I couldn’t resist ordering a set of her prints. Can’t wait to get these hung up. She has such a wonderfully honed aesthetic and her work is simply delightful. I don’t think I ever actually say that word in real life, but it’s so fitting in this case. Delightful!

And incidentally, Uppercase looks like it will be amazing – anxiously awaiting the first copy!

I think they’re fairly commonplace now, but whoo boy, it seemed like a real innovation to me at the time. Somehow my brother and I must have convinced our mom to buy one. At least for a few years there it seemed like we were always sitting around after school, cookin’ up some sort of glorious (read: disgusting) pocket creation.

In memoriam, I present a Choose Your Own Sandwich sketch, featuring some of the ingredients that most dazzled my ten-year old tastebuds.

My fave combo probably would have been The Breakfast Pocket: 4 + 5 + 6 + 9 +2

Aside: I can’t even believe it, but the original infomercial is actually on youtube. Thank you, Internet!

All sentiment aside, it was fun to make. I really, really like working in more of a sequential format and have been tossing around some petite book ideas for some time now. I still have the two burning Vertical Cities follow-ups burning up a significant portion of my right brain, though. We’ll see!

Directed by Albert Lamorisse in 1965. According to imdb, the only short film to win a non-short film Oscar, ever (it won Best Original Screenplay).

From fat cat’s site:

Director : Agust Jacobsson and Sigur Ros
Date : January 2001

This unforgettable and award-winning clip, conceived by and supervised by the band with direction by Agust Jacobsson features the Perlan special-needs theatre group acting out a simple but beautiful play about the elements.

You know, at some point way back I remember hearing that they had this full-on fragrance laboratory in Manhattan, filled with all sorts of the really obscure scents (like Funeral Home, Bacon, Condensed Milk, and Chalk), but I have an idea I’ve conjured this resplendent mental image of it that’s way out of line with reality. Like you have to utter a secret password to be granted access and then it’s a whole subterranean maze of foggy corridors and floor-to-ceiling shelves full of colored glass bottles, scents of every description all in alphabetical order.

Spent the morning holed up in the upper echelons of the UT library with a smuggled mega-cup of JP’s ultra-octane latté. Looking for pix/info on the Limbourg Brothers’ illuminated calendars as I’ve been kinda sorta noodling with the idea of taking a stab at a modern take on them.

A fingerprint, a blot, a parade of sunspots.

Even entrenched in the neon faux-glory of the ’80s, I felt a slight nausea toward the never-ending parade of fluorescents, the wide chartreuse shoelaces, Hypercolor t-shirts and neon feathered keychains. Then one weekend we went to the Crayola factory and I saw a vat of molten day-glo pink up close, all fat, fat bubbles and the thick scent of hot wax.

As a kid I’d always been fascinated by color wheels and the different models used to create them (Munsell, CIELAB, Swedish NCS, etc.), and in this moment, staring into the steaming psychedelic impudence, I wondered where this color could possibly fit into the spectrum. So aberrant, it seemed, so manmade and impossible to belong to a natural order.

It wasn’t until the drive home that evening that it suddenly made so much sense. You know those certain dusks, when the sun’s just begun to graze the horizon line, making a perfect red disk with no visible corona? Nose pressed to the backseat window glass, I stared directly at it, that perfectly hot slice of round neon red. Roy G. Biv, you’re out there somewhere, I said. Twenty years later I marvel at the many shapes the colors take. Undefinable, somehow, yet ever-present in fluorescent bursts.

This must be a dream, I thought, as the sweet scent of nitrous oxide filled the air.