Graphically Challenged: Why Covers do Matter

Left (Design: David Pearson), Right (Design: Ralph Steadman)

UPDATED:

Better famously known through its abridged snippets scattered among the master theses and PhD dissertations in collegiate dungeons around the world, the Ur-essay of all aesthetic manifestos still retains is ever mystical aura. A perpetually renewable source of enlightenment, Walter Benjamin, as pop historian Howard Hampton, rightfully notes, “has become become a convenient, all-points totem, one who blessing and validation are sought through the offerings of a host of supplicants…in this shopworn, once-upon-a-time-academe form, he stands for an indivisible synthesis of blissful disenchantment and unshaken theoretical faith.” Despite Benjamin’s dying belief that the age of Fascist fetishization has passed, that we should acquire a richer visual literacy unfettered by commerce and prestige, he couldn’t have imagined the marketing battle between publishing rivals for his 1935′s “Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (a second, much longer variant from the famous, widely circulating first edition, “…Age of Mechanical Reproduction).

Two editions released and refurnished this year, conspicuously with dissimilar translations in each, but ultimately (over)determined by their physical allure, their pulpy facade vulnerably exposed to the discerning consumer. Which book will be adopted, which book will be put to sleep in the inventory storeroom?

Intellectually-speaking, means I’m here for the “official” version (the right side, by Harvard University Press), this newly extended essay (“Reproducibility”) ventures into more prodigious discussion of film as a medium that can liberate art from its confined spaces to even more confining spaces, from museums to bedrooms, from Dennis Hopper to Joe the Plumber. Despite its fawning, tasteful cover, I’m sold only because it will bear me future fruits of critical rigor, as it attempts to say something about the insidious nature of repetition with the floating cartoon heads of the dead Frankfurt bookworm.  Thanks to Kevin from HUP for pointing out that the cover art was an original from Ralph Steadman, known for his collaborations with Hunter S. Thompson.

To the left side is something else altogether, a dilapidated curiosity shop that rings true to its title, a familiar version, like a baby blanket, I’ve encountered so many times in all my undergraduate classes. Yet, it keeps me coming for more, with the outside matching the thematic aspirations of its insides. Radical to the end, old-fashioned only by appearance, the design (for “Reproduction”) captures the author as a brand, the modern equivalent of aura, a work of art itself thanks to the printing revolution. Replicating the experience of reading itself, as the same book is multiplied in the mind as many, the trompe-l’oeil of a cover unveils the material act of holding a book, with its stubborn dimensions and the endless row of spines awaiting at the library shelves. It thrives on minimalist simplicity and renews the reader’s interest in the cosmopolitan writer’s prismatic observations, contradictory projections, and his weary, utopian voice, alive through the incantation of reading, albeit still full of glory and melancholy.

Penguin's Great Ideas Series, all covers designed by David Pearson

Like many unsung anti-heroes of any industry, the cover designer’s work exhibits the same fate as Poe’s purloined letter, open to the world, but everyone only noticing the “author,” (the director) the one whose existence rests on a prominent name, horizontally slashed on the surface. The success of one does not mark the success of the other, but the failure of either will lead both to the trenches of obscurity. In a parallel manner, taking a quick browse through the Criterion Collection yields an even more difficult decision. Since the auteur mantle is already a given, the real question lies in the search for the other auteur, literally, the winning poster child on the DVD.

In this post, my initial interest of these two books, sharing the same author, but lacking identical appeal, will now funnel down to a self-motivated promotion of graphic extraordinaire, industry-secret typographer, David Pearson, who is the executive designer of the Penguin Classic branch, which includes this new edition of Benjamin’s essay in novella form as part of their GREAT IDEAS series. Surgically beautifying the so-called masterworks of literature, Pearson may have already carved his own legacy among the great morticians of cultural remains.

Great Books Series

History of Logos

Excuse my Slumdog Rage

I have more records than the KGB, BBC, NBR, so on.

