things magazine

Spam-erican Apparel, or how automated customisation just increased your choice to the point of utter incoherence (via MeFi, where someone notes sagely: ‘Zazzle, the Cafepress for people late to the internet’). There is something to be said about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction here, but we can’t formulate it just yet. Zazzle vendors exist to amplify the confusion by splicing public domain stock photography with Zazzle’s extensive inventory of objects, creating tens of thousands of things with no precedence in the history of design. From the article: ‘ShroudedLake basically arranges miniature versions of a fairly limited number of everyday objects in a seemingly endless number of combinations: square of grass with a tiny shoe on it, square of grass with a golf tee on it, square of grass with a golf ball on a golf tee on it, square of grass with a golf ball next to a golf tee on it, etc.’

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Amazon has over 700 books about the history of Route 66. The British road system hasn’t inspired quite such attention, but there are a few classics in the genre. Pieter Boogaart’s A272: An Ode to a Road, for example (reviewed back in things 12) and Edward Platt’s Leadville, a biography of the grimy ribbon of asphalt destruction that is the A40 in West London. Now there’s a new A-road biography for the pile, A303: Highway To The Sun, the book of the film. More on the A303 at the wonderful SABRE, The Society for All British and Irish Road Enthusiasts, with its incredibly maps and forums. Are there any other minor British roads that deserve their own monograph?

A selection of Historic Photos From the NYC Municipal Archives. In comparison, London’s digital archives seem to have a long way to go before they can match the quality and quantity of the material now available at the New York City Municipal Archives (870,000 images). The issue is largely funding. Throughout its history, there have been surveys and records of London. The London County Council Photograph Library comprises of around quarter of a million images, for example, whereas the London Metropolitan Archives ‘is the largest local authority record office in the United Kingdom. There are 105KM of archives, modern records, plans, audio-visual and printed material in our strong-rooms – an enormous amount of information about the capital and its people.’ The problem is that these collections are scattered and confused, some digitised, some not, some paywalled, some watermarked, all belonging to different collections and agencies and institutions. The potential is there: Collage, which offers imagery from Guildhall Art Gallery and London Metropolitan Archives, is a start, as is the London Metropolitan Archive. But to have a resource like the one in New York? A pipe dream.

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Otherthings. Speaking of archives, John Peel’s Record Collection has a very 2008 feel to it / we love Archived Music Press, but it seems to have shut up shop about 14 months ago / the jesus collection / Graphic Nothing on the art of Jan Pienkowski / Nicology, a tumblr / advertising imagery, film posters, stills and more at Harald Haefker’s photostream, from where the above comes: famous mysteries that baffle us all.

The 1900 Summer Olympics attained a height of elegance and quirkiness that few games have managed since. Known as the Games of the II Olympiad and held in Paris. From Wikipedia: ‘Some unusual events were contested for the only time in the history of the Games including automobile and motorcycle racing‘. In this novel category, France won every single medal but two, including gold, silver and bronze in the ‘Delivery Van – 500 to 1200kg – Electric – 300km’ category. Unfortnately no record car type or driver survive. According to the Journal of Olympic History (pdf) there’s some debate as to whether these events could realistically be described as ‘Olympic’, given that prize money was often awarded.

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Nevertheless, the city to city race was hotly contested, often by those entering cars from their own company. Drivers included René de Knyff, the director of Panhard, Selwyn Francis Edge, Louis Renault (who won a gold medal in a car built by the company he founded and was later – probably unfairly – accused of collaboration with the Germans) and Baron Adrien de Turckheim, manager of the Luneville factory of the Societe Lorraine des Anciens Etablissements de Dietrich & Cie, a car maker that could trace its industrial origins to the late 17th century.

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Other unique events in 1900 included cricket, croquet, pelota and ballooning, the latter another pursuit, like motor racing, that flourished in France at the time. The event was also probably an offshoot from the Exposition Universelle, held concurrently. The Exposition was
carefully reconstructed in 3D a few years ago: there is also a host of archive material available. The 1900 Games weren’t especially well organised, with accusations of cheating (‘Three marathon runners from the United States contested the result saying the French runners who got first and second places took a short cut, and the proof was they were the only contestants not spattered with mud.’) and poor organisation. Some even claim that ‘Very few [Exposition visitors] even knew the Paris Olympics was underway.’ Nonetheless, Paris went on to hold the Games in 1924. Olympic Venues Past, Present and Future as Seen From Space.

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There was also some fishing: ‘Apparently, at a series of competitions in August, some 600 fishermen, of whom 40 are from 5 other countries than France, participate, and final prizes are awarded.’ Many more gems to be found at the LA84 Foundation’s Sports Library, which ‘houses one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of sports information’ Much of which is searchable.

Anchor Bay Entertainment are from the quick and dirty school of film-making, with countless schlocky slasher movies and knock-off action titles in their copious backlist. The parade of DVD covers gives an interesting masterclass in the art of cinematic design, with every conceivable cliche explored multiple times. They’re also purveyors of Car’s Life 2, which together with films like Tangled Up and The Little Cars in the Great Race continue a long tradition of the ‘deceptive purchase’, the chameleon-like object that is designed to appear just similar enough to a more well known product that it may well be bought by mistake, rather than intentionally. The saddest is not that these films are artless, incompetent and wafer-thin imitations of other people’s ideas, but that someone somewhere probably worked very hard indeed to get this to market, unsupported by a producer, a script, a director or even any colleagues to bounce ideas off. Imposter objects usually just get lumped in with pure plagiarism, just as own brand goods walk a careful line between imitation and simple copying. Sites like You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice and this collection of Extreme Graphic Design Plagiarism simply skim the surface of cut and paste design. But a true imposter object is designed to sit alongside their more expensively produced doppelgangers in established outlets, with the veneer of respectability that implies.

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The above image is from a BBC gallery launched to coincide with John Ryan – A Retrospective, a recent exhibition in the late illustrator’s home town of Rye, East Sussex.