Typecast: the challenge

Requiem for a doodle

Nup's comment on yesterday's post got me to thinking, art is a subject I've really overlooked here on Strikethru thus far. Well, art might be a high-flown word choice here, I am thinking of something literally a little closer to the margins: doodling.

Back in my paper-based school years, I was a career doodler. You could easily fill a very heavy coffee table book with all of the skritchy swirls and coffee cups that festooned the edges of my incoherent notes about symbolism in Mikhail Zoshchenko's Scenes from the Bathhouse. I actually had an aesthetic of good and bad doodling, then. I assessed the doodles of others. People who doodled the same geometric shapes in endless snakeskin patterns had, I assumed, imaginations made of the same repetitive stuff. Then there were those who would never call themselves artists, yet always reached to capture some new, never previously illustrated impression of something in otherwise nondescript lecture notes: this time a house, lopsided, struggling to attain a third dimension, the next time trees with obsessively detailed five-pointed leaves. Those were the doodle Picassos.

In those days I was a fan of alternative comics (mostly women's, like Julie Doucet and Ariel Bordeaux and Diane DiMassa and one of my personal idols, Lynda Barry) and was inspired, based on a short lifetime of unremarkable notebook scrawling, 90's zeitgeist, and Lynda Barry worship, to venture, inauspiciously, into comics myself.

A couple of my friends created bad comics all their own, and we amused ourselves by photocopying and assembling them into mini comics and zines for a spell, a great amusement hatched out of the age-old act of drawing in the margins.

I haven't doodled a thing in years-- like most of us, it's rare that I pick up a pen. I wonder (and drum roll please for the long-delayed thesis), have digital distractions seriously cut into this kind of hard copy pastime altogether? Have computers made it less likely for the next Lynda Barry to find herself an audience, or simply easier to advertise to one? I can't imagine if the interwebs had been around when I was in school, that I would have spent any time with pen and paper whatsoever.

Abandoned love

Olivetti advertising images

I just found an amazing set of images on Flickr that represent vintage Olivetti advertising designs from a number of artists. Take a look.

Who decided to take the art out of advertising, and why? These ads are gorgeous.

Field trip: Blue Moon Camera and Machine

Next month I have an opportunity to visit Blue Moon Camera and Machine in Portland, which as I mentioned before, sells refurbished typewriters for pretty good prices. I will have to try really, really hard not to buy another one, I'm sure.

Here is a picture someone took of Blue Moon's typewriter collection; can't wait to see it. I also hope they can help me load my Agfa Ansco box camera with 120 film, which I have thus far been too afraid to attempt.

Update

I made the visit in March '08! Here's my review.

Bodie ghost town typewriter

I like this photograph of a Smith Premier typewriter left behind in the Bodie Ghost Town. You may have seen this picture before on the web, since it is a royalty-free public stock photograph. Here are some other pictures of the ghost town, anyone ever been there? I have half a mind to pack up the car and head there this moment except oh, right, at my age and station in life, road trip and spontaneity have no business being in the same sentence.

Sigh.

More pictures from Flickr

Typecast: 'Cognitive processing limitations'