Richard Rose (5.4)

Richard Rose is a tall thin man in his early 60s with a slow, deliberate voice that curls at the ends with a touch of the South. He first fell in love with the art of letterpress at U.C. Berkeley, as a graduate student. There, in the back room of the Rare Books Library, amongst dusty manuscripts and Persian carpets, he learned to set type. The coalescing of the physical and intellectual that presented itself in the act of hand printing was wildly appealing to him. As a student of architecture, he thought of each lead letter as a brick; he was building pages, building art. But it wasn’t until 12 years ago, when he purchased his own press, a SP-20 Vandercook bought from a defunct South Carolina newspaper, that he was able to pursue letterpress. 

In an era dominated by printer-friendly technology printing presses have become in many ways obsolete. But Richard argues that letterpress offers something to the designer that computers and programs like Photoshop cannot. To him it is an art grounded in the details of reality, in which the artist has to respond directly to his art and environment. Particular hues are achieved by mixing oil-based inks not by clicking on a desired font color.  If while setting a page of type a printer runs out of a heavily used letter or “sort”, he must rethink, rework and recreate his piece; this is such a common occurrence it inspired the old saying “he/she is out of sorts”. The art of letterpress is filled with limitations, physical limitations of iron, lead and steel which create the necessity for increased creativity and experimentation.  

It also has an undeniable connection to history. It is the art of Guttenberg’s bible. Every typeface has a story deeply rooted in the practices of its time. Garamond, Bembo, Gaudy: Richard knows the designer and story behind each. The history of printing is parallel to the history of the modern intellectual tradition: from its genesis in illuminated manuscripts to the rise of newspapers and with them popular culture.  

Richard creates mostly broadsides (posters that combine text and images) and short books. Many of his pieces reside in the Haas Special Collection, in the basement of the Arts and Architecture building. I was able to view, one afternoon, a small accordion book entitled “Lattice, Thicket, Thistle, Thorn”. The piece was printed on thick, eggshell cardstock and in black and bright green inks. The design, which was clean and simple, was obviously the product of an architect. Every page had been built beautifully. Each of the four words had an accompanying quote, the latest dated 1737, and an image, all modern and black and white. First there was a shattering white lattice above a tangled mess of thick and thin strokes, then a thicket of straight lines arrayed like a dropped handful of spaghetti, then a sparse thistle with strong elegant strokes like those of Japanese calligraphy, and finally a scattering of thorns that looked like shattered blades of grass. The juxtaposition between the ancient gravity of the text and the contemporary elegance of the images was striking. And everything, the pictures and quotes, had been printed on an old press, the kiss of the lead on paper stamped into the cardstock.

Jerry (5.3)

I don’t remember his face. But I remember him. It was the 2008-2009 Texas State Finals in Academic Decathlon and 9-student teams from all across the state had convened in a non-descript high school just outside of Houston.  To properly convey the importance of what happened I have to include a few technical details. Of the ten subjects in AcDec, one of the most subjective and important is Impromptu Speech, which requires students to answer a specific question using no more or less than 3-4 minutes. By the time a student had reached state finals he would have practiced this at least two dozen times. That day, we were walking into the lobby of a cheerless cement building for the final portion of the competition. As we pushed through the door I caught a glimpse of a student (a wild tuff of brown hair, glasses, skinny, pale limbs) and fragment of a conversation:

“So… how long do we have to talk for again?”

“Come on Jerry, come on buddy. We’ve been doing this for a while.”  

And in those broken fragments of an impression I knew Jerry.  Here was this kid, his name was Jerry, he looked like a cartoon rendering of nerd, and he had made it all the way to the State Finals and still couldn’t remember the prescribed time limit.  The way his coach, a tan exasperated man in a tight white polo called him buddy, his voice overflowing with tired condescension sealed it. This kid was a fuck up. He was bad at sports and academics and being social. He was the kind of kid who tripped in the cafeteria and could never concentrate in class. That brief moment was a keyhole through which I saw his entire life. My friend, who had also witnessed the exchange, and I laughed about it for the rest of the day and still do when it’s brought up. For a split second we were violently connected to this stranger, to Jerry; we knew him. And if we hadn’t laughed I think I might have cried.

