Linotype was a hot-metal typesetting process, remember, so each of these images had to be carved, made into a mold, and cast in lead for use. Which is simply to say there was some actual effort involved in making them available. Yes folks, in the storied past even clip-art had to walk 20 miles, uphill, in the snow, to get anywhere.

I realize, of course, that these images were almost certainly not “official” logos and that they were likely just pulled from the vast storehouse of imagery Linotype had at their disposal. But the very fact that, in an election year, they chose to offer symbols for 10 possible parties means that there was enough demand to warrant a supply. Linotype is still going strong after all so I think we can trust their business acumen.

In any case here is the page-

Nice of them to set up a sample ballot wasn’t it?

Interestingly as it turns out their example here was not to different from the ballot that citizens saw in the Presidential election of that year. There were, in fact, candidates from 7 different parties represented. Granted the 5 who were not Democrat or Republican only garnered 5.5% of the vote as a group… but still.

If I were to update their page for the present day (taking demand into consideration when formulating our supply of course!) it might as well look like like this-

That’s no fun is it?

Now in the interest of full disclosure for those of you who weren’t paying close attention the last time around, in 2004 there actually were at least 10 parties represented on the ballot.

“10 you say?!”

Yes, 10. Minus the obvious those parties were the Libertarian, Constitution, Green, Socialist, Peace and Freedom, Prohibition, Christian Freedom, Socialist Equality, Workers World, and the Personal Choice Party.

Sounds just positively bustling and vibrant doesn’t it?

It doesn’t look so vibrant unfortunately. I mean when was the last time you saw the logo for the Socialist Equality Party emblazoned on one of the 20 massive HD screens which are continuously swirling and pulsating behind Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room? In fact, now that I think of it, have you ever seen any of their logos anywhere? ⊕

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

This sounds like a job for Linotype! They can dig into their vast stores of imagery once more for the American electorate and bring forth handsome and heroic emblems which in one bold stroke typify all that the parties stand for… these emblems can pepper posters and banners and bumper stickers across the entire expanse of this great nation and the ideals for which… oh wait, that’s right, there is no demand. Sorry.

These parties already have logos obviously, ⊕  it’s just that so few people care that we’ll never see them. “Miscellaneous characters” indeed.

Setting aside the socio-political ramifications of this essentially two-party system, let’s just say that from a visual standpoint it would seem we the people are stuck with the same dull, uninspiring,

elephant show.

Which brings me, finally, to the issue that I’m certain is gnawing at the young and idealistic designers reading this, who, like teary-eyed children listening to their parents discuss a dead puppy from the top of the stairs, are wondering about the those poor cast-aside logos from the 1920 Linotype catalog, which having once symbolized grand ideals now seem so hopelessly lost in the wilderness…

Let me just say this, you sweet and gentle kids- cry not!

Cry not for the Eagle or the 5 Pointed Star! Cry not for the Fountain or the Book or the Moose! Nay child; cry not for the Torch, the Scales, the Bell or the Strong Arm because in America… in America we graphics professionals see to it that no logo is left behind!

There. Feel better? Good. Now here’s some warm milk, off to sleep with you, daddy’s got a whole lot of whiskey he needs to swallow.

I give you:

GET OUT OF IRAQ A public service handout, in which the example of a small group of seemingly pinned-down soldiers is used to illustrate the complex machinations of the administration’s war policies on the whole.

Click each Image for a larger and easier to read version.

See? Simple as that. Makes you wonder what we’ve all been so worked up about doesn’t it? Can you believe some of us actually thought these guys didn’t have a plan? That they were incompetent and dangerous?! Shows us. And just let me say, though the adorable Rummy spokes-head may say it isn’t magic it certainly is magical.

For those of you wishing to use this as a teaching tool, who would like to run through these brilliant machinations yourself, or who simply want to extend this knowledge to their neighbors and disseminate it further, I am making a downloadable pdf available which will print on a single letter-sized sheet of paper. All you need do is fold it in the middle and tape or glue the two sides together. Good luck and happy learning.

