Some photographs — like this one of “Inside Out,” 2006, by Ueno Masao (b. 1949; Kanto region: active in Kamogawa, Chiba Prefecture; madake bamboo, rattan, and gold leaf, Asian Art Museum, gift of Ueno Masao and Tai Gallery, 2006.41, photograph by Kaz Tsuruta) — set an object against a background that subtly blends from darker to lighter tones. (The photo appears in the book Masters of Bamboo.)

In page layout you might want to fit this vertical image into a more horizontal space without losing any of the image. For a long time I struggled with the best way to accomplish this in Photoshop. If you did something like sample a tone near the edges and fill the background with that color you would get an unacceptable result like this one (copying and pasting bits of the background give results that are little if any better):

Currently I use the following simple technique. (I can’t provide many screen shots because for some reason they don’t show selections and cursors very well.)

1. First, I increase the canvas to the desired size.
2. I select a rectangle of background right up to the outside edge of the original image.
3. Next, I paste that rectangle into a new layer.
4. Then I flip the rectangle horizontally. This puts all the pixels on the edge of the selected rectangle adjacent to identical pixels in the original image.
5. With the rectangle still active, I select “free transform” and stretch it to the edge of the canvas.

This image shows the original and the two rectangles as Photoshop layers:

Here you can (sort of) see one of the rectangles that has been flipped, now ready to be stretched. I’ve circled the selection markers where you do the stretching. I unchecked the original image in the layers palette in order to show this better. Of course it fits in the blank space in the middle of this image.

This technique results in something like the image (here a little funky because of saving down for the web) below :

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• 50 things you might not know about Barack Obama : For example, e collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics, and he has read every Harry Potter book.
• Doubleday Dismissals Were Self-Inflicted : Steve Rubin should know, right?
• Who killed the blogosphere? : Or are reports of its death exaggerated? (via Observations from the Balcony)

Incoming

• Who’s been linking to Right Reading : And I thank you

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It’s by Shepard Fairey. My friend Ellen, who works at Gingko Press (currently located in Marin County but soon to move to Berkeley), informs me that the press has reprinted a choice selection of??Fairey’s work that is selling so fast they can’t keep it on the shelves. The monograph was originally published in a limited edition paperback in Japan. According to the Gingko site, the book “documents Shepard Fairey’s career from his creation of the Giant phenomenon [THE GIANT HAS A POSSE] up to and including the advent of Black Market, a San Diego design agency Fairey formed with Dave Kinsey and Philip Dewolff.”

Here’s another Fairey for you. This is called Mujer Fatal.

Fairey’s own website is obeygiant.com.

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I hear Merle Haggard is recuperating in Bakersfield following surgery for a cancerous growth on his lung. Merle is one of the most soulful singers in the tradition of Lefty Frizell (as opposed to the crappy twangy pop junk that passes for country today). There aren’t many of those guys left. I did the drawing above to express wishes for a speedy recovery.

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I also added him to my more or less endless stream of quotations.

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Over the past several days at least four of my blogs have been producing “error establishing a database connection” messages. This has been caused by server-wide loss of the mysql database connection at my host, midphpase, who claims the problem is now fixed. For how long, who knows? (Html pages, like my top-level home, rightreading.com, have, of course, not been affected by this.)

To top off my web annoyances, I was briefly hacked a couple of weeks ago. Dusk Peterson noticed this and alerted me pretty quickly, so it was all cleaned up within a day or two. But as a result, the site is now banned from Google, and even a “site:” operator search produces zero results. I have filed a reinclusion request with Google — we’ll see how long this takes.

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On the bright side, I installed a plugin that lists posts from today’s date in previous years. You can see it in action at the bottom of the left sidebar. I’m not sure how long I’ll keep it, but it’s amusing me at the moment. As a general rule the less bling the better but sometimes you’ve got to play around a little. Especially when things just aren’t going your way.

