knit one street purl one city

polaroid sx-70 promo : ray + charles eames

The Apple iPad may be a magical device from Jon Ives but the Polaroid SX-70 slr had Land and Eames’ on the case – no contest. This is a delightful promo film (11 minutes) full of intelligence, imagination and gentle humanity – no hard sell, it is self-evidently useful.

The two cameras I feel most comfortable with are the rolleiflex 3.5F and hasselblad 500c/m. The SX-70, like the braunschweig and gothenburg inventions, is I think grokkable (silly word but useful signifier), as described by berg.

Thanks to product designer Saikat Biswas for the find.

Also, there may (or may not) be a polaroid-phoenix’d announcement at Photokina 2010 from the impossible project… there is a lot of interest in the format worldwide – there was a photographer who took large format colour images in the polaroid netherlands factory after they closed it down a couple of years back but having trouble tracing – will update.

Noise and smoky breath

The title above is the title of a poetry anthology on Glasgow published by the third eye centre in the late 80s. Naturally Edwin Morgan featured, and this well mindmapped book has become close to me again in the past month. So it is fitting that the deid poet in word and deed is good-worded and reminisced fondly along with UCS frontman and vocalist (he was a rock star to many) Jimmy Reid this week, well above and beyond the foolishly lame-minded diversionary tactics of the scottish government regarding the very-likely-innocent “bomber” chemo’d up to the gills in the very-likely-not-so-innocent green-flag Maghreb republic.

What be may – it doesn’t do to take things too seriously and Edwin Morgan was an individual I have always looked up to at the back of my mind both in words and in graphics; allowing the death of working class ecosse to soften into the imagination. As a poet of the urban experience in this northern land he always did the right thing by shifting the perspective playfully but truthfully to other worlds and languages.

60s concrete poetry was a sort of banksy-meets-the-ancestors kind of movement and one I’m very fond of. Find out more here.

Hello. I’m Mr Cutler. Nice to meet you Mr Morgan. Shall we sing? You go first as you’re new to all this. I’ll show you around later. You can take your glasses off now.

image from the edwin morgan archive at the scottish poetry library

top tales

Top tales : series one are poster and card sets by fromztoa.

They’re cutups of fictitious dialogues imagined from overheard street conversations, long-forgotten books or tv episodes; in the manner of a scriptwriter reducing a story to one sentence (Roald Dahl comes to mind : see Ode to J. Smith post). Aphorisms that perhaps unsettle; unheimliche.

Archival giclee A1 + A2 artprints and A5 cardsets available to purchase now via Paypal – view Series One in the Shop here

ATYP in glasgow

A bit late, this : part of The Glasgow International Festival in May 2010, A Typical Route is a public art trail along the clyde walkway and central glasgow.

View Atypical Root – Public Art Trail (X) in a larger map

Ode to J. Smith : travis, dahl + birdsall

Taken last week on Wellington at West Regent in Glasgow, Travis’ Omnific eye billsticker is revealed again; probably first posted (and then covered over many times since) in summer 2008.

The eye design was taken off a 1980s Roald Dahl book cover. It’s classic late-old-school (i.e., just before macs came) graphic design, from the master of late-old-school british graphic design, Derek Birdsall.

If you’re interested in street typography, pop over to the excellent Letterpool who are preparing a new book on London.

Ginsberg : Moloch

Another snippet from Daisysaint – from the BBC4 docu Selling the Sixties – Ginsberg on top form (abridged version of the poem from Howl)

Borealis by Héctor Serrano Studio

No borealis in Scotland this weeknight but this is nice from last year.

…and Burns’ bit on the lights, from Tam O’Shanter…

Or like the snow falls in the river;
A moment white – then melts for ever

Or like the Borealis race
That flit before you can point their place

And a clip from Daisysaint’s superb YT channel – Tam Lin with Stephanie Beacham and Ian McShane (lovejoy).

The opening sequence here is lovely if you like fresh-minted brutalism seen from quiet motorway via Jensen, Aston and Corniche… (not too sure what the gold droptop is – Wolseley? )

north british station hotel book

Edinburgh’s landmark hotel, the North British (now called the Balmoral) was opened in 1902. I’ve just bought a copy of the souvenir book (from Cooper Hay books in Glasgow) that was published to commemorate the opening; and it is most beautifully illustrated and typeset. It contains three sections – Old and New Edinburgh; a description of the hotel; and then a gazetteer of the places covered by the NBR’s routes throughout Scotland. And a lovely big routemap tipped in at the back too. What the guests that day would think of Hallam Foe…

NB is journey’s northern end for Auden’s Night Mail. As railway hotels are a focus of intense transience, whilst remaining themselves the static empty vessel for these fleeting flickers, they do take on a weight of – well this is where it gets subjective. All I can say for myself is that they hold a fascination beyond their architectural iconography. Central Hotel in Glasgow, like the Balmoral, also has this feeling (Central’s currently being renovated). And of course the mother and father of them all has it too – the newly restored St Pancras Hotel, the model for Chhatrapati Shivaji in Mumbai. Cultural hegemony at its finest.

I once did a brochure for the Balmoral’s downstairs bar, No. 1 Princes Street. The third picture shows the main hotel brochure used at that time, done by an agency in London I think, with vogueish soft-blur photography. I’ve appropriated A day in the life (also a reference to simple minds’ first album Life in a day, which has always stuck with me since seeing it in Bruces’ record shop on shandwick place) for the title of a piece musing on Waverley station for PsyGeoEdinburgh.

one day is a lifetime under the canopy of ghosts
From the arrival of the 19:00 Kings Cross to Waverley; to the departure of the 23:36 Waverley to Euston 24hrs later – our flickers are ghosted into the grain of sleepers across years, decades, eternities. So and so appears; an unknown number vanish never to return. We sit; we stand; our belongings jumble around us; fellow pilgrims delight and infuriate; our time is mostly spent engrossed in ephemera. Spun out on a zoetrope of tree and telegraph post, the train and that symbol of the industrial revolution, the precision railway clock, plots linear life-shaped trajectory, perhaps to the music of Steve Reich; or Coward’s Brief Encounter; The Archer’s Red Shoes.

Stephen Walter on BBC4

As mentioned before on fromztoa, our favourite mapmaker Stephen Walter features on BBC4′s Maps series, episode 2 here

magazines and iPad

This video summarises the thought processes involved in re-creating a magazine in a new way. That’s as in a new way since Caxton.

As an alternative, sure, to the print edition – but this is so immersive. Here’s Jack Schulze from BERG London, elucidating on the process.

Mag+ live with Popular Science+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

By the way, it seems the 3G iPad is the one to go for… saving already for UK launch.

Catch more of Jack at the Horizonless Manhattan Project.