My publishing roots compel me to hit the new MoMA exhibit on George Lois‘ iconic Esquire covers from the 1960s and 70s.

While the heady news topics of those times provided ample raw material for Esquire and Lois to weave their magic, there was a much more fundamental design concept at play:

What was remarkable then — and seems even more so now, when virtually every magazine cover is a thicket of text lines running behind or on top of one celebrity or another — is that the Lois covers were virtually textless. They achieved their effect by communicating a single idea through an image.

Relying upon a single image to sell an issue (and that’s what it comes down to for any magazine, really) is a chancy high-wire act. Either the casual browser bites on the compelling cover, or else s/he ignores it and moves on. That’s probably why so many publishers hedge their bets by loading, and overloading, their covers with so much accompanying bullet and blurb text.

And for me, it’s become a turnoff. In fact, I recently canceled my subscription to Lois’ old periodical stomping grounds, in large part because I was finding that those text-gorged covers were constantly turning me off each month. Far from enticing me to open the cover and dive in, the instant in-your-face design seems a bit too desperate for attention.

In a way, it pains me to make that observation. For years, I considered the standard teaser-cover to be pretty user-friendly, even to the point of being a good template for online publishing adaptation (think of each of those cover blurbs as a hyperlink). But somewhere along the way, the aesthetic became diluted, I think.

Today, Lois’ image-only style would stand out simply because every other mass-market title persists with the textual path. It’d be a refreshing change.

Today would be Easter for the other Christians. Since I’m in that sect — Greek Orthodox, although don’t test me on devoutness — I’ll be spending time with the extended family, chiefly in the form of eating. The highlight for me will be doling out the chocolate Easter bunnies and Peeps to the little niece and nephews; I’ve been stockpiling that sugary goodness for a month, so the payoff will be nice.

Not to play a game of one-upmanship with the Western observance of this holiday, but I’ll point out that the Orthodox method of determining the date of Christ’s comeback is a bit more straightforward: Basically, Easter should fall on the first Sunday after Jewish Passover, based on the acknowledgment that Jesus celebrated Passover a few days before his crucifixion and resurrection.

Simple, although linkage with Jewish ritual is pretty much the root of this East-West schism:

The belief gradually grew that the phrase “with the Jews” was to be understood literally and that the Holy Fathers at Nicea had decreed that the Christian Easter must not, even accidentally, occur on the same day as the Passover; rather, it must be celebrated later. As a matter of fact, however, such an interpretation was not only inaccurate but contrary to the spirit of what was decreed at Nicea, considering that acceptance of this interpretation necessitates a chronological relationship between the Christian Easter and the Jewish Passover, the very undesirable connection the Great Council sought to abolish.

Contrast that with the hoops that Catholics and Protestants have to jump through to determine their annual Easter Sunday calendar spot. The lunar-calendar calculations are so complex that they had to come up with something called Computus, basically an ecumenical math algorithm.

All told, I’d rather stick “with the Jews”.

Stern Pinball, Inc. is a company that’s in about the most concentrated niche industry that’s possible:

But this place, Stern Pinball Inc., is the last of its kind in the world. A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000.

That Chicago connection also played a big part in coin-op videogaming history. In fact, Stern Pinball’s predecessor company produced some 1980s-era arcade videogames. And cross-town rival company Williams went a step further, not only delving into videogames but in fact producing some of the more memorable and challenging games from that era, notably Defender, Joust, and (my personal favorite) Robotron: 2084. As much as Silicon Valley gets credit for birthing Atari, Chicago should get some credit for fostering some eminently playable classic videogaming.

As for pinball, I’m not one who’ll miss it’s eventual passing. I never could get into it. I don’t mind the concept of the ball as a free radical, but so much of the game forces you to be an observer — you watch the ball spring forth, bounce around for a minute or more on various bumpers and bells, and then maybe drop down to the flippers area. Then, even if you get a decent hit, you usually have to wait another several seconds for the ball to descend back down to you. Or, more likely, it drops down dead center, where all your hapless flippering can’t prevent the end of the turn. Woo-hee.

