At the Kaffeehaus that straddles artisanal and mainline, out of the corner of my eye I spotted a strangely coloured skin illustration. I also saw trees.

The bearer later walked by – a solid thick classic regular guy with a C. Kent haircut and E. Costello glasses.

Everyone with a tattoo has a story they’ll tell you more or less unbidden. This Michael became an illustrated man to commemorate his family cottage (hence the stand of trees under the Northern Lights); the place he comes from; Rocky Balboa (“Inevitably”); a Roman numeral I didn’t have the heart to tell him he got wrong; and a murder of crows on a wire standing in for him and his buddies.

“Why? What do you do?” he asked. I couldn’t quite tell him “I see all,” but I did say I had an eye. I talked about my other acquaintance, the man with the vines growing up his side.

I told Michael if he gets more tattoos to stick to the right side. Why? “Staying on one arm is a statement.” He got that immediately. This is a man (very much so) who can be taught to design. He’s halfway to a classic male designer already.

Queers, LGBTs, and trannies – being opposed to fact and being mortal enemies of gay men and simply enemies of men – have no tribe. Their lives are Venn diagrams of negation. That makes sense, though, seeing as how they are an abnegation of life itself. There is nothing elemental and timeless about resentment, chest scars, self-hatred, and make-up slathered on a linebacker. Trannies, queers, and LGBTs have become what neoconservatives became in the 1980s: A collection of hatreds. Nothing can nourish them because they taste of bile.

Whereas I can talk to a man, one who commemorated the other men in his life on his very body, be taken seriously, and walk away nourished by the feeling that men like him and me matter.

My week is looking up. And – I can say this as a Maritimer – now so is all y’all’s.

1. ENERG

   1. Y
   2. IJA
   3. IE
   4. IA

2. Graphic Designer:

   here’s a mini website and incredibly boring essay about our typeface no thx

3. “This wall” (not White Pass’s) “is reading my mind.”

4. (REPRISE w/ UPDATE) Hobo. (Hobeaux!) Hobo!

5. Worst nonsense I’ve ever read about Univers, and almost as grave a desecration of Frutiger as posthumously diagnosing him as trans*. Or swapping out Univers for Helvetica and/or Arial, as the City of Toronto actually does on “Thursday’s.”

6. You’ve heard of 88 (⑧⑧? ⓼⓼? ❽❽?) and 14. New! Neo-Nazi parentheses (“echo”).

7. Are you as bored with reading about Avant Garde as I thought I was? (“Mother [HEROIC EMBRACING AMPERSAND] Child.”) Hi-res sidescrolling scans made it interesting again, and recalled Leonidas’ dictum that one must always inspect the original object (even if here one is not).

8. Unsympathetic Michael Everson dukes it out over Georgian majuscules (mtravuli). Days later, they show up on Wheel of Fortune.

   (Somebody here write “mtravuli” in Georgian for me, please. I looked and I can’t find it.)

9. Журнальная рубленая, the poor man’s Futura. I don’t see anybody trying to transgender this one.

10. “ОУР ЦЛУЕ ИС WРИТТЕН ИН ТХИС АЛПХАБЕТ.” Meanwhile, Jeopardy type actually looks better on Black Jeopardy.

11. 😜: First emoji on a death notice? (Discussion.)

    (“Emoji are not worth the forced line[‑]height increase.”)

12. “[S]ome Tweets [sic] suggest that Tarek Atrissi Design agency [sic] is the designer of the new Arabic font being used on Apple.com[/ae‑ar/],” declares credulous Apple blog without bothering to use Web Inspector to identify the typeface used as Gulf (which in turn identifies as five genders weights).

13. For the love of G‑d don’t ax Adam Curtis about fonts.

14. Trump Mediæval(l)ed. Ax me sometime about how I schooled the highly receptive late artiste Félix González-Torres about the fake italic Trump on his stacks.

    Such “LTypI,” an acronym you couldn’t even typeset behind the Iron Drapery of Bringhurstian party ideology, is derided as unimaginative, including by one great mind. I shatter consensus. In point of fact Ell Type Eye never gets better than with Brothers.

    I used to have a lousy photo of George Howe Colt’s Brothers. I could easily borrow that (audio)book from the library and take another couple of lousy photos. But I would direct your attention to a phenomenon that 88ers would seek to eradicate from the earth: Gay rugby.

    Every team consists of gay males trying to be men and seemingly every team has an awesome name. (Spot the name in Occitan [mtravuli?].) One of the Top 3 feared gay ruggerses, Muddy York here in Toronto, just had personalized jerseys produced. Typeset, obviously, in Brothers.

• Julia Fleischaker at Melville House, a female working in an industry where most workers are in fact female while most executives aren’t, takes time out of her busy day to belittle men’s book clubs. Fleischaker couldn’t be bothered answering the following question:

  Yeah! Just keep reading other men, all you men out there, and maybe one day you’ll be taken seriously! […] That’s hard to argue with, and we would never discourage reading, or joining a book group.

