Booker loved green

“The phone must have rung 15 times before Booker got out of the Jacuzzi, put on his green satin robe that matched the emerald pinned to his left earlobe and picked up the phone. Booker said: “Who’s this?” A woman’s voice said, “You sitting down?” The phone was on a table next to a green leather wingback chair. Booker loved green.”

—Elmore Leonard, Freaky Deaky, 1988.

Foe-damned ruby motor

Colourful Allusions, vol. 1

Red rimmed his eyes, blue shadowed his jaws

“He looked very tired and at the same time enthusiastic, if the combination can be imagined. Red rimmed his eyes, blue shadowed his jaws, but he had a triumphant look on his face, the look of a man who has done his job well and expects a kind word.”

—Cornell Woolrich, Dead On Her Feet, 1935.

a tiny revolution

“Every joke is a tiny revolution.”

—George Orwell, quoted by Emma Larkin in Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.

the real scenery

“When [George] Scott entered [Shan] territory over a century ago . . . [l]ocal people drew maps for [him]. A few months before I had sat in a reading room at Cambridge University Library marvelling over some that had survived. They were as big as bed sheets, and thickly painted on rough paper or mould-speckled linen which crackled as I unfolded it. Some were quite beautiful. The rivers were painted ruby-red; the mountains, which were often given strange, curly peaks, were done in electric greens and purples; pagodas were painted gold. The maps were surreal, magical, like illustrations from a Dr Seuss book, yet utterly true to the wonder inspired by the real scenery now unfolding before me.”

—Andrew Marshall, The Trouser People: A Story of Burma—In the Shadow of the Empire, 2002.

a man called Zaganar

“The country’s most famous comedian was a man called Zaganar. In 1990 he joked that he’d just bought a new colour television, but when he got it home and turned it on it only had two colours: green and orange. Zaganar, whose name means “tweezers”, was poking fun at the endless airtime devoted to showing generals in uniforms making meritorious donations to orange-robed monks. He was arrested after the show, and spent the next five years in the notorious Insein Prison in Rangoon’s northern suburbs. (And yes, Insein is pronounced “Insane”.)”

—Andrew Marshall, The Trouser People: A Story of Burma—In the Shadow of the Empire, 2002.

The secret of history of graphic design

The secret of history of graphic design, marginalized, at best, by most American books on the subject, involves a thing called punk rock. Punk was born in the United States in the late 1960s, in the form of bands like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators in Austin and Iggy and the Stooges from Detroit. It further developed in New York with the Velvet Underground and the Ramones. But it ultimately had its strongest flowering and its greatest impact on graphic design in Great Britain, in the mid to late 1970s. I feel that I would be remiss as a graphic design educator if I did not now present, from the ten-part documentary The Punk Years, Programme 7: Ridicule Is Nothing To Be Scared Of.

Shwedagon

Last week I mentioned that the Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon, Burma, reminded me of the North Carolina State Fair. I think I should explain that comment further. The Shwedagon Pagoda consists of a massive, stunning gold pagoda, and a complex of hundreds of smaller pagodas and temples. When I visited it, the area was thronging with people and monks who were gradually circling the main pagoda on a beautiful day. Everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time. There was plenty to look at; there were painted concrete animals and characters, temple after temple, with spinning fortune-telling devices and other clever ways to give offerings at many of them. OK, the Shwedagon Pagoda was not nearly as crowded as the North Carolina State Fair, and it was much cleaner and more aesthetically more appealing than the North Carolina State Fair, but there was a similar sense of camraderie and excitement and plain old fun in the air.
Have I mentioned the great courtesy and sly humor of the people I spoke English with in Burma? At one point a man, perhaps noticing my eyes, showed me the way to a beatiful deep green wooden temple. It was built, he said, expressly for green-eyed people. There was no Buddha in it, because green-eyed people tend to be foreign and non-Buddhist. The temple was very tall, because green-eyed people tend to be tall. And, he added, tapping his head and smiling, “they tend to have good brains.”

postcards from Burma

I bought these postcards from Burma while travelling there in 1986, because, with my recently acquired degree in graphic design, I was astonished at the print quality. Which is awful, of course, but so bad that the images become unreal and maybe even magical. Amazingly, they capture the spirit of the place—both the terrible poverty and the transporting beauty.