pencillers in their 6 books as DC did in their 69 books. By percentage, Valiant beat both DC and Marvel handily in terms of female cover artists and pencillers just with Emanuela Lupacchino on Archer & Armstrong. Their numbers across the board may be awful, but that they’re able to smoke the Big Two is a couple of categories with their ONLY female creator shows some serious faults at DC and Marvel.

ZENESCOPE

I was very pleasantly surprised by Zenescope. I judged the book by its cover in the most literal way, assuming they’d not be great with female creators because of all their sexed up Grimm fairy tale books, and boy was I wrong. In April 2013, Zenescope put out 8 comics with 91 credited creators, 71 men and 20 women. Let’s look at the stats:

This is the second best overall total we’ve ever seen, and by a big margin. Dark Horse’s 15.7% in November was impressive, but Boom! and now Zenescope have completely shattered that record.

By category, we actually see the patterns we’re used to at the Big Two: strong on colorists and editors, and low everywhere else (most of the female cover artists credits are actually colorists). The percentages here are much higher, though, and are bolstered by having Nei Ruffino pencil and ink Grimm Fairy Tales Presents: Unleashed #0. Yet again, a small publisher has as many penciling credits as DC’s massive line, and Zenescope’s penciling and inking percentages slay DC and Marvel. Zenescope didn’t have any female writers or letterers, but Marvel hasn’t had a female letterer in over two years. Overall, female creators are doing well in terms of coloring and editorial at Zenescope, and are branching out into other areas as well.

All together, our guest publishers made DC and Marvel look pretty bad this month, with even the pitiful Valiant smacking around the Big Two a bit in terms of female pencillers. There are lots of women doing lots of work in comics out there, including the categories where DC and Marvel are chronically low. They might want to check them out.

As fun as the numbers were this month, our guest publishers are shaping up to be a real doozy for next month. I’m not done the numbers yet, but I’m fairly certain we’ll have at least one publisher with no female creators at all, and quite possibly two. Who could it be? Tune in next month to find out.

To learn more about this statistics project and its methodology click here, and to see the previous stats click here. You can visit Tim at Straitened Circumstances and follow him on Twitter @timhanley01.

 

Gendercrunching April 2013 – Boom And Zenescope Buck The Trend For Employing Women In Comics

Using cheap plastic animal toys, Instructables’ play editor and community manager Mike Warren created super cute corn on the cob holders. He even cleverly designed the holders to reconnect when not poking corn (tutorial).

via MAKE

Since Helen’s face launched a thousand ships, Isaac Asimov proposed that one millihelen was the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship. And one negative helen is the amount of ugliness that will send a thousand ships in the other direction.

When the taciturn Paul Dirac was a fellow at Cambridge, the dons defined the dirac as the smallest measurable amount of conversation — one word per hour.

Robert Millikan was said to be somewhat conceited; a rival suggested that perhaps the kan was a unit of modesty.

And a bruno is 1158 cubic centimeters, the size of the dent in asphalt resulting from the six-story free fall of an upright piano. It’s named after MIT student Charlie Bruno, who proposed the experiment in 1972. The drop has become an MIT tradition; last year students dropped a piano onto another piano:

In her series “Errata,” artist Ekaterina Panikanova creates large-scale paintings using grids of open books as her canvas. The paintings feature disquieting, almost nightmarish images of childhood, memory, and mental illness. The book grids allow the paintings to be mixed and matched by turning pages, allowing the artist to create collages of multiple subjects.

via DesignTAXI

Chris-Rachael Oseland of Kitchen Overlord has created a biscuit bar, a waffle bar, and a breakfast taco bar themed after the Settlers of Catan game board.

images via Kitchen Overlord

via Neatorama

Orlando, Florida-based comic aficionado Amy Watkins of PowerUpCollage gave her old collection of comic books new life by turning them into beautiful collages that spell out “signature sound effects.” Select designs are available to purchase online at the Etsy shop, PowerUpCollage.

