re: The Pick Of The Day

quote:

---

Elderly people 1929

---

quote:

---

Al Jaffee, one of Mad magazine’s longtime “Usual Gang of Idiots,” is enjoying a rather unusual week. Several days ago, the cartooning legend got vaccinated for the coronavirus. On March 13, he plans to celebrate turning 100 years old.

“Hitting the century mark in age, it’s a nice number” for the brain to consider, Jaffee said with a warm laugh Thursday from his New York home — even if some body parts don’t “seem to appreciate it.”

---

quote:

---

Jaffee, who made his Mad debut 65 years ago, is best-known for the magazine’s iconic back-page Fold-In — he has created more than 450 of them — and the running feature “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.”

“The most impressive thing about Al and his work is his seemingly bottomless well of great ideas for features, and how varied they are,” says caricaturist Tom Richmond, who rendered the new center-spread piece. “If all he did was invent the Fold-In and write and draw it for 55 years, that would already be deserving of legend status. But he did so much more: comic books, comic strips and features for Mad that were completely different from one to the next.”

---

quote:

---

it’s hard to feature a time when records came wrapped in plain brown paper like cheap booze or covered in nondescript bindings like business ledgers. But this was the case, before another widely admired designer, Alex Steinweiss, more or less invented the album cover in 1939 at the age of 22.

---

quote:

---

There had been cover art before, during the age of the 78 rpm record, but only for the rare special release. Most music came stamped with its contents and little else. Initially contracted by Columbia Records to produce better jackets for the unwieldy 78, Steinweiss soon became the label’s art director and convinced them to try out several full color designs inspired by French and German modernist poster art. When Columbia released the first vinyl LP in 1948, Steinweiss not only designed the cover, but he invented the paperboard jacket that still surrounds records today.

---

quote:

---

While much of pop culture today is siphoning through old ‘90s grunge for a retro fix, photographers like Robbie Augspurger show us what it is to truly appreciate the past. The Oregonian has an eye for shining light on odd pop-culture archives – old VHS covers, Olan Mills family photos – and honing that obscurity into modern shots for bands like Wampire and Blitzen Trapper. His photos often hint at humor, but more than anything they're alluring, so much so that Balenciaga picked Augspurger out of the blue in fall of 2017 and put him at the helm of shooting their spring line. Since then, Augspurger has launched into working with Louis Vuitton, Numéro, and was even profiled by Vogue. He hasn't lost his taste for the old stuff, though.

---