I considered discontinuing my reading of 24 Hour Party People by Anthony H. Wilson, “[b]ased on the original screenplay 24 Hour Party People by Frank Cottrell Boyce,” after p. 1 (“It’s a great, great city, but should develop it’s sense of humour, perhaps”). I ultimately did so at p. 8 (“ ‘”Inconstancy is my very essence,” says the wheel”). I then rapaciously speed-skimmed for the important bits.
You do realize how very much I idolize Peter Saville, Suede album-cover débâcle notwithstanding?
Pp. 57–60:
“Excuse me, Mr. Wilson, I’d like to introduce myself. I’m studying typography at Manchester Poly. I know who you are and that you do lots of things and if you ever need any graphics, I think you should use me.”
A phone number was given or taken. A connection made.
Thank God for Patti Smith. It wasn’t just Horses that changed Wilson’s life.
It was two months later that Peter Saville, a sort of twenty-year-old Bryan Ferry lookalike with searingly intelligent eyes, turned up at the Granada canteen to see Wilson.
Over a cup of GTV coffee, Peter showed Wilson a book on Jan Tschichold. He showed him the Penguin Crime covers from 1941, the constructivist play posters from the 1920s and the cover of the 1965 Hoffmann-LaRoche catalogue…. The utter commitment of this kid said soul brother. […]
“He’s great but useless. The brochure turned up three weeks after the exhibition we needed it for. Great brochure, though.” […]
Two trips to Peter’s sedate flat in Manc suburb Altrincham (upper-middle without much middle) to watch him arrange and rearrange black rectangles of thick paper on a big piece of yellow card…. Wilson retreated back from the door just in time to see Saville striding through the throng, with a big cardboard tube under his arm and mane full-on flowing.
“Jesus, Peter, what’s that?”
“It’s the poster.”
“But this is the gig [happening right now].”
“So.”
Reasonable answer, thought the rapidly-calming Wilson. Peter’s aura of “the artist” had that effect.
“What’s the point in bringing the poster now? This is the gig,” said Wilson.
“I know. I couldn’t get the right yellow.” […]
It was just so good. Yellow and black; a use of a Thirties æsthetic that was to catch on about nine months later, but rarely done as well in Paris or on Madison Avenue. And this was for the fucking Russel Club in Hulme. Genius gets forgiven damn easily.
Pp. 144–145:
“I have been asking myself a question and I want the sleeve to answer that question…. How many colours does it take to replace language, to replace the alphabet?” […]
Wilson had an edgy feeling. Colours. Special colours. Pantone fucking colours. Most people print colours by the four-colour printing process…. And Factory did that. But every so often Peter or one of his acolytes… asked for a special colour[, because] Factory’s designers did not trust the cyans and magentas to get together specifically enough to give them the exact bloody shade that their vision demanded….
With ten colours representing digits 0 to 9, you could make numbers 1 to 26 and reflect a Western European alphabet.
So that was that. They’d have this bloody picture of a bunch of flowers and some colour-coding instead of lettering. Sounded good. No one complained. No one ever did. Peter was good. That was enough.
Select a category to see additional posts. Add feed/ to a category to subscribe via RSS
The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2004.07.24 16:46. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2004/07/24/saville/
Select a category to see additional posts. Add feed/ to a category to subscribe via RSS
The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2004.07.21 18:59. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2004/07/21/tty/
Select a category to see additional posts. Add feed/ to a category to subscribe via RSS
The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2004.07.21 18:58. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2004/07/21/basics/
Select a category to see additional posts. Add feed/ to a category to subscribe via RSS
The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2004.07.21 18:57. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2004/07/21/tractorange/
Richard “All I Need to Know About the Internet I Learned By Top-Posting with Outlook and Surfing with IE” Morochove writes, in the Toronto Star, 2004.07.18, p. D2 (not online):
When it became as good as Netscape’s browser… Explorer killed off competing Web browsers. Or did it? […] Netscape 7.1 is loaded with features – overloaded for my tastes…. Unless your ISP is AOL, you won’t make use of all the features of this sluggish, bloated browser. However… Mozilla [is] a full-featured Internet application that’s better suited than Netscape for non–AOL users….
If the thought of picking and choosing from a long list of browser extensions for downloading makes your eyes glaze over, Firefox is not for you.
Except it works fine right out of the box. What extensions do you actually need?
Opera has been around for years…. [I]t comes with useful features Internet Explorer lacks… you can save a collection of Web pages, opening the group later. […]
The open-in-tabs feature is easily found, even in Moz and Firefox. (No mention of tabs per se, mind – one of several features sufficient unto themselves to justify switching.)
Some Web sites will not display properly unless they’re viewed using Internet Explorer. That’s more a function of the Web-site designer than the browser.
Correct!
Internet Explorer is more forgiving of Web sites that don’t conform to the World Wide Web consortium’s (W3) [sic] standards.
No, that’s not true. The Gecko- and KDE-based browsers have a better implementation of quirks mode vs. standards-compliance mode. (So does IE for Macintosh, actually.) Compliant pages look better on those browsers and noncompliant pages generally do not look any worse, save for the counterexample Morochove notes:
Some Web sites are specifically designed [not to] work well with other browsers. Some of the worst offenders are the Web sites of financial institutions.
Indeed. But isn’t it curious how tiny North Shore Credit Union could produce a fully-compliant site using only two developers? (Go, Scott Baldwin – and mazel tov on the new baby.)
Wouldn’t it be interesting for this esteemed columnist to actually tackle – and coherently explain – Web standards to his readership? Could be a challenge, given that his column is entitled Computer Watch and barely ever mentions a device that doesn’t run Microsoft system software. But he’s halfway there.
Want to come out to our next Webstandards.TO boozeup, Richard? You’re buying.
Select a category to see additional posts. Add feed/ to a category to subscribe via RSS
The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2004.07.19 13:02. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2004/07/19/computer-watch-watch/
Select a category to see additional posts. Add feed/ to a category to subscribe via RSS
The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2004.07.18 20:11. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2004/07/18/el-aztek/
Select a category to see additional posts. Add feed/ to a category to subscribe via RSS
The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2004.07.18 20:10. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2004/07/18/oca/
Select a category to see additional posts. Add feed/ to a category to subscribe via RSS
The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2004.07.18 14:19. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2004/07/18/button/
Select a category to see additional posts. Add feed/ to a category to subscribe via RSS
The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2004.07.16 20:50. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2004/07/16/bm/