Download the pdf here.

Recently something dawned on me. I came out of my office and turned south toward the N/R station. I happened to look up and saw the emptiness which terminated the pinpoint of a horizon, where, as it so happens, the towers used to be. It struck me, looking up casually and unthinking, that what I really wanted to see were those towers. It wasn’t a sad moment, I didn’t crash knee-down on the pavement and (damn them!) launch into a Heston-worthy soliloquy. I simply looked up and realized for the first time, that long after all the sadness and shock and directionless anger, after the promises and grand plans and presentations that what I would most fondly like to see were those two towers again. My opinion suddenly formed solidly on what should be       built on that ground.

A few months ago I had to go down to the court building to throw my name into the jury-duty hat, and afterward walking by the site of “ground zero” I was dismayed to see what, after nearly 5 years, all the glitzy competitions, heated debate, and ponderously heavy rhetoric had wrought… exactly nothing. “Ground zero,” suddenly a doubly fitting name, was ground that contained zero. It was a huge fucking hole in the ground; that’s it. I don’t know whether those of you living outside of the Tri-State area realize that. With all that has been said and all that has been done in the reverent name of 9/11, the actual site, the “holy ground” which evidently just radiates with meaning and power, is still, 5 years later, a dirt hole. It seems that in “this post 9/11 world” symbolism and rhetoric are all that can be built-up, with passionate gusto, tall and strong. 

When I say what I really want to see when looking south are those towers I mean it literally. You know what I don’t really want to see? A hideous fucking monstrosity, covered in prisms, couched in forgettable hackneyed concept, birthed from the piteous wombs of politics, greed, and compromise.

Message to George Pataki- You and your “Legacy” can suck cock. I can only take heart that your utter failure will impede your using our tragedy to bolster a presidential bid (like a certain Mayor, who everyone seems to forget was widely despised by those he governed before events allowed him to don the hero-mask… oh wait… it’s 2006… that’s a Presidential pedigree today isn’t it?)

Message to Larry A. Silverstein- Kill yourself. Seriously. You are a Scumbag. I’d rather tongue-kiss a lipless leper crack-addict than even look at you. 

Message to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation- Fire yourselves.

Message to George W. Bush, his cabinet members, and the sycophantic House and Senate- Get the term “9/11” out of your filthy fucking mouths. I don’t want to hear another tangential argument given weight by your use of September 11th as ballast until the “ground zero” of those events is afforded the same weight, in physical reality, as it is in your “stirring” words.

You know that primary construction on the original Twin Towers only took about 5 years? That means that if our leaders were not so full-of-shit, if our business-men were not so totally devoid of social conscience, and our citizens were not so listless, that we New Yorkers could look south and see, if not this September then one very soon, two reassuringly familiar (albeit structurally improved) towers rising to fill the empty spaces? How “right” would that feel? As things stand symbolism is threatening to usurp reality completely. If the incompetence continues much longer the symbol itself might be threatened with transformation. Anyone who says “Think of 9-11” will be saying “Think of how utterly full-of-shit we are.”

This is another photograph I took years ago. For some reason this image of a classic (Milton Glaser designed) “I heart N Y” coffee cup substituted with the word “V O I D” had a vitality and meaning to me. I made the cup and shot a whole role of it. I think I even had a t-shirt. Today, if I’m being honest, I have no idea what it meant to me exactly, or why it resonated. But again, as with the “towers in heaven” image, it seems to have found a new relevance, resonating for more obvious reasons. It’s an accidental protest image I suppose and I would like to offer it to you.

If anyone out there finds themselves similarly dismayed and upset by the void which still occupies what is ostensibly one of our countries most important sites, one which seems to symbolically initial all manner of political blank-check, then take it and use it.

