Sunday, August 23, 2009

different strokes...

Letter Cult have posted their Best of 2009... so far... including some incredible work by Adam Garcia, Andy Smith & Will Bryant, and Enkeling.



the romanticist

I have eaten beef stew with silent, shabby men in cheap eateries and fingered the last two pennies in my pocket with anger and irony … I have dined most sumptuously in a spacious Park Avenue home, duck brought forth in silver dishes by a butler … I have seen $.10 movies on Times Square, seated in the first row of the balcony in shirtsleeves, smoking and laughing … under a lashing rain and gale, I have gazed at the angry mid-Atlantic for a moment, pausing in my labours … I have stood on a Liverpool street corner in the middle of a drowsy afternoon and cursed the cobbles because the pubs had closed … I have made love to women in Canada, Washington, D.C., Nova Scotia, England, Greenland, New York City, Maryland and New England … I have lain drunk in the gutter of a street … I climbed a mountain in Greenland and gazed down on the slim ribbon of Ikatek Fjord … I have toiled in the sun on construction jobs from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Alexandria, Virginia … I have attended cocktail parties in New York City penthouses … I have worked in mills … I have worked in garages … I have sold door to door … I have worked as a reporter on a newspaper … I have starved in a cheap urine-smelling room in Hartford, CT … I have dated actresses, models and social workers … I have brawled in streets, in bar entrances and in cafeterias … I have heard great symphonies and been transported … I have walked the streets, a lonely U.S. Navy gob and sought women … I have languished in hospitals and shuffled cards in melancholy abstraction … I have written reams and reams of writings … and through it all, I have always been restless, unhappy and seeking new horizons. What shall I do?

~ Jack Kerouac, The Romanticist, September 1943 (photograph Harry Benson, Berlin Kiss)

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

typos

Opening this Thursday at the Electrik Sheep Gallery (which is a brilliant gallery, by the way), in the cold northern city of Newcastle, is a show by typographer Seb Lester. If you like raw talent then you’ll love his work. Prints also available online at Seb's website.