The gang at Collected Ventures has some excellent fun with “Flagpole Sitta” by Harvey Danger. Whee!

[via Coudal Partners.]

What is it with Spanish-speaking countries and poster art? They’ve got something going on. In addition to the work of Bachs, I’ve become a bit obsessed with Spanish Civil War posters. I’d been vaguely aware of them for a while, and I had a general understanding of their cultural and political importance during that conflict, but now I’m in awe of their greatness. Some of the most amazing poster art ever. I’ve been dreaming of owning a couple of custom-framed originals that I could hang in my apartment. Chisholm Larsson in Chelsea sells some well-preserved originals, and reproductions are available online in various places. For now I will make do with the six framed postcards that I recently hung from my bathroom wall; I bought the postcards for a buck each at Chisholm Larsson. The one below is my favorite. I love the type on this, and the powerful energy swooping toward the upper left.

Lots more posters and history here.

In my ongoing quest to find great, unusual stuff to hang on my walls, I’ve discovered a few amazing poster artists I’d never known about. One is the Polish artist Jan Lenica. But first and foremost is the Cuban illustrator Eduardo Muñoz Bachs (1937-2001), who created more than two thousand posters, most of them for movies. He did much or most of his work for ICAIC, the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematografica, founded by the Castro government in 1960 to make and promote Cuban films. I found some of Bachs’s work online and I thought, I have to get some of these. Bachs used vibrant colors in a very Cuban way, and he had an incredible sense of space and proportion.

I now own four Bachs posters, including the first two below (I couldn’t find graphics of the other two I bought):

I found them here in New York at the Cuban Art Space at the Center for Cuban Studies, which is located at 124 West 23rd Street. They have a few dozen silkscreened Bachs posters for sale, as well as a bunch by other talented Cuban artists. Original posters are generally $100, high-quality reproductions (also silkscreened) are $55. I bought four reproductions, and had to stop myself from buying more. They’re a slightly odd size—20” X 30”—but after looking around for a while I found great frames in that exact size at Sam Flax, which is the go-to place in Manhattan for high-quality prefab frames.

Here is a 1995 interview with Bachs. To see more of his posters, and maybe buy one or two, try eBay, Stony Hill Antiques and Gallery in Madison, Wisconsin (linked page contains work by Bachs and other Cuban poster artists), and Soy Cubano, based in Cuba.

This clever promotional coaster got some blog attention a little while back, but I never got around to posting about it. I first saw it here. It’s apparently the work of Paul Brazier, Daryl Corps, and Ben Kay of London’s Lunar BBDO.

In 1980, the same year Airplane! was released, Robert Hays starred in a made-for-TV movie called The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything, a sci-fi comedy about a man who inherits a magic pocket watch that can stop time. I thought this was the coolest thing ever; what kid hasn’t dreamed of having the power to stop time, especially when that power is used to make a girl’s bikini top fall off, as happens in the movie? I’ve always remembered The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything, and in recent years I’ve poked around the web a few times trying to find a copy. Finally, a few weeks ago, I stumbled onto a pirated file on one of those secret BitTorrent sites. I am somewhat amazed that other people remember this silly thing and would go to the trouble of uploading it to the world.

The movie is far, far worse than I remembered, a low-budget extravaganza with an aesthetic that’s distinctly A-Team. Hays plays Kirby Winter, a lazy guy who inherits an heirloom watch—and, much to his initial chagrin, nothing else—from an uncle who was a wildly successful businessman. Kirby eventually discovers the watch’s incredible powers, which allow him to freeze a scene and physically alter it in big and small ways. (This same ability was the driving gimmick in Nicholson Baker’s erotic novel The Fermata.) With the help of a ditzy Southern damsel played by Pam Dawber, of Mork and Mindy, Kirby fights off several bad guys who want to steal the watch; he uses its powers to escape parking tickets, evade the police and the villains, and halt bullets in midair. Just like Neo in The Matrix!

In the scene below, Kirby discovers what the watch can do.

(The movie was based on a novel by John D. McDonald. A sequel, The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Dynamite, was aired the following year, but Hays and Dawber were not in the cast.)