One aside: They still call it the “coin-op industry”. Do any arcade machines still even accept coins — last I noticed, they all had dollar bill feeders, and the newest models even have card-swipe slots. I guess soda and snack machines are part of this business, and they still take coins, so maybe they still justify the industry’s name.

Regime change in the name of commerce hasn’t been (and, to this day, isn’t) limited to that black liquid found in the Middle East. Peter Chapman’s “Bananas!: How The United Fruit Company Shaped the World” goes deep into the United Fruit Company’s economic and political dominance in Central America during the early 20th Century, which included familiar corporatist tactics:

In some countries, United Fruit blatantly paid no taxes at all for decades. In others, when troubled by local officials, it simply installed a more sympathetic government. In Honduras in 1911, the banana men not only staged an invasion to depose the current regime and put in a new one, they had the audacity to demand the new government reimburse the costs incurred in the invasion!…

It may seem hard to believe that the banana business could be as nefarious as the oil business. But to our banana chroniclers, it may have been worse. The banana men managed to be at once ferociously exploitative, while cultivating a beloved image with their customers, pioneering public relations and marketing practices still in use today.

Equating yesteryear’s interventionist actions with today’s blood-for-oil foreign policy certainly puts things into perspective. I’m sure the history of United Fruit (today Chiquita Brands) is far from common knowledge, even though it should be as a watershed moment in CIA influence (i.e., the Guatemala coup in 1954).

But it’s important to look at this more comprehensively. It’s not just isolated one-off actions that jump from one corner of the globe to another — global interests by American-based corporations are the drivers for Washington’s foreign policy. This isn’t new, either for the U.S. nor other world powers past and present. If more people kept themselves informed, maybe the periodic jingoistic war rallying would fizzle out.

Today may be Good Friday, but at least for 2008, it’s not just for Christians anymore:

In what is statistically, at least, a once-in-a-millennium combination, the following will all occur [this March 21st]:

- Good Friday
- Purim, a Jewish festival celebrating the biblical book of Esther
- Narouz, the Persian New Year, which is observed with Islamic elaboration in Iran and all the “stan” countries, as well as by Zoroastrians and Baha’is.
- Eid Milad an Nabi, the Birth of the Prophet, which is celebrated by some but not all Sunni Muslims and, though officially beginning on Thursday, is often marked on Friday.
- Small Holi, Hindu, an Indian festival of bonfires, to be followed on Saturday by Holi, a kind of Mardi Gras.
- Magha Puja, a celebration of the Buddha’s first group of followers, marked primarily in Thailand.

“Half the world’s population is going to be celebrating something,” says Raymond Clothey, Professor Emeritus of Religious studies at the University of Pittsburgh…

Ed Reingold and Nachum Dershowitz, co-authors of the books Calendrical Calculations and Calendrical Tabulations, determined how often in the period between 1600 and 2400 A.D. Good Friday, Purim, Narouz and the Eid would occur in the same week. The answer is nine times in 800 years. Then they tackled the odds that they would converge on a two-day period. And the total is… only once: tomorrow. And that’s not even counting Magha Puja and Small Holi.

Something’s in alignment somewhere, cosmically.

Of course, I’m left out of this little ecumenical group hug, because the Eastern Orthodox Church observes a different calendar for Easter (April 27th this year — more than a month away). I’ll just have to appreciate today merely for its secularly-inherent Fridayness.

I give you the last mortal words of Pancho Villa:

“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”

While making note of Villa’s penchant for Hollywood-quality self-promotion, I’ll let the statement stand.

I came across this quip over the weekend, before the prostitution scandal surrounding New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer hit the fan today. I may be the only one in the world drawing a connection between these two figures; but somehow, Villa’s coda seems well-tailored to Spitzer’s prospective hubris-filled fall from grace.