FIRST HATER POST, oh the carnage

It seems futile to barricade the top ten lists of 2008 from the inspirational puppy-dog-eyes of the Hollywood/Bollywood brainchild, Slumdog Millionaire, another lucrative product from the folks who have succeeded, much like the Disney Channel, to clone a progeny of audience favorites (Juno, Little Miss Sunshine), which makes the job of any ghost reviewer easier by dutifully proclaim “It’s this year’s _______.” When all the independent sidearms of the top studios have been liquidated to only a footnote in history, Fox Searchlight endures as it funds and buys out the better-tested of the best, safety features, that is. Radical risk-taking isn’t exactly part of the mission statement of the company, and their acquisitions have come to mirror each other in tonality and predictability, in which those legal last rites of the rolling credits should be appended to “All characters are purely fictional and frictionless.”

With the announcement from the National Board of Review that Slumdog Millionaire is supposedly the BEST FRAKKIN’ FILM of the Year, a no-surprise shrug was my first reaction, followed by an angry realization that a smug shutter would suffice instead. Sharing Meg’s initial and permanent assessment of our screening at Telluride, Slumdog’s only salvageable virtue lies in its ingenuity to wed MIA’s gangbang hum-a-thon, “Paper Planes” into the movie’s soundtrack, after a gleeful sham marriage of a teaser from Pineapple Express. Not once of course, but twice, including a DFA remix of the song, in a subsequent lull moment after a frenetic montage of the brothers’ joyous robberies aboard a luxury train across India, keep those Marc Jacobs’ limited edition LV trunks close to you at all times. Otherwise, the film suffers not from ADD, in threading together the lead character’s rags-to-riches flashbacks with utmost pandemonium editing, but OCD, carefully cleaning up the beautiful mess with a single-minded goal to get the boy his girl, these damaged goods are back together at last.

With the majority of its defenders celebrating its lush, odorous in-your-face imagery of contemporary India coupled with a national fable of upward mobility both idealized and envied, how could a small minority of critics muster their intellectual weaponry at such a PC crowd-pleaser of a tale of two cities, Mumbai, loud and dangerous, recent Terrorist events have only reinforce the social reality of racial tensions, and Mumbai, ambitious, modern, and Western-friendly, recent retaliation to the attacks have also indicated. The only offensive line of reasoning would lead to nowhere but the emotional indifference that possessed me at the time of my viewing, an unimpressive impression. With the exception of the MIA song that highjacked my feet off the ground, this Bollywood-lite musical was made for those who don’t really want to see a full-blown Bollywood spectacle nor the American epic poems of the 50s or 60s, their length and majesty truncated for the 120-min threshold of the action thriller. Australia falls on the other end, too much with too little to say.

With the DGA deciding its next saint coming early 2009, Danny Boyle may find himself accepting that honor and delivering what his auteur admirers would find consistently fitting into a future retrospective, but for me, Mr. Boyle is basically paying back Fox Seachlight the loan he borrowed for his flopped pet project, Sunshine, a sci-fi rumination on human-termite existence. Perhaps, one could fault this no-holds-bar acceptance of Slumdog as a cultural symptom of our downtrodden times, when happy endings sloppily hemmed together stand for larger wish fulfillments of a quick-bailout kind, from the government, or from media giants that finance get-rich schemes like “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?”.

Has 2008 begotten such an impoverished roster of cinematic candidates that we must crown a pauper in place of a prince?

UPDATE: As much as I despise Slumdog Millionaire, discovering that Paste Magazine awarded its top prize, in a bold, but deeply calculated move, to Nandita Das’s Firaaq is equally distressing.  I prefer the inauthentic audacity of the former over the authentic affectations of the latter.  Please, has the same plague afflicting the Academy in 2005, when Crash triumphantly crashed Brokeback party, returned in a more menacing form?  Say it aint so.