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Photo from hypertypos’ photostream

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• High ceilings spur creative thinking, study finds : Think big
• Lolita at 62 : Still spunky
• Publishers to Bush on memoir: Don???t hurry : Silence is golden
• Harper Collins death spiral : Well deserved?
• List of L.A. Times departures : It’s not a short one
• The Politics of Grace (An Entreaty to Malaysia) : A Malaysian historian ponders the US election

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But we can make an exception for Joe Lieberman.

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via thedailyaphorism.com/

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BTW, There are a few quotations here at rightreading.com as well, including this one from Wilde.

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Congratulations to Barack Obama and his campaign on their landslide victory, but even more so to the USA, which has taken a great step forward out of the depths of the past eight miserable years.

Obama’s win is being celebrated as a great moment in race relations and a triumph for black people. It is those, surely, which is wonderful and exquisitely moving.

At the same time, it’s worth remembering that America did not just select a black (as we strangely call a person with one black parent) president. It also selected a man who distinguished himself as steady, focused, capable, sensible, and eloquent. In a television interview, Obama colleague Valerie Jarrett spoke of his “core decency.” None of these are words we have heard in connection with our presidency in a long time.

So good on us.

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map via 538.com

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Obama’s 9 votes up, so now he just has to run out the clock!

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Mary Reynolds (1891-1950) was an innovative book binder who for three decades enjoyed a relationship with Marcel Duchamp described by friends as “happier than most marriages.” Susan Glover Godlewski has written about her life and career, and examples of her work can be seen at the Mary Reynolds Collection (affiliated with the Art Institute of Chicago).

A post at Ordinary finds called this extraordinary binding for Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (Ubu the King) to my attention. It quotes the Reynolds Collection:

This binding is perhaps the best known and most successful of the collaborations between Reynolds and Duchamp. On November 26, 1934, Duchamp visited his close friend Henri-Pierre Roch?? in Arago and excitedly reported on a binding that he had just designed for Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi that Mary Reynolds was going to execute. Reynolds and Duchamp created out of the binding itself an extraordinarily clever pun. Both the front and back covers are cut-out “U’s” covered in rich earth tones; the spine is a soft caramel B. The endpapers are made of black moir?? silk. A gold crown, signifying the puppet king, is imprinted on the front flyleaf and visible through the front cut-out “U”. The author’s name is imprinted in gold on the back flyleaf and is similarly visible through the back U. The binding spread open spells “UBU.” Reynolds must have spent considerable time executing this binding. We know from a letter from Duchamp, responding to a question from Katharine Kuh, that the binding was not completed until 1935. It is expertly and lovingly crafted. Both Duchamp and Reynolds were so pleased with the final work, that another copy was bound identically for the American collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

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Paris: Librairie Charpentier et Fasquele, 1921. Binding: morocco, levant, and niger (goatskins) with silk and glassine endpapers. Mary Reynolds Collection, MR 253.

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Ordinary Finds - Book binding for Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry

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• The pain of readings : I know it well
• L’Art Arabe:?? Beautiful book designs
• A big bookstore : Where everything is big
• Google books settlemen : Some issues remain
• What’s Paul Theroux Reading? : Hint: it’s not pop fiction

Duly quoted

• “Obama is running out of states if you follow out a traditional model. Today, he expanded his buy into North Dakota, Georgia and Arizona in an attempt to widen the playing field and find his 270 Electoral Votes. This is a very tall order and trying to expand into new states in the final hours shows he doesn’t have the votes to win.” — McCain campaign manager Rick Davis

Recent inlinks

• Recent incoming links : Thank you

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Someone gave me a Pogo book recently. Among memorable campaigns, the possum’s ranks high. Howland’s comment above reminds us that it’s a good thing for Obama that Democrats now control the secretary of state position in several swing states.

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The McCain campaign, meanwhile, is still working on their clothing argument.

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UPDATE, 11/05, via??Newsweek …

NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin’s shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain’s top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family–clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards. The McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent “tens of thousands” more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast,” and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.

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This is the latest in my left face/right face series. I noticed Gary Busey has a very asymmetrical face. The original photo is in the middle. The image on the left is composed of the right side of his face repeated, and the image on the right is made up of two left sides.