I love my comics too much to keep them in dusty long boxes in the closet. After I’ve read the stories and pored over the pictures, I want to enjoy my comics again, as a medium for new art. I sell original, handmade pieces–no prints here–constructed out of the amazing art of old comic books.

images via PowerUpCollage

via Rahzzah, DesignTAXI

The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks by Amy Stewart is a truly impressive and important book that I'll be referring to for years to come. The book is an entertaining encyclopedia of the plants that are used in fermentation and distillation, in flavoring spirits, and in accenting cocktails. Though botany is the primary focus, Stewart also explains how these ingredients are used in spirits and how fermentation, distillation, and different sorts of infusion work mechanically. From the first chapter on agave I knew the book would be revealing. Though I've been to Mexico a bunch of times and know a lot about agave and tequila and mezcal production, I learned so much more by reading this chapter and was surprised to be corrected on a few popular mistruths about the plant and its history (like who named Blue Weber agave and how those supposedly pre-Spanish Filipino stills got there). Stewart also tackles spirits production, like how yeast (and bacteria) work to ferment things into alcohol, and sums up how malting works in a few paragraphs while it took me several distillery visits to Scotland to get it down. Other delights in the book include how...

[Visit Alcademics.com for the full post.]

San Francisco’s latest cocktail joint, Novela, is slated to open this week on the Mission Street stretch between Second and Third.

Aside from the theme component (books! literature!) and the bar’s large scale (3,500 square feet), the main reason why Novela warrants some opening buzz is the names that are attached: Kate Bolton and Alex Smith.

Bolton and Smith are both former Chronicle Bar Stars — in 2012 and 2011 respectively. At Novela, which has been in the works for a while, they teamed up to collaborate on the cocktail menu. Do note that Bolton remains at Maven, where she’s actually a partner now; Smith, formerly of Honor Bar and Gitane, will handle the day-to-day bar manager duties at Novela.

The cocktail menu, which is in full below, features a few notable characteristics. First and foremost, there is punch on tap, available in pitchers ($45), flights ($14) or regular old glasses ($10). The idea is that the punches — to start, six of them, each with a different base liquor — can be premade and help eliminate wait times. Quickly served drinkers are happy drinkers, after all.

The rest of the cocktail menu is themed around famous literary characters, like the Holden Caulfield (rock, rye, Oloroso, Angelica bitters, $10), the Atticus Finch (bourbon, Earl Grey honey, balsamic bitters, $10) and the Leopold Bloom (hibiscus gin, pineapple syrup, mint, $10). The timing is fun, too, since we were just talking last week about the most iconic cocktails of film and literature.

The full menu:

Puppet Massacre is a great series of illustrations by Syracuse, New York-based artist Isaac Bidwell that reimagine various Sesame Street characters as horror film icons. A “Mega Set” of 10 prints and new limited edition series 3 prints (seen above) are available to purchase online at the Etsy shop, Dr. Frankenwell.

images via Isaac Bidwell

via OMG Posters!

[Image: From a map of the San Andreas Fault, cutting through the Carrizo Plain, by T.W. Dibblee (1973), courtesy of the USGS].

Those of you sonically inclined might be interested in the latest weekend challenge from Marc Weidenbaum's Disquiet Junto project: "Read a map of the San Andreas Fault as if it were a graphic notation score," and then post the acoustic results to Soundcloud.

[Images: From a map of the San Andreas Fault, cutting through the Carrizo Plain, by T.W. Dibblee (1973), courtesy of the USGS].

This collaboration-at-a-distance between BLDGBLOG and the Disquiet Junto comes as a kind of sonic follow-up to the San Andreas Fault National Park architectural design studio I taught this past semester at Columbia, part of which involved designing architectural "devices" or "instruments" for the San Andreas.

[Images: An architectural "instrument" for the San Andreas Fault, designed and fabricated by student David Hecht at GSAPP].

However, the Disquiet Junto challenge literalizes the notion of the "instrument" a bit more, specifically listening for the sonic implications of the Fault.

Partially inspired by earlier graphic and musical explorations, by such composers as John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, among many, many others, the basic idea is that geologic maps of the San Andreas can themselves be "interpreted"—or perhaps willfully misinterpreted is more accurate—as a musical score.

They are, in Marc Weidenbaum's words, a "faulty notation" for pieces of music that do not yet exist.

[Images: From a map of the San Andreas Fault, cutting through the Carrizo Plain, by T.W. Dibblee (1973), courtesy of the USGS].

You can find out more about how to participate over at the Disquiet website. However, compositions are due Monday, May 27th, so, if you're interested, you need to dive in straightaway.

Listen to previous Disquiet sound challenges on the group's Soundcloud page (and consider following Marc Weidenbaum on Twitter for reliably interesting sonic news and world reports).

Update: Listen to nearly three hours of ambient compositions resulting from the challenge.