Fritinancy

Word of the week: Retrofuturism

Bruce McCall, the Canadian-born author and illustrator whose work adorned 83 New Yorker covers and who was, according to Car and Driver, “one of the funniest men ever to write about cars,” died on May 6, four days shy of his 88th birthday. He had recently completed “Safe Travels,” the gouache illustration that appears on the cover of the New Yorker’s May 15 issue.

McCall’s specialty was “retrofuturism,” a word he claimed to have coined. (The OED awards that honor to a 1988 issue of Inland Architect magazine. The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael used “retro-futurist” in a 1986 review of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.) As McCall defined it, retrofuturism entails “looking back to see how yesterday viewed tomorrow”—in McCall’s case, with sly faux-nostalgia and a keen eye for hucksterism and hyperbole. His first job after dropping out of high school was at a Toronto ad agency, and he later wrote copy for a Detroit agency that represented Chevrolet; he drew on those experiences to concoct automotive inventions with fanciful names like Bulgemobile and Bongo Beatnik Ferlinghetti Turbo-Hipster. Many of McCall’s delicious, fictitious car promotions originally appeared in the National Lampoon and were later included in The Last Dream-o-Rama: The Cars Detroit Forgot to Build. McCall also wrote about his automotive career in a memoir, How Did I Get Here?, which was excerpted—with wonderful illustrations—in the New Yorker.

 

In McCall’s imagining, Bulgemobile models included the Fireblast, the Blastfire, and the Firewood (“For the man who has everything and just needs something to carry it in!”).

Word of the week: Duty

The word came into English in the 13th century, from Anglo-Norman dueté, a word with connections to due and debt. It retains a slightly antique air tinged by its original meanings of “reverence” and “homage” and by its sense of a monetary obligation. But for Queen Elizabeth II, who died on September 8 at 96, duty was no anachronism. It was a thread woven through her adult life, and it was the word that eulogists reached for when paying tribute to her.  “A monarch bound by duty” was the AP’s headline. On the CNN website author and professor Peter Bergen called duty “the one word that defined Elizabeth II.” “She made sacrifices to duty,” her son Charles, now King Charles III, said in a televised tribute the day after her death—a royal understatement if ever there was one.

Opening frame of a video of scenes on the theme of duty from the Netflix series The Crown.

Issey Miyake, 1938–2022

Issey Miyake, who died August 5 at 84, was acclaimed for his inventive fashion designs and best-selling fragrances. But he was also a prolific and often playful inventor of names. His company’s brand family is full of international references and multilingual puns—appropriate for a Japanese-born designer whose first collection debuted in New York (in 1971) and who was the first foreign-born designer to show at Paris Fashion Week (in 1974).

Word of the week: Paparazzo

The death, on April 30, of the American photographer Ron Galella brought the fun-to-say Italian borrowing paparazzo back into the news. Galella, who was 91, was a “paparazzo extraordinaire,” the Telegraph and the Guardian headlined. “He personified the paparazzi,” the New York Times obituary reported, using the plural form: “brazen and relentless in chasing the famous, particularly Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”

Galella himself proudly accepted the title of “paparazzo extraordinaire,” appropriating it for the title of his 2012 memoir.

Advertisement for a 2012 book-signing event for Ron Galella: Paparazzo Extraordinaire via New York Gossip Gal.

Stephen Sondheim, 1930–2021

He lived 91 richly productive years, attended a live theater production eleven days before he died, enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner with friends the day before his death. Who can ask, as the Gershwin song goes, for anything more? But we fans are greedy: The death of the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, on November 26, after a long life of creative brilliance, leaves us wanting still more.

So here’s a little more.

A partial list of Sondheim musicals in chronological order, via Teepublic

Names in the news: Bamlanivimab and beyond

Yes, there have been other things going on besides the bonkers yet tedious aftermath of the US election.

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September linkfest

This month I’ve been reading Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, published in August by Kurt Andersen. According to the publisher, it’s “the epic history of how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ever change.” Andersen also pinpoints a when for the everything-going-to-shit: around 1980. (Perhaps you remember who was elected president that year.) Andersen is a deft writer who makes even dense economic theory fun to read—he is, after all, one of the founding editors of Spy, the satirical magazine of the 1980s and 1990s that dubbed DJ Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian.” For me, though, the book’s most interesting insights are about nostalgia and how everything became “retro” or a “reboot”—or, in movies, a sequel or remake. Andersen says we started retreating into nostalgia in the 1970s, as an exhausted response to the “disorienting” newness of the 1960s. But we’ve never really shaken off that nostalgia-fever. The entries under “Nostalgia” in the Evil Geniuses index fill more than a column, and include these headings: “of blue-collar workers for time when they were majority,” “default to, enabled building of reproduction-old-days political economy by economic right-wingers,” “as fuel for fantastical or irrecoverable post politics,” and “‘USA! USA!’ chant.” I quoted a particularly excellent sentence from Evil Geniuses in last month’s linkfest, which you can read here.

 

May linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is The End of October, by Lawrence Wright, the New Yorker staff writer best known for his deeply researched nonfiction (The Looming Tower, about Al-Qaeda and 9/11; Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief). This new book, however, is a novel, although you’ll be forgiven for mistaking it for journalism.

It’s set in a time very much like the present (the US president is “self-conscious about his girth” and keeps a tanning bed in the White House Cosmetology Room—an actual room in the actual White House), in which a viral pandemic spreads from Indonesia to the hajj in Mecca to a submarine under the Atlantic to North America and beyond. Our hero, epidemiologist Henry Parsons, scrambles to decode the virus and prevent its spread while civilization’s institutions crumble on every continent. If the plot is a little overstuffed and the dialogue speech-y, you’re unlikely to care, because the story is so eerily prescient and timely. (Wright began writing the book in 2015 and turned in the manuscript in 2017, long before COVID-19 broke out.) Wright’s journalistic background serves him well: you’ll learn a lot—painlessly—about viral reproduction, cytokine storms, and the workings of submarines. I listened to the audiobook, which is well narrated by Mark Bramhall: it’s the audio equivalent of a page-turner. 

September linkfest

“Texting is not destroying the language” and five other things you may not understand about English. (John McIntyre for the Baltimore Sun)

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A study of 597 logos found that “descriptive logos more favorably impact consumers’ brand perceptions than nondescriptive ones, and are more likely to improve brand performance.” (Harvard Business Review)

Old descriptive logos (left) vs. new nondescriptive logos (right).

December linkfest

It’s the end of the year as we know it, and I feel linky.

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New York-based creative director Lukas Weber turned some familiar online abbreviations – LOL, ROFL, BTW, and more – into familiar-looking logos. (Via Brand New blog)

 

 

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“An examination of today’s American skull logos shows a variety of businesses exhibiting crude expressions of menace, juvenile assertions of badassedness, and more than a little fascist iconography.” (Emblemetric)

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