Portraits: 11

Willem Dafoe, actor, in a hotel in London, 1990
I shot this as the interview was going on. Of the interviews I attended, this seemed one of the more engaged, as journalist and interviewee ranged around the room and allowed time for photos. Coincidentally, I'd photographed film director John Waters only the week before. I'd heard that he and Dafoe were friends, so I mentioned this and Dafoe said, oh yes, Waters had done some babysitting for their child only recently. I remember liking the idea of having John Waters as a babysitter. For City Limits.

John R. T. Davies, sound technician and musician, in his studio, England, 1993
Described in The Independent after his death in 2004 as "… the world's leading specialist in the art of sound restoration" and "a gentle and supremely English mixture of the intense and the absurd". He notably restored jazz 78s – eventually (just for example, and after this shot) seeing the release of his complete 8-CD set of the music of Bessie Smith. The Independent added: "Affection and care for his family, animals, trees, insects and local miscreants showed a Buddhist core in this gentle genius of restoration." Shot in his studio, surrounded by notes, records, tapes, recording equipment and a great typewriter. For City Limits.

Roy Decarava, photographer, after his Photographers' Gallery talk, London, 1988
Roy's work was an inspiration to me when I first came across it. His work on jazz – in dark clubs without any extra lighting – helped me focus on what I wanted to capture. So I was keen to hear his talk, and took the opportunity to ask to take a couple of shots (barely portraiture) afterward. He was quite amenable, and even signed my copy of his The Sweet Flypaper of Life book of Harlem work accompanied by Langston Hughes' text. I remember him saying that he took pictures in such darkness that he sometimes didn't know if there was anything on the film until he got home and developed it. Although quickly taken, as he signed and talked with others, I kind of liked this blurry picture. He died in 2009.

Ian Dury, singer and songwriter, at home, London, 1989
One of Ian's hobbies was photography, and he had this tripod and carpet-backdrop setup for his use in his flat overlooking Hammersmith Bridge. He was energetic, emotional and talkative. Posing him in his own home-studio looked a good setting. Dury was later diagnosed with cancer and he died in 2000. His drummer, Charley Charles, also died of cancer in 1990. I very briefly worked alongside Charles in an attempt to save the theatre the Kilburn State in London – a classic art deco theatre – which nevertheless became a bingo hall. I see that now, the bingo has closed and there is a new campaign to save it. Life goes around. For City Limits.

For more on these portraits, see here, and the Portraits tag at right.

Power ranges

With Tokyo and east Japan facing the necessity for saving power, and surrounding boroughs having the possibility of rolling power cuts, a couple of people have put up graphically designed, live infographics (using electric company TEPCO's own figures) of available power supply versus power consumption.

The one illustrated above shows supply against percentage used. At the time of taking the screen shot we were using about 82% of the supply – that's with convenience stores, department stores and trains switching off lights, stations and stores cutting escaltors or lifts, and all companies and residents saving lights and switching off things normally on standby. So we're getting by. (And learning what power we waste.) The problem is that in Tokyo's hot summer, consumption usually goes up to 6,000 kW – and the power just isn't there. (As you can see, there is 3,800 available.)

We've already had one threatened all-Tokyo blackout, avoided by a TV announcement to save power. The summer might make it inevitable. (And believe me, anyone reading this in temperate climates, with 50+ consecutive days last year when the temperature never dropped below 30 degrees, even over night, you need some cooling simply to function.) So Tokyo's nervousness is far from over yet.

via Japan Probe

Giving shelter

I'm a week late in finding this, but an interesting article in The New York Times last week about designing shelters for evacuated people and refugees. Japanese architect Shigeru Ban's designs have been used in other places, now he's looking to get something in place immediately for the people sheltering in school gymnasiums etc after the tsunami. More on that process on his own website.

Some have divided gymnasium floors by simple cardboard box partitions, others merely by staking a claim on the floor. All power to Ban's work in making a difference to shelter, comfort and privacy.