Police dogs in Germany will soon be stylin’ some serious footwear. Duesseldorf is outfitting its canine crime-fighters with blue plastic-fiber shoes for protection:

“All 20 of our police dogs — German and Belgian shepherds — are currently being trained to walk in these shoes,” Andre Hartwich said. “I’m not sure they like it, but they’ll have to get used to it.”

The unusual footwear is not a fashion statement, Hartwich said, but rather a necessity due to the high rate of paw injuries on duty. Especially in the city’s historical old town — famous for both its pubs and drunken revelers — the dogs often step into broken beer bottles.

Hmm. Wasn’t Hitler a dog lover? Just sayin’.

This quote by 19th-century British poet/social critic Matthew Arnold resonates with my personal worldview:

“The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.”

It also comes across as timely in this political season. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which side of the political divide it more closely hews toward.

Fortune cookies are an after-meal staple in Chinese restaurants across the globe, but culinary sleuthing has found that Japan is the historical birthplace of the paper-bearing treats.

Sushi bars could benefit from a dessert tray consisting of fortune cookies and sake…

A woodcut scene from 1878 is considered the clincher for establishing Japanese origin. As for how they migrated from Japanese cuisine to Chinese, by way of the American melting pot:

Early on, Chinese-owned restaurants discovered the cookies, too. Ms. Nakamachi speculates that Chinese-owned manufacturers began to take over fortune cookie production during World War II, when Japanese bakeries all over the West Coast closed as Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to internment camps.

Sadly, none of this shed light on the mystery that is the empty fortune cookie.

If Islam had never existed, would things be nice and cozy between East and West, Jew and Arab, Greek and Turk? Probably not, according to professor and CIA advisor Graham Fuller, who argues that economics and geopolitics trump religion:

Mr. Fuller ponders a litany of history’s major battles to drive home his message that while Islam might be a convenient culprit, global strife, past and present, can’t be blamed on any one religion. Europeans would still have wanted the spoils of the Middle East and launched the Crusades, he says, albeit under a different banner. The West still would have tried various ways to get control of oil-rich areas. The French would still have gone into Algeria for its farm lands. The creation of Israel would still have displaced Palestinians, no matter what their religion.

And so on.

It’s fun to speculate on alternate historical divergences. On this particular counterfactual, Harry Turtledove’s “Agent of Byzantium” series of novels posits Mohammed becoming a Christian monk instead of The Prophet, leading to a modern-day Byzantine Empire cold-warring against a high-tech Persian Empire.

The trouble with alternate history fiction with such a wide scope is that it loses plausibility with the stretch of time. Sure, you can weave a reasonable unfolding of events within a few decades of Islam’s non-emergence; but can you credibly speculate how the next millennium and change will turn out? Too many variables.

Still, here’s some off-the-cuff musings of a world without Islam, conveniently ignoring the role of Islamic civilization in preserving and advancing classical scientific knowledge during the Middle Ages (among other things):

- An Eastern Orthodox Christian cultural hearth extending from the Balkans down to Arabia, and perhaps westward from Egypt through to north Africa.

- A Zoroastrian Iran (the world’s only Zoroastrian Republic, ala today’s real-world Islamic Republic?), culturally conflicted with the Orthodox Christian Arabs on its western border; and perhaps isolated, unless it was able to export its faith into Pakistan, Afghanistan and other points north and east.

- Alternately (if that’s possible in an alternate-reality scenario), a Jewish homeland being established in Iran, which historically hosted one of the world’s larger diaspora communities.

- As for Europe, would there have been a markedly more tempered Protestant Reformation, given that the prior Catholic-Orthodox schism had already defined intra-Christian boundaries?

Even as SUVs are doing the long fade-out, automakers are struggling to engineer cars that will meet Federal baselines for fuel efficiency, i.e. 35 miles per gallon.

