Nora hates Times New Roman. She blogged about it awhile back, and lots of people chimed with in their take on favourite and despised fonts.
Virginal Postrel likes Times New Roman, but Nora forgives her. Virginia is a writer for The Atlantic Monthly Magazine and she's the author of The Substance of Style. Virginia wrote a great piece earlier this year about fonts and why they are so hot right now. She delves into the cultural and business trends that are driving our interest in typefaces.
Ancient Pre-Internet Message Boards Unearthed at Harvard
Topic: Arts
9:51 am EDT, Apr 21, 2008
While hanging out with the folks at Harvard's student radio station for a story about a long-running specialty show, Phoenix music editor Michael Brodeur was shown a shelf filled with grade-school-style composition notebooks dating back to the early 1980s. Since first coming on the air in 1984, DJs at WHRB's Record Hospital have been keeping meticulous records of every night, every playlist, every song (or non-song) they've ever played. (And let's face it: any radio station that can go 24 years without playing "Sister Christian" deserves a closer look.)
The hand-written journals, which were kept in the studios and became the primary means of communication between dozens of DJs, reveal that many of the tropes that we tend to associate with message boards -- the snarky put-downs, the punning screen-names, the long-running flame wars -- were actually alive and kicking at least a decade before the Web browser. It's kind of like finding AIM chats in a cave painting.
The booklet 2063 A.D. was published by General Dynamics Astronautics, and placed into a time capsule in July of 1963. It is believed that only 200 copies were ever printed. The 50 page book contains predictions by scientists, politicians, astronauts and military commanders about the state of space exploration in the year 2063. This edition is a reprint made from scans of the original 1963 book.
Worldwide media sensation JENNA JAMESON and Nightmare on Elm Street’s ROBERT ENGLUND star in ZOMBIE STRIPPERS. When a secret government agency lets out a deadly chemo virus causing the reanimation of the dead, the first place to get hit is Rhino’s, a hot underground strip club. As one of the strippers gets the virus, she turns into a supernatural, flesh-eating zombie stripper, making her the hit of the club. Do the rest of the girls fight the temptation to be like the star stripper, even if there is no turning back? Also featuring ROXY SAINT (of the Goth band Roxy Saint and the Blackouts) and Ultimate Fighting Champion TITO ORTIZ, ZOMBIE STRIPPERS is a sexy, bloody, hilarious good time!
Musicians have always had to struggle and make sacrifices for their art. In previous times, commercial and political pressures helped to create a climate of insecurity in the world of music. Today the problem is a little different. Outwardly, music and art are celebrated as never before - but they also face relentless pressure to serve causes that have little to do with their inner meaning. As former UK prime minister Tony Blair said last year, part of his project was to make ‘the arts and culture part of our “core script”’. Music that is composed and played to someone else’s script is unlikely to inspire the kind of inarticulate revelation of Truth that so stirred Browning.
Indeed, the current focus on who sits in the audience and on the therapeutic value of music represents a demotion of music’s status and its truth. That is why the current trend for subordinating music to someone else’s script should be loudly challenged. And that can be done only if we have more confidence in people than those populist snobs do, who imagine that children must make do with second-rate ‘music-making opportunities’. Classical insights into the status of art - beauty is truth and truth is beauty - have long roused the human imagination. They will do so yet again, especially if we have the courage to confront the current obsession with the composition of the audience and instead allow the sound of music to speak for itself.
“Like at the end of the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties, we are going the other way,” Mr. Gross said. “We are clearly in a period of excess, and we have to swing back to the middle or the center cannot hold."