Subcomandante Marcos (5.2)

The Mexican government asserts that el Subcomandante Marcos is in fact Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vincente. They are wrong. He is a man in a black mask with a pipe. At sunrise on January 1, 1994, the very day of NAFTA’s implementation, a small group of poorly-armed Mayan peasants leaked out of the Lacandona jungle in Chiapas, Mexico and, against all odds, took the major city of San Cristobal de las Casas. As the chaos and confusion of those first early hours evaporated like morning fog a leader materialized: Subcomandante Marcos. He had no name, no face, only a nickname and a balaclava. His brown army fatigues were crisscrossed by bandoliers, his neck hidden by a knotted red bandana, his wrists covered in woven indigenous bracelets, his masked head topped by a brown cap. He emerged like the peasants from the mists of that jungle morning, without a history. Ever since that day the government has attempted to pin him down with facts. He is supposedly Rafael Vincente, a middle class, well educated citizen. He is a philosophy professor at UAM, the Autonomous Metropolitan University, in Mexico City. And these snippets from his history attest to the fact that he is an essence a strange white man with strange Marxist ideas who secluded himself in the jungles of Southern Mexico in order to teach the illiterate peasants revolution. He is, simply, an idealist nut. But Marcos is a man without a past, without a history. He is a blank canvas, an unseen face underneath a black balaclava. He is whoever the Mexican people want him to be. And though his birth certificate may read Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vincente, he will always be Marcos.

Charles (5.1)

Charles McConnel looks like and is a seventy-three year old health care economist. His wardrobe consists entirely of neatly pressed khaki slacks and collared shirts, the majority of which are some shade of purple. When at the university, he dons brown leather lace ups, when at home or the super market, a pair of kelly green crocs. At 5’5’’ he is a short, wiry man with a round belly and stooped shoulders. He moves in small explosions of jerky energy; as he speaks he joggles back and forth, his hands fluttering around in a flurry of gestures. His face is decidedly jolly. Rosacea has colored his nose and large perfectly round cheeks apple red. Above the bulb of his nose sits a pair of thin, wire rimmed glasses, which frame his dark kind eyes. The skin around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth is like crumpled paper, and hangs down in thick folds around his neck. A thinning mop of unruly white hair crowns the top of his head and a thick white mustache sits above his thin upper lip. In the afternoons he is often hunched over the thick glass of the kitchen table, a dark hand-carved pipe in his right hand, a shot glass and an imported beer at his left hand, a hard backed tome in front of him, and a small bag of tobacco above that. As he reads and smokes and thinks he takes small sips from the beer-filled shot glass as if it were whiskey, which he only drinks at night.

Quote 5

"They are very close to abandoning themselves and thinking about themselves as men might speak of them when they are not present. That seems to be their progress."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

"No one says naked like Leonard Cohen." - Tom Robbins (4.5)

Leonard Cohen’s real voice didn’t appear until the 1990s. It descended from a stripped-down, tender baritone in 1967’s “Suzanne” to a deep, clear-ringing baritone-bass in 1984’s “Hallelujah” all the way down to a broken-down bass in 1992’s “Waiting for a Miracle”. In the late 60s Cohen’s voice was the fragile, earnest voice of a young poet singing his deeply personal love poems to the twanging chords of an acoustic guitar. In “Hallelujah” his voice is God’s voice; it resonates with clarity and simplicity. Each lyric is a sober pronouncement against the uplifting harmony of a church choir. Then, in the 1990s his real voice arrives, a voice that fills each line with deep, raw vibrations that give way to a suggestive rasp. Not even time could smooth down the rough edges of this voice. It is the voice of a man who has gone beyond God, beyond everything and emerged on the other side busted and broken-down and capable of pronouncing the truth but only because he doesn’t know anything else. It’s the kind of voice that could scrape out “It’s lonely here/ There’s no one left to torture” viciously, honestly, sexily. Leonard Cohen pulls out each battered word and pronounces it with a throat made of sand and gravel. His voice is a booming growl that threatens its listener with the awful truth.  Each syllable is imbued with the raw clarity that comes only from defeat, from hopelessness, from pessimism so deep the speaker mistakes it for reality. It’s my kind of voice.