The funny thing is, the 1987 Honda Civic CRX had an EPA-estimated 57 mpg rating, better than any modern-day hybrid. So why is it so much harder today to squeeze more miles out of a gallon of gas?

The bigger answer is that the Honda Civic has changed a lot in twenty years. Honda no longer sells a tiny two-seat version like the CRX. Even Civics with back seats are much bigger and heavier today than similar versions were in 1987.

It’s in the nature of the car business that companies want to offer more - more legroom, more trunk space - with each redesign. As a result, cars get bigger and bigger.

Besides size, American consumers expect a lot more convenience out of a car than they did in 1985. Today, we expect power steering, power brakes, power windows and more.

The base CRX HF did not have power steering or power brakes. (As light as it was, it really didn’t need them.) Air conditioning was optional, as it was on most cars in those days, so it didn’t figure into the EPA’s fuel economy ratings.

Today’s consumers also expect safety. In the 1980s, car companies would sell cars that got one-star or two-star crash test ratings. Numbers like that would now cause car companies fits. Four out of five stars is considered the minimum acceptable rating.

So we burn more fuel for shorter distances while hogging more roadspace these days, but we’re safer and more comfortable. Except that if we get into a car crash, we’re still pretty much toast.

As much as I like taking the AirTrain JFK for my airport runs, I never thought of it as the successor to the long-departed JFK Express Train from the ’70s and ’80s:

Which is surprising, because constant childhood exposure to that damnable television commercial managed to embed that oh-so-annoying jingle deep into my memory. I didn’t even need to press “play” on the above YouTube clip to recall the infectious, almost mantra-like ditty:

Take the train to the plane! With news of the No. 7 extension’s ceremonial groundbreaking, trains were on our mind. If you’ve never heard the jingle for the failed train to JFK, we strongly urge you NOT to view this video. Because if you do, you will be “taking the train to the plane” for the rest of your life.

Oh so true. I guess I should have pasted that blockquoted warning higher up on this post; sorry. But now, we can share the torture!

(Via GraffMuseum)

The other day, I was so drawn to the new January issue of Vanity Fair, with cute little Katherine Heigl all dolled up on the cover, that I almost bought it as I was passing a newsstand.

Now that I know that one of the features is about a Middle East with borders re-drawn to skew more closely to socio-ethnic realities, I’ll have to plunk down some cash for a hard copy. It’s a more justifiable reason than covergirl cheesecake.

And more thought-provoking:

Vanity Fair’s four ad-hoc mapmakers — historian David Fromkin, diplomat Dennis Ross and Middle East scholars Kenneth Pollack and Daniel Byman — devised a new set of borders that restore some ancient kingdoms, and even create a new unoccupied zone known as the science-fiction-appropriate “Empty Quarter” on the Arabian peninsula.

It might sound like some kind of fly sci-fi, but the Empty Quarter (Ar-Rub al-Khali) has been an acknowledged geographical fact for ages. Defining it as a no-state’s-land is probably a fanciful exercise — the suspected oil reserves under that desert sand would compel surrounding states to stake their claims in short order.

- Some boundaries basically line up with today’s, as with Oman or Israel.

No Palestine in this “natural” order? Hmmm. I’m sure there’s an explanation in the full offline text; offhand, I’m guessing that Jordan would wind up being home to a Palestinian state. But that would still require big population movements.

- The Wahhabi strain of Sunni Islam at the core of Saudi Arabia would have a homeland carved out of the core of the current nation called the Southern Tribal Area. Portions of Iraq would be combined with new territories constructed along religious and ethnic lines.

- The mountainous parts of Iran would join mountainous Yemen to form a mixed Sunni-Shiite kingdom that was called Arabia Felix in ancient times.

- Egypt would be limited to the Nile’s banks, split into an upper part of cities and commerce and a lower one of villages. The desert either side of the Nile would be named the Western Tribal Area – an Arab domain that would have more in common with the tribal areas across the Red Sea than its neighbors abutting the Nile.

