Vancouver, Canada

Above are just a few from a great online collection by Oliver Tomas—lots more retro design eye-candy here.

Happy Birthday, Beverly.

Tyuratam, Kazakhstan

Forty-nine years ago today, on the 12th of April in 1961, the first manned spaceship left our planet from the Baikonur cosmodrome in the Soviet Union with a singular and heroic (if somewhat diminutive) man aboard—Yuri Gagarin, the world’s very first “rocket-man” or cosmonaut…

This was the beginning, the blazing of a trail which has now become a road to the cosmos. One after another, spaceships are leaving earth for the wide expanses of the universe. Today, space pilots live and work for months aboard space stations, they fly to the moon; and Soviet and American spacemen have accomplished a joint experimental flight.

In the near future, perhaps, earthmen will go still further, journeying to other planets and universes. But alongside the names of these future explorers there will always rand the name of the first Soviet cosmonaut, for Yuri Gagarin’s 108-minute flight in space represented not only a triumph of science and engineering, but also a bursting of the “bounds of possibility,” the breaking of a psychological barrier. It was literally a flight into the unknown.

Being a pilot, he had flown many demanding assignments, including flights at night and in blizzard conditions, and at home they would wait anxiously for his familiar step. Even so, he was never very far from the earth. But now… he had gone out into the unknown where no man had ever been before. Valentina, his wife, well understood all that this entailed but had agreed. And this, too, was an act of heroism for the mother of two small children.

From Zvyozdny Gorodok (Star Town), Yuri had flown to the cosmodrome. It was quiet at his home. The children were asleep. The sky, washed by recent rain, was studded with stars. The night seemed to be waiting for something. The wet pines stood motionless, and the houses merged together in the stillness and bluish darkness. In only one of them shone a yellow rectangle of light…

“Am I happy to be setting off on a cosmic flight?” said Yuri Gagarin in an interview before the start. “Of course. In all ages and epochs people have experienced the greatest happiness in embarking upon new voyages of discovery… I want to dedicate this first cosmic flight to the people of communism—the society which the Soviet people are now already entering upon… I say ‘until we meet again’ to you, dear friends, as we always say to each other when setting off on a long journey. How I should like to embrace you all—my friends and those with whom I am not acquainted, strangers and the people nearest and dearest to me!”

(From a booklet published by Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Moscow, 1977—which some might call “propaganda?”)  Care to ramp up the nostalgic context a little more? Have a listen to the Soviet National Anthem, here (best with lyrics, I find…).

People of the world!
Let us safeguard and enhance this beauty—not destroy it!

Beginning in the Edo period…

Boro is a Japanese word meaning “ tattered rags” and it’s the term commonly used to describe patched and repaired cotton bedding and clothing lovingly used much longer than the normally expected life cycle. “Boro textiles were made in the late 19th and early 20th century by impoverished Japanese people from reused and recycled indigo-dyed cotton rags. What we see in these examples are typical—patched and sewn, piece-by-piece, and handed down from generation-to-generation, where the tradition continued. These textiles are generational storybooks, lovingly repaired and patched with what fabric was available. Never intended to be viewed as a thing of beauty, these textiles today take on qualities of collage, objects of history, and objects with life and soul.”

From the excellent blog Accidental Mysteries. More background on boro textiles (and lots of samples) here. Today’s pre-aged, stone-washed fashion mimicry doesn’t even come close…

Oporto, Portugal

Lots of wit, acerbity, pathos, and considerable illustrative talent on display in this virtual cartoon museum founded in the home of port wine back in 1997… thanks to designer/climber friend Antonio Coelho (Toze) for the link.

(from the beyond…)

Only days before his untimely death in 2001, Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) gave a riveting talk at the University of California that sparkled with his trademark satiric wit—about, amongst a myriad of foci, blind river dolphins (in China), reclusive lemurs (in Madagascar), and a seemingly doomed parrot (in New Zealand) that is as fearless as it is lovelorn… “an ingenious commentary on his own personal, close encounters with these rare and unusual animals… revealing that evolution can actually be mighty fickle.”

Without a doubt, the best online talk I’ve viewed in months… watch it here (close to 1.5 hours in length, and worth every single minute). Enjoy!

Johannesburg, South Africa

The last i-jusi Magazine was published just a little over 2 years ago (i-jusi translates loosely as “juice” in Zulu)—begun in 1994, it was an experimental graphics magazine by longtime designer friend Garth Walker, born along with “the New South Africa” and posing the question: What makes me African?

By dent of being on the i-jusi mailing list, I received notice today of the launch of the first i-jusi Portfolio (which recently made its debut at the Joburg Art Fair). The portfolio consists of 10 lithographs (7 graphic, 3 photographic; each signed by the artist) in an edition of 50. The selected works are by renowned South African artists who have been featured in i-jusi Magazine and include David Goldblatt, Pieter Hugo, Anton Kannemeyer, Mark Kannemeyer, Brandt Botes, Conrad Botes, Garth Walker,  Wilhelm Kruger, Bride Vosloo, and Mikhael Subotzky.

Sales have apparently been brisk… with just over 20 of the 50 editions sold (buyers include San Francisco MOMA, the library of the International Center of Photography in New York, The Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston, and the Minneapolis Art Institute).

More information here and here.

Toronto, Canada

Two years ago, I had posted about an El Lissitzky poster I’ve had hanging in my home for the past few decades—one of several dozen given to me by the curator of the magnificent Poster Collection at the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Applied Arts) in Zürich when I visited there in 1986—I’d been surprised to stumble across the original photo-montage prep the famous Russian Constructivist had used in preparing the dramatic poster.

A week ago, I was delighted to hear from Adell Shneer, a Toronto-based food stylist and now Senior Food Specialist at Canadian Living magazine who had come across my earlier post in a quest for more information about twenty or so large-sized posters she had re-discovered (rolled up in a tube and forgotten in the basement of her home). Adell studied graphic design at York University in the early 1980s and then at the London College of Printing (a diploma in Advanced Typographic Design), and in an experience similar to my own, had been given a variety of posters by the congenial old curator of the Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich’s poster collection when she visited there. It was a reunion with former design classmates last week that spurred Adell to hunt for the posters she still had somewhere in her basement…

Adell is interested in establishing a value for these posters (they’re in excellent condition), though she’s not sure she actually wants to part with them—she has also considered donating them to a museum. I’m curious as well, as I still have six of these same posters (shown above) in my collection. I put Adell in touch with friend Rene Wanner (who offers comprehensive advice and information about poster collecting on his exhaustive website here), and offered to post some thumbnail images on this blog [√]. I invite anyone who’s interested in these posters to contact me—I’ll gladly pass your query or information on to Adell.

Please forgive the poor quality of the images shown above—Adell photographed the oversize posters with a point-and-shoot digital camera while standing on a chair and sent them to me for informational purposes… ergo the image foreshortening, inaccurate edge trim, distorted aspect ratio, variable focus, and dodgy colour fidelity—the original DIN A0 posters are truly spectacular (each is 841mm x 1189mm, or 33.1″ x 46.8″).

Amsterdam, the Netherlands

How timely, methinks… an architectural hen-house for Easter. Inspiring, and quite lovely… by Frederik Roijé.

(thanks Kevin)