I don’t claim it means much, but it’s like light through a spectrum. All those colors equal white, and these faces put together equal, well, Gary Busey, I guess.

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• Literary voices : BBC puts recordings of Woolf, Steinbeck, Doyle, Waugh, Nabokov, and more online
• Margaret Drabble claims she us being pressured to “dumb down” her writing : “‘They don’t quite know whether I’m highbrow or literary,’ she said.”
• Bloomsbury gives it away : In order to get more back
• Will sell rare books for gas money : Signs of the times
• Recommended books on writing : Not this list, a different one
• Art beats science! : Doesn’t it? (In any case, Jonathan Hoeffler writes very small.)

Duly quoted

• “You should think of that as unthinkable.???
  – Press secretary Tony Fratto

News of the day

• Oct. 24, 1901: U.S. troops go on killing rampage in the Philippines

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Impossible not to talk politics now. So let’s look at the electoral map. It’s hard to see how McCain can pull this one out. Even Ohio + Florida don’t seem to give him enough, assuming:

• Obama sweeps New England and the lower northeast
  NY 31 + NJ 15 + MA 12 + MD 10 + CT 7 + ME 4 + NH 4 + RI 4 + VT 3 + DC 3 + DE 3 = 96EV
• In the rust belt, Obama takes PA 21 + MI 17 = 38EV
• Obama sweeps the north central states
  IL 21 + WI 10 + MN 10 + IA 7 = 48EV
• In the mountains and southwest, Obama takes CO 9 + NM 5 = 14EV
• Obama sweeps the Pacific states
  CA 55 +WA 11 +OR 7 +HI 4 = 77EV

Those states give 96+38+48+14+77 = 273EV

All of them look pretty strong for him right now. Even if he has losses among this group he could make up the electoral votes from the pool of swing states that includes FL 27, OH 20, NC 15, MO 11, NV 5 = 78EV

No wonder the McCain campaign is going for the hail mary. They need to hold all of the states I haven’t mentioned, take both FL and OH, pull at least one state from the Obama column listed above, plus pull additional states if they have any losses among the NC, MO, NV group, or indeed in any other states.

It’s likely we will see more attempts by the McCain campaign or its supporters to exploits racial fears especially in the southern seaboard states, where McCain needs to wrest VA, NC, SC, GA, and FL into his column by hook or by crook.

Obama needs to watch his back among the states I’ve counted for him (such as in NH, PA, MN, CO, NM) and keep the pressure on in FL, OH, NC, and other swing states. By all accounts he has a strong ground game, and if McCain goes into November in this same position, as seems likely, Obama had better have a lot of sharp people watching for chicanery at the polls, which will be McCain’s last shot at sneaking in.

We will probably see a lot of dirty tricks and many legal challenges related to polling in this election.

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This great photo is from a series by Andy Clymer devoted to Las Vegas’s Neon Beonyard, where neon signs go to die be preserved for posterity.

The Boneyard, according to??Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler & Frere-Jones, is “a project of the Neon Museum, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and study of one of the nation???s great lettering traditions, the neon boneyard is of course located in the Las Vegas desert: an ideal climate for preservation, and convenient to the center of the energetic neon carnage of the 21st century.”

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I wonder how old this ghost type is. Located on an old building in historic Sutter Creek in Amador County in California’s Sierra Nevada (the town takes its name from John A. Sutter, who owned the sawmill where gold was found in January 1848), it reads “Brignole Estate General Merchandise.”

According to a history of Amador County published in 1927, “Bartholomeo Brignole … an energetic and scholarly young Italian, came to California in 1850, and mined successfully in the hills about Jackson and Sutter Creek, returning to Italy to claim his bride, afterward establishing their home in Sutter Creek in 1863. In that year, the business was founded where it is today, and is the oldest active mercantile establishment in Sutter Creek. ”

So the store was still operating in 1927 — but for how long afterward?

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I might be without internet for about a week. I haven’t built up a reservoir of posts because I’ve been working on other stuff, so posting will be light. Be back soon.

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