Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984, p. 87:

Roxy were massive in Sheffield. The group’s flamboyant, future-retro image inspired the post-hippie generation to glam up and dance at Sheffield clubs like the Crazy Daisy. And Roxy performed regularly in the city. “When you went to see them you’d wait until you were on the bus before applying the glitter, so your mum and dad didn’t see,” recalls [Phil] Oakey. “Martyn [Ware] was more daring than me. He’d be going through the toughest areas of town in green fur jackets and high-heel shoes.” […]

Ambiguously pitched between irony and romanticism, Roxy were the æsthete’s option. “I remember buying the first Roxy album and listening to it with the gatefold sleeve open, spread out on the floor,” says Ware. “The entire atmosphere around the record was as important as the music. It all came together as a piece of art for me.”

I read this while seated in my morning haunt, located on the edge of nowhere in plain sight and with a great feeling of place. It caused me to look up, and I thought of a wordless impression I have lived and relived since my very first act of pulling a Peter Saville New Order album out of a bin. It resists description and it borders on embarrassing, as all my examples are dated and even trite.

The graphic-design band is inextricable from its graphic image, which, contrary to claims that refuse to disappear decades later, was not harmed one wit by CDs and still hasn’t been harmed now that “album covers” are JPEGs loaded into iTunes.

What is hard to reproduce or recapture, because it exists almost in a quantum state and dies just as it comes to life, is the wordless placeless feeling prompted by rare brief passages in rare industrial and electronic songs. It is an impression of a life where design means something, indeed of a life that manifests itself as a conjunction of design and sound. It is a life that is design. But it isn’t a real life and you cannot actually live there. You come back to earth – not crashing, but with the same sudden vague disappointment you get after patting the dog pleasantly for a few minutes and forgetting everything else around you.

The graphic-design band is, to coin a phrase, an ideal for living, but it’s a kind of magic spell and it expires just as you turn off your regular life and start to enjoy it.

Leitmotifs, not all of them mine: Saville, “Perfect Kiss” (Demme), Technology: Western Re-Works, DV8, Metro Music, Copper Blue, Very, XTRMNTR, songs played on online radio stations whose titles one can never actually learn.

(Q.v.)

Last week, Ronald Shakespear of Diseño Shakespear, Buenos Aires, was in town, accompanied by his wife Elena.

Ronald is known for a rational and colourful wayfinding system for the Buenos Aires subway system (photos). I have quibbles with it – perhaps the choice of Frutiger leaves too many confusable character shapes, and the line colours are too hard to distinguish even by name – but it’s in another universe compared to what we have in Toronto.

On a lark, I sent along an E-mail before he arrived asking him if he would like to ride the subway for a while to get a glimpse at how the other half lives. He graciously accepted. Ronald and Elena would accompany me on a 2½-hour voyage from Wellesley to Yonge–Bloor to St. George to Sheppard–Yonge to Leslie. We dodged security cameras as we took umpteen noncommercial photographs of subway signage.

Many were the moments when I found myself alone 20 paces ahead of Ronald as he stood there and looked at everything. Ronald is much less interested in functionality than I am; he has more of an interest in affect and feeling. I took what notes I could of his observations, but to do justice to his expansive and impressionistic worldview would require notes that are much closer to verbatim than I have.

The first thing you notice about the name Ronald Shakespear is that it must be missing a letter on each half. No, it really is Ronald (not Ronaldo) and it really is Shakespear without a final E. I explained my decision, reached in exasperation long ago, to simply suspend disbelief about Argentinean names, which are never what you expect even if you expect the unexpected. (It is a pattern true all the way to the name of the sitting president of this Spanish-speaking South American nation, Néstor Kirchner, and the vice-president, Daniel Scioli.) Ronald’s great-great-grandfather, John Shakespear, emigrated from the U.K. to Argentina. “He was in charge of the railroads, of course.”

Three of Ronald and Elena’s five children are graphic designers. Note their echt-Argie names: Juan Shakespear, Lorenzo Shakespear, Bárbara Shakespear.

I thank Ronald and Elena for going on such a gruelling mission in a strange town. I don’t think even I understood just how momentous it all was. I had to have my esteemed colleague state the obvious for me: I had just had a dream come true – of riding the subway doing nothing but talking about signs.

I’d love to visit Buenos Aires, but, on two steaks a day, such a visit would leave me nothing to eat. [continue with: Shakespear takes the subway →]

The sun has completed a full circle around the earth and, once again, undead ghouls may walk the streets unfettered by the living. So too may an accuser of narcissism alight from steerage class and trod the alleyways of Muddy York, his studies and observations undifferentiated from the mob’s save for the salient concern of who might produce a visage in a looking-glass.

As night turns to day, the prerogatives of ghoul and accuser converge: Come to grips with his true nature and seek reconciliation with interlocutors, be they human or narcissist; or, the case unavailing, take care to alienate himself soundly from the Free City of Leslieville.

(Q.v.)