Art director Pearce Marchbank recently launched a website that rounds up much of his excellent magazine work from the past 40 years, including many now-iconic covers for Architectural Design, Time Out and OZ.
Marchbank started at Central School of Art and Design, London in 1966, initially influenced by George Lois (whose work for Esquire is currently showing at MoMA ; some of Lois’s best-known covers have been revisited – or rehashed – a few times of late).
A precocious student, Marchbank was art-directing AD, a ‘design science’ monthly, while still studying at Central. After graduating, he worked on Friends, the short-lived Mick Jagger-funded UK version of Rolling Stone, before starting at the newly founded Time Out in 1970. Marchbank’s re-design of the Time Out logo, a slightly blurred Franklin Gothic only intended as a stop-gap, is still used today.
The covers are all the more impressive given that Marchbank would often have less than a day to come up with a design. Marchbank worked at Time Out until 1983, then moving to the Richard Branson-backed competitor Event. Interestingly, some of his layouts for Le Nez Rouge (pictured below), a house magazine for a wine club that Marchbank worked on in 1984, are close to those of well-designed new(ish)comers Fantastic Man and Bedeutung. It seems that his influence lives on.
We’ve just observed Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, and the sins and transgressions of the past year have been more or less absolved. Which may be just as well, since another major guilt-trip may loom on the horizon: ‘If Barack Obama doesn’t become the next president of the United States, I’m going to blame the Jews.’ Or so threatens Sarah Silverman, the aggressively sardonic and deadpan comedian (_Jesus is Magic_, The Aristocrats), in her new web video The Great Schlep.
Noting that Florida is yet again going to be a pivotal swing state in the upcoming election, Silverman made the video with the help of the political action committee The Jewish Council for Education and Research to urge young Gen-X and Y Jews to head down to the Sunshine State and badger, bully and coerce their retired grandparents to let go of their latent fears and prejudices and vote Obama in November. ‘Yes, OK, Barack…Hussein…Obama: it’s a super fucking shitty name. But you’d think someone named “Manischewitz Gooberman” might understand that,’ explains faux-exasperated Silverman regarding why normally staunchly Democratic nanas and zaides might believe all the right-wing blogosphere rumors about Obama being a Manchurian Candidate-like closet Muslim bent on the destruction of the state of Israel.
I first came across The Great Schlep while in Tel Aviv for the opening of Art TLV, where it started to get a lot of play, and in the two weeks since it’s release it has been watched by over 7 million viewers in the US, where it is circulating virally and is the latest instance of a brand of confident, informed, acerbic and focused satire that is fast becoming a significant insurgency tool against the Republican’s Rove-style disinformation machine. A tool that is actually having a measurable effect. (After Tina Fey nimbly lacerated Sarah Palin with her pitch-perfect impersonations of the VP nominee – using her own incoherent interview and debate transcripts as fodder – Palin’s solidly positive poll numbers immediately began to drop in inverse proportion to the rising TV viewership of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Even Palin acknowledged during a campaign rally in Florida late last week that she is ‘providing job security for Tina Fey’ in an odd feedback loop between the parodist and the parodied.) All this stands in stark contrast to the lonely job description of the political satirist just a few years ago (think of Stephen Colbert’s bravely inspired roasting of President Bush at the White House press correspondents dinner in 2006 at the height of W’s mass popularity and the media’s timid self-censorship and how radical and nearly suicidal his speech then seemed).
Now former SNL comedian Al Franken is running a serious campaign for US Senate in a close race against the incumbent Republican senator in Minnesota, and it has become a familiar fact that a disproportionate and rising number of 20 and 30-something Americans get their news from such news parodies as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, not the major networks. Meanwhile, as Silverman assures her bubbe, using the kinds of carrots and sticks that only a grandkid can wield, Obama’s “brisket is beyond…it’s beyond”. If that doesn’t sway the election, what will?
A new, expanded edition of Lawrence Weschler’s classic, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin is a cause for celebration
When I was growing up, the vilified white-brick ziggurat-like apartment buildings of my Manhattan neighborhood were considered cheerless and dull. Initially designed as middle-class housing in a then-unfashionable end of an expensive zip code, by the ’70s the apartments were oft-said to belong to single women of a certain age who worked as secretaries in advertising agencies, or shop assistants in fancy Fifth Avenue department stores. In the ’50s, when many of them were built, their ‘self-cleaning’, glazed white brick and modest – some would say banal – facades were about as close as America came to Corbusian functional modernism. One of the earliest and more well-known examples of the form was called – rather grandly – Manhattan House, and designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Mayers & Whittlesley; in 1950 it won an award for ‘Outstanding Apartment House’ by the New York chapter of the AIA. The project was sponsored by New York Life, an insurance company, which bought the connecting property to ensure the building was not hemmed in by similar monstrosities (Manhattan House contains 587 units). Though I have always had a soft spot for them, the white brick apartment buildings quickly fell from fashion, and have never been well-loved by New Yorkers, despite the growing real-estate value of the neighborhood. Recently, however, the Landmarks Preservation Commission announced the first landmark restoration of one of these white bricks: a 1960 iteration at Fifth Avenue, at 71st Street (though I sense address has more to do with the designation than aesthetics).
Meanwhile, six miles downtown, the finishing touches are being put on a new luxury apartment complex in Tribeca. It’s been granted a new address: 1 York Street, since ‘the corner of Canal, Laight and Sixth’, doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and is designed by Mexican architect Enrique Norton, who was pegged back in the glory days of 2005 as the architect of a new Guggenheim in Guadalajara. The press material for the building calls its Tribeca home ‘Manhattan’s most affluent neighborhood’ (some in 10021 may care to disagree). Located within earshot of the Holland Tunnel and eyeshot of a thousand Louis Vuitton knock-offs, the 32-unit building features no less than 47 parking spaces in a ‘Swiss-engineered’ wholly automated parking garage (sounds slightly dangerous), and—wait for it—a white glazed brick base. Is it having a comeback?
I’ve yet to inquire whether the $25 million penthouse comes with a hovercraft to transport your 1.46 cars over the Canal Street logjams. The building isn’t quite yet done and the reviews aren’t in; we’ll see if New York has some love to spare for the new white brick on the block.