1Q84

The cover for the US edition of the huge seller by Haruki Murakami has been revealed. I had wondered what they'd do with it, as its title, 1Q84, reads as "1Q84" or "1984" in Japanese (in which "kyu" is "9"). That word play just doesn't work in English, unless enough readers are familiar with numbers 1 to 10 in Japanese, or just enjoy learning of the word play after the fact. Or perhaps the questioning "Q" provides just enough of a game in English to hide/reveal the "1984" behind it. (Though it does still read in English at a glance as "IQ84" as though it's about someone with a low intelligence quotient. I guess his following does not rely on knowledge of the book coming at a random glance!)

Many books have titles adapted to allegedly suit readers in different countries, and I had thought this might be one. Maybe it's just such a big publishing event that the original title became known from the Japanese long before it made it to translation. (Personally, my own enthusiasm for Murakami's brand of surrealism ran out some years ago – I prefer his straight and documentary work – so I won't be first in line, but there are many thousands waiting.)

Tsunami

Tsunami is a France-based site collecting artist's/comic illustrator's images with the aim of having an auction and subsequently to publish a book, the proceeds of which will go to an aid organisation working in Japan.

There's a whole range of work: many variations around the red circle of the flag, around the theme of hope, and many directly referencing manga and anime. There's no denying the heartfelt response, with some painting direct from reportage photographs in their attempt to get to the reality. The quality varies a lot, as you'd expect, and there's perhaps a slight surfeit of the almost-twee and, unavoidably, of images of rebirth. But there's a lot of good stuff that will make a good book and very welcome fundraiser.

These images by Xavier Besse, Jake Gumbleton and Flab   

In another lifetime

It seems amazing that this was something that seemed worth writing about only a month ago! My take (in the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan's in-house magazine) on the "controversy" over BBC comedy quiz show QI's use of a Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivor as material for a question. With British humour under question at home and abroad, it seemed important enough to write about. Now, in the scheme of things, it seems less so, but anyway, here it is. (The FCCJ is in the process of revamping its website, so it may all look a little temporary!)

Other non-roman alphabets

Most of my work is in English, as that's my "niche" in a Japanese-speaking world – alhough I do work in Japanese of course. (I just finished a CD jacket/lettering for a band called じゃ〜んず, for example.)

I just found this occasionally-updated blog and website, 29 Arabic Letters, by Pascal Zoghbi, an Arabic type designer. Very nice work – like the lovely "art: reoriented" logo above – and some interesting postings. And interesting to see another lettering thought-process at work.

Switching off

A site collecting posters to promote saving electricity (setsuden – 節電). One power plant has taken all the publicity, though the second Fukushima plant is non-operational, and other conventional stations are damaged. On top of that, west Japan can't export electricity to east Japan because the two halves work with different hertz. So east Japan is seriously short of power. It's already tricky, but in the summer months it could be looking more than tricky… see here.

So stopping all wasted usage, as well as experiencing the sometimes enforced scheduled blackouts in the areas around central Tokyo, have become a necessity. This site promotes making posters designed not merely for design's sake, but to put up outside your house or encourage local businesses to display etc.

Never get old

The Man Who Fell to Earth premiered 35 years ago – on March 18, 1976. I saw it that month in that Leicester Square Theatre, and it quickly became a favourite film, which it remains today. And I'm on pretty safe ground to say that this poster by Vic Fair was one design that fed into my becoming a graphic designer.

Tears, fears… and the setting sun

How to present the stories behind the Japanese quake perhaps fell into three approaches round the world, the covers above from the UK, Japan, India and Europe... (Meanwhile, read a story here on The Washington Post about how a newspaper in the tsunami-hit area resorted to hand-written editions)

The radiation issue: most sensitively and imaginatively dealt with by The New Yorker, whose radioactive cherry blossoms at least suggest a rebirth, or the temporariness of the problem country-wide, while also at least hinting at the horror in the area around the nuclear plant. The Japanese AERA went less imaginatively, along with its worldwide tabloid compatriots, with the headline, "The radiation is coming"

The Hinomaru: the Japanese flag (a long-time favourite of designers) got various treatments. It's inevitable and at least occasionally unavoidable in the course of designing covers on a Japanese theme. Hokusai's "Great Wave" was also used more than once. Already each is iconic and applicable to the situation, but of course both are also a fallback

The tears: also inevitable. How do designers get the scale of the story across in a single image? India Today used it to turn questions about the nuclear issue inward to India's own use of nuclear energy.

