Thanks to everyone who came out to Type In The Open on Saturday evening. Over the course of the 5 hours I had about 30 people come through the door, and about half a dozen of those tried a hand at setting some type and printing on the Adana Eight Five. I got to show off the Golding Jobber No. 8 (its mechanical beauty was, by far and away, the highlight of the event), tell the story of how it came to me, and talk about type, printing and why I’m interested in it.

It was a diverse crowd, and people found there way there via a combination of Twitter, Facebook, and the posters I’d peppered around the downtown. Kenny and Winnie printed up a card for Tai Chi Gardens, I printed up a batch of Tourists Not Allowed In This Area posters, and there was a lot of interest in the collection of letterpress cuts loaned to me by Ian Scott.

A reminder that I’m opening my letterpress studio in downtown Charlottetown at The Guild tomorrow night, August 25, 2012 from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. You’re welcome to drop down any time during those hours: not only can you see my Golding Jobber No. 8 press in action, you’re welcome to try your hand at setting some metal type and printing on the smaller (and thus much easier to learn on and handle) Adana Eight Five press. There’s no charge for anything.

Here are some things to remember:

• You can enter either through the Richmond Street entrance of The Guild (all night) or, when the gallery is open, through the Queen Street entrance.
• The studio is only wheelchair accessible when the Queen Street entrance is open; you might want to ring 368-4413 before you head down to verify that entrance is open and that the lift is staffed.
• The bar in the Gallery in the Guild will be open from 8:00 p.m. onward if you want to grab a drink.
• I recommend wearing clothes you don’t mind getting dirty if you want to try your hand at printing.
• People of any age are welcome; because there’s metal type involved, which contains lead, I recommend you make a point of washing your kids’ hands after your visit (I also have latex gloves available if you want to be extra-cautious). Read Metal (Lead) Type Handling Safety if you want some background. Also, do not eat the metal type. 
• I have paper in various sizes available, but you’re welcome to bring your own paper if there’s something special you’d like to print on: the maximum printed size of the Adana Eight Five is, as you might expect, 8 by 5 inches.

Hope to see you all in the readership out tomorrow night. And be sure to take in the rest of Art in the Open while you’re around and about, especially Catherine and Lori’s installation down the street in Connaught Square.

I’ve been running a little side-project this week, working to add street numbers to the OpenStreetMap of Charlottetown. I’ve been using the excellent little Windows Phone app MapStalt Mini (from Microsoft itself, oddly enough), which makes walking up and down the block entering street numbers really easy. My goal is to number all visible addresses from Euston Street to the water. I’m making good progress; here’s the corner of Queen and Kent:

It’s remarkable, given how useful street numbers are as an aid to potential customers (to say nothing of the fire, police and ambulance), how many buildings have no visible street number at all.

Here’s what the process of “address tagging” looks like in MapStalt Mini. The app auto-detects nearby streets from your geolocation, you select one, and then you just walk down the street stopping in front of every address typing in the house number (note to Microsoft: it would be nice if the keyboard presented for this was the numeric one rather than the alphanumeric one):

If you’d like to contribute to this effort yourself, and you have a GPS-enabled mobile device (there’s free software for iOS, Android, Blackberry and many other platforms).

The nice thing about a project like this is that the data you contribute become immediately useful and usable: here’s walking directions based on address data I captured yesterday afternoon; and the OpenStreetMap itself gets updated with address numbers less than 10 minutes after you add them.

A lovely acoustic from Tim Chaisson. If they ever make a docudrama about my life, please arrange to have Tim compose the soundtrack. Also, if I am to be reincarnated, please give me a small smidgen of his talent (and perhaps a small smidge of his beard).

Everything I need to say about the new Woody Allen film To Rome with Love was better said in 1940 by type designer Frederic Goudy in his book Typologia:

To Rome with Love is a collection of interesting themes and ideas that, despite that, never come together to make a compelling whole. Sometimes this approach works; in this case it doesn’t. It’s still a worthwhile film, and if you are a fan of Allen’s work I suggest you see it; just don’t expect anything life-altering.

On our way home from the letterpress studio last night Oliver and I happened upon Cape Breton music phenomenon Carmen Townsend playing live at the far end of Victoria Row.