Here is another:

Fuck it. What else is there for me to say? I’m tired.

I assume that The Times, being, like the rest of the mainstream press in recent memory, a sorry, weakling shell of a what might properly be called “a paper,” wishes to save itself in these choppy waters. Well I have taken it upon myself to create a mock-up of a format which, if adopted, would not only ingratiate The Times to the Administration, but which might even conceivably prove readable for a barely literate nincompoop of a President.

See below for 15 clippings from The Administration Times.

See? Now wouldn’t that make the boo-boo all better?

All images were taken from the New York Times’ own Sunday pictorial suppliments, specifically from the online exhibit: Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Rotogravures from 1913-1919 offered by The Library of Congress.

After a discussion I had this morning here are a few points to consider and kick around, in no particular order:

American culture, meaning the culture, not the government, of the United States of America, was nurtured under puritanical principles, which we have yet, in our 230 years of existence, to shake off. Today’s so called “culture wars” are just another in the long line of skirmishes in which one group of people, lets call them “those who wish to move forward and evolve” attempts to throw off the suffocating and muscle numbing yoke of the old guard, let’s call them “those that wish to take globs of warm amber into their lungs and become fossilized forever in the continually outmoded past of human experience.”

American culture is one fed on repression. Our notions and experiences of sex, the most universal and natural of human experiences, are warped, from our puritanical upbringing, in ways no other culture (save perhaps the Japanese) could even begin to comprehend. For us everything must be hidden and secret. For us everything must be dirty and guilty. For us pleasures of the flesh can never be trusted and so never completely enjoyed. We are a land of philosophical eunuchs, even the best of us, when it comes to human sexuality. We skulk around feeling guilty, averting our eyes when we are supposed to, masturbating in secret places with the memories of what we’ve seen. The worst of us would have vagina’s sewn up with consecrated threads, only to be cut on a wedding night, with saintly scissors; penises lopped off, only to be attached again for the purpose of overpopulation. Every man, woman, and yes- child, knows the deceitful unworkability of this. But we are cowed by those with the loudest mouths. We nod and pretend. We must deny everything and sublimate our yearnings into lies and violence.

Other cultures, with the good fortune to have existed for thousands of years, in one place, look at us and shake their heads. “How can they be so childish?” they must wonder. “How can they be so full of shit?!” And I wonder as well. How?

How, in the year 2006, can so many of us still be so ignorant of the obvious? Heads can be cut off on 80 foot screens, bowels torn from bellies to slap against thighs, bullets can enter bodies from 10 different angles, but the word “fuck” can not be permitted on the airwaves. A breast can never be glimpsed. A fully nude body must be accompanied with a warning which tells us: “This is very naughty and bad for you!” The peoples who descend from ancient Romans, who walk the same avenues as their ruined forefathers, look at us and laugh as they slap one another on the asses without benefit of a lawyer’s council.

We despise the old. We cringe at their wrinkles and bellow behind their slow motions. We put them in cheap rooms to die while doing every ineffective thing we can to fend off age in ourselves. Knives slip between our skin and bones to artificially tighten, firm-up, enlarge, and slim down. We inject poison into our faces to remove our hard-won wrinkles. We dress in children’s clothes and pretend at child-like freedom. We buy a never ending succession of “toys” we don’t need. In short we make vulgar monsters of ourselves. Everyone sees this but no one admits to the ugliness of it all.

We see the fake breasts creasing and bulging on the sides, we see the faces pulled back into masks, we see the wigs shift, we watch the artificially plumped lips move, we see the huge heads, like baubles, of those who had the fat vacuumed from them, we watch the starving women making excuses and we pretend this is beauty. We pretend we are fooled and celebrate it on every magazine cover and television screen. We pretend the glow of youth dwells on a knife edge, in a needle, in a cream, in a wish.