Below Bloomberg Businessweek used the Hinomaru rather neatly with a hidden crack in the flag, while, when revealed, the crack itself was a crying face. Illustration by Noma Bar.

Presenting the story is a question I'll face later this month when designing the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan magazine's issue on the subject.

Update, April 5: Kyodo News is reporting that the Japanese Consulate General in New York has lodged a complaint with Bloomberg Businessweek about the cover, above, claiming it is inappropriate. I did show this cover to one Japanese friend who said it was "terrible" – the sun represents everyone and the cover means we're all sad. I was somewhat surprised: as this was just such an illustration of the trauma of the nation. The UK's Union Flag is constantly used in a "pop" way (not to all conservative's pleasure but without any real upset), and this actually seemed a genuinely sympathetic design use. Clearly – and from angrily negative Japanese responses to another blog – the same doesn't apply to how many Japanese see their flag. But why single out Bloomberg for this issue?

some images via Magculture and Nascapas

Positivity and destruction

A series of 360-degree panoramas on Sankei news (with the help of Shigeru Okada's VR factory) – from positivity in Shizugawa Elementary School's shelter, in the detail above, to the devastating impact of seeing the destruction in 360 degrees.

Radiation graphics

There have been the simple lowest-to-highest example graphics explaining radiation doses, there have been every TV channel's diagrammatical illustration of the construction of the Fukushima reactors, there has been an animated video explaining the radiation problem via a farting boy with stomach ache who the doctors try to help before he poops – and there is even the scale hand-made model situated in front of the NHK TV announcers which now includes even a solid white plume representing the water out of the fire hoses. (An earlier version featuring the helicopter water-drop is shown here. Japanese TV still often prefers the hand-written or model graphic to computer ones.) All are attempts to explain radiation and the current situation in an overall situation in which people have just been introduced to the term "microsieverts" and have no idea what a dosage let alone dosage per hour means and in a week when people have only just found out how nuclear power works.

I haven't seen any up-to-the-minute info-graphics on this (perhaps surprising given the current designer obsession with such graphics). It's difficult to explain, as there is both dose and dose-per-hour (or minute or day or year), and a microsievert is 1/1000th of a millisievert which is 1/1000th of a sievert. So the extremely high, first-announced life-threatening dose that the truly heroic workers battling to control the nuclear pant at Fukushima were exposed to was 400,000 microsieverts. An horrific situation for those at the reactor. But what does it mean further away?

The best I've seen yet is the above, which I'll leave the interested to work out.

Via the Facebook Tokyo Radiation Levels page, who sourced it via the xkcd comic blog (from a cartoonist with a degree in physics and who worked at Langley), who complied it from information from a friend, Ellen, who's a senior reactor operator in the States: just one indication of how people are trying to get information to base informed decisions on and from more than one source. And I'm in Tokyo, and have pretty much felt safe from radioactivity since the event happened, I just wanted to confirm for myself – not via an ill-informed media – what the scenario was. My situation is nothing like those affected closer or evacuated from the Fukushima area, as reported here by colleague Justin McCurry in The Global Post.

Font Aid

I guess this is one step further than the poster-for-aid (see my previous posting here). But doing something that is your skill and using it to promote a relief effort should not be sniffed at. Designers' skills are not in need directly (I've never felt more useless as a designer), so perhaps its good to simply do what you can.

Font Aid is an already established process which gets designers to contribute a glyph to a font which is then sold to raise money – for Japan in its latest effort.

Meanwhile, the Japanese Red Cross – established, active, required by government to help out in disaster situations and also taking your donations and giving money directly – seems a good place to donate if you want to give without buying something.