While Victoria Row has never struck me as an ideal venue for live music — it’s an shipping-container-shaped amphitheatre — Townsend and her band were simply too powerful not to sit and watch.

I appreciated that the “we’re out to make music not money” style of the PEI Jazz and Blues Festival meant that the street wasn’t set up like an prison yard, and had attracted a large an enthusiastic crowd. We ended up borrowing chairs from Catherine’s studio (handy-by on the second floor above where we were perched) and stayed for the entire performance. It was a great night.

Since the middle ages bass clarinet and saxophone players have traditionally been the Hatfields and the McCoys of the horn section*. As a bass clarinet player, I was always on the other side of this great divide: there I was, a playing an unknown and unloved instrument, seated in the senior band beside the tenor saxophone players with all their swager and popularity and music featuring their solos. I have avoided saxophones ever since like the plague (the only exception being the soprano saxophone; as it’s also a misunderstood instrument bass clarinet players, along with the oboists and bassoonists, formed a sort of kinship-of-the-outcast; see also Heaven Can Wait).

Imagine my surprise, then, to hear the most beautiful music echoing up Victoria Row toward my office, only to find, on investigation, that it was coming from the Nikki Schieck Sax Quartet: four saxophones (four!), creating sounds I wasn’t aware could emanate from that confounded instrument.

Consider the saxophone fully-redeemed.

Nikki Schieck Sax Quartet are Barrie Sorensen (soprano/alto sax), Dan Rowswell (baritone sax), Melissa MacRae (tenor sax) and Nikki Schieck (alto sax). They’re a joy to listen to, and if you have the chance — even, or especially if you’re a longtime anti-saxite — you should make a point of seeking them out.

* I made this up.

It took me eight years to make it inside a performance at the PEI Jazz and Blues Festival. The delay was a combination of some misplaced misgivings about what “jazz and blues” music entails and a pigheaded determination not to support a festival that had put its sponsor’s inflatable beer cans in the middle of a city street. All it took, in the end, was a multi-year soft-sell campaign by members of the Williams-Nicholson-Sorenson musical dynasty.

In the end, I’m sad I didn’t get over my misgivings many, many years ago, as the Gypsophilia-Alain Caron double bill that Oliver and I enjoyed last night at Murphy’s Community Centre was a tour de force and if it’s typical of what I’ve spent 7 years missing, then it’s a grievous loss. Here’s a taste of what we saw and heard.

Architecture Week is coming up here on Prince Edward Island again in October — you may recall coverage here  and blow-by-blow from last year — and I’ve been thinking about ways in which architects could better open their tent to we civilians (having office open houses and awards ceremonies is nice and all, but there’s only so much fun you can have in an architect’s office, no matter how nice the wine and cheese is).

Last year my friend Morgan turned me on to Minecraft, the digital world-building out of Sweden that’s sweeping the world. It took a year for me to get around to it, but after this year’s trip to Sweden I came home and installed it, and I’ve been playing it, off and on, on both my Mac and on the iPad.

Minecraft is a hard game to characterize, especially if, like me, you’re not a regular gamer, without the generally-accepted vocabulary (“a 4x vertical action scroller with HUD and MOOG capabilities,” or whatever). I’d describe it as a “limitless world where you can build cool stuff out of blocks.” There’s much more to it than that — zombies and such — but at its heart Minecraft strikes me as being essentially a game about architecture.

Which got me thinking: wouldn’t it be cool to turn more people on to Minecraft, in the company of architects. Architects, after all, spend all day, every day, thinking about nothing but architecture.

I like the idea of creating opportunties for architects to talk to real people, and for gamers — serious and casual — to learn more about architecture, and the idea of taking real-world architectural methodolgies inside a virtual world.

So I’ve proposed to the Architects Association of PEI that a “Minecraft for Architects” workshop be organized for this year’s Architecture Week: an event to bring civilians, architects, and gamers together in the same physical space for an evening of virtual space making together. And I’ve proposed to help facilitate this if asked.

If participating in, organizing or otherwise engaging in such an activity would interest you, please leave a note in the comments; ideas for format and structure are welcome too.