Highlighted words found in a used copy of Steven Heller's Pop

Highlighted words found in a used copy of Steven Heller's Pop:

• Antediluvian

• Bifurcated

• Conflated

• Pavlovian

• Pedagogy

• Tertiary

• Vituperative

• Ziggurat

Friday links

• Nobutaka Aozaki is making a map of Manhattan composed entirely of hand-drawn maps by various New York pedestrians whom the artist has asked for directions.

• "Most days during production I drove him to the studio in my E-type Jaguar. I recommend this as a way to get to know your director" — Ken Adam discusses his creative relationship with Stanley Kubrick. 

Accidental LSO rebrand

Caught sight of the Apple website upside-down the other day, and it struck me that they've inadvertently come up with a natty little logo for the London Symphony Orchestra. Not that they need one – their current one is rather beautiful and clever. A great example of the magic that can be magicked with a simple squiggly line. Anyway, now I'm looking at everything the wrong way up just in case there's a potential something, even if it's just an interesting flipped S. Another symptom of the design disease.

Echo Base

Here's a thing I made for Matthew Kenyon's book on game culture, Every Day Is Play. A little Gerhard Richter-esque tribute to the first video game I ever played, The Empire Strikes Back  on the Atari 2600. It may not look much to you, but those fifteen pixels are the best damn ship I've ever flown.

The map’s the thing

When invited by Herb Lester to write words about my home town, I decided to talk about aspects of York that most visitors will be blind to – the buildings and spaces that don't appear in guide books or on postcards. The grit between the cobbles.

But while out taking photos for these posts (usually facing the opposite way to the tourists, who were busy looking for "the big church"), I realised that the obliviousness works both ways. There are peculiar details out there that I completely take for granted, simply because they aren't aimed at me, the resident. For example: maps. Oh my, the maps.

I'll gladly stare at a book or go to an exhibition on the mappy history of a foreign city or some ancient battlefield. But it has never occured to me before to actually pay attention to all the maps – and there are a lot of them – on my own doorstep. Until now. 

Illustrated maps, new maps, out-of-date maps, simple maps, historical maps, 3D maps, alcoholic Harry Beck tribute maps. It's all a bit lovely. One of my favourites is a map spread out over the entire city: an A4 relief map split into sections, each located at a different way onto the city walls. Children and easily distracted designers are encouraged to make a crayon rubbing of each one until they've done a lap of the city and got the whole set to make a complete map. Brilliant idea. 

Perhaps it's the walls themselves that add to the appeal of other maps too. No matter what style or age or subject, the constant shape of the city, dictated by the confines of the walls (much like the recognisable watery confines of Manhattan), remains on the map.

One thing I noticed recently about the size and shape of York: if you had a lot of time on your hands, you could neatly fit the walled city inside Regent's Park in London. But York isn't a park – it's a theme park. Vikings wander the twee narrow streets; everywhere is (apparently) haunted; lengthy queues build outside everything from smelly museums to tea rooms. It's essential that you know where you are and how to get to the next ride.  

As a nipper, I had a 1960s map of Disneyland that my grandfather had somehow procured. I've never actually been there, but I spent hours poring over that map, tracing my finger from one illustrated area to the next, working out my route, my imaginary visits. Skip ahead a few decades, and I'm living inside the most incredible map, full of real adventures. I've got my own magic kingdom to explore.

In trying to avoid the tourist trail, I've found myself obsessed with the very essence of it. It seems fitting that an assignment from Mr Lester and Associates should open my eyes to this cartographic gateway.

Thank you Herb.

Written for Herb Lester Associates

Stonebow House

Drab. Depressing. Repulsive. Eyesore. Embarrassment. Soulless. Put it out of its misery. Tear it down. Tear it all down.

Stonebow House puts up with a lot of abuse. Few love it, many hate it. Just a few steps from the picturesque Shambles, all cobbles and beams, this brutalist tower does seem a little at odds with its surroundings. All that concrete just doesn't seem very York, or so the critics would sniffily tell you.

I used to be one of those sniffilers, turning my nose up at this office block/job centre/car park thing whenever I walked by. And then one day – I don't know why exactly – it struck me. It's beautiful. Stonebow House is an Eliza Doolittle of a building, its common-as-muck appearance hiding so much soul and untapped potential.

No, it doesn't "fit". But so what? All these other historical buildings were erected decades, centuries apart. They didn't fit either. But they endeared themselves to the story of the city, earning their place through some kind of urban-evolutionary architectural selection.

