Though I love the name Ira, we'd pretty much settled on Eli for the kid... a pity then that Chris Evans nabbed it so publicly last week. He gets called Meatloaf or Frazzle-Face right now, but I think we're pitching for Orson; it sounds a bit like 'Our Son', teams well with Underwood, and —even better— means bear-like. Trouble is, everybody says 'Like Orson Welles?'... whose real name was George.

 

There's a few other Orsons though; the feral original from a 14th century tale Valentine & Orson (pictured here in a 1566 street theatre study from Bruegel), or the intense looking phrenologist, Orson Squire Fowler, advocator of social reform and octagonal houses. With all this quick Wikipedia knowledge, I should apply for a job as a research assistant!

• model-maker's pic from the amazing smallhousepress

• Incendiary still from Jordan's Dance, 1977, which forms part of Derek Jarman's Jubilee and is reprised this week for a timely screening on The Mall at the ICA.

From the Corner...

What with last week's dual role as hospital patient/jittery new parents, we completely missed the preview of From the Corner of Your Eye to the Corner of the Room and Back Again, the new show from an old friend, Tom Gidley. There's another of Paradise Row's artisits, Barry Reigate, who Edward's known since they were 11... you can take it from me, that's a very long time!

25.5.12 - 30.6.12, Paradise Row Gallery, 74a Newman Street, London W1T 3DB

Ouch!

I know childbirth's not exactly a rare biological phenomenon, so I'll try not to prattle on; suffice it to say we had a boy. All humility aside, at 9lb 13oz (4440g) I deserve a giant medal. The nurse for the 3-month scan wrote the gender on a scrap of paper and stapled it shut. The urge to look was strong for the first few days but soon wore off. Her '98% certain' proved 100% correct. Now, to discover his name.

Joop Zoetemelk trains with his wife, Francoise. In 1980 Joop won the Tour de France on a TI Raleigh frame designed by Alan Oakley (1927-2012)

RSI

Out of the studio this week is an 30x40cm print version of the Splashing Whale (one of our earliest surviving card designs) and a monotone version of a house print. We've done limited runs of a house print in the past but mixing three tones of ink with any true precision is tough, the middle shade is never exactly betwixt light and dark, and what works in the pot may not work on paper. Here the tones rely fully on pattern and texture. Signing 100 prints apiece makes my faltering fingers feel funny.

 

Our Love

Donna Summer (1948-2012) featured on a handful of popular culture's finest moments, for sure, but that AIDS-as-punishment-from-God controversy was a real stinker and no mistake. Here's the only link I can find to 1979's Our Love, a track not really cited in today's obituaries though I love the Acid touches at the end/drum pattern on the chorus... and so did New Order! The images are Gran Fury's late 80s agitprop for ACT UP, to whom she later apologised.

Whoa!

I know this sight's almost obscene, but I'm 38 weeks pregnant and Edward's wardrobe is really coming into its own; care worn t-shirts for sleeping and oversized shirts in the day. Luckily I've avoided those pleated cap-sleeved jersey numbers (with the curious floaty empire-line) and stuck to sack-like dresses like a penance. The Earth rumbles and cups of liquid ripple when I approach, I'm pretty sure I'll not be sneaking up on anyone anytime soon.

 

•

David Weiss (of Fischli & Weiss), 1946-2012

Saddened by the deaths this week of Adam "MCA" Yauch and the outspoken Maurice Sendack. Sendack's work had seen such a resurgence of interest in these past few years, been made so ubiquitous, that I was temporarily blind to it. An interview with Tom McCarthy highlighted structural similarities with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (c. 1899), recast Max as Kurtz, and made me revisit Where the Wild Things Are (1963); noticing—for the first time—that smart formal game whereby the bordered illustrations progress to fill the page, form wordless double spreads at the carnivalesque climax and fall away once more at the tail end. Proper genius.

• The In Sound from Way Out! Gershon Kingly & Jean Jaques Perrey's 1966 thrift-classic which forms the nominal inspiration for both The Beastie Boys' 1996 LP and Stereolab.

So pleased to receive a copy of One Timid Babbler from Silver Jungle's Joanna Skipwith this week. The same little format as our collaborations, One Timid Babbler features Hannah Turner's fantastic illustrations of equally fantastically named birds: Lemon Poplets; Sugar Marshlings; Chesnut Ruffles; Banded Frowls or Fiery Smidgeons. A simple counting game is introduced with each bird, building to more complex additions, with colour and pattern also combining to a cacophonous chorus! The dawn fade on the cover is paired with a dusk fade on the closing pages and all are wonderfully offset with a smashing Modern/Didone typeface. See more at Silver Jungle... and maybe check-out our books while you're there. Tee-hee!

The Write Stuff

Well, what with The Bard's birthday and World Book Night #2, it's been one belletristic week. Also on the subject of writing, it's been National Stationery Day... no, honestly. Keen to stress the tactile, visual or creative aspects of old-time communication in the age of email, National Stationery Day arrives alongside a 30% hike in postal prices that should ensure the letter's luxury status, and maybe seal its fate.

