The Joy of Books, How to Avoid Huge Ships

Book designs by
Rodrigo Corral, above,
and Chip Kidd, below.

Everyone is tweeting the "Joy of Books" video today and it feels like it should have a place here. A husband/wife team live-animated the shelves/stock at Type Books in Toronto.  The piece showcases the eye-candy quality of a room full of good print. And it is always fun to find a new bookstore. Now I have a bookstore to add to my list of destinations for an indeterminate future visit to Toronto. I hope to make it to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)  some year sooner than later. My entire previous Toronto experience comprises one night passing through, feeling lost after a few days in orderly, showy Montreal; still, we managed to find a great meal in one of Toronto's Chinatowns, and stumbled onto a free Lila Downs concert at the Toronto Harbourfront
Centre. Then we slept in the van.

A congruence of animations, animated books, creative couples, and our old friend book design: Last night I was finally introduced to Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Somehow I missed it while 15 million + others were melting in the face of monumental cuteness. If you're like me and you're late to this party, watch adorable Marcel now!!! Marcel might even be certifiably poetic (in my book): "Guess what I use for a hat? A lentil." The word "lentil" is almost a little, round poem unto itself. And maybe the thing we call "lentil" is too.

Naturally, I looked up the people responsible. "Co-habitating couple" Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp created Marcel together, and on filmmaker Fleischer-Camp's website I noticed he had directed an intro for comedian Patrick Borelli's one-man multimedia show, "You Should Judge a Book By Its Cover." Borelli, a former book designer, critiqued bad book cover design for laughs; he conceived the show for a library audience in 2009 [sic?] and took it to American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) conferences across the country. The intro didn't do much for me (perhaps my expectations were too high coming straight off The Shell) but a cool interview clip from Borelli's show (also directed by D.F.-C.) features author/artist/designers Steven Heller, Rodrigo Corral, and Chip Kidd, and the covers selected and comments from the designers evidence the subjectivity involved in pinning down "bad," let alone "good."

In an A.V. Club interview with Borelli, the much-mocked How to Avoid Huge Ships is singled out to exemplify bad bookdom. I found myself taking issue with this particular skewering. There are so many jokes about this book afloat on the internet that it's difficult to find serious references. I get it. But, I thought, if there's a book about it, maybe avoiding huge ships is actually pretty difficult, once you're in a situation where such action is necessary. And if so, then I certainly want the person responsible for keeping me out of collision with a huge ship to know exactly how to prevent the disaster. The cover design is not that bad. Plebeian. Unsurprising. I've seen worse. Okay, I might even feel attracted to it. (At any rate, I hope that author Captain John W. Trimmer benefited in some way from the maelstrom of fun-poking.)

Borelli suggests that a bad concept makes a book design bad, but the two are so different to my mind, although related in a stimulating way in the best books as objects. I have personally owned some pretty bad books, in terms of content, that were just so great to look at that I got suckered in. And then, who are the concept police? In the Borelli/Heller/Corral/Kidd video linked above, Cooking with Pooh is brought out for discussion; I was glad to hear Heller back the idea that the book, though provoking, of course,  chuckles in the adult demographic, is probably effective in reaching young Pooh-lovers.

At the end of the day, I do love what Borelli brings up in his own interview and the interview with other designers, about picturing all the parties involved in publishing a real stinker okaying the really sucky cover/book design. Just last night we were talking about television ads, the good and the ugly, and the corollary visualization in which I picture a group of decision-makers sitting around a table, agreeing, "Yeah, we'll go with that one." Such as the one that could turn a true Pepper off Dr. Pepper forever.

Twelve Days of Christmas Books: Frame Publishers (I Diverge)

As soon as Frame Publishers' Frameweb newsletter pops up in my inbox I minimize any paid-work windows and take an invigorating break to check out their new art/architecture/design beauties. Today's brought wind of Jonathan Harris's Balloons of Buthan, in which the artist seeks to measure happiness using balloons as a quantitative measure, on a scale from one to ten. Immediately above, "Restaurant owner Khandu shows his level of happiness." The photographs are captivating, and at the Balloons of Bhutan Web site Harris has created a deeper interactive multimedia exploration, including interviews, audio, and statistics. Each of the 117 participants also wrote a wish on one balloon, and the balloons were strung along prayer flags at the conclusion of the project. While the colorful balloons make for whimsy and cheer, the material does not avoid the more bittersweet stream that courses through the study. One man's balloon wish reads, "I want to go with you so I have a place to live." And when we see participants holding fewer than five balloons, we are able to presume (with an admixture of relief) that Harris hasn't fluffed up the happiness level of the Himalayan characters who are his subject (along with happiness and other more general and elusive states and measures).

Check out Harris's website (linked above) to see his webby/tech-related art/thought and photo projects, and to peek into his handwritten, handdrawn sketchbooks. 

I meet people. One at a time they step inside me and live inside me. Some of them only for a moment, some stay. They set up wherever they want to and take my facial expressions or my leg's resting position and put their own in their place. They lie on my back and press their toes into my Achilles tendons. They appear in every pause and come out when I am in doubt and fill all the empty space. I shake and say to myself for a long time: good, really good. —Talo/The House

(Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. © Crystal Eye Ltd, Helsinki.)

A month back I saw "Talo/The House" (2002), a three-channel video installation by Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, at the Art Institute. Ahtila drew on research and interviews with individuals suffering psychotic disorders for her work, which is rendered with high production values, pretty sets and mise-en-scène, to make a dreamlike experience for a viewer, one part Anthropologie, two parts Roman Polanski. The dream bridges the divide between those Ahtila interviewed and the viewer on the bench in a darkened room in the corner of an art museum. I looked Ahtila up and read a NYT piece on an exhibition that came down Dec. 3.

Marian Goodman Gallery was showing two projections: "The Annunciation," enacted by non-actors (all women, excepting one, who had experienced addictions); and "Horizontal," which NYT writer Ken Johnson described as "representing a tall spruce tree rotated 90 degrees . . . six vertical projections, each showing a section of the tree, it spreads more than 35 feet across one wall. With its wind-blown branches heaving and swaying and its trunk whipping up and down, it looks more animal than plant, as if it were a great, arboreal whale." Sounds great. There's never enough (really top) video art around.

So, when that week's Frameweb email came through featuring Pipilotti Rist, my longtime (once?) favorite video artist, I went from, "Oh, I guess I won't unsubscribe," to "Now I definitely won't unsubscribe." The newsletter and website feature an agenda section that trots out mentions of a fine stable of very contemporary artists. I was lucky to catch a Rist installation in Chicago soon after moving to the city (maybe "Sip My Ocean"?), and then saw and loved "Ever Is Over All," a giant-flower-smashing-car-windows number at MOMA a few years later—uncannily, giddily uplifting (a bit of a reenactment below). The "Agenda" covered her first solo show in Italy, ending this weekend.

The divergence . . .  I am actually touting a magazine here, versus a book; a magazine available in a digital format no less (in addition to print, but given the cost of international subscriptions a digital option is a coup). Definitely peruse Frame's books offerings; if you have a serious interior designer on your gift list you can pull out the stops and make his or her season. But for uber-contemporary art lovers who blur the "line" between fine art and applied arts and design, a subscription to ELEPHANT is in order.

"A view of MoMA’s second-floor atrium with Pipilotti Rist’s “Pour Your Body Out” installation." Thanks, NYT.