What this dilapidated 1960s modernist clunk needs is the same TLC afforded to so many other buildings around here. In the lower levels, a couple of gig venues deliver some after-hours culture, as if the council have solved a soundproofing problem by burying music under tonnes of concrete. Above ground, it's home to the Job Centre, a couple of small businesses and perpetually empty office space.

It's all a bit sad really.

But it doesn't have to be this way. As with most brutalist architecture, this concrete monolith is a blank canvas. It can stay looking miserable and alone, or it could be … anything.

Look at London's South Bank. Not that long ago, it too was a bleak slab nothingness. And then something changed. It started to make an effort. Shops, restaurants, culture, colour arrived. And people followed. It's not hard to imagine something similar working in York. Turn that plateau car park into an open air performance space, turn the abandoned offices into a much-needed contemporary art gallery, the ground floor units into pop-up shops. All it takes is a developer with vision and a bit of bravery from the council.

So don't dismiss Stonebow House just yet, no matter how unhappy it looks. It doesn't need to be put out of its misery, it needs to be awoken. Nothing happens here. But so much could. And should.

Written for Herb Lester Associates

Where the Gaps Are

A city built over centuries, restrained within defensive walls, York's streets are crushed together in all sorts of messy ways. It's very easy for a visitor here to lose their bearings, the only hope of geographical reference being the occasional peek of the towering Minster between buildings. Hundreds of years of redevelopment and conservation have jumbled up the puzzle of architectural styles and urban ideologies. Sandwiched between the wonky buildings on these wonky streets, there are crevices and creases in the city.

These are more than just alleyways. These are snickelways. Or some call them snickets. Or maybe ginnels. Hairlines on the map. Whatever they are, they're essential to the fabric of York, for tourists and residents alike.

For tourists – the adventurous, let's-just-bloody-well-get-lost-and-see-what-happens-kind – these anonymous portals between shops throw up unexpected courtyards and connections and colourful stories. Who was the Mad Alice of Mad Alice Lane? What exactly is a Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate? With these and other historical (and often sanitised) names around the city – Brownie Dyke, Bitchdaughter Tower, Gropecunt Lane – York betrays a rather colourful, family-unfriendly history.

For residents – they are wormholes, safe and swift passages through chaos. Blinkered to the historical theme park that York becomes when the coaches unload in the morning, sometimes you just need to get through town and get on with your life. And that's when the snickelways really deliver. Between them and the handful of shops with multiple entrances (BHS, Laura Ashley, Browns), it's possible to get from one side of York to the other without having to deal with a single horde of pac-a-mac pensioners. At Christmas – oh the chaos that is York at Christmas – knowledge of this network of architectural fissures means the difference between a regular supply of Betty's mince pies and misery.

They aren't pretty, they're filled with bins and pigeon crap and pools of last night's piss (a drunk in York always knows where the nearest snickelway is), but they're our gaps and they're just perfect.

Originally written as a guest post for Herb Lester Associates.

Four Colour Process

The halftone sediment of the Secret Wars cover in that last post reminded me about the existence of 4CP, a massive time-leech of a blog by Half-Man Half-Static. Not content with scanning tons of old comics to get a good look at the dot patterns, he's also behind Comic Book Cartography (maps and diagrams are always my favourite bits of any comic) and masthead collection SUPERTYPE!

Covered comics

Covered is a simple blog with a basic premise: artists reinterpret covers of comics. And it's utterly brilliant. A lot of the work is a bit pants, or a bit too cutesy for my liking, but every now and then you get an absolute gem. Probably my favourite of the hundreds of submissions, Dan Scanlon's cover of Sol Brodsky's X-Men #1 always brings a chuckle to the heart. Just look at Iceman. Look at him there.

I also rather like Paul Bower's interesting take on Secret Wars #4 (a title from the dark days when Marvel comics were little more than toy catalogues). There's something particularly splendid about the Avengers being crushed under the weight of their own halftone patterns. The rest: Henry Bonsu's Batman Year 100; Lasse Peuraniemi's wonderfully wet Peter Parker: Spider-Man #10; Steve Tillotson's Peanuts #2 and Robert Goodin's Walt Disney Comics and Stories #211 (yes, I'm a sucker for realistically drawn cartoon animals).

Ego

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. The bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.” 

Anton Ego, Ratatouille