I would appear to have designed the cover for eldritch Priest's new book, Boring Formless Nonsense. It's due out sometime early next year, and looks like a fascinating, brain-scratchy read. Jolly good.
22 February 2012 / Batman / Television 
Since returning to the addictive tumblr, one of the accidental collections I've made is of 1960s Batman photos. Given that the show only ran for a couple of years, the impression it left on popular culture is pretty damn spectacular. The tongue-in-cheekery is reflected perfectly in these stills, particularly the odd sight of Batman helping some kids across the road (or maybe it's the other way around?) and Burt Ward doing his best Fallout Boy impression. And I think it's fair to say that the Meriwether girls have the coolest mum ever.
See the ever-growing collection at Hammer & Code.
21 February 2012 / Film 21 February 2012 / Design No. No they aren't.
John Naughton's recent Observer article, unambiguously tittled "Graphic designers are ruining the web", would seem to suggest otherwise. It's hard to summarise his polemic, as it's a bit all over the place – it's mostly about how websites are bulkier than they were ten years ago, and how that's a bad thing and it's all your fault, Macjockey. It's received a big response (some knee-jerk, some more considered) from the design community – check out .net for a collection of considered retorts, including my own, which is basically …
Naughton's argument seems to get lost by taking a shotgun approach to the web and then highlighting a single favoured alternative, as if the "underdesigned" approach of Peter Norvig is relevant to any of the other sites he discusses. News and photography sites are mentioned as examples of bulky sites, but the appropriateness of the quantity and size of the loaded items isn't addressed. It just seems ironic to me that I accessed his article thanks to some of the great steps forward in web design: mobile access to an RSS article via twitter. And illustrating the piece with Naughton's idea of good minimal design contrasted against a page full of LOLcats seems to be missing the point completely.
It's hard to make out exactly what point Naughton is really trying to make, but I think it boils down to "good design is good, bad design is bad". I'll agree with him on that one.
10 February 2012 / Film / Kubrick / Photography 
Kubrick with Rosemary Williams, Showgirl, 1949.
When I started Hammer & Code, my little black and white tumblr, I knew I had to source some images from VandM, who sell a great (and wallet-threatening) selection of photographs by a young, pre-cinema Stanley Kubrick. Working as a staff photographer for Look Magazine from 1945 to 1950, he captured the changing face of post-war America. These pictures contain the seed of what was to come – the carries through to his early films, such as the industrial and criminal underbelly of the city seen in The Killing and Killer's Kiss (particularly the rooftop chase and the scene in the mannequin factory).
More of this early work is available in the book Stanley Kubrick: Drama and Shadows, which is well worth getting your hands/eyes on (or, get two and cut one up and get those pics on your walls). Here's a few of my favourites:
Shoe Shine Boys (Pigeons), 1947.
The Hollywood, 1948.
Student at Columbia University, 1948.
Betsy Von Furstenberg, 1949.
09 February 2012 / Film A very brief introduction to Douglas Trumbull for those you who don't know him: he's the guy who created the groundbreaking effects for, amongst other things, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and more recently, The Only Bit In The Tree Of Life Worth Sticking Around For. And he directed Silent Running, which is ace. So there, now you know.
Anyway … in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Trumbull describes a film he's planning on making, a project that will showcase the true potential of cinema in the 21st century, something that is "way beyond anything that Peter Jackson and James Cameron have been doing". Here's how he describes it:
… it’s a 200-years-in-the-future science fiction space epic that’s going to address very big, lofty issues, like man’s place in the universe, and how our contact with an extraterrestrial civilizations that are so mind-bogglingly in advance of our own that it will go into some of the same territory that 2001 went into, and it’s going to do it in a very plausibly scientific way, not a fanciful way. There are no alien monsters, and the earth is not being attacked by anybody. It’s going to be a much more intelligent, what we call hard-science fiction, and I think there’s absolutely nothing out there like this.
That sounds an awful lot like Rendezvous With Rama to me. Having just read the book for the first time (it's amazing), it's still fresh in my mind. And every single thing Trumbull says has for Rama written all over it. Plus it's by the same author, Arthur C Clarke, so that reinforces the "same territory as 2001" bit.