  Yet that’s exactly what you’re doing.

  But, as Meredith Clark at Glamour… points out[,] “rather than think about it too much, pick up a book – any book – and if you don’t like it, pick up another one, no judgment on the gender of the author or characters needed.”

  In other words, when presented with men’s private spaces making their own rules, you show up and tell them they need more women and fewer rules.

  For attribution, answer this question: Why?

• Dyspeptic Jessa Crispin founded and ran Bookslut, a title that dares you to call her dyspeptic. She shitcanned the joint and offered this aperçu about her next book.

  That contemporary feminism is not only embarrassing but incredibly misguided to the point where I can’t associate myself with it. There’s outrage culture, safe spaces, the lean-in culture – but also the Gen X/BabyBoomer rah-rah capitalism, yay [sic]! And also a lot of misguided notions about gender. As if women are somehow more naturally empathetic than men, and all we need is full participation in public life and somehow the world gets better. Which is not the case.

  When I asked for more detail (initially branded “not for publication”), Crispin’s answer was “I mean, who are you?” And that is the kind of answer I publish.

  Not everyone believes “women are somehow more naturally empathetic than men.” Certainly Ed Champion doesn’t, based on the dealings he separately told me he had with Crispin. But Champion is one of those men who simply deserves what he gets – à la Mike Daisey, he warrants perpetual destruction.

Bruce LaBruce has a set of scans of his old “queer punk zine” J.D.s up on some horrific site that presents PDFs in Web pages. Because I am actually competent, I merged all eight issues’ files, ran OCR, and added bookmarks and tags. Hence you can now read all eight issues of J.D.s in one go.

John D’Agata, The Making of the American Essay, prologue (ancient Amerindian recitation):

Creation

Water went, they say.

Land was not, they say. Water only then.

Mountains were not, they say.

Stones were not, they say.

Fish were not, they say.

Deer were not, they say.

Grizzlies were not, they say.

Panthers were not, they say.

Wolves were not, they say.

People were washed away, they say.

Grizzlies were washed away, they say.

Panthers were washed away, they say.

Deer were washed away, they say.

Coyotes were not then, they say.

Ravens were not, they say.

Herons were not, they say.

Woodpeckers were not, they say.

Then wrens were not, they say.

Then hummingbirds were not, they say.

Then otters were not, they say.

Then jackrabbits, greysquirrels were not, they say.

Then long-eared mice were not, they say.

Then wind was not, they say.

Then snow was not, they say.

Then rain was not, they say.

Then it didn’t thunder, they say.

Then trees were not when it didn’t thunder, they say.

It didn’t lighten, they say.

Then clouds were not, they say.

Fog was not, they say.

It didn’t appear, they say.

Stars were not, they say.

It was very dark.

(Cf. Here. [Via.])

Well, that’s not really the live issue. Not one but two Tom of Finland movies are apparently in process. Neither producer acknowledges the existence of the other. (The producer of the “official” film, Tom, denies that. The other producer ignored my question.) If either movie, or both, actually came to fruition, the producers could easily hire any number of Finns to play Touko Laaksonen at his various ages.

What’s harder to cast is the idealized model in Tom of Finland’s drawings, generically named Kake in the comic books that are not as well known. As the queens on DataLounge pointed out, not only do all Kakes make mesomorphs and roidheads look like 98-pound weaklings, they all have the same nose. It’s a short, flat nose, and it occupies the top of the flowchart when it comes to casting a live actor to embody the illustrated man.

The problem has a solution, and his name is Jon Bernthal, a big strong strapping specimen with in fact just the right nose.

Here we have to be sensitive to Hollywood’s century of casting against type. Bernthal is a hot Jew (if only he were also a ginger), and Tom of Finland knew not of Jews. He could barely draw blacks. For his lovemap was drawn from his time in the Finnish army, from its enlisted men and officers and most of all from their uniforms.

Tony Shalhoub isn’t Italian; Scarlett Johansson (q.v.) is not Japanese; Jon Bernthal is not a Finn, real or imagined.

He is, however, perfect for the role. And he’d do it! Bernthal and Andrew Lincoln achieved the impossible when, in The Walking Dead, they hugged and nuzzled and held and grappled each other with complete violation of each other’s personal space yet no eroticism whatsoever, only brotherhood. I have never seen this before or since.

Here, compare the casting in Beefcake, a film that still holds up and that starred a cast of thousands of very game young men. I know one of them is mildly embarrassed by the whole thing, though I told him not to be. Then there is Bernthal manqué Josh Peace, who these days sports a shaven head but has always been the lissome and open figure you see in Beefcake. I’m sure he looks back fondly on his time there. (Despite walking by his house for years, and despite observing him stride manfully about town, I found no way to ask him. I am still sure that’s how he feels about Beefcake.)

