The tragic beauty of burns

Plus the funny fate of Comic Sans, Murat poll results, a film with Ray Troll, and a health update from Barbara.

PICTURE & WORDS

Miller’s Butte (left) in Jackson, Wyoming.

SMOKE IS DANGEROUS to breathe, but can add complexity and beauty to a photograph. In a picture, smoke evokes the mysterious or ethereal or obscure. Like fog, it offers a layering and light-filtering effect if not too dense. On a recent trip, my friend Brian Goodman and I encountered heavy smoke in Jackson, Wyoming, where the Air Quality Index the day before we arrived was in the 140s—unsafe for breathing—and in the 90s when we checked into a local motel the following evening. The smoke emanated mainly from a fire in Grand Teton National Park, the Pack Trail Fire, which has burned roughly 90,000 acres and is still not fully contained. The famous peaks themselves were barely visible—ghosts in the distance.

We saw huge swaths of burned forest on our trip through Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. These forests revealed a tragic beauty as new growth emerged among the blackened trees. I took this early-morning photograph of Miller’s Butte from a roadside stop just a few miles from the entrance to the Tetons. A large group of ducks huddled in one corner of the reeded wetland seen in the foreground. Birds’ respiratory systems, evolved for flight, are especially sensitive to smoke, which also impairs their ability to see and hunt. When they fly to a new location, they face competition from locals. Sadly, like the rest of us in the western United States, they’ve been forced to live with more fires and smoke in recent years.

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FOR THE LOVE OF TYPE

As a kid, I always wondered if I was named after the comic-pages detective—the only other Kerry I knew. This is the way Comic Sans should be used—in a hand-drawn comic.

Sans comedy

A VERY SMART FRIEND recently asked me: Why make such a big deal about type? I could tell by the quizzical look on his face that the question was sincere. But since typography has been such an enormous part of my life for decades, and I like this fellow, I had to suppress my stupefaction. The mantra of a favorite character in Ted Lasso— “Soccer is life!”—popped into my head. Type is life, I wanted to say. Instead, gathering myself, I explained that the history of typography is the history of writing—remember those calligraphic monks toiling away at their desks?—and therefore the history of recorded thought. Type, I pronounced, is all around you if you take the time to notice. Didn’t work. The puzzlement scrunched up on his face remained.

Well, this morning I ran across an article in no less an august publication than The Atlantic about the genesis and journey of a single typeface. Comic Sans went from a popular explosion after its almost accidental introduction in 1994 to a severe backlash from true type lovers to a severe backlash against the backlash, and finally to an un-ironic “meh.”

Comic Sans has long been the “Macarena” of fonts. Type aficionados don’t like it, the way coffee connoisseurs don’t like Starbucks. It is the font everyone loves to hate. But I love to love it. More than the typeface itself, I love the idea of Comic Sans: a set of letters that can make people suddenly intrigued, and sometimes cross. No other font gets people so worked up. When was the last time you had an argument over Garamond or Calibri?

Well, actually, I can get worked up over Garamond, especially in comparing the sloppy bastardized versions with the original cut by the 16th century French printer whose name it bears. (Calibri by Microsoft is milk-toast by design.) Still, I count an article on a typeface in The Atlantic as a win. Moreover, I learned that the article by Simon Garfield is an excerpt from his book, Comic Sans: The Biography of a Typeface. Another of his twenty books won the Somerset Maugham Award and he’s currently writing a history of the pen. Isn’t that proof enough of the central importance of typography in the history of humankind? And isn’t this true regardless of my sour distaste for the use of Comic Sans in anything other than comics?

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HEALTH UPDATE

Happy heart

LONGTIME SUBSCRIBERS to Wild Things know I went through a scary set of medical problems earlier this year. Here’s a quick update.

Following open heart surgery in March, my recovery was complicated by recurrent atrial fibrillation, a heart rhythm abnormality that significantly interfered with my daily life. On October 2nd I had a catheter ablation, a procedure where they insert a tube into a vein in your groin and thread it into your heart. Through this tube, they can both freeze and fry various spots inside your heart in order to disrupt the “short circuits” that create abnormal heart beats. The procedure can sometimes be quick, just 15-30 minutes in some cases, or lengthy in more complicated situations. My ablation took four and a half hours.  

Apparently it worked. While it takes three whole months to fully assess ablation success or failure, so far so good. I’m now able to exercise normally, climb stairs whenever I want, and be as active as I care to be. Last week I had an echocardiogram (echo), an imaging test that creates a real time video of both heart structure and motion, allowing a dynamic assessment of the heart’s function. My echo results were great. I am on the mend! I actually feel, from the inside, my heart’s newly found strength. The echo offers objective proof, but the feeling is even better. 

—Barbara Ramsey

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Murat Poll Results

Your votes have been tallied and the results are in. Is Murat a creep?

YES 21% NO 42% MAYBE 37%

Hmmm… I’ve learned something from this. While I’m a huge Murat fan and don’t find him at all creepy, your votes have shown me that part of his draw is his ambiguity. Not merely his male/female, hetero/homo ambiguity, but all his other ambiguities: Campy or solemn? Virtual or real? Wig or real hair? Comic or serious? Genuine or fake? You can love him or hate him—or he can remain a mysterious in-between. —BR

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A LITTLE HELP FROM OUR FRIENDS

THIS ANIMATED film illustrated by our pal Ray Troll and produced by his son Patrick is a delightful climb through the tree of life. The entire history of protoplasm on our planet is covered in five minutes, narrated by paleontologist Henry Gee with a jaunty Cambridge accent. Do yourself a favor.

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FINALLY, HERE’S ANOTHER LITTLE NUMBER FROM ELLE

WARNING: If you have trouble distinguishing a PDF from a PNG, this probably won’t help. The rest of you, ZIP it.