Quieter times

Life continues in some sort of normal form (and even the press has slowed down on eating its own fear) here in Tokyo.

By many city standards, Shinjuku would still seeme crowded and brightly lit, but here on the Friday the week after the quake and tsunami in north east Japan, department stores are shut, all streetlights and much above-street-level lighting is off, and the restaurant we ate at took last orders at 8.30pm. (It would usually be something like 1am.) Some might say they should have days like this every week. (I would be one of them! It's one of the reasons I like living out of town!)

Work continues: here a Sagawa package delivery van makes a delivery during a power cut.

A power cut shuts the local convenience store.

In fact, most of the scheduled power cuts haven't happened, and Shinjuku, like elsewhere, is deliberately saving electricity as Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) cannot currently generate enough (for the obvious reasons). There are no complaints about our inconvenience and luck.

Panic stations

In 1981 I was in Brixton as the riots hitting London at that time were happening. I was a young man interested in such politics and understanding ways that black people were being treated differently in my country. I stood across the road and watched as looters broke into a jewellery store, stepped into a doorway as a line of (black) people ran past and stayed there as a line of riot police chased them, watched as a car was turned over by angry youth. The next day I thought I'd check and see what the press had to say. The tabloid Daily Express' headline was full page and bold; "It was black against white". It was my first introduction to tabloid lies. I was there, I am white, the majority of rioters were black. (I sat with a black colleague on a wall as the sun set and he commented: see how the white rioters will disappear, and they did.) But it was not black against white: I was not approached let alone threatened. It was black against the police. The headline was an out-and-out lie by someone who presumably wasn't there.

I was reminded of that this week in Tokyo. Back in the UK one headline from the tabloid The Sun was "Exodus from Tokyo", another was " … warning to Brits … Get out of Tokyo Now" They were lies. I was here – I am here. Sure, some people – Japanese and foreign – were leaving, but there was no "exodus" and, in fact, no real warning to get out. (The British Embassy initially essentially said "stay, it's fine", and later – after such headlines – changed it to "consider leaving" followed by contradictory scientific advice supporting their earlier advice and stating there was no threat from nuclear fallout.)

In a disaster (which was directly, horrifically affecting other other parts of Japan) such reporting is inconsiderate, unhelpful, even dangerous – apart from being an out and out lie. All in Tokyo were concerned because accurate information was difficult to immediately assess. All friends in the UK were further worried for me because of such reporting. Although my background is in (non-tabloid) newspapers and magazines, and I have defended print journalism on this blog, this aspect, this type and this field of journalism is indefensible. When the cliche "don't believe everything you read in the papers" is spoken, it's as well to remember that there can be a truth in it. Sometimes what you read is a direct lie made up by someone who isn't there.

As a counter point see former Tokyo inhabitant and again on-the-ground reporter Jonathan Watt's excellent coverage of a decision on whether to leave Fukushima (not Tokyo) in The Guardian here, and David McNeill's Irish Times piece on such journalism here.

Update, 20 March: Since I wrote the sentence about contradictory advice from the British government, its scientific adviser has clarified the phrasing. The advice to "consider leaving" was a reaction to the general situation (distribution problems, power cuts etc) and NOT to any radiation threat. He found it hard to imagine a realistic situation where radiation from Fukushima could threaten Tokyo. The French government's advice to French citizens to leave because of the radiation threat, he added, "was not based on science".

How to help?

Interesting post questioning the need to buy a poster – specifically, the above by Signalnoise – to filter your money through to charities helping Japan. Why not just give? It's something I question myself. Recently I've been busy communicating with friends and family round the world who are concerned (though we in Tokyo, as said, are inconvenienced rather than in trouble) and also researching the effects of nuclear power plants failing, but I will now research the best charity to give to for the most direct relief. But a friend is thinking of giving a charity concert. Indeed, there is one tonight which I'm had wondered about risking travelling into central Tokyo to see. (With an anytime power cut threatened, it doesn't make sense to go in to town unecessarily, or you could be stuck there!)

