Category: General

Ascenders & Descenders is a typographic reinterpretation of Merce Cunningham’s dancing hands. From this blog:

The piece is a Cunningham dance work reconstructed from textual deconstructions of other Cunningham dance works. Each finger has an associated excerpt from an article, review, or essay on Cunningham from the last 5 decades. These texts become the “ink” with which each finger manifests its movements. Each text is dynamically typeset in 3 dimensional space along the curves traced by his fingertips.

What, from the outside, appear to be subtle manipulations of the hands become a beautiful tangle of diving flocks and waterfalls of letters. Presenting dance in this way, we hope to get closer to the experience of the dance from the inside out.

The Spring 2009 Ampersand has just come out. (That’s the quarterly book arts journal I edit for the PCBA.) It’s got the third of three articles on papermaking by Ginger Burrell where among other things she writes about printing directly on handmade paper using an ink-jet printer and Golden Digital Grounds. One of the problems with ink-jets is that they really only print well on coated papers. Digital Grounds is an ink-receptive coating that can be applied to a variety of substrates, making them more amenable to ordinary ink. You can read more about it here.
You can see back issues of the Ampersand here.

This is a video of “Remember,” an installation by John Powers that makes music with old typewriters. The video is from the Universtiy of Alabama website. Power’s has another video and more photos on his own website (it doesn’t have the background music so you can really hear the typewriters playing).

I’m continuing to read books on my kindle — I’m currently wading through James’ The Bostonians — and I like it better and better for reading in bed. Despite what xkcd says in the comic above, the web access may be free but the built-in browser is horrible.
My friend Cathy sent me a link to this wonderful interview with Ann Krischner where she compares reading Dickens’ “Little Dorrit” 4 different ways: as a paperback, as an audio book, on her Kindle and on her iPhone. The first question in the interview cuts to the heart of the big issue with the kindle (at least for me): “Do you love reading or do you love books?” (My answer: reading.) The interview is posted 2 ways — as a podcast and a transcript. I must say that I really liked reading along as I listened, seemed to make me listen more attentively.

Nikki Dahlke bought one of my flipbooks, and that’s how I found her blog Only Flipbooks! where she displays movies she’s made of flipping the flipbooks she buys… That’s one of the books she shows off, to the left.

A few weeks ago, Marty Weil asked to interview me for his blog, “ephemera: exploring the world of old paper.” On Etsy, the tag line for my shop is “Green Chair Press: letterpress, books, ephemera,” but formulating answers to his questions made me think anew about “ephemera” and if I really made such a thing. The current common definition seems to be paper items — posters, broadsides, tickets and the like — that were originally meant to be tossed after use but along the way become collectibles. Saying I make things that are too good to throw away does seem a bit presumptuous! You’ll find more of my musings if you read the interview here.
Finding an illustration for this post was a challenge! So I resorted to my own “ephemera” collection — perfume bottles (I wrote about them and collecting here) — including several ads torn from old Vogue magazines. That’s one of them to the left, illustrated by Marcel Vertes, from 1949.