- Not all the divisions would be religious. Kuwait and Qatar would be added to the United Arab Emirates to form a collective of mercantile Sunni sheikhdoms known simply as the Emirates.

- The Levant on the Mediterranean’s east coast would be defined by its traditionally cosmopolitan cities.

These more “natural” divisions were inspired by an uncovered 1918 map by legendary T.E. Lawrence that proposed much the same geopolitical landscape. Would it have avoided the region’s present-day strife? Nation-states based on near-homogeneous populations are no guarantee of peace. In any case, the black gold that lies below trumps any positioning of international dotted-lines.

As the music industry’s business model dissolves in the digital age, Digital Music News’ Paul Resnikoff sees a fragmented future that can’t sustain the development of broad-based superstar performers:

Just take a look at any one of the millions of bands on MySpace, iTunes Radio, or eMusic. Or simply stroll into any club, subway station, or cafe in thousands of cities worldwide. Most of these artists will never achieve mega-stardom, and larger-than-life stars (and disasters) like Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, and Guns N’ Roses are probably a thing of the past.

For a band starting out, that puts a whole new spin on 360-degree thinking. How many artists can pack an arena like Madonna? In the present, the answer is precious few. And in the future, without a major artist development machine, the answer may be virtually zero.

This strikes me as too much in-the-box thinking. Because recording labels have been the driving force for talent development for so long, Resnikoff sees their eventual demise (at least in their current form/role) as leaving a permanent vacuum, and thus no way to build a mega-popular musical artist.

But that “major artist development machine” doesn’t have to follow what’s been the status quo. Ultimately, fostering an entertainment act comes down to marketing. Having a limited number of media channels through which to direct the communication campaigns makes it easier — versus the seemingly wide-open online future — but it’s not a prerequisite.

And in fact, there’s a good example from the century before last on how to make it work. Long before he founded what’s now the world’s most famous circus, American showman P.T. Barnum made an opera diva known as the “Swedish Nightingale”, who’d never been heard of or from in the United States, into the 19th Century equivalent of a media frenzy:

“Jenny Lind’s story is perhaps Barnum’s single most extraordinary accomplishment,” [Barnum Museum executive director Kathy] Maher said, “because he took something that was absolutely nothing in American society and created a frenzy, a mania, very much equivalent to today’s rock stars.”

For six months before her arrival Barnum used every marketing and advertising means at his disposal to whip up a fever of “Lindomania.” He filled newspapers with articles of her beauty and piety. He ran Jenny Lind poetry contests. An entire merchandising industry sprang up to churn out Jenny Lind hats, Jenny Lind parasols, Jenny Lind face cream and the Jenny Lind crib, which you can still buy today.

When her ship pulled into a dock at Canal Street, 30,000 fans were there to cheer her. Another 20,000 lined the streets to her hotel. On Sept. 11, 1850, she gave her first American concert at Castle Garden, now Castle Clinton in Battery Park…

With Barnum manipulating a bidding frenzy, the top-priced ticket sold for an astounding $225 — almost $6,000 today. To his relief both critics and audiences loved Lind’s voice.

All this was well before the appearance of the concentrated media landscape that became so familiar by mid-20th Century. In some ways, access to mass audiences was as fragmented in the 1850s as it is now, with the Web and other digital media chipping away at old-media and retail outlets. Barnum knew how to exploit the existing channels, and he made his mark. The perseverance of that Jenny Lind crib, while hardly ubiquitous, is a lasting mark of the success of this decidedly old-school marketing campaign.

Comparisons between Jenny Lind and Madonna might not be immediately apparent, and indeed it’s a bit apples-to-oranges to measure up different eras. But as long as there are willing audiences — which, through social networking attractions, will easily encourage the growth of broadly-popular acts — there’ll always be superstars on the pop horizon.

