This adage of the traditional bohemian artist has become the first commandment for freelancers everywhere in today’s economy. Addicted to deadlines, we’re supposed to imagine burnout lurking around the corner, as we’re working ourselves to the bone.

Today, December 9, as we just finished Novembre Issue 2 (out in January, so get ready) I’m savouring the pleasures of exhaustion and thinking: the corner is not a straight angle. It’s a round one. A neverending one, that you can endlessly follow, never reaching any horizon. Time is never up, countdown never hits zero and this is it. This is how it must be, it could have been different but it’s not, no drama.

Yet the constant state of exhaustion that we’re in can be used as a way to produce new spaces. Overspending and exhaustion are not only moments in the cyclical patterns of capitalism’s reproduction and regeneration anymore. They are spaces of latencies, of levitation. Why not consider the potentials of that peculiar production? Nothing can be burnt anymore, anyway. We’ve already reached the state of ashes, soft and volatile. No spell to break. We’re not too drunk to fuck, we’re simply drunk all the time and fucking all the time. Let’s forget about the horizon and actualise latencies, as they can too be faster, better and stronger.

Let’s keep working oursevles to the bone, let’s reveal ashes beyond fire, and life beyond blood.

Above, “SUNSET, I love the horizon”, 2008, by Andro Wekua. (published by Le Magasin)

Sang Bleu is happy to announce that its sister company B&P recently produced this special version of its “Didot” typeface on behalf of Adrien Pelletier, new Art Director of l’Officiel Paris. Speaking of B&P, we are currently working on a brand new website and several new releases, coming out very shortly on www.swisstypefaces.com!

At a release party for V magazine, you might find:

Yesterday we attended to the Launch of the 26th issue of iconic french fashion magazine Encens. It took place at non-any-less-iconic NY store Atelier on Hudson street. Needless to say, the cream of the crop was to be found among the attendees. Pictured here Zana Bayne (wearing a very impressive new piece of hers), Nikki Moose & jewelry designer Jonathan Goldstein.

see you there!

In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over tabletop scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.

Until now.

HERE, download “Scan This Book!” by Kevin Kelley in New York Times Magazine (May 14th, 2006)

The essay is divided into 9 rather appetizing sections.

1. Scanning the Library of Libraries
2. What Happens When Books Connect
3. Books: The Liquid Version
4. The Triumph of the Copy
5. The Moral Imperative to Scan
6. The Case Against Google
7. When Business Models Collide
8. Search Changes Everything

Kevin Kelly is the “senior maverick” at Wired magazine and author of “Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World” and other books. He last wrote for the magazine about digital music.

Above: woodcut from Swift’s Battle of the Books.

THE MANIPULATOR magazine was born in 1984 into a world almost unimaginable today: no cell-phones, no internet, no Adobe Photoshop, no digital cameras. In those quondam times, it was the cordless phone, the fax machine, the colour-copier and the Apple IIc that defined the technologically savvy.
Johnno du Plessis

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