This came from an unmarked box in my mother’s (Sheila Sullivan Peterson, 1942-2008), closet. Unknown camera, unknown lens, unknown subject, unknown date. Interesting to think not only of the development of photographic technology in the past century, but also the evolution of our own “camera awareness” – not merely the awareness we have of ourselves in the moment of our picture being taken, but the vigilance which is maintained both before and after the fact. That we are always already in a state of readiness-to-be-captured. Unsurprising then, that the best photographers are often credited with their ability to “disappear” in the midst of an event, to assume a kind of ghostedness which allows his or her subjects to continue living in the natural way.

The above shot exists tenuously somewhere between the posed event and the natural one. Her arms are spread, as if ready to grasp, her feet a shoulder’s width apart. There may be some wind in her skirt, or she may have turned suddenly to face the photographer. But what is interesting is also the picture’s other figure, facing away, engaged somewhere else in some other temporal moment. Perhaps even another figure behind her. It makes me think of Ovid’s description of Thisbe’s foot when she is tranfigured by the new knowledge of her lover’s death. Becoming.

Here is another shot, from the same box. My aunt Victoria on her wedding day. A picture of several events, it seems to me, judging by the woman in green.

I always admired the design of those mid-seventies New Directions poetry editions. And not just for their almost pathologically monochromatic covers. Their being set (sometimes entirely) in Optima could be seen as a seriously bad choice or curiously great one. Optima, after all, does walk that uncanny line between serifed and unserifed, the industrial and the neoclassical. Platonic in its elevation of Roman letterforms to the ideal. So it’s somewhat fitting that at least a couple of Levertov’s later volumes included it. It makes almost too much sense that we’re seeing a lot of Bank Gothic in poetry titles right now. It has many of the same elegant, metallic qualities (while missing some of the more human enthusiam of both Optima and Univers).

This is some paperwork from a few years back. I was in love with Optima and it jibed well with the broader feeling of the project: spiritually hearkening back to Paul Blackburn’s poetry readings at St. Mark’s. While Optima probably loses its readability the blacker the page (and the smaller the size), it nonetheless seemed a perfect in its modesty and volume for these tiny books, part of a larger “ephemeral” package distributed and sold for the Express~Local Reading Series in Greensboro (NC) from September through December of 2007. The concept was pretty simple: five readers reading/performing in collaboration, preferably in some of the city more “unique” non-venue venues. How we did this all on a single inkjet printer using Microsoft Word is frightening to recall; the amount of tweaking/hacking was preposterous. The “mailer” was inspired by those ravaged interdepartmental mailers we so often found ourselves using/abusing. Each contained a date-stamped “memo” from one of the collaborators which was then sealed and delivered via interdepartmental mail services to university personnel. The minipostes were inspired by a pocket-sized postcard packet from Hull, England from the 1940′s. Each contained a hand-perf’d foldout booklet which was then hand sewn into the folding sleeve: the idea being that you could tear individual poems out and actually mail them. They were sold basically at cost at the reading for three dollars apiece. Paper: French Paper Co.’s Contruction and Via Linen. Typeface: Optima. (2007).

Little America (WY). Camera: Lumix LX3, Leica Lens (4f/80ISO). (2010). Stay posted for Flickr madness.

Not really a business job. More like a quick gift for a boy I know who wishes he’d been named “Scout.” Admittedly, it was done in the crunch and it had been a while since the olfa cutting mat had been out of the closet. The paper was some kind of strange 120 lb. wood-grained type stuff. Just enough to get one sleeve right. Hand-cut, saddle-sewn off-axis. Typeface: League Gothic. (2010). Fun.

New work for my friend Nate Kelley at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He wanted something with that Chermayeff and Geismar feel. Happy to oblige. Typeface: Trajan. (2010).