As Michael Mukasey starts his stint in the Attorney General chair, he might want to include a couple of history texts in his reference library, just to help him out on his fuzziness regarding waterboarding.

Because apparently, this technique was debated as a form of torture during America’s colonial ware in the Philippines, more than a century ago. And if the “water cure” from those days wasn’t definitively identified as torture, then it certainly was by the Vietnam era.

So if the issue was already decided decades ago, why the confusion? Is it because of the supposedly new terrain that the War on Terror represents? Mukasey will have to hash that one out as he guides the Justice Department during the remainder of the Dubya years.

I wish I could say that I came across this Emily Dickinson quote via my leisure-time reading:

The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind

But that would imply I actually have some leisure time these days…

Fact is, I read it on the subway. I had to take the 1 Line last week to get part of the way home, and Barnes & Noble provided the poem, “Tell All The Truth But Tell It Slant”, on a sponsored patch of train interior.

So now I’m getting my poetry from subway ads. I can’t tell if that means I’m being dazzled or blinded.

This is the scene behind the bar at The Bowery Poetry Club, on (of course) the Bowery downtown. I captured it with my Nikon D80 camera on loan from MWW Group, and that being the case, you can also view a larger, uncropped version on Flickr.

Congrats to you if you got the in-joke that’s scrawled onto that countertop television set. It is, of course, a paraphrased play on the first line of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…

The syntax may be ever so slightly off, but “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by television” is an apt parody. Having the junky little TV set plugged in and displaying a perpetual screen of snowy static is an addition nice touch. The volume should have been on too, but I imagine that would get real old real fast for the bartenders.

Appropriately enough, I ordered an “Allen ‘Gin’-sberg”, one of their signature drinks, while taking this photo. I got some heat for it for some reason. They wouldn’t tell me what was in it aside from the gin, but what I got was a stoplight-colored layered cocktail: Red on bottom, clear in the middle, blueish-green on top. Tasty.

In the beginning, the IRT and other portions of the New York City subway system were privately-owned.

The Depression killed off those business ventures. If you think the time is ripe for another go at the idea, these discarded subway signs are waiting for you on Houston Street. Heck, maybe with the mounting outrage over proposed MTA fare hikes in 2008, a private tube would be embraced — assuming it doesn’t go belly-up within the first few days.

This scene photographed by me just a few days ago, as part of the MWW Group’s Nikon D80 Picture This Project, naturally. Click here or above to embiggen.

If New York’s once-infamous Times Square can get de-smutty-fied, I guess any den of iniquity can. No doubt inspired by the Manhattan makeover, Amsterdam’s city elders are funding real-estate acquisitions that aim to gentrify the world-renown Red Light District right out of existence.

What’s the world coming to, when no corner of the globe is safe for seediness to thrive?

It says something about the modern-day state of affairs, that not only are several of the world’s indigenous languages dying off from extra-cultural encroachment, but that their demise is paralleled by the growing popularity of wholly invented languages.

In other words (in English only, perhaps regrettably): People would rather learn and spread fabricated tongues than preserve authentic ones. So while Siletz Dee-ni and Amurdag are each down to aged, sole-surviving oral speakers, Klingon and Toki Pona are picking up new adherents every day via the Web.

Both these linguistic trends are sad, albeit in different levels of solemnity.

Only in Hell’s Kitchen could the infamously gritty Market Diner have existed.

How gritty was this now-closed greasy spoon on the corner of 43rd Street and 11th Avenue?

A former paramedic who now works at Metropolitan Lumber and Hardware up 11th Avenue at 46th Street, and who would give her name only as Marie, recalled rough nights on the ambulance — after a few too many trips to Bellevue — that were best cured by a stop at the Market Diner.

“You could go over there for scrambled eggs and bourbon,” she said. “You could smoke in there, too. Scrambled eggs and bourbon. Gimme a coffee with a shot.”

Let’s hope it reopens soon, somewhere. With a “scrambled eggs and bourbon” special on the menu.