It's a project that David Fincher and Morgan Freeman have been trying to get going for several years, so perhaps they've given up and Trumbull has stepped in. Or, better yet, they're working with him. Given the Fincher pattern of every other film being amazing, he's just got to get something merely very good out of his system (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) and then … this. Even without Fincher, this could be fantastic. I may have just jumped to completely the wrong conclusion here, but for now, I'm incredibly excited.
Any other Rama fans out there? What do you reckon?
07 February 2012 
Image from the Complete Peanuts 1961 to 1962
For the past month, that young Dr B and myself have both been working from home. She's on research leave, which basically means she gets to spend most of 2012 pouring the brilliant ideas in her head onto paper and into academic journals. Clever bunny.
We've set up our matching trestles-and-Mac desks, slapped the hellmouth printer in between, and now we've got a nice little office/studio/thinkatorium. Now you would've thought that working side-by-side was a terrible idea, and we'd get bored of the sight of each other, but it's actually going rather well. We drink silly amounts of coffee, we take it in turns staring furrowed-brow at the bookshelf for inspiration, we get stuff done. Crucially, we both know when we're due a Judge Judy break, and every now and then we'll have an impromptu Goodbye Yellow Brick Road sing-along.
One highlight of this set-up is that we get to share the highs of the other's work (like Dr B having a eureka moment in the middle of the night and trying to type it up as quickly as possible before sleep got hold of her) and help each other out through the lows ("I'm sorry darling, I have no idea why Word is doing that … no don't throw it out the window … let me make you some toast …"). Plus, having someone working really hard in the corner of your eye is incredibly motivating – and between two people, that's self-perpetuating inspiration. In summary: working with Dr B is brilliant.
Do you work with – or alongside – your other half? How is it?
03 February 2012 / Architecture / Art 
The Doc and I visited the Hepworth Wakefield the other day. It's a beautiful moated lump of concrete angles and brutality, full of some rather nice art. Very much my cup of tea. But it's also a bit confusing.
Worldwide, galleries generally fall into one of two camps: "please take as many photos as you like" and "if you even dare contemplate reaching for a camera you will be shouted at and publicly humiliated you pathetic art thief, what are you thinking, now delete every single file on your camera or we'll do your kneecaps in".
I understand both approaches, even if one is always upheld in the most disproportionately aggressive way possible (Leeds Art Gallery is particularly bad). I take photos of pretty much anything and everything I come across in my travels, but freedom to take snaps can be incredibly disruptive – a trip to MoMA a couple of years ago was marred considerably by the fact you couldn't get near any of the works for gaggles of people slowly framing perfect shots with their enormous TouristGigantiCams.
The problem with the Hepworth is that it can't decide which camp to be in, flitting between these two extremes on a room-by-room basis. Each room in the gallery has a tiny sign telling you whether or not photography is permitted. It all seems rather arbitrary. As a result, I spent my entire vista being slightly distracted by trying to work out under what conditions I may enjoy the work, and trying to perfect my iPhone-camera-ninja techniques. In the end, the only decent pics I managed to get were of the outside of the building.
So I'm undecided as to whether or not gallery photography is a good or bad thing, but I am certain that each gallery should make a decision one way or the other. What do you reckon?
31 January 2012 A little bit of bloggy housekeeping: after staring at Feedburner for several hours, I've finally managed to change my RSS feed. Unfortunately this probably means you lovely people have to resubscribe. Here's the new feed. Sorry for taking up a few precious seconds of your day.
Just to remind you why you should bother following me at all, here's a little taster of the sort of stuff that pours forth from my gnarled inky fingertips:
30 January 2012 / New York I need some help from you wise, handsome folks. The beautiful Dr B and m'self are heading from York to New York for our honeymoon this summer, and our wedding gift list is basically going to be made up of New Yorkulous activities that people can get us.
We have a couple of things – a lunch of pastrami on rye at Katz's Deli, a pop to the top of the Empire State Building – but other than that, we're not entirely sure what to put on the list. We'll probably be heading to the High Line and MoMA at some point, but as far as I'm aware, they're both free. And cocktails will have to be had … somewhere.
So what would you recommend?