#289: Budapest Skull Fest!

Széchenyi Chain Bridge, Budapest

Because nothing quite warms the heart like a cute skull stencil -- not to mention a cute skull stencil spray-painted on a Hungarian bridge. I've linked to this site once before, but I was delighted to learn that the skullifically adorable Skull-A-Day site is still in operation. So if this little guy captures your heart, you'll find more of the same there. Not to mention skull wallpaper, skull vintage vacuum tubes, and "Pancake Love Skulls." You're welcome.

#50: Onward

Pest, Budapest

#96: The Wires

#97: Straight and Arrow

Buda, Budapest

Once again, while everyone else was strolling the historic streets of Budapest in search of pretty postcard views and gazing out at the lovely Danube, I turned my camera's gimlet eye to the cryptic and forgotten municipal signs so lonesome and unnoticed I practically wanted to open a shelter for them. I've been told these arrow-and-number signs indicate underground sewer systems, but I like to believe there are mutant turtles down there, and that maybe this 97 helps them plot their super linear ninja attacks.

#289: Skullduggery

Széchenyi Chain Bridge, Budapest

Despite the perfectly good, never-before-seen #289 in my arsenal, I couldn't resist bringing this little guy back for a second look. What can I say? I just saw the Pogues play at Terminal 5 and they've got more skulls on their merch than Jolly Roger's T-shirt drawer, so I guess you could say I've got skulls on the brain. (Heh. I've also got brains in my skull.) Here's one more for the collection -- a lurker painted on the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, which spans the Danube and connects Buda to Pest.

Winged Defeat

Buda, Budapest

#289

#289, Budapest

Skulls: they make me feel so warm and fuzzy. I found this lurker painted on the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, which spans the Danube and connects Buda to Pest. If you like this little guy, be sure to check out the non-stop skullfest over at Skull-A-Day. And while you're there, why not download the delightful Skullphabet font? It's free and it's cute, and with Halloween just around the corner, the time for free skull fonts is now. Kind of brings a whole new meaning to the word typeface, doesn't it?

#97

#97, Buda, Budapest

Today, &7 takes a look at the mysterious wall plates of Budapest: What are they? What do the numbers mean? Why do they look like they've been poked with industrial-strength thumbtacks? And what's up with the arrows?

I was fascinated with these cryptic signs that I found all over buildings in Budapest. Each sign was smaller than a license plate and could usually be found at eye level in a relatively inconspicuous place: on the side of a building rather than near a door. There was never any accompanying text -- not that the Hungarian would've been much of a clue -- and I was left doing what I do best: wondering what it all meant.

Sifting through the archives to come up with today's 97, I was reminded of this 97's uncanny resemblance to 72. I wish now that I'd compiled more, but here's a sampling. A cryptic triptych, if you will. Say that five times fast. And if anyone knows what these symbols represent or wants to take a guess, let me know.

And put on your Advanced Hieroglyph hat for this last one:

#95

#95, Buda, Budapest

Because it makes things easier, I try to learn the language of the places I visit. I can say "I'd like the check please" in Czech and "I need help" in German. I once knew how to ask for a cigarette in Irish and I can drink to your health in Italian. One thing I cannot do, however, is make heads, tails, or middles out of Magyar, the Hungarian arrangement of the alphabet they insist on calling a language. Now, I know the Magyar tongue is a rich and complex language unlike any other European or romance languages, and I'm sure there is a beauty to the Finno-Ugric language group that is related, somewhat distantly, to Estonian, Finnish, and a handful of other minor languages found in Western Siberia, that I'm just not grasping. But what can I say? I can't be a master of everything.

This inscription comes from a museum plaque in Budapest. I know neither who nor what the text says and I haven't a clue what the 95 represents. So I'm opening this up to my readers, skilled as you are in navigating the unexplained intricacies of the Word Verification word system, to interpretation. Who, or what, is "OVAROSI TANACS"? Is it man, woman, mineral, or vegetable? Or is it something far more nefarious? And what's so special about that 95?

#92

#92, Kossuth tér, Pest, Budapest


This number always reminds me of a line from Edward Gorey's The Disrespectful Summons , a delightfully ghastly illustrated tale wherein a fiendish flying imp named Beelphasaur presents a lady, recently visited by the Devil, with a book called Ninety-Two Entirely Evil Things to Do . This she proceeds to read in bed with great curiosity. I love books within books, especially when they're books that don't exist. Borges and his libraries come to mind, as does Leopold Bloom buying The Sweets of Sin for his wife in Ulysses.

For the curious browser, there is, fortunately, the The Invisible Library, which has catalogued a list of titles of "imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound." Gorey's fictions-within-fictions appear here, including not just Ninety-Two Entirely Evil Things to Do but also The Toothpaste Murder. The Invisible Library is also the place for you if you are looking to peruse the complete list of works by Philip Jose Farmer (via Kilgore Trout, via Kurt Vonnegut), including classics such as Quarantine!, No Nose