So, I have already considered filtering money through an event. Partly, it feels more than just giving. A concert can contribute beauty to an horrific situation. You not only give, even with a poster like the above, but you "share" the giving and the concern. The poster is a commemoration, something that says "we don't forget".

It's a luxury, as all design is. It's all that designers can contribute without mucking in themselves. (Volunteering isn't requested at the moment, nor is access to the area easy, nor is inexpert rebuilding help necessarily more important than keeping working to lift an economy badly hit etc.)

So I sympathise with the designer of this poster. While the blog-post questioning the design is a good one, if design is a luxury we "don't need", communication is a necessity. This poster is perhaps just a mixture of both, rather than an egoistic "look at me giving".

Update, 19 March: More on the necessity or lack of it in the design of "help" posters here on the Eye magazine blog.

What is news?

The Guardian has a report about UK newspaper coverage of the quake aftermath. The sensationalism in headlines is not limited to the other papers, The Guardian is just as guilty. (Yesterday: "Growing humanitarian crisis as nuclear drama overshadows disaster relief". Yet isn't it the media doing the overshadowing?)

I knew very little about nuclear power, but checking as much as I could to satisfy myself of what threat I faced living in Tokyo, I couldn't see the real threat at all. Some people – foreign and Japanese – have left the city for western parts of the country or for abroad to escape tremors and now nuclear threat. It's understandable to be with family, and, especially, protect young children etc. And with all the questioning and a media sense of fear, Tuesday night was pretty low for me, more so because there was a sizeable (just over magnitude 6) quake to the west. But as the ground very really moved, the more I researched about the power station problem, the less I could find to worry about – that is, here in Tokyo, not within the exclusion zone: as with the initial quake and tsunami, Tokyo has been luckier than the areas properly hit. (The press always concentrate on Tokyo, of course. There's a sizeable town called Mito, for example, nearer the station, but perhaps "Exodus From Mito" wouldn't sell papers. My friend's parents live there. Other friends live closer in Chiba City)

Fortunately, yesterday the British Embassy has a more level-headed approach than the press. They posted advice on Facebook, which was re-posted elsewhere: here for example.

Not knowing much about the threat, and the threat being invisible, all make good press, and a nuclear symbol makes for a good break from tsunami images. Here, too, the media have over-focussed to the point of hysteria on the power station. Prompting one person in a shelter in the tsunami-hit area, with no house, lost friends and relatives, food scarce, keeping warm from the winter temperatures, to comment: it seems like people are already forgetting us.

Let's hope it's not so. Good reporting continues from my colleague Julian Ryall for the Telegraph

Being there

I can't believe it's only the fourth day since the quake – or is that, I can't believe it's already 4 days since the quake? Time passes rapidly. So many reports, updates, and now further serious hazards. (And in Tokyo – currently inconvenienced but not suffering like the hit areas – continued, frequent rumblings remind us of the threat of a further big quake; rolling blackouts are a daily possibility; supermarkets have seen lines outside and emptying shelves.)

Two journalist colleagues are writing reports from as close to the nuclear power plants in Fukushima as they can get, other colleagues are reporting from the stricken areas further north, others are reporting round the clock from Tokyo. Photographer colleagues are also in the area most hit by the tsunami and quake. Here two examples of photos: the long walk home or overnight stay in Tokyo after the quake by Tony McNicol, and the continued trauma of the people in the devastated quake-hit area by Rob Gilhooly.

Earthquake/tsunami graphics

Let this post not diminish the real problems in the truly effected zone. As I said, in my last post, a design blog might as well not exist while a trauma of this extent is happening.

I write this as I'm back working – which I wasn't sure would happen much today since rolling power outages are planned around Tokyo. This morning's was cancelled. This evening's might still go ahead. (Homes, offices, shops, traffic lights: all could be out.) Also as I write this another tremor hits – more than 30 quakes since the big one have been over magnitude 6.

