Well, it’s not that new: Lay It Down was released in late May. But it’s one of the best albums I’ve heard all year. (My pal Joe Keyes is the person who tipped me off to how excellent this disc is.) If I told you it was recorded in 1976, you would believe me. Everything has a real analog feel, thanks to the spare production by James Poyser and Questlove of the Roots. Questlove also played most or all of the drums on the record.

Al Green is singing about as well as I’ve ever heard him. Here’s the second track, “Just for Me.” You can buy Lay It Down here.

I grew up in southern Indiana, where a joke circulated that “shit” could be pronounced with four or five syllables: “shee-ee-uh-it,” or some such. This pronunciation wasn’t common in the college town of Bloomington, where I grew up, but I definitely heard it from kids who lived in the more rural areas outside of town.

Imagine my surprise not long ago when I discovered that Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, one of the most trusted general dictionaries in the English language, lists the two-syllable “shee-it” as an alternate pronunciation of the word. And not only that: The software version of the dictionary, which lets you hear pronunciations of many words, even provides audio of the two-syllable pronunciation. Here it is. I’ll let you judge whether audio of the word “shit” is NSFW or not.

From Flesh Gordon to The Sperminator, spoofs of mainstream cultural offerings have long been a staple of the porn industry. Shakespeare porn in particular is surprisingly common, as I found in 2001 when writing an article for Lingua Franca, “The Pound of Flesh.” But here’s something I hadn’t actually seen before: Kubrick porn. In The Sexxxing, a 2005 quickie from Danni.com, a young woman named Miss Torrent applies to be the winter manager of a porn company’s offices—and the place turns out to be haunted by horny, fake-breasted lesbians. Orgasms ensue.

The two clips in the video below are pretty tame, because I edited them that way. But be careful if you’re at work, because there’s a bare breast or two and a few seconds of moaning. The opening titles, in Futura Extra Bold, Kubrick’s favorite typeface, are mine. As is often the case with porn spoofs, this one is an adaptation only in the loosest sense (double entendre alert!), and it was probably filmed in a single afternoon.

There have been several other porn films inspired by Kubrick’s oeuvre, including Spermacus, 2002: A Sex Odyssey, Thighs Wide Shut, and A Clockwork Orgy. I found copies of the last two, but I won’t be posting clips, as they appear to be pretty hardcore all the way through. You’re in luck, though, because I just found the work-safe trailer for A Clockwork Orgy on YouTube. This was made in 1995:

The website Adult DVD Empire has a page for The Sexxxing that isn’t quite safe for work.

And this fake Shining trailer from 2005 is still the funniest thing ever.

In the late ’90s, I occasionally did freelance typesetting for a small firm that designed annual reports for AOL, Boston Properties, Tommy Hilfiger, and other corporations. It was a really good gig, and my Quark skills improved enormously from having to lay out elaborate financial tables in meticulous, pixel-perfect fashion.

It was at this firm that I acquired the hilarious Publishers Clearing House spoof below, which was tacked to a bulletin board in a corner of the office. I pulled it down and made a color copy of it. All the jokes are about the advertising industry, and everything’s very inside-baseball. So it’s likely that this originally appeared in some sort of advertising-industry trade publication. I have no idea where it was published, and I’ve always been curious. If you know, please post in the comments!

I’ve been wanting to post this for several years, but its unwieldy size and awkward layout made it difficult. Even with the new Panopticist design, I’ve had to cut this up in Photoshop so I can post a readable version.

Anyway, pretty much everything in this is funny and spot-on, and there are dozens of perfect little details. As the tagline for Popular Concept says, “It’s Stuffed Full of Zingers!” Here’s the whole thing; zoomed details are after the jump.

[Continue reading "Hot Deals! Subscribe to X-Acto!, Boot Lick, Bathroom Stall Digest, Professional Award Judge, and Other Advertising-Industry Magazines"...]

Mad Men is a terrific show for lots of reasons, and it’s rightly been praised for its obsessive re-creation of the fashions, values, and emotional landscape of the early 1960s, a transitional period between the dull, ordered Eisenhower years and the cultural chaos that would soon follow. Part of the fun of watching Mad Men is knowing that we’re watching the tail end of an era—and knowing that few of the characters have any idea what’s about to happen. The show occasionally hints at the deepening cracks in the American order of things, and I’m convinced this will be a bigger and bigger aspect of Mad Men in the episodes and seasons to come.

The show’s fixation on the seemingly superficial details of a bygone era could have overwhelmed a series with second-rate writing or a weak cast. In the hands of less talented people, it might have been nothing more than That Show With the Amazing Production Design. Instead, everything is of a piece: The art direction is so immersive that there are no clangy wrong notes to distract you from the rich psychological world the characters inhabit.

