This month’s Dwell magazine contains a review of Blue Monday.
Thanks everyone! I have Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit now and am looking forward to reading it and seeing how it inspired the reviewer to compare the two.
blue monday
metropad
Over at Candyland, Brayan reflects on architecture, estrangement, effect, and in doing so mentions AUDC’s method of working.
Absolutely on the mark. I’m amazed to see us compared to the juxtaposition of Baroque and ultra-modern at the end of 2001, but honored too… It’s always been a model to live up to.
Section
Time for yet another gratuitous post to plug Blue Monday. This go around, since some of you have asked about the typeface, I thought I should post a link to Section, a typeface designed by Greg Lindy of the Village Collective. Although ACTAR chose the face, it seems rather apt, given that AUDC’s base at the time was L. A.:
Section was designed specifically as the identity font for Intersection
Studio, a multidisciplinary design firm in Los Angeles. The goal was
to create a flexible, yet distinctive and legible font. Section’s
application involved everything from business forms to collateral
material. This font was a key element in establishing the Intersection
Studio brand. It is suitable for text as well as display. Eurostile and
News gothic served as reference in the creation of Section.
Blue Monday in stock!
Back from final reviews at the University of Limerick and the book launch of Blue Monday that director Merritt Bucholz kindly put together for me. Work at the school is progressing well and it was a delight to have such a great reception for the European launch.
But to my complete incredulity, Blue Monday is now in stock at Amazon, but act fast. Pre-orders have taken their toll and there's only one left.
Blue Monday
It’s been a Blue Monday here in Montclair in more ways than one. It’s foggy and wet with patches of drizzle. The doorbell rang this morning and the Fedex man came with my advance copies of Blue Monday. The book looks fantastic and I can’t wait to get it into the wild. It is the perfect size to be “A Guide to the Operating System of the System itself” as Reinhold Martin calls it. If the dot.com era was marked by Verso’s somewhat (deliberately) cynical Communist Manifesto with the Komar and Malmid cover that was supposed to “fit snugly in a Prada purse,” then Blue Monday is the irony-free successor.
Regrettably, ever since I moved to a so-called “failover” web hosting plan, my server has done nothing but fail. Varnelis.net took a turn for the worse today and the not-so-very-helpful staff weren’t able to account for (or admit) what they had done. As a result, instead of being able to post this account to the blog quickly, I had to move the site over. Oh well, it all makes the eventual transition to a new host easier! In the meantime, some links will have broken. Unfortunately, it will probably be a long time before I can spare the cycles to rebuild them.
But, with the site up and (largely) running, I’m pleased to finally be able to report this news along with this photo of the first American Blue Monday and its owner.
Did you know there’s a whole site dedicated to photographs of copies of Blue Monday and their owners ?
another blue monday
Another Blue Monday sighting! The book is available for purchase via ACTAR's online catalog
Thank you to everyone who is making pre-orders!
The Berlin Wall’s Wife, Clarence the Record Collector, and Mike the Headless Chicken
The previous post on Clocky brought us to the topic of our relationship to things, something that Robert Sumrell and I have spent a good deal of time thinking about in our new book Blue Monday. This week, I have been going over the edits one very last time before we sent it to the printer and, in so doing, realized that I should point varnelis.net readers toward three short stories in Blue Monday that we have, thus far, kept largely under wraps.
The first is the story of Wall W. Berliner-Mauer , a Swedish woman who fell in love with the great modernist icon, the Berlin Wall and married it in 1979. As you might imagine, Berliner-Mauer's story is quite tragic as her husband was demolished a decade later. Berliner-Mauer has extensively theorized her relationship with the wall on her web site. The second is the story of Clarence, an obsessive record collector who has given up his life to the objects of his attention. In this story we explore our devotion and even slavery to objects. The third is the story of Mike, a chicken who survived decapitation to form a bond with the man who chopped off his head. Mike's life allowed us insight into just how perilous relationships of people and things can be.
Together, these three stories explore the fraught relationships we have with objects and our desire not only to make them submit to us, but to submit ourselves to them. We hope you'll enjoy them, and enjoy them even more when they become available in far more readable form in the book.