Jackson West’s Obsessive Compulsion

So I’m spending the weekend trying to accomplish as much as I can towards getting a rough cut of my student film Dominoes done. When editing, it’s always good to have at least a temporary music track to use as a timing reference. I’d also thought about adding music as background ambience — as though a radio were playing in the distance.

Of course, I’d never be able to clear rights to commercial music. So instead I dropped by ccMixter and used the search tools to browse for tracks tagged “hip-hop” that could be used freely with attribution. I turned up about ten choice tracks, of which I used five, and mixed them together using Traktor so that they segued seamlessly and maintained a steady tempo.

While you’ll probably barely be able to hear it in the film, I figured I’d post it here to let you in on my process as I’m working, as well as an example of the quality work that people publishing under a Creative Commons license so that it can be re-purposed by other artists.

Dominoes Mix [9.3mb MP3]

Featuring:

Slumlord by Lo Tag Blanco
Open Your Eyes (Long Island Remix) by CoffeeTrim
The Beat by CDK
Open Your Eyes (Elithrmix) by BOCrew
Martini Madness by DJ Blue

Looking through my bookshelf for something I hadn’t read a few weeks ago, I stumbled across Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. I have to say that as someone who has played writer and designer on the Web, it’s a life-changer I only wish I’d discovered earlier. The edition that ended up on my shelves (from where or whom I know not) is the 1997 printing. But it’s at least as timeless as Strunk and White, and Bringhurst’s poetic prose measuring considerations of reading on, and writing or designing for, computer displays are still quite apt. An excerpt, emphasis mine:

“The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. This makes it an attractive place for advertizing [sic] and dogmatizing, but not so good a place for thoughtful text.

“The screen, in other words, is a reading environment even more fugitive than the newspaper. Intricate, long sentences full of unfamiliar words stand little chance. At text size, subtle and delicate letterforms stand little chance as well. Superscripts and subscripts, footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes disappear. In the harsh light and coarse resolution of the screen, such literate accessories are difficult to see; what is worse, they dispel the essential illusion of speed. So the links and jumps of hypertext replace them. All the subtexts then can be the same size, and readers are at liberty to skip from text to text like children switching channels on TV. When reading takes this form, both sentences and letterforms retreat to blunt simplicity. Forms bred on newsprint and signage are most likely to survive. Good text faces for the screen are therefore as a rule faces with low contrast, a large torso, open counters, sturdy terminals, and slab serifs or no serifs at all.”

If you’ve ever designed anything, from pages to packages, web sites to billboards, it behooves you to pick up this book. If you’ve ever written anything, and are curious about the history and the future of text, it behooves you to pick up this book. And if you’re just curious and want to read a master discourse deeply on a rich topic, it behooves you to pick up this book.