But life in Tokyo, while disrupted, goes on. Much of the weekend was spent watching television, for news and updates from the devastation further north. Japanese TV goes into rehearsed emergency mode, and the screen above shows what we see (on the right of a screen) overlaid the video or studio report. Japanese TV graphics, like for the weather etc, are not renown for design. The tsunami warning is basic and functional, and appears in the bottom right of all channels' broadcasts – constantly while the actual warning is in place. For two whole days the tsunami warning remained in its place. As you can see the whole country was under a warning, with different areas of the coast delineated by different threat-level colour. At the top of the screen there's a report of a further quake (Japanese level 3, with a list of affected towns or areas.) That appears 30 seconds or so after the quake, accompanied by an alert sound. Occasionally – three times while I was watching – the announcers can issue a verbal warning: a quake has occurred somewhere, and there is seconds to warn people further from the quake to avoid falling objects. Fortunately each time, by the time the tremor reached us it had weakened.

It was along weekend of seeing that icon and thinking of the victims.

For the safe: be happy

Haven't thought of blogging since the earthquake hit on Friday. From here in Tokyo, where we rattled and rolled, but were undamaged, I can only think of those further north. Our beautiful sunny day is only their continuing nightmare. At such times a design blog is, well... essentially useless. (While foreign correspondent friends work constantly to keep us informed.) So I will just link to Take Inoue's twitpics, which he has been drawing since the quake, of people smiling, some wearing T-shirts with affected area names. Thoughts are with those people in those areas.

via watashitotokyo

Portraits: 10

Julee Cruise, singer, in a hotel room, London, 1990
Julee Cruise was promoting her (excellent) album "Floating Into the Night" and was famous for her work – on that album and Twin Peaks – with David Lynch. I got a nice enough shot of her in black-and-white sitting on the hotel bed, a blank TV to her left and looking off to her right. I'm not sure if it said so much about her or her relationship to TV (!) but it looked OK. But, this colour and slightly eccentrically framed shot with the flowers seemed the most (very vaguely) Lynchian and sort of lush for the few minutes I had with (a quite probably jet-lagged) Cruise. For City Limits.

Ivor Cutler, song writer/poet, outside the BBC, London, c1990(?)
Ivor Cutler, who died in 2006, was known for his perhaps off the wall, humorous poetry/songs, so I wanted something that was not "straight on". I'd arranged to meet him on the street outside the BBC, as he was there to record something, to get a few minutes for the shot for City Limits. The pillars are from the church immediately opposite BBC radio in central London. He watched me framing the shot and fiddling with the focus and gave me a compliment I've always loved, when he asked if I was a musician. I said no (I can't play a thing), and he said he'd wondered because I handled the camera like a musical instrument.

For more on these portraits, see here, and the Portraits tag at right.

Face-to-"face" calls

A new prototype design for a mobile phone (left) was unveiled last week. Based on a child-sized responsive robot (below), the Elfoid phone is a humanoid(-ish) shape that could mirror a callers face and head movements. Osaka University – instigators of the original robot – linked up with NTT and Qualcomm for the mobile. The original robot has already made a certain splash, so something sale-able could develop… should your object of desire be a squishy, rubbery, sort-of-creepy, humanoid phone in your hand.

Cosplayers

I went to the opening of Kyoichi Tsuzuki's "Cosplay: Both Sides of the Mask" exhibition at the FCCJ last night. Tsuzuki is famous for his shots of people in their rooms in Tokyo and other works (as well as being a magazine editor). This latest on-going project is of people mirrored next to their cosplay (costume play) alter egos. He says, one aspect he wants to show is the everydayness of the people – these aren't necessarily otaku geeks, aren't isolated obsessives, but are ordinary, mostly young people, often from the suburbs, perhaps living with parents, perhaps working at a bank etc, who just dress up in their spare time…

Upside Time

Neat cover idea from Time magazine

Portraits: 9

Noam Chomsky, linguist, philospher, political activist, London, 1989
Many times I had only a few minutes with a "portraitee". I took this portrait in a corridor at his publishers as people milled about us. With only those few minutes I chose the corridor for the very simple contribution that the stairs could give: Chomsky is, in part, a thinker, and with little else to play with, I took some close-up and some with the stairs behind him, where they just (very) vaguely suggest somewhere where his thoughts could go! For City Limits.

