Singer-songwriter Carlene Carter has posted a touching memoir of her mother, the country giant June Carter Cash who would have been 86 this week, at online music ‘zine Innocent Words.
A few years ago I attempted a dissection of the intriguing elements of the culture-shock t-shirt You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On!, produced by Bernie Rhodes, Malcolm McLaren and Gerry Goldstein for sale in Sex at 430 King’s Road in the autumn of 1974.
In You’re Gonna Wake Up, the declamatory tone, aggressive punctuation, satirical bite and use of basic typographical emphases such as the repeated forward slash and random capitalised text combined to detonate a densely packed cultural device.
For its 75th anniversary issue, US visual culture publication Print has selected Barney Bubbles as one of six “unsung heroes of design”.
“Bad thing for a young man to lose his father” Charles Cheeryble, Nicholas Nickleby
My father died 35 years ago today.
I was 20 at the time, and witnessed him take his final breath. The narrow world of music and clothes I inhabited was preoccupied with Ian Curtis’s recent suicide; given the fact that my father had been diagnosed with cancer four years previously and spent the last 18 months on earth hospitalised and fighting like a bastard for his life, I couldn’t see what the fuss was about. PiL’s Death Disco was much more my speed.
Continue reading The Old Man: Philip “Staff” Gorman (April 25, 1903 – June 8, 1980)
Congratulations to our pal Johnny Deluxe for this fantastic spot; he happened upon this kitsch sketch of an original tits t-shirt while leafing through an early 70s Frederick’s Of Hollywood catalogue.
Great news that the British Library has digitised the archive of one of the most important magazines of modern times: Spare Rib.
If you don’t know it or haven’t seen the publication, you are in for a treat. As the British Library’s politics and public life curator Polly Russell says, Spare Rib was “funny, irreverent, intelligent and passionate… a product of its time which is also somehow timeless”.
Continue reading A cause for celebration: Digitisation of all 239 issues of Spare Rib
I’m pretty late with this but there are still three or so weeks to go, so, if you have the opportunity, I recommend a visit to Hauser + Wirth Somerset, home until June 21 of the contemplative and poised exhibition Land Marks: Structures For A Poetic Universe.
Curated by historians Nicholas Olsberg and Markus Lähteenmäki, Land Marks presents 100 architectural studies and works constituting an investigation into the boundaries between sculpture and architecture and landscapes and cities.
The spell-binding space at Durslade Farm outside the village of Bruton provides the perfect setting; I am thrilled that the curators included Derek Boshier’s quizzical 1971 work 16 Situations.
It’s been a busy and satisfying week, rounded off by publication today in the Architects Journal of an essay of mine on the cultural significance of 430 King’s Road.
A film of last month’s celebration of design hero Barney Bubbles by American graphic designer Ian Lynam is now available to view online.
Continue reading ‘A profound influence’: Ian Lynam on Barney Bubbles’ impact on graphic design
Photographer Nick Knight has posted a fond tribute to Barney Bubbles.
//Back and front cover, C’Est C Bon, Carlene Carter, F-Beat/Epic, 1983//
Among the contributions Knight made to designs by the late graphics maestro was one of Bubbles’ last, for Carlene Carter’s 1983 LP C’est C Bon.