Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Greetings From My Desk #2


This piece of artwork was commissioned in 2001 from Alex Richmond. It's Janey's typewriter which we left on the coffee table of our (Janey, Doretta, and my) apartment, along with some paper.

Typing on it was good for the household tendonitis as you had to learn to exert force to get a nice clear page of type. The pinkies were hard to train, but ultimately rose to the challenge. Forceful typing was new to our inflamed wrists and elbows and better for them than all those slow arm curls with soup cans.

The idea of leaving a typewriter around in the living room was that people would type things. Thoughtful lists, poems about the winter and why we should drink martinis, messages from overnight couch guests and multi-authored rambling from parties all appeared on the paper we left around. The elusive Year of the Horse Press had planned an issue of Pony magazine called "The Typewriter 'N' Me" to publish all these ramblings (some of which included drawings: the four horses of the apocolypse, dapper little groundhogs with spats) but alas, procrastination met stasis and the idea of this zine sunk in the peat, to be discovered by civilizations hundreds of years in the future.

The typewriter painting, however, as it was actually completed and not just thought of, remains. Thanks Alex! I like the orange.

1 comment:

JEB said...

Not related to this post (which I did thoroughly enjoy, BTW), but the Times article now features a correction about the Murch flub. Fun!