Upcoming caricature gig

Yup, that’s me! I’m the caricaturist Ms Arendt mentions in this clip. On Saturday, September 10th I’ll be drawing caricatures at an elegant fundraiser— the Hospice of Jefferson County’s Masquerade Ball at the Harbor Hotel in Clayton, New York. My manager, Marie, will be on hand to keep my operation moving along smoothly! https://www.witn.com/video/2022/08/29/jefferson-county-hospice-masquerade-ball/

Milton Glaser and logograms

When a symbol works—when everybody sees it and immediately knows what the writer is saying—it really works.

Back in the mid-1970s, there was a hugely influential graphic designer named Milton Glaser. In New York City—and everywhere—every young graphic designer knew about Milton Glaser and the mighty crew at Push Pin Studios. He was asked by the State of New York to help out with an advertising campaign to promote tourism. They wanted people to come visit the state and spend money. The slogan was to be: ‘I Love New York.’ They would turn the slogan into a musical jingle for radio & tv ads. It would appear on all print promotion.

While thinking about the project in the back of a taxi cab, Milton Glaser grabbed a crayon and a scrap of paper and turned the slogan ‘I Love New York’ into a logogram: *

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/128649

which became this:

Gajillions of T-shirts/buttons/coffeemugs/ballcaps later, everybody knows that logogram. The design is trademarked, but not by Milton Glaser. He was generous with his talent and did the work pro bono—for free. Pro bono is Latin for ‘why people in the graphic design business are often short of cash.’ Try to negotiate for a percentage of sales, you young designers, even if you’re doing a favor.

You can see how logograms became part of the system of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. A scribe might hit upon a widely-recognized symbol and use it to replace a word or words. If it worked, it became part of their writing system.

*I admit: only the ‘heart’ part of this is a true logogram, standing for the word ‘love.’ And, yes, hearts have been part of romantic love imagery and Valentine’s Day cards for years and years. But before Glaser’s design, nobody had used a heart symbol that way—to replace a word. Today it’s part of our visual language. How about that for influence on a culture?

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Logogram
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_New_York
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/graphic-designer-milton-glaser-obituary-1890597

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.

Planks for the memories

Pretty soon lots of people owned cars. Driving around was interesting back then. Europe had roads dating back to Antiquity, paved in stone. In America, paved roads weren’t exactly a thing. Unpaved roads are merely dirt that turns to mud in the rain.

Soon after the annual Spring thaw in August, farmers bring their goods to market.

For about a decade in the mid-1800s, there were plank roads. Lots of trees, so let’s make roads out of wood! Plank roads were going to be the next big thing in Central New York State. They didn’t last through too many of those brutal Central New York winters, though. The wooden planks got wet, froze, thawed and turned to mush. I’m kind of surprised nobody saw that one coming. In winter, Syracusans measure snow by the yard.

https://www.syracuse.com/empire/2016/06/central_ny_was_the_center_of_the_wooden_roads_boom_in_the_us_until_they_rotted.html

History

North Syracuse businesses name themselves for when Main Street was Plank Road. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sxsrf=ALeKk00gU9bc4hYSRU1fB2olorYJHB2I8Q:1594029903842&q=syracuse+plank+road&npsic=0&rflfq=1&rlha=0&rllag=43135899,-76130151,1007&tbm=lcl&ved=2ahUKEwjt2reRsLjqAhWObc0KHXSVDqMQtgN6BAgLEAQ&rldoc=1#rlfi=hd:;si:;mv:[[43.145189099999996,-76.1245228],[43.126610199999995,-76.1357812]];tbs:lrf:!1m4!1u3!2m2!3m1!1e1!1m4!1u2!2m2!2m1!1e1!2m1!1e2!2m1!1e3!3sIAE,lf:1,lf_ui:10

https://jeffpaine.blogspot.com/2013/01/rise-and-fall-of-plank-roads-in-central.html

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space

The big ditch

A passenger barge pulled by a mule or two. The helmsman steers.

The cities on the eastern coast of the United States needed to be connected with the western settlements so that both could do business. One of the first ideas to shorten the trip from New York City to Ohio was the wonderful Erie Canal.

An upstate New York miller named Jesse Hawley suggested digging a long ditch, a canal, from the Hudson River at Albany to the Great Lakes at Buffalo. Even President Jefferson thought it was a crazy idea, but New York Governor Dewitt Clinton liked it and pushed through government funding for construction. For eight years—from 1817 to 1825—crews worked to dig the canal. It was an engineering marvel. How did they figure out how much dirt needed to be moved, or how much of a slice to take out of hill? From what I understand, there was never an accredited engineer on the building site. Back in those days, presumably, a kid’s grade school education included Euclid’s Elements (I’m not kidding. Up until 100 or so years ago Elements was the #2 bestseller after the Bible).

When the canal was done, you could get to the MidWest from New York City in less than half the time of a stagecoach.

“Canal packet boat passengers traveled in relative comfort from Albany to Buffalo in five days—not two weeks in crowded stagecoaches. Freight rates fell 90 percent compared to shipping by ox-drawn wagon. Freight boats carried Midwestern produce from Buffalo to Albany. Most continued on to New York City’s seaport, towed down the Hudson River in fleets behind steam tugboats. Mid-western farmers, loggers, miners, and manufacturers found new access to lucrative far-flung markets.”

This site has a really good video about the canal—https://eriecanalway.org/learn/history-culture
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/eriecanal.htm

Here’s Bruce Springsteen singing the Erie Canal song—
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDvYBCZwMIk&list=RDgIIM1mHfJ0U&index=4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal
http://www.canals.ny.gov/history/history.html
https://auburnpub.com/news/local/cayuga-county-hamlet-had-vital-role-in-erie-canal-history/article_5d0fde51-9008-53b7-ab76-f2e8adce748d.html
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/EuclideanSpace.html
https://www.britannica.com/science/Euclidean-geometry

https://www.khanacademy.org/math/geometry/hs-geo-foundations/hs-geo-intro-euclid/v/euclid-as-the-father-of-geometry