We blame and repent and pass judgement, never for a second doing the only thing required of adults: taking responsibility. We sue, and we go on talk shows, and we tell all, and we accuse, and we weep, and we “self-help,” and we take our medicine, and stuff our fat faces, and stuff our pockets, and we congratulate ourselves, and we pamper ourselves, and we turn our culture into a infantile embarrassment fit not for men and women but for children whose development is forever arrested.

“We must do it for the children!” What better sentiment for a culture that endlessly caresses and fondles and probes the tight anus of youth!  Our culture, from our music to our “literature” to our entertainments is all unsophisticated and childlike. Every market salivates over the youth dollar and every decision must take the children into account. Nothing legal seems to exist anymore for the benefit of adults. We idolize vapid celebrities. We make millionaires of game playing man-children. We elect intellectually stunted buffoons because they remind us of ourselves, because they are “average” and visibly flawed, as though that were a selling point. The stories of our leaders are always coming of age stories in which mistakes must be made in order to be learned from, but each leader is temporary, and each lesson must be learned anew.

We worship youth both in our rhetoric and in our degradation. But not for the actual youth of our population, to them we are happy to leave cesspit of waste and debt and ecological ruin. “The children” we so adore are ourselves. Our young country is full adolescents, awkward and uncertain, always looking to their invisible father figure in the sky for approval, always fueled by a bottomless undercurrent of fear at facing any reality.

Some of us defer to our invisible father figure in the sky whenever we are made uncomfortable, whenever we are unsure, whenever we would rather not be responsible. We honor him in public, always, saying the things that must be said, but in private we are compelled to push the boundaries and see just what we can get away with. We are rebellious in all matters where his “law” does not serve our purpose, but relent when caught. After all the power to invoke daddy’s name is the greatest power of the weakling child.

These among our number will always stand at daddy’s pant leg. It is only his perceived power that allows them to cover their ears and shake their head chanting “la la la la I can’t hear you la la la…” when things like science and facts and logic threaten. It is the weakling child’s last defense when those among us who want change and progress and betterment attempt to speak up.

It is my feeling that American culture, as it stands today, is very nearly a kink in the evolution of human culture on the whole. (We are by no means the only kink, but a kink in the smooth flow none the less.) It’s dominance is troublesome when elsewhere in the world there are more mature cultures who by turns seem willing to celebrate life, to enjoy themselves, to love, and most of all to learn. If those among us who want further enlightenment here on earth do not eventually shake loose of the yoke which keeps America backward and fearful, if we don’t grow up and punch the schoolyard bully square in the mouth as it were, then we are part of the problem and not at all the shining light which we’ve always assumed ourselves to be.

In any event we have some serious fucking issues.

Discuss.

The monkeys and the crabs have never liked one another much. They worshipped different Gods and had little patience for what they saw as the other’s shortcomings.  Yet each possessed something the other wanted and so uneasy interaction was inevitable. The monkeys were poor and power hungry and so needed money which the crabs had plenty of. The crabs had a mighty thirst which could only be quenched with persimmon juice, and the monkeys owned most of the worlds persimmon trees.

Once upon a time in the “wretched” land of the monkeys the crabs, being rich and powerful and full of that mighty thirst, installed a monkey of their choosing in a big persimmon tree. They figured having a “puppet-monkey” of their very own, ruling over a tree, would yield all kinds of benefits in that unfriendly land, not the least of which would be access to the sweet sweet persimmons they so desperately craved. An ugly little crab shook hands with the ugly power-hungry “puppet-monkey” and all seemed just fine.

Over time the power hungry “puppet-monkey” began overstepping the bounds which his crab overlords had set for him. His land acquired a little wealth from persimmon sales and he became even more power-mad and viscous. He hurled poison persimmons at any monkey who challenged him and began taunting the very crabs who had put him in power. This went on and on and on, the monkey becoming ever more bold, the crabs becoming ever more angry. The crabs soon realized they’d picked a bad monkey to be their puppet and yearned to remove him from the persimmon tree.