“ALL I WANNA DO…is take your money” YES, so close your wallet and watch this clip, IT IS THE MOVIE.

8…8 1/2…9…

Clockwise (by character): Mama, Claudia, Liliane, Carla, Random Blonde Socialite, Luisa, Saraghina, Guido

Yesterday, on Good Morning America, during Britney’s performance of her new single, “Circus,” also the title of the latest effort to reboot her career, I notice the familiar tune of Nino Rota’s score for Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963) as the opening and closing bookends for the song. Transporting us to some carnivalesque wonderland because you know…Fellini/Rota equals garish circus freaks and a barely sweating ringmaster attempting to sell the greatest show (I mean, preview) on earth, Britney is less of a performer than she was before, now a vampish marionette in the grand tradition of female has-beens, like Lola Montes and Mariah Carey, wearing her setbacks as pity points for fans’ financial support. By even comparing herself to the incredibly cluttered yet fluidly warm style of the late Italian master is more insulting if it was an intentional homage than simply browsing through Itunes for mood music.

Guido & Carlo: Then and Now

Fellini and his harem

To her credit, Britney revived my interest for Rob Marshall’s film adaptation (filming in the UK, due out 2009) of the Tony Award-winning musical, Nine (also thanks to Meg!), simply due to its stellar casting stunt alone: Daniel Day-Lewis, as the womanizing (ha, Britney) artist Guido with writer’s block, Nicole Kidman as his on-and-off again muse, Claudia, Judi Dench as the witty French reporter, Lilianne, Marion Cotillard as his faithful wife, Penelope Cruz as the voluptuous dim-witted mistress Carla, Sophia Loren as his Mamma only in memory, Kate Hudson as a composite character of American/European socialites parading around the set, and of course, the Duchess herself, Fergie as Guido’s first sexual conquest, a misunderstood monster of a whore Saraghina. Even though the film is adapted from a theater show and not directly a remake of the original Italian film, creating a compare/contrast profile chart of the character/actors gives us however, tiny of a clue, that Marshall is referring to both sources for his project rather than the musical itself (look at the exact hair styles!) and hopefully unlike its dour box office cousin, The Producers, another film-to-musical-to-film inbred, Nine should absorb or borrow the exuberant energy that made 8 1/2 a sensational box-office draw of its time, a classic in the kooky genre of films about films, transforming the behind-the-scenes of the production process into an exquisite confrontation between fantasy and memory, the tempting desire to let go and the stubborn will to create meaning.

Sophia Loren on the set of 8 1/2. Fellini and Marcello by her side.

As the reigning discourse around the word, “adaptation” brings to mind, the embarrassing accusations that the “film” didn’t do this or that justice to the “book,” or what I think is inevitably an impossible endeavor, one could distill the situations or more crucially, the sensual essence of the source, while taking liberties with how an actor will improvise spontaneously with words and gestures, or how a whole scene could be shot from a perspective that goes beyond what the book can imagine. Upon digging through the photo archives of 8 1/2, who could have known that Sophia Loren, visiting the set of the original film, would star in its redo’s remake. If originality is inherent in the original, could originality be transferable to a copy, cutting its ties to the original, plain and simple? I find it better to move away from the iron curtain of fidelity and towards a more conducive discussion around intertextuality. Excuse my academic jargon, but the term means what it says, suggesting the play of allusions and references that one cultural object refers to another. Rather than speaking in ad finitum about a singular piece, the plenitude of experiences between texts bring us closer to dissecting changing attitudes about times present and past, and how subjective interpretations are being filtered as objective criticism. If professional and amateur critics like to spin personal anecdotes only for the sake of attention, followed by defending their preferences through external standards of good taste, than for better or worse, in the probing spirit of 8 1/2, to think about the trivial and profound relations from one book to another, from one film to another, would surrender the human ego to the witness stand as its own judge and prosecutor…the artist have already sold his soul to the devil, it’s a matter of how long he can keep it.

