In the strongest sense, letterforms do not age but become fixed to a period of time primarily in their application. Longevity is often precluded by blatant design approaches that are banal, modish, and consequently ephemeral. Many products and graphics are designed to seize the moment and cash in on a popular idea.
When I first browsed through this book, I didn’t realize all of Young’s logos are handlettered. After reading the introduction, I delved back into this catalog of work much differently. I didn’t spend as much time as I would have liked looking through it — it seems I always take out huge art books and then ignore them until they are overdue — and barely read much of his accompanying text. I’ll have to invest in this book someday.
It was a little funny to read this slim little book directly after Play it as it Lays, as they are both wrapped so much in hot weather and it’s been colder and colder lately.
Originally written for Holiday Magazine, the extended essay is a nostalgic look at New York City (Manhattan, mostly) from the perspective of White, who had lived and worked in the city years earlier but had since relocated to Maine. He returned one summer to write this piece, observing how much the city had changed. But yet with a few shifted details, one could easily put the same words to the New York of today, still offering its gifts of loneliness and privacy (though I may edit that to be “the illusion of privacy”).
There’s something soap-operatic about this terse novel detailing a vaguely successful Hollywood actress’s nervous breakdown. Avoiding histrionics, the story details all the gossipy founders of Maria Wyeth with glances to her similarly challenged friends. Despite the concise nature of Didion’s prose, she manages paint nuanced settings. From the freeways Maria drives all day for a while just to fill her time to later when she joins the film crew in the desert.
By day the thermometer outside the motel office would register between 120° and 130°. The old people put aluminum foil on their trailer windows to reflect the heat. There were two trees in the town, two cottonwoods in the dry river bed, but one of them was dead.
The book reads almost perfectly like a screenplay, and of course Didion made a movie version of the story.
A few years ago I abandoned my vegetarianism and started adding fish to my diet. Mostly I felt like I needed variety in my protein sources, but also there are a lot of nutritional benefits to eating fish. I’ve looked at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Sustainable Seafood Guide many times, but have always found it difficult to consistently remember what to avoid. Reading the stories behind key “avoid” fishes (as well as a few fish that are good eat) should help me navigate the fish world a little easier.
The core of Grescoe’s international survey of fish is that we have overfished the larger predators (like tuna and cod) and the only way to help the fish come back is to stop eating them and go instead for fish lower on the food chain. But not necessarily any fish.
After reading this book, I will sadly avoid ever eating shrimp, as most of it is farmed in third-world countries in a manner that severely impacts the environment and adjacent farmland as well as being treated with chemicals and antibiotics. I will also stop eating mysterious salmon, as it is probably farmed and has many of the same problems (the descriptions of sea lice alone should hammer that in). I also don’t feel too bad that I never ate fish and chips while in the UK, as they continue to procure cod by any means necessary, despite the collapse of the Atlantic cod, which experts think have reached an irreversible point where cod will never return to the places it was overfished.
In recent years, an industry has formed around more sustainable land meats. Of course, the less sustainable industry still exists alongside it. But in the case of fish, not only do we need to advocate for a sustainable fish industry, but the plan must include a complete dismantling of the current system. Otherwise we may see a collapse of all world fisheries by as early as 2048.
Definitely a must-read for fish eaters.
