Jordan Swartz-The Rad Times #29

The case on my iphone finally crumbled to bits after a few years of use and in the hunt for a new case I was reminded how nice of an object an iphone is, but that’s its major flaw. It fits in your hand with ease, tucked in the center divot of your palm, its edges simultaneously smooth and crisp, and all of it infinitely insecure and constantly on the edge of utter destruction¹. It doesn’t matter how nice of an object it is if one fall can destroy it all. It teeters on the edge of Schrödinger’s iphone, if the perfect, beautifully designed object has to be wrapped in landfill bound plastic, is it a perfect object at all?

Like most of the world I’ve been watching as much of the World Cup as I can and one of my biggest takeaways doesn’t have to do with soccer at all. The World Cup overlords wouldn’t let any companies with stadium naming rights show their logos, for most this was an annoying task at best, for Levi’s, it was an exercise in brand recognition. They covered their logo on the stadium that bares their name in San Francisco, but they cut the white tarps to perfectly fit their iconic red badge. The batwing as it’s been dubbed was clearly recognizable and maybe even drew more attention than if it had been left alone.

As a brand designer, my daily job is to color in the center part of the venn diagram from the two examples above. If I give a hotel the greatest logo anyone has ever seen but not a healthy system built around it, that allows for different use cases across a variety of mediums and media, then it doesn’t matter how great the logo is. On the other side, I am constantly striving to create a logo that can be totally whited out and sheet wrapped and still convey what the brand is². It’s a puzzle that changes with every client and situation.

^{1.The screen on one of my first iphones cracked and I put packing tape over the top and rocked that til glass shards started poking through.}

^{2.I pass an old sign on my way home from the gym, the guts ripped out, and just the outer form still in tact, but every time I pass it I mumble to myself “Chuck E. Cheese.”}

Thanks for hanging!
Be good to each other.

I’m moving soon so I’m doing a sale of sorts to clean out the archives. All orders of my collage zine Visual Affects will come with a few prints and other ephemera from the vaults thrown in as well.

I’ve got a few identity projects rolling, one for a new hotel in Arlington, TX. I’ll be sharing pieces of those as they materialize.

Magdalena Wysocka and Claudio Pogo are collaborators who also helm Outer Space Press. They use found images, books, and archives to create new narratives and recontextualize these collections. Combining their varied resources of publishing, printmaking, and photography they create new visual languages and beautiful handmade books and prints. Each book is a historical riddle that is textural and graphic, their prints often feature repetition and a blurred origin.

Zayd Ayers Dohrn grew up in a space few will ever know, his parents were both leaders in the Weather Underground. Dohrn’s new book Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young chronicles his youth spent in hiding while his parents were on the FBI’s most wanted list, and growing up learning more about their revolutionary origins and actions. A section of the book is featured here and gives a nice overview of some of the Weather Undergrounds actions. A more militant offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), they led a self proclaimed revolutionary war against the U.S. government that included breaking Timothy Leary (among others) out of jail, the Days of Rage protest during the trial of the Chicago Seven, along with bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and other government buildings. The documentary about them is worth a watch as well.

Every Noise at Once is one of those sites that reminds me of the “old” internet, a time before everyone had a computer in their pocket at all times, and it felt like a place of endless discovery. The site is a generative scatter plot of music genres, texture being represented vertically and rhythm horizontally, over 6,000 genres are represented³. You can click on any genre name to hear a sample of its musical styling, or click the arrow on the right for another generative scatter plot, this one a list of the bands represented by said genre. It’s a great way to find new bands and genres and connect the dots between one you already enjoy.

^{3.I came to hip-hop only in the last few years and after discovering Deltron 3030, I’ve been able to map similar and connected artists to discover some great stuff I maybe wouldn’t have otherwise.}

The Lowdown is a neo-noir with a sturdy spine of comedic mayhem. This show feels like one of those old rip cord kids toys, you pull that cord and off you dive into white supremacist churches, ex convict security guards, literary secrets, unbridled confidence, blackmail, and political dynasties to name a few. Created by Sterlin Harjo⁴, and based on the life of his friend and journalist Lee Roy Chapman, Ethan Hawke carries an excellent cast of ne'er-do-well’s through the Tulsa landscape. This show feels like if Raymond Chandler wrote the screenplay for Fletch, for the Coen brothers to direct.

^{4.Co-creator of Reservation Dogs, one of my favorite shows of the last decade.}

Claude Cahun was a French surrealist photographer, writer, and sculptor, who gained wider recognition after their death, mainly for their series of self portraits that blurred gender lines and identities. In the late ‘30s, Cahun moved with their partner to the Island of Jersey to escape the Nazis, only to have them invade a few years later. The couple began a resistance campaign, leaving poems and anti-Nazi flyers in soldiers’ pockets, cigarette boxes, on car windshields, and crumpled around town for soldiers to find. When they were eventually arrested, the Nazis thought there must be a much larger resistance network operating on the island, not two surrealist artists.

Read Posters - The American Library Association are auctioning off some of their classic read posters.

Matthew Dickman “Slow Dance” - All-American Poem is one of my favorite poetry collections. I recently reread it and it crushes me still over a decade after finding it. He’s funny, absurd, depressing as hell, and so joyous all at once.

Carolina Caroline - I haven’t seen this yet but I can not wait. Sweaty, gritty, and taut. A Southern romantic crime thriller, sign me up.