Across the ocean in the rich and fertile land of the crabs a catastrophe befell the citizens which left them fearful and angry. Seeing their chance the king crabs blamed the catastrophe on their “puppet-monkey” and confused the none too smart citizens, creating a perfect excuse to shake him violently from his persimmon tree! The council of crabs, being almost wholly without chitin, agreed to the plan of the king-crabs.

Not wanting to seem as viscous as the monkey to the rest of the animal world, and fearful of having their true motivations become obvious to all, the king crabs gathered together a coalition of others with something to gain from the destruction of the “puppet-monkey.” They made promises of favor and showed all of the animal world it was not the crabs alone who wanted to be free of the “evil” monkey.

With their coalition in place the crabs travelled to the land of the monkeys and came down upon the “puppet-monkey” with all the considerable power their wealth could provide. There was shock and awe at the spectacle of flames leaping about the persimmon trees. The “puppet-monkey” proved easily defeated and the crabs exulted in accomplishing their mission.

But rich and powerful though they might have been the crabs and their coalition were not very smart! In their verve to shake the “puppet-monkey” from his tree they’d forgotten just how unfriendly the land of monkeys was, and just how much they’d always been despised. They somehow thought that mere words could erase thousands of years of distrust and animosity between monkeys and crabs. But of course they were wrong. Monkeys from all across the land came to fight the crabs and explosion after explosion would thereafter sound for years on end.

The crabs tried everything they could think of to thwart the monkeys, but as we’ve seen the crabs were not very smart, so for a long while all they could think of were sending in more crabs. Old crabs and young crabs and untrained crabs. Crabs of every kind. But no matter how many crabs they sent the explosions in the land of the persimmon trees just kept on coming. Both crabs and monkeys were blown to bits every single day. 

The crabs decided to set up super-secret prisons where they could send the problematic monkeys and torture them at will. They could beat the monkeys and demean them and piss on the books of their Gods without anyone ever knowing of their brutality. But the prisons didn’t help. Not being very smart the secret didn’t stay a secret for long and the persimmon fields exploded with a renewed vigor.

In the land of the crabs persimmons became even more expensive than they were to begin with and the citizens, after years of explosions, became tired of all the death. In truth they didn’t want to even hear anymore about the monkeys and their unfriendly land. The violence, though it occurred far away in the land of monkeys, had just as surely come to rule their lives at home as well. They couldn’t remember anymore why they’d allowed the king crabs to shake the “puppet-monkey” from his tree in the first place. Was he really worth it they wondered? Most of the crabs just wanted it all to be over.

But it was too late. The battle of the monkeys and the crabs had become an endless battle and no one could even imagine a way to stop it. It seemed no longer to be about persimmons and “puppet-monkeys.” The monkeys would fight forever to dispel the crabs they hated, and bewildered crabs would continue to die forever as well, because the king crabs, worried of being shaken from their own tree, would keep sending them. It was a sad time in the animal world, and still is, because the endless battle continues to this day.

The illustrations above were adapted from this version of the story.

The real story, just below the surface, seems to be summed up as follows: “This couldn’t have happened at a better time for the Bush Administration.” More than one talking head has oozed this sentiment. How disgusting is that? Yeah, dropping two 500 lb bombs to kill a single terrorist, one whose “importance” was in large part manufactured by our own errors in Iraq, is so minor an accomplishment it’s very nearly symbolic, and in as much the effect could be political only. Perhaps it will bounce Bush’s poll numbers a half a percentage point? The administration were so thrilled at this prospect evidently that they took the time to artfully matte and frame the death photo in a very tasteful gilt frame. How nice.

About the only effect I can imagine this having is more self-congratulatory bluster from the administration and, of course, retaliatory violence. But then The bluster is there with or without even minor accomplishments, (these are people who actually congratulate and award medals for failure) and the violence would have happened regardless. So as I said before “...AND?”