can you feel his disease?

YOU LOVE, YOU WONDER

You love a woman and you wonder where she goes all night in some tricked-
out taxicab, with her high heels and her corset and her big, fat mouth.

You love how she only wears her glasses with you,
how thick
and cow-eyed she swears it’s only ever you
she wants to see.

You love her, you want her very ugly. If she is lovely big, you want her
scrawny. If she is perfect lithe, you want her ballooned, a cosmonaut.

How not to love her, her bouillabaisse, her orangina. When you took her
to the doctor the doctor said, “Wow, look at that!” and you were proud,

you asshole, you love and that’s how you are in love.
Any expert, observing
human bodies, can see how she’s exceptional, how she ruins us all.

But you really love this woman, how come no one can see this? Everyone must
become suddenly very clumsy
at recognizing beauty
if you are to keep her.

You don’t want to lose anything, at all, ever. You want her sex depilated, you
want everyone else not blind, but perhaps paralyzed,
from the eyes down.

You wonder where she goes all night. If she leaves you,
you will know
everything about love. If she’s leaving you now,
you already know it.

Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy,
“You Love, You Wonder”
from
Interior with Sudden Joy.
Copyright © 1999
by Brenda Shaughnessy.

the alternate shaping of reality

while some 60s poster artists looked to french art nouveau, others looked to vienna. particularly when it came to lettering, alfred roller's font was nearly ubiquitous.

"The lettering by Alfred Roller in this poster he designed for a Secessionist exhibition in 1903 was the major source of inspiration for Wes Wilson and the other San Francisco poster artists of the 1960s period." 1

other designers of that moment included kolomon moser, but even on his own posters, he used variations of roller's fonts.

david goines borrowed from wiener werkstatte fonts (along with many others) in his posters as well.

when i was living in the haight-ashbury district of san francisco in the late 60s, my favorite poster artist was mari tepper. her work was so different from the rest, but now i see echos of vienna here as well.

why, you might ask, should there be such a strong influence from secession vienna on bay area artists? patience, grasshopper. all will be shown in the end.

beyond the letter- ing, we saw the alternate shaping of reality which may easily explain the way the fonts look different in the hands of wilson versus their originator. what do you think?