448th

If only the English Renaissance diet had been a little better Shakespeare would've celebrated his 448th birthday this week. Here's an illustration of Anne Hathaway's cottage from an old biscuit tin lid. The artwork is uncredited but the style (especially on the sides) puts me in mind of Edward Pond, whose illustration was an integral feature of Thameslink's old rolling stock.

,',','

Rats! I think I've got a dose of the national pastime, obsessing over the weather. It could have its own clickable category here on the right but it just wouldn't be fair to the rest.

• Façades & Faces, Osbert Lancaster, John Murray 1950

The short answer to Milly's recent question is yes... there's fewer walls to bounce off. I'd love to post some more pics of our home online, but the tiny stone yurt still needs so much attention. Here's an exterior view from 1935; a well-cropped shot of the interior; another rundhaus in Aalen, Germany; and The Round Building in Derbyshire (ostensibly a factory), designed by Michael Hopkins for David Mellor in 1990.

The latter's circularity isn't entirely void of symbolic content; it's interesting to note that, eschewing the prevalent C20 trend for Fordism, Mellor encouraged his metal workers to "rotate from task to task, increasing job satisfaction through a sense of involvement in the project as a whole".[1]

Happy Easter

Coming up short on seasonal post inspiration, I thought I'd snap some charity shop pots around a tenuous Easter theme. The eggs and birds are obvious but, just in case you're wondering, the fish is for Good Friday and that there's an Easter Bonnet... well, I did mention it was tenuous.

• Studio pottery bird jug, 1953, mark unclear, found here
• Studio pottery bird vase, unmarked, found here
• Guldkroken white bust vase, found here
• Studio pottery egg vase, mark unclear, found here
• Amateur (but characterful) fish dish, unmarked, also found here

Ship-Shape Shed

When we got here this shed was a huge rotting rhombus of wood the colour of gravy. After so much attention (a few new panels, some cross-braces and a lick of paint), I'm hoping it'll last a couple more years. Now it really needs a length of gutter and a water-butt to counter the coming drought.

Listen, I realise my life's completely dull but what should I do, make stuff up? Next week: pure lies.

Nice to see the BBC use Faber & Faber's preferred font, Albertus, throughout the otherwise unremarkable Arena documentary The Dreams of William Golding. "Unprecedented access to the unpublished diaries" did little to dull the image of Golding teaching while writing bombastic boys books destined only to be taught. Yet between those well-known works, sodden with allegory, there's a peculiar, less noisy novelist. I'm unsure what led me to some of the in-between works, Free Fall (1959) for instance, the truly odd Darkness Visible (1979), or the late literary romp The Paper Men (1984), but they're all still there on the shelf; a watermark of sorts. Sometimes I half expect to find Golding's imagined town, Stillborn, out there on Google Maps.

I love this photo by my friend, Virginie Vaulot, especially as I know these are her daughter's* favourite trousers. After holding out until spring to re-post, I figure we're nearly there now; this week saw the vernal equinox... the official end of winter! Sometimes Virginie lets rip with a piece of writing to accompany Hips Like Boys, her online photo-journal, and it's almost as excellent as hearing her speak.

* I say daughter, more like long-term collaborator.

Culpable Earth

We didn't make it to the opening night of an old friend's exhibition, for a pregnant woman it seemed far too far for a couple of hours of standing and shmoozing. Hopefully we made up for it by taking the round trip to Colchester a couple of weeks later. Standing over the final plinth of Steven Claydon's Culpable Earth (lathed wooden cylinders resembling tins, a modular Euclidean cube in red on a recessed back-lit resin bed) another visitor struck-up conversation.

Like most awkward people, I tend to deflect suspected small-talk with a series of stock responses (you know the drill, every statement a light conclusion, never a leading question. Polite and trite in equal measure), and yet this energetic septuagenarian engendered something else entirely. Emboldened and enlivened by the work, we all spoke for a time about the stranglehold of Catholic symbolism; object/artefact/relic; transubstantiation and the appearance of matter; the pure becoming of life; the imperceptible end of a bell's open note; and his expansive hunch that some moments can never be truly lost in time but continue to unfold everywhere and always at once.

On the train back to Liverpool Street we laughed at the way the stranger had become and integral part of the show... or at least our experience of it. It's a pity he won't be waiting there for everyone, an uplifting and interpretive tool for an artist who's often awkward and always engaging. Sure, Essex isn't the most glamourous destination but with an ancillary gallery pairing Constable's cloud studies with Carl Andre's infamous Equivalent VIII, there's certainly a stack of reasons for visiting Firstsite this season.

Steven Claydon: Culpable Earth, 4 February - 7 May 2012

Firstsite, Lewis Gardens, High Street, Colchester CO1 1JH

• from Steven Claydon's Culpable Earth, 2012 [Andy Keate]
• Firstsite, Colchester, Rafael Viñoly Architects, 2012 [Richard Bryant]
• John Constable, Rainstorm over the Sea, c.1824-1828
• Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, 1978, Firebricks