I don’t generally like to just post photos of myself on the internet without some reason, and up till now I have avoided posting photos of me on this blog altogether, but I figured I would share this image because it’s fun. I took an existing photo of someone dressed in steampunk fashion and pasted my own head (from a family photo taken twenty years ago) on it, which amuses my greatly. I chose this particular steampunk figure because of the mechanical right hand, which is the hand that I am actually missing, so it fit. I use the head shot from this image (with a different background color) for my io9 avatar and elsewhere on the interwebz. I hope you enjoy it because I’m not likely to post any more photos of myself for awhile. 🙂
I love bookplates and will be featuring a lot of them in upcoming posts. I am kicking off this series with work from Edward Penkov, a contemporary Bulgarian artist. His illustration tends toward the darkly humorous and surreal. Some of it even reminds me a bit of H. R. Giger.
I don’t really have an article this week, so I’m going straight to the artwork. This is a gorgeous Art Nouveau-style poster by Florian Bertmer representing John Milton’s Paradise Lost. I don’t know if it’s ever been used this way, but it would make a damn fine cover for the book. Bertmer usually does work for the extreme metal and punk scene, including album covers, and he was himself the singer for a band called Cheerleaders of the Apocalypse. I don’t know anything about that, but he’s a freakin’ sweet artist.
Florian Bertmer – Paradise Lost
Album Cover of the Week
I thought about posting one of Bertmer’s covers here, but I wanted to give equal time to a different artist and decided to go with yet another excellent poster and album cover artist, John Dyer Baizley. He’s another artist associated with the extreme metal scene, and, like Bertmer, is himself a musician. Also like Bertmer, his artwork is heavily influenced by Art Nouveau artists like Alphonse Mucha. Check out this lovely cover for Gillian Welch’s The Harrow & the Harvest album.
John Dyer Baizley – Gillian Welch – The Harrow & the Harvest (cover)
Song of the Week
This week’s song is by The Veils and comes from their Nux Vomica album. I love the sweaty, gritty, desperate feel of this song, which fits the subject matter quite well. The song is called Pan, ostensibly after the Greek god of the same name.
It’s a universal law—intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Indigo Xix 