Until the show ends, that is. When the last frame flickers off the screen and the credits start to roll, careful observers—okay, just the font freaks—will notice a curious thing: The end credits are set not in the iconic sans serif used in the opening-credits sequence, and not in, say, Helvetica, which was designed in 1957 and became popular soon thereafter, but in Arial, the controversial Helvetica knockoff that Monotype cobbled together in the late 1980s to avoid paying license fees on Helvetica. The main giveaways are the “R”s and the “G”s:

Thanks mainly to Microsoft, which has bundled Arial with every version of Windows since version 3.1, this “shameless impostor” has become one of the most widely used fonts in the world, if not the most widely used. No respectable designer would ever choose to use Arial, except in small sizes on the web, where its ubiquity must be catered to. The use of Arial indicates that Mad Men’s designers, so fussy about everything else, don’t consider the closing credits to be worthy of their oversight. (You’ll also notice that the single and double quotes in the screenshot above are straight, not curly—another indication that the design staff is not involved. And jeez, I just noticed that the “r” in “Dr. Oliver” is inadvertently non-italic.)

Of course this raises a conceptual issue: Do a show’s closing credits take place outside the world of the show? If so—and it ain’t hard to make that argument—then who cares if the credits are set in a shitty font? Well, then, why are opening credits usually so carefully art directed? They usually don’t exist within the world of the show either. It’s partly because an effective opening credits sequence helps set a tone and a style. So why not sustain the tone and the style all the way to the end of the closing credits?

No one would argue that Mad Men’s producers should spend as much time or money on the closing credits as they did on the opening credits. And it’s not like they necessarily had to choose a font that existed by 1962. (The font in the opening credits looks like Trade Gothic Condensed or a similar classic gothic, but it may well be a modern cut.) My point is, it wouldn’t be hard to choose Helvetica or Futura or even EF Windsor Light Condensed from the drop-down font list in whatever program is used to create the closing credits.

This is obviously a small detail. But Mad Men is a show that matches small details as well as any series that’s ever been on the air. Why does such a pitch-perfect show end with such a jarring anachronism?

Related articles: “The Scourge of Arial” and “How to Spot Arial.”

Hello. As of yesterday there have been some major changes around here. I’ve spent the last two weeks adding a search engine, tweaking the layout and typography, putting in place a robust tagging scheme, creating a big master archive page, and adding lots of other little bits of functionality.

Apart from the tags and the search engine, which allow the slicing and dicing of Panopticist content in all kinds of new ways, the biggest change is to the layout itself. Inspired by the brilliant work of Khoi Vinh and the people behind the Blueprint CSS framework (which itself was inspired by people like Khoi), I’ve killed the cluttery left sidebar and added some code that allows me to run much wider graphics and videos by pulling them out to the left using negative margins. Videos like the one featured in “High-Def Backyard Shootout” can now run almost 600 pixels wide, when previously they were limited to the 380-pixel width of the center column. This opens up some great new possibilities, like the ability to run the magazine covers much larger than I could before:

Underlying everything is a nine-column grid that has been subdivided into one or two smaller grids.

One genius aspect of Khoi’s approach is that it solves a great web-specific design conundrum: When a column is wide enough to accommodate large graphics, the type size often has to be scaled up so it matches the proportions of the column width—and this can throw off the balance of the whole layout. In print, big graphics don’t have to mean big type, but on the web they often do. By keeping the type in a relatively thin column and pulling graphics out into the whitespace (er, brownspace) at left, these two priorities no longer clash—and it also results in a much more dynamic and exciting layout, because visual elements can burst through the boundaries of the columns. Imprisoned no more!

There have been some other major changes here too. Inspired by the fun all the cool kids are having with their Tumblrs, I’ve tweaked Movable Type to allow me to post some new kinds of content quickly: first, a linked, styled quote I’ve dubbed a Callout; second, embedded mp3s, which I can now post with a few clicks; and third, Five-Word Links, which used to be a separate element but are now integrated into the larger blog, with their own archive page and everything.

That’s it for now. If you notice anything awry, I hope you’ll email me at hearst@nyc.rr.com and let me know.

Amateurs are doing amazing things these days with consumer-grade high-def camcorders, especially Canon’s HV30 MiniDV unit (which retails for about $800) and its predecessor, the HV20. The impressive clip below is the work of a Memphis college student named Kyle Shields, who acquired a new audio library and wanted to test out some of the gunshot sounds. So he used his HV20 to film a short backyard shootout with a friend. The ominous music, the well-crafted audio track, the Saving Private Ryan-style green filter, and Shields’s talent with the camera combine to make this a very cool little experiment. I wish video technology had been this advanced when I was his age.

To watch this in actual high-def, go to the Vimeo page.

There’s a whole channel on Vimeo devoted to people’s experiments with Canon’s HV30 and HV20 camcorders. The selection is hit or miss, but some of it is quite good indeed.

[via my pal Jonathan Hayes.]