"Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain. 

"Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Beacause no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fingering the type-page? Again: the glass is colourless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its colour and is impatient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass! When a goblet has a base that looks too small for security, it does not matter how cleverly it is weighted; you feel nervous lest it should tip over. There are ways of setting lines of type which may work well enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried by the fear of 'doubling lines', reading three words as one, and so forth. 

"Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a 'modernist' in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first thing he asked of his particular object was not 'How should it look?' but 'What must it do?' and to that extent all good typography is modernist."

Spending my Sunday with Beatrice Warde.

And The Swan Silvertones.

Taken from

The 72-Room Bohemian Dream House

“The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future." 
        –Marshall McLuhan

My books arrived.

My list is growing.

The extent of my facilities is staggering.



I would like to see this.

I would like to go to Brighton on Wednesday to see Dean Wareham play Galaxie 500.

I wish I had more time

My head hurts.

I sit on the other side of the glass, peering out. 

An observer of other people's worlds, other people's lives.

I've seen that man's face before. 

I've seen her umbrella.

I've heard their voices in the street.

But now it's silent.

If I put my hand up against the pane, it's cold.

I feel isolated from the world I knew.

And I wonder if I continue to exist in it.

A name or word.

A story.

A joke.

A sound.

A feeling.

A scent.

A memory.

One is alone, a total stranger and only an object of curiosity. And so long as you say “one” instead of “I,” there’s nothing in it and one can easily tell the story; but as soon as you admit to yourself that it is you yourself, you feel as though transfixed and are horrified.

Grey skies above,

but I have work to do on all fronts.

To find a package,

and a place to live,

and some printer paper,

and some sugar (construction) paper,

and more VHS tapes.

Like the person who sent this to me, I also can't stop listening to it.
Because it's a good song, but also because I wonder if it was meant as a swipe at me.
Not that it matters, but sometimes you just want to know.
Even if it's a stranger.

Passed on from one friend to another, but nice to look at this morning.

 

found here. 

I've had this morbid fascination with the Chernobyl disaster of late.

I saw this last week. Diana Thater's Chernobyl Exhibition.

I've heard tales of the abandoned city of Prypiat.

She filmed the once, nearly extinct, Przewalski’s Horse in the "Zone of Alienation." The horse thrives in a habitat free of human life. A habitat so toxic that you will surely die from exposure.

The "Zone of Alienation" is about the size of England.

 I've heard tales of mutant bears and wolves that live in the old reactor.

The above is graphic.

A parallel has been drawn between the "Zone of Alienation" and Tarkovsky's the "Zone" in Stalker.

I've heard tales that Tarkovsky was murdered by the KGB.

Or was this the scene that poisoned Tarkovsky, his wife, and Anatoly Solonitsyn at the end of Stalker?


I've been unable to roll a good cigarette.

Until now.