A Very, Very Thorough Look at Blade Runner’s Typefaces

From Blade Runner.

At ninety-seven, Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still telling stories, hanging out with Sterling Lord, and drinking Merlot, as one does: “The partnership between Mr. Ferlinghetti and Mr. Lord, two towering legends in the publishing world, traces back to the heady, early days of the Beat movement, when a literary and cultural revolution was ignited by a band of iconoclastic writers … Both men attribute the longevity of their lives and careers partly to the fact that they weren’t as wild as the Beat writers they championed. Mr. Lord, who cycled through four marriages, hung around with many of the rebellious, semi-feral writers he represented, but he was always the straight man. He never even smoked cigarettes, at least not in the last half-century. ‘I did smoke a little, in my thirties,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t inhale.’ ”

The biographer Michael Shelden would like to say that Herman Melville had a mistress, and William Giraldi would like to say that it doesn’t really matter: “Biographers have long known about Sarah Morewood, the Melvilles’ bewitching neighbor in Pittsfield, Massachusetts—an indefatigable thrower of parties and the Berkshires’ top literary hanger-on—but Shelden wants you to know her in the Biblical sense. ‘Sexy beyond measure,’ Morewood is ‘one of the great unsung figures in literary history,’ a woman who ‘didn’t like to take no for an answer.’ Shelden describes her as Melville’s ‘goddess in his Berkshire paradise,’ the ‘powerful key to unlocking his secrets,’ an ‘untamed spirit’ whose ‘seductive powers worked their wonders on more than a few men.’ Her supposed years-long affair with Melville was ‘so intimate and revealing that it colored every aspect of his life.’ Shelden’s panting, cliché-choked style soon has you reaching for the light switch and candle, then the cigarette and bonbons.”

Eliot, Auden, and Yeats all praised David Jones’s 1937 In Parenthesis as a masterpiece, the best long poem to come out of World War I—so how come no one reads it anymore? “Fuelled by direct experience, but highly composed, with a frame of reference that reaches across centuries, In Parenthesis works at the level of poetry, yet isn’t verse, nor, I’d argue, a poem. Multiple narrative possibilities are deployed throughout, fragmented lyricism giving way to sections of prose, dialogue, stream of consciousness, slang and song. The flow between these modes and registers never feels anything less than organic, and yet the work is built upon a parenthetical structure of mathematical precision; a subterranean architecture of image, pace and movement that provides a governing background rhythm to the multiple transitions of voice, perspective and cadence … In the seventy years since its publication it has been too rarely read, or even known, though it has maintained an influence on writers and poets working in its wake.”

Isn’t it time you took a good, hard look at the typefaces and art design in Blade Runner? The movie is set in 2019, and that’s right around the corner—best to be prepared. Don’t worry. A lot of it will be familiar, including “a neon advertisement for popular American food processor manufacturer Cuisinart … Cuisinart are far from the only 1980s company advertised in 2019’s Los Angeles cityscape, however. We once again meet American flag-carrier Pan Am … popular carbonated sugar-water Coca-Cola … perennial halitosis-mitigator Dentyne … extraterrestrial game manufacturer Atari … regularly product-placed watch manufacturer Bulova … alcoholic beverage brand Budweiser … and genius, irreverent, sexy mythical perfume brand Jōvan.”

Spending time in Berlin this summer? I know this cool artists’ collective curating this cool Biennale you might want to che—oh … wait … “the Berlin Biennale has, under DIS’s curation, transformed from one of Europe’s most critical pinnacles of contemporary art into a vast obsolescent pageant of irrelevance, a disposable cobranding opportunity made to measure for privileged shareholders with little (if any) connection to the numerous issues facing Germany, Europe, or the international community today. Instead, what DIS have come up with is an exhibition so vacuous, ideologically apathetic, ahistorical, sarcastic, and dehumanizing, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been blacklisted solely on account of its conformity to commodity fetishism.”

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