Marilyn Crispell, pianist, Woodstock, NY, 1988
Marilyn Crispell is a great pianist and a very warm person. This shoot was for a cover feature for The Wire. I think the magazine wasn't happy with the shoot – it made the cover, but not the feature – though then-editor Richard Cook said it was one of their most "human" covers. This was a nice compliment – and reflects Marilyn's personality – but also meant I probably hadn't met the stylised demands of The Wire's artwork at the time! Nevertheless, from that cover shoot this other shot appeared inside the magazine in a later issue, and there was some surprise as to how much they liked it when printed up: possibly old-style contact sheets hadn't revealed enough of the overall impact of the full-size image. Marilyn was staying in a friend's house in Woodstock, with her keyboard and cats, and this was taken in the garden of the house. (Scanned from the magazine – haven't tracked down my negatives for this shoot yet.)

For more on these portraits, see here, and the Portraits tag at right.

Forgetting and apologies

The Japanese band Kishidan wore Nazi and Nazi-style regalia for an interview with MTV. The Simon Wiesenthal Center complained. In response, Kishidan (who apparently usually have an image of wearing Japanese school uniforms) immediately apologised and promised to never wear the costumes again. After the ignorance involved in the incident, brownie points, at least, for a swift, clear apology, and a changing of ways.

They are not alone, of course, in using Nazi symbols, ephemera and clothing in music (or elsewhere: for example, Prince Harry's ill-thought-out fancy dress in the UK.) The band Kiss use in their logo a Nazi-style, storm trooper  double-S (Kiss' lead member Gene Simmon's mother is a concentration camp survivor, and the band claim accident or appropriation for the letters' similarity) and the punk-era saw a few bands using Iron Cross-type imagery, claiming it as a rebellion against, presumably, whatever you've got.

There can be arguments for appropriation or artistic license, but to think that Nazi imagery was happenstance is belied by National Socialists' clear attempts to coordinate imagery and propaganda, and to impress via their design choices: see designer Stephen Heller's find of the Nazi design handbook.

As such, Stephen Heller is not alone in arguing that further continued use of Nazi symbolism and imagery purely for design's sake and to believe that it has no impact is to operate under a delusion. Back in the first issue of (the now obsolete and sadly missed) magazine Speak, in 1996, Heller wrote simply: "Designers who believe they are doing the world a service by reducing symbols of brutality to the equivalent of happy faces are deluding themselves." He added, "Reducing Naziism to nothing more than an object of fun is an example of the politics of forgetting."

That was already 15 years ago, and forgetting continues. Good, then, that (in a country not renown for immediately understanding the effects of remembering war events) Kishidan acted quickly.

(By the way, the first link at the top also mentions the BBC QI/Hiroshima controversy. More about that from me soon.)

The Elephant Balances

Love this… More on the artist, Daniel Firman, on his site here.
via mestudio

Japanese imports and exports

The influence of Japanese character design loops back with these quirky, slightly disturbing, faux-vintage characters from illustrator, art director and character designer Rey Misterio (aka Juan Molinet) in Buenos Aires.

via Pink Tentacle again

Skinship

Excellent selection of photos over on Bonze Buckaroo Wandering's Flickr photostream – historical images of Afro-American men, presented under a gay theme. Not knowing the provenance of some of these photos, many seem patently "couple" images, while some could be just friends or family. But it could be argued that merely presenting a simple image of male affection – gay or not – gives a fresh look at a perhaps under-represented aspect in both photographic and African-American male history.  Some also interesting written commentary accompanies the collected images.

(My headline here, by the way, plays on a Japanese use of English: kinship becomes "skinship" when you have a skin-touching relationship with someone. Here, both that and skin colour play a role in the selection of the photos.)

Thanks to Fung Lin on facebook