Britney’s “I’ll just wiggle around the playpen” routine, listen for the beginning:

Back it up, My Sassy Girl

Before and After The Fat Suit

After a long, deep slumber, this blog is finally resuscitated by what/who else, Prince Charming, a Korean one by the name of Oh Ji Ho. Only seven episodes (of 16) into the hit Korean dramedy, Get Karl, Oh Sung Jung! (aired last fall), I’m enamored by the irresistible physique and boyish dimples, of its ugly-duckling-turned-beautiful-swan who is the desired object of the title’s intrusive command to its leading lady, Soo Jung. Dumped by his fiancé after failing the bar exam, Go Man Soo vows to return triumphantly as a headlining success story, in both profession and appearance, becoming Karl Go, a rising PGA champion with the looks to paralyze any nearby female into abrupt seizures of unattainable fantasy. In the first few episodes, we find out he struck gold in America, even dating former IT girl, Gwyneth Paltrow (pre-Brad, pre-Apple, pre-Shallow Hal), before returning to Korea to find a suitable wife and end his glamorous bachelor life. Behind this publicist stunt is Karl’s true motive, to seek revenge against his former love, who falls short of the audience’s sympathy, as she exhibits all the temperaments of the perverse modern woman—brazenly charismatic, porcelain-figured, overtly pompous—yet considered a barren old spinster by society’s standards. Gold-digging through her friend’s dating agency, she needs to find a husband fast and loaded, and who better than her now 150-lb lighter ex-high school slave.

Since the show lacks the melodramatic polarization of virtue and vice, any clairvoyance about possible coupling is shrouded in suspense and uncertainty, driven by the faint glimmer that some form of re-marriage should occur towards the end, a comedic one for sure, a crying fest, why not? So far, it relies on the cat-and-mouse game to test out the limits of fidelity, of love without conditions, while displaying shamelessly all the luxuries afforded by the magic of television to dazzle us with upper class goods and leisure. To its advantage, the show overcompensates the wear-and-tear gimmick with uproarious slapstick performances by its two leads, hinting at the absurd lengths in which only the sitcom format could make such vengeful madness relatable. Will she change her ways? Will Karl take her back? Sound like the typical cliffhanger-engorged stakes that haunt and punctuate the fictional reality of Korean romances, yet the writing obsessively comments on its oh-so-obvious trials and tribulations, as character by character bemoan that these coincidences and happenstances could only occur in “dramas” and “movies.” In one of the most hilarious openings, Karl Go tells his caddy/manager that he calls himself Karl after noticing that all the men in films like Titanic and The Graduate suffer the loss of their betroved at the altar simply by sharing this fateful namesake…Karl (or its many variations).

Some have labeled this show as the television complement to the 2006 hit, 200 Pound Beauty, which I covered earlier. Though they can be categorized together by their superficial premises, Get Karl isn’t concerned with the plasticity of the body and how surgical artifices tend to be more real than the natural, rather, it revolves itself around the status of marriage and the question it asks for women already in the 30s and hitting menopause. Taking a page out of Carrie Bradshaw’s cop-out compromise that “Love itself is a label,” Get Karl confines love within the parameters of matrimony, and unlike the usual Debbie Downer PSA that this billion-dollar-per-year institution bakes dull Stepford wives out of our liberated single ladies, the life under this regime isn’t much different from the Match.com dog-date-dog world. Most of Sung Jung’s girlfriends, who are indeed secured with a husband plus/minus children, spend their time hatching plans and offering advice to our main protagonist. Their freedom not curbed nor resemble anything productive, though it procures the prospect that being a wife is fortunately, only a status symbol, a financial benefit, and yes—a label rather than a role to be taken seriously.

I have no clue where Karl and Soo Jung will end up, or when for that matter, but I’ll make sure to post about the finale, however of a whimper it might be.

Television promo: