The 1930s

I’ve updated the blog theme, and I’m just enough of a pre­ten­tious bas­tard to talk about it.

Two years ago, I took a pho­to­graph of the “back forty” behind my apart­ment build­ing. The build­ing itself was stuck at the edge of civ­i­liza­tion, at the end of a small cul-de-sac hang­ing off a street which divided the pseudo-suburb of DeKalb, IL from the farm­land which sur­rounds it. I’ve one of that series of shots as my desk­top wall­pa­per for a while now, some­thing I stopped last week.

The image itself seemed fit­ting for my exist­ing blog title (Homage To Icarus), and I’ve always wanted to use it as a back­ground spread for this blog. Along the way, I decided to re-implement the blog as a soft­ware project, stored com­pletely in sub­ver­sion, using ven­dor branches of WordPress, built in Zend 6 (Eclipse + some pro­pri­etary PHP stuff that I don’t actu­ally use for this).

The theme itself was based on a thought I’d had a long time ago about the last pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Namely, the utter shame­lesness and pro­pa­ganda of it. As back­ground, the United States makes it’s friends look bet­ter, and it’s ene­mies look worse than they really are. There’s more than just an ele­ment of car­toon­ish silli­ness every time some bas­tard or other is des­ig­nated “The Next Hitler” by an spokesper­son for the Executive Branch. Every gov­ern­ment does it to their for­eign rivals, and the extrem­ists in one’s own coun­try are also like­wise attacked.

What arche­typal Western gov­ern­ments typ­i­cally do not do is call other mem­bers of the gov­ern­ment “trai­tors,” schem­ing to sell Our Country down the river to who­ever the bad guy is this time around. In this regard, what the 2004 elec­tion reminded me of most was read­ing George Orwell’s descrip­tions of polit­i­cal life in the 1930s; the faux nation­al­ism that dis­be­lieved all of Stalin’s crimes (on the part of the left) and invented hor­rors by the anti-fascist resis­tance (on the part of the right). It’s sim­ply depress­ing to look at the garbage that peo­ple are expected to believe about their polit­i­cal ene­mies: Reds Crucify Nuns, Kerry con­spires to sell out U.S. with Jane Fonda dur­ing Paris Peace Talks, and this is work­ing right up to today, Barack Obama a secret Muslim, per­son­ally respon­si­ble for the cap­i­tal cri­sis.

So I started type­set­ting this web­site like a book printed in the 1930s. The header was set in a fat serif type, like the chap­ter title of a flour­ish­ing book — as opposed to one that would sim­ply print the chap­ter title in bold upper­case and waste a half a page. I dithered about that, added and removed other graph­i­cal ele­ments like the sidebar.

And this week­end I had time to sim­ply sit down and work on the site. Given then exi­gent cir­cum­stances (i.e. the implo­sion of the econ­omy), I started googling for “1930s,” and ended up see­ing some adver­tise­ments and page lay­outs from Popular Mechanix, the obvi­ous pre­cur­sor. At that point the right answer pre­sented itself: don’t model this on a book from the 1930s, model it on the other side, a mag­a­zine adver­tise­ment. The rest was sim­ply a mat­ter of fin­ish­ing the implementation.

So far as future work, what I’d like to do is retract the side­bar into a tab, and I’m think­ing about the use of drop shad­ows and gra­di­ents to give a dis­tor­tion effect when it slides out… We’ll see .