Tangled Lettering

I was reading Pride of the Decent Man by T. J. Kirsch, published by NBM. It’s OK, but I found myself sort of vaguely annoyed by the diary/letter parts. They look like this:

And then I started really staring at the diary (and letter) snippets.

And then it hit me: There’s really no other way to get bold handwritten text other than to have two pens: One thin pen and one thick pen.

Which then suddenly changes the image of the person writing these diary pages from the grizzled old man seen above to a 14-year-old boy, lying on his bed with a pop song on the stereo, writing his diary with different pens and dotting the i’s with hearts and glitter.

Fam.

I mean, in my mind.

So, hot tip for people working with computer lettering and “hand-written” fonts (which this is): Don’t use bold. Use underlining if you want to get that insane grizzled random insistent vibe going on.

This has been a public service announcement.

4AD Bootleg Tapes

During the 90s, I was involved with a lot of tape swapping related to the British record company 4AD. These tapes have since languished in a box in the basement, but this autumn I went on a I Must Tidy Things! jag and carried the box up to the apt. and digitised all the tapes.

Most of the tapes were rarities (tracks from limited edition 7″ records and stuff like that), and all that stuff is available already for anybody interested. But there was also a small stack of live bootleg recordings that nobody seems to have bothered to upload to Youtube yet, so I did it.

Enjoy. Most of these are pretty horribly-sounding recordings from the middle of the audience, so you get a lot of “whoo hoo” and not so much music, but I think some of these are pretty exciting anyway. Especially the Throwing Muses live at Anaconda tape, which is just so raw-sounding and intense. Wish I were there.

Kristin Hersh live mid-90s (bootleg audience recording)
The Breeders live at Toad's Place, New Hampshire (bootleg audience recording)
Dead Can Dance live at the Loft Club, Berlin, 21/11/87 (bootleg audience recording)
Throwing Muses live at Anaconda, Santa Barbara 12/9/92 (bootleg audience recording)
The Breeders live 1993 Double Trouble (bootleg soundboard recording)
Throwing Muses live at Club With No Name 11/11/92 (bootleg audience recording)
Kitchens of Distinction live (bootleg audience recording)
Björk live at Paradiso Amsterdam (bootleg audience recording)
Cocteau Twins Live in Cleveland 3/17/94 (bootleg audience recording)
Cocteau Twins Live at London University 12/13/83 (bootleg audience recording)
Cocteau Twins Live in Vera, Holland 2/2/85 (bootleg audience recording)
Interview with Kristin Hersh at a radio show 25/01/1994
Interview with Mark Kozelek at Dutch radio May 1993

ACW1984: Starman

What a pretty baby!

What is friend?

What happened! They’re both in focus at the same time!!!

And now the backgrounds are in focus at the same time as the people!? WHAAA. Is this even a Carpenter movie!?

John Carpenter. Starman. 1984.

By this time in his career, Carpenter had abandoned everybody from his stable of production people and actors from his pre-studio days, apparently? At least I don’t recognise anybody from the screen or the cast list… (But that may be the beer writing…)

In any case, this is his biggest budget yet. Kinda puzzling after The Thing and Christine not exactly putting the box office on fire.

And it’s a puzzling movie. It’s not immediately obvious what kind of film this is going to be, which is the question you ask of genre film directors. Another The Man Who Fell To Earth? E.T. remade with Jeff Bridges as the alien? Alien Encounters without the mashed potatoes? The Day the Earth Stood Still with a less shiny klaatu? What?

It’s a comedy about Jeff Bridges learning human behaviour and languages, and the humour is just what you’d expect: Cringe-worthy. These things are never funny, no matter how many times it’s been attempted.

So it’s another semi-flop, commercially and critically. But not sufficiently to bar Carpenter from getting money to do another comedy.

This post is part of the A Carpenter Winter series.

ACW1983: Christine

Uh-oh.

Nasty boys.

You can tell that he’s evil by his leather vest.

John Carpenter. Christine. 1983.

The only thing I remember about this film is 1) I thought it was a bit meh, and 2) I had several friends that thought this was the greatest film ever. Or something.

I’m excited to determine who was right.

The first thing I notice is how grainy the film is. Carpenter likes to make his films look luxe, so that’s odd. Was it shot on the same experimental film stock as Aliens? Did something go wrong during the bluray transfer?

And… My friends were right! This film is a hoot! I love the sensitive jock/jerky nerd protagonist pair. It’s a strange kind of power fantasy, though: The jerky nerd (who I think we’re supposed to sympathise with, but who I loathed from the first frame) goes through a journey where he becomes kick-ass (and evil)… Are nerds supposed to go “yeah! so cool! he was a nerd but now he’s kick-ass! whoo!”? We’re cheering when Christine is killing those nasty boys, aren’t we?

So it’s a nerd service film, and kinda disgusting that way.

But it’s still fun, although that rant near the end is snoresville. Probably Carpenter’s most accomplished film so far, helped a lot by finally getting a cinematographer that’s not useless. He’s still totally hung up on the shallow depth of field thing, though. Probably fails the Bechdel test.

This post is part of the A Carpenter Winter series.