Back in my 1-year stint at New Age Retailer magazine, I got to do a layout now and again. This is one of them, a radical departure from my regular rock band/music industry stuff.
Back when I was krazy for kung fu, I threw together this photo. I looked to old 70′s Karate/Kung Fu magazines for inspiration/theft. Note matchie-matchie ad that compliments this poster, likely to run in What’s Up! or the Bellingham Herald.
Note Johnny Cage shadow kick.
This was for a modern dance event at WWU back in the college days. The theme of the show, IIRC, was new dances that hadn’t had a lot of rehearsal time to finalize the show. I had made a real arty poster, but then on a whim I chased an idea. I bought a steak, scanned it, cooked it, and finished this poster while eating it.
Of the two designs, this is the one Nolan, the director, chose. I always wondered if people would read too much into the fact that the steak looks like Africa, but no one said anything about it.
I don’t know that this ever saw the light of day until now. The big image is scanned from a MONSTER film trade journal I got at an estate sale. The rest are from a book on monster makeup that I had when I was a a kid, lost, and then found again at a book sale at the Bellingham Public Library. All press type set by hand.
IIRC, there was a miscommunication and someone else’s poster got printed/hung.
Maybe.
So here’s a long opinion video about how Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing, and went on to fill The Shining with many, many hidden messages about the experience. I’ll be the first to confess that the filmmaker’s obsession with numerology in this admittedly thorough study alllllmost ruins it for me. Narrator straddles the line between “astute guy with time on his hands” and “conspiracy theorist.” But it’s still funscinating.
If you’re like me, you know there are advantages to flexing your well-oiled tolerance muscles like a good liberal, so please do so and strap in. If you pretend that the numerology isn’t here, and instead focus on the film’s musings on The Shining’s undeniable use of symbolism, it becomes clear that something might just be going on here at more than a just a surface level—which has always been true of The Shining.
But still. This is a fascinating take on the picture. It didn’t change my mind, as I still have yet to be convinced that there’s been a fake moon landing, which is something of a prerequisite here.
Here’s The Shining Code 2.0, from Michael Wysmierski.
I watched the whole thing. Good to have on in the background while you are sorting laundry or cleaning house. Which you should do, by the way. It looks like a tornado hit in there.
I found this while looking up more info on Room 237, which I just saw, and was awesome, and contains at least five different film nerd theories on what The Shining is really about.
The only show I ever put on, I was a nervous wreck. Tons of underage drinking going on in the street outside the venue—the oldest brick building in the state.
The bull is lifted from a liquor advert from an old Playboy mag, but what’s really interesting about this one to me is how well that freebie font called whatchamajig works with it.
While it wasn’t my common charge, I was tasked with designing an ad or two at New Age Retailer. No industry gets more use out of glowy, cloudy Photoshop layer effects.
Client supplied the unnerving photo, and I went whacko with the “Stroke” command in Photoshop. Type was done with a real-deal typewriter and scanned in.
I did a few of these f0r the Bellingham Roller Betties back in the day, but I don’t even remember doing this one. But I must have, it was on my hard drive. Looks like some of the usual suspects. I think the gal doing the punching was a stock photo of a female boxer that I found, with the eyes of a black metal musician and the mouth of The Joker, but turned upside down to look completely horrible.
A style imitation; aka going a little far for a Facebook joke.