Any face used to set the texts of Dante’s Commedia and Petrarch’s Rime Sparse should be good enough for this endeavor. Francesco Griffo’s attention to what Bringhurst calls the “quietness” of the face (in large part due to the low contrast of stroke weight, though one could make an interesting argument for the low x-height as being a good metaphor for its austere character) seems to jibe with what I prefer good design to be. Typeheads tend to prefer Jensen, but I find that I’m thrown by the slanty serifs on the descenders. So on we go.

After several hours of “serious” work, I began designing the first of many postcards in the promotional campaign for the Keith Sweat Dance Party, a Charlottesville institution/get-down claiming its new roost here in Chapel Hill. A fun quickie but _serious_ work nonetheless. Or perhaps more appropriately, *serious* work. Why Keith Sweat? There’s not really any good reason for that, but there was quite a lot of perspiration in Hogwaller on some of those nights back in 2001-2003. A lot of Modern Lovers, T.Rex, and Television. Tom Petty sounding like a bottle of ripple at 2am.

I remember that Jeff Fallis (a wonderful poet and friend with whom I’ve sadly fallen out of touch) would usually find some excuse to put on “Shake It Baby” by John Lee Hooker at the end of the evening, if not the entire “Serves You Right To Suffer” album. You could probably guarantee that some KRS-One and Pharcyde would get deck-service in the in-between-time.

In the spirit of the old Keith Sweat RRDP we’ll be sewing bells on ourselves in preparation for the inaugural KSRRDPCH, to take place at some point after the last frost, but before the arugula hardens off. Laundry will cost 3 bucks a load and the Overholt will be free.

Spring is in the air.

Fig. 1: Logo for Nectar (Vegan/Vegetarian Catering in Chapel Hill, NC). Typeface: Disco. (2010).

Fig. 2: Logo for Sophia (Tutoring Company of Chapel Hill, NC). Typeface: Gill Sans. (2009).

Rawboard postcard for the final MFA reading of fiction writer Jenna Dietzer & poet Michael Peterson. Done in Word in the back-breaking days before owning Adobe CS. We wanted an affordable but heavy paper. What we found was discarded rawboard which, while not providing very good ink registration, proved to be cheap and sustainably-minded. The run was somewhere around 100. Typeface: Rockwell. Numerals: Neue Helvetica. (2006)

Over the last month I’ve been designing and fabricating these for Callie Metal Design, a Chapel Hill business. Thinking about Edison’s first public lamp demonstration on New Year’s Eve of 1879 in Menlo Park, NJ; thinking too about Heidegger’s notion of comportment, equipment, readiness-to-hand; why is it we continue to hide our light bulbs, when bulbs themselves are perhaps the most gorgeously designed mechanism of the modern lamp? Achille Castigiliani knew this.

Design-thinking approaches its application – while becoming itself a system of application – as ontology. Perhaps more so than poetic/aesthetic “thinking” to which we are accustomed. But truly applicable design – design that makes itself ready-to-hand cannot be overtly ontological in its process. It cannot become, as Nagel says, a view from nowhere. That being said, the ontological must give way, always, to a return, a falling back to the pre-ontological from which it arose. To the hand that wanted to hold the thing in the first place, for the first time, at the first moment of its necessity.

Heidegger writes: “The achieving of phenomenological access to the entities which we encounter, consists rather in thrusting aside our interpretive tendencies, which keep thrusting themselves upon us and running along with us, and which conceal not only the phenomenon of such ‘concern,’ but even more those entities themselves as encountered of their own accord in our concern with them.”  The more we seize the thing, the more primordial our relation to it becomes, and the more it “unveils” itself to us as equipment. Without this “concern,” we are unable to concern ourselves with others. The designed objects I find myself most emotionally attracted to are always those objects which shudder or resonate with these concerns. It is as if a good designer leaps ahead (temporally) to address the needs of her or her community, and their particular (peculiar?) inclinations toward Being.

Nicely done, Tommy E. / Love and regards to my hometown of Menlo Park, California, fair sister-city of aforementioned town in Jersey.