matilda mouse, max and monsters

this week has been filled with lots of cool stuff that reminds me about being a kid - swimming in the pool after dark, cycling in the sun, my mum's birthday, kids books and kids-books-as-movies.




tonight i found out about the seriously-long-awaited release of matilda mouse by simon griffin. simon is the brilliant copywriter from love, all round top bloke and fabulous childrens' story writer and i was lucky enough to get an audio book version of his book when i was in manchester in january. it's such a beautiful story and add to that a series of amazing illustrations, snazzy double gatefold in the middle and the smell of ink, and you have a very awesome childrens' book about a little mouse with hiccups.

plus...

i know that everyone in the universe has posted the trailer, but i couldn't resist.

where the wild things are is finally seeing the light of day.

a dear friend worked on the production, so i feel like i kind of know it a little more than i ordinarily would about a film. which means i'm super excited.




i'm usually a purist about books and their film adaptations. [i've only ever like one adaptation and that was, believe it or not, hitch hikers guide to the galaxy - mostly because of the cast.]

but this is one i'm going to break my rule and watch. how can you put spike jonze, dave eggers and that beautiful production design in a room and it not be at least worth $15. i have to wait 'til october, but that's probably for the best, because i'm kinda busy until then anyway. heh.

summer of design books

ben from noisy decent graphics has opened up his blog for reviews of design books.

it's summer there right now so of course everyone in london has plenty of time to read the stack of books that gather on the bedside table, while gettings tans and sipping pimms.

i don't have such luxury, but i stumbled on a cool book the other day that i wanted to review anyway, so thought i would do so here and for ben's books (also a great bookstore in bentleigh, in case you were asking).


Designed Maps
Cynthia Brewer

i've become a bit of a fan of maps. since i did some travel around europe last year i realised that there's a definite art to developing that little valuable set of codes and indicators that will (when it comes to tourist maps) be mauled like it's a baby's dummy (pacifier for those NYC peeps). so when i walked into my trust RMIT library and saw this on the 'just released' shelf, i thought i'd check it.

and actually it's pretty cool! it's for GIS Users, which I'm not. and it is probably the geekiest thing i have ever thought was cool (aside from twitter). But i did enjoy checking out the difference between an infrastructure map, topographical map, tourist map and geo-political map. i know, it's kind of obvious, but when they're all together, and when each of those ones has a variety of scale, colour, type, etc, it's quite an interesting lesson in design and visual heirarchy:







Book deets:
Title: Designed maps : a sourcebook for GIS users / Cynthia A. Brewer.
Author: Brewer, Cynthia A., 1960-
Item ID: 31259009136388
Call #: 526.0285 B758
Publisher: ESRI Press.

OK, so it may not be the next hit wonder on the 'must read' list, but if you're into design, urban design, drawing, mapping, place - whatever, then it's an interestingl little book to check out.

book report: colour after klein

i'm not sure if i'll start doing regular book reports, but after seeing Andrew Frost's Fascination in (inside) on a Philip K Dick book, I realised that I don't give much blog time to the books I like. I'm going to try and correct this a little by gushing over a new book that I bought accidentally on purpose from amazon.

Accidentally on purpose? Ok, just quickly: you may remember that I went to the NGV a few weeks' ago. In the interminable mire of satanic temptation, otherwise knowns as the bookstore, I discovered a great book called Colour After Klein. My kind of book, filled with lovely stuff - pics of artists whose work i admire, words by some of the same bunch and all in a nice, large format that you can either keep precious, or scribble over and fill with post-it notes. And it was too expensive for me at the time. I vowed to save up my pennies and get it.

Then I snuck a quick peak on amazon on the day that it was announced that the exchange rate between the US and Australia had jumped to 0.92! With that exchange rate, it was going to cost me less than half the price from the NGV.
So i put it in my shopping cart, to see how much it would be with shipping.
It looked like a fab deal.
I pressed Confirm Order, just on the off-chance that my credit card might squeeze out a drop of blood, but fully expecting the polite amazon equivalent of 'fuck off and earn some money before you bother me with that rubbish'.
What i got in return was 'Your order has been processed and will be shipped as soon as possible'.
Wow!
Ha!


So, back to the book:

Anish Kapoor, 1000 Times

It's based on a great exhibition from a couple of years ago at the Barbican in London (great gallery, bad 70s architecture that just manages to scrape into looking good), and is edited by Jane Alison, published by the fabulous Black Dog Publishing (where I would love to work, some day, please).

The subtitle, Re-thinking Colour in Modern and Contemporary Art is short, sharp and nicely to the point too!

The book features a whole swag of images/text and loveliness by some of my favourite artists:

Donald Judd
Yves Klein
Anish Kapoor
Sophie Calle
Louise Bourgeois
Helio Oiticica
Felix Gonzales-Torres
Mona Hartoum
Dan Flavin
and Joseph Beuys






It also features specific text by Yves Klein, Helio Oiticica, Nuit Banai and Donald Judd and the essay by Jane Alison, Colour Me In is fantastic, covering a variety of theoretical standpoints on colour, including structurally, psychoanalytically, scientifically and phenomenologically. She's pulled out quotes from the big-guns: Wittgenstein, Newton, Kristeva, Merleau-Ponty, plus loads of quotes from the featured artists.

I'm already sticking post-its all over the pages and wrestling with the age-old question of whether I write in the book or try to preserve it. And I'm even taking it on the train with me and reading it in bed! I never do that with art books, they always stay stoically on my bookshelf, but this particular one is like some kind of personal jesus, or something.

On a formal note, the book has just the right amount of big glossy pics that make you want to dive right in, smaller pics that illustrate a point, and text. Given that I've seen some of the works up-close-and-personal, and that the reproduction of colour can be such a fucking farse, the print job is also fantastic. [Oh dear, it's all over, I'm analysing the print reproduction of artworks and judging a book on it accordingly. Hmm]

This is the exactly the kind of publication that glossy art books need to be - the right amount of fetish and education, so that you can either just enjoy, look at the pretty pictures, or you can delve in, pore over it, learn some and get inspired. Well done to all concerned with this one.