Imagine Jon Bernthal as Tom of Finland’s ideal. An instant classic. Bernthal could just stand there and look beautiful. Easily.

It’ll never happen. Niklas Högner plays Kake in the “official” Tom of Finland film.

Further concerns: Nordics thinking they speak good enough English and can replicate even an iota of the American experience that was half Touko Laaksonen’s life in his later years. In either or both films, I expect Finns looking Finnish, and speaking English in an accent they by definition cannot even detect, acting as “Americans.”

That week just flew by, didn’t it?

1. A phenomenal bit of business about repainting the name of a ship onto that ship. “It took a day to letter-space [sic] seven characters.”

2. “I need those ashes so I can dot this i.”

   (“He left me for a woman who uses two spaces after a period.”)

3. Robert Palladino, who taught Steve Jobs that typography matters, died in February.

4. Tal Leming, whose surname my inner voice always pronounces with the stress heard in LeMans, dodges the bullet of solving the already-solved problem of fonts for “coding” by solving the problem of fonts for U.S. Soccer athletes, a lifelong goal for Tal. (Leming’s Levidéo.)

   We have discussed jersey type before. I am just going to assume the Paralympians will use the same typeface, but of course they never get mentioned anywhere ever.

5. There’s just no way to avoid an aperçu from Spiekermann. His house is more impressive (Sowersby, who’s been there, told me so) but Rhatigan’s remains kooler.

6. Digital Fonts and Reading (“Series on Language Processing, Pattern Recognition, and Intelligent Systems: Volume 1,” “USD118.00”).

7. Nobody remembers inline and contour fonts from the ITC days. I just loved them growing up. Au courant thinkfluencers use colour emoji to navigate our post-Federal/‑Brim media landscape, so wood-type-redolent colo[u]r fonts are self-evidently next. They aren’t SVG.

   (“FIREWOOD.”)

8. “By reverse engineering, we can determine the following characteristics about the standard Emoji font on iOS and OS X.”

9. “help me” (“[f]ind the differences between Myriad and Frutiger”).

10. FUCK YEAH[,] I ❤ FRANKLIN GOTHIC.

11. “ ‘Excellens’ is the first font totally created using Microsoft EXCEL 97” (caps in original).

12. I guess we’re back with Spiekermann: “He only deserves Arial.”

13. Richard Ishida (op. cit.) still doesn’t have his utility back up that lets you paste in a string and get back a list of every Unicode character in it, but Babelstone’s has been there all along. (Tim Whitlock’s Unicode Character Inspector has better type.)

    And just as I mishear “Leming,” I constantly mistype “Unicide.” (“You have selected REGICIDE.”)

    (Unicode ⒸⒶⓀⒺ ∕ ⒼⒶⓉⒺⒶⓊ Unicode.)

14. Alcuin Book Society Awards 2015 homepage superhelpfully lists the designers, authors, and publishers of winning books (without a canonical URL). And that’s all it does.

15. Probably need another piece on Johnston Sans. Meanwhile, the Toronto Star achieved the impossible by publishing a thorough, technically accurate profile of Rod McDonald. And you know how important technical accuracy is to us, much more so than adequately encapsulating a human persona, which Katie Daubs’ article also succeeds in doing.

16. Courier (also dachshund [not Dax]).

17. Are you jaded about and bored by the wonderful Web pages designers produce for each of their new typefaces? You can’t keep up, can you? A lot of the time, you have no idea what some piece is typeset in, do you? But you used to be able to ID every font on sight, did you not? You were king and/or queen of all you surveyed.

    You were younger then. You remember inline and contour fonts.

    Well, you now have a new purpose for living, because even in this post-JustLefthand/‑ErikRighthand media landscape, Manu brilliantly fills gaps jaded bored typophiles did not know existed. (No dachshund.)

Snowpiercer is a totalizing visual obsession with returning one’s gaze to the symmetrical features of, the gleaming blue eyes of, every bristle of hair on American actor Chris Evans.

To watch Snowpiercer is to enact the “concentration, immensity and intensity” of a timeless Hollywood masculine archetype, a man “[j]ust tall and handsome enough, just manly enough, good with his hands, nonjudgemental, with intelligent eyes and a rich sonorous voice, shivering, cold, vulnerable, needy, beaten to shit and crying.”

The Koreans who created this picture – as Me and Earl and the Dying Girl showed, Koreans are working on another plane of cinematic existence – would be expected to direct such adoration at a blond or a ginger, two somatotypes unknown in their land. But not even with fair delicate Jamie Bell do they do that. Snowpiercer is a hindbrain obsession with finding an excuse to look at Evans’ face over and over again, and, implicitly, an obsession with how that face diverges from Koreans’. An exemplar of the narcissism of small differences, Chris Evans is as Kim Novak to Hitchcock.

If my analysis stretches the bounds of credulity, you must be an heterosexualist male. Cinema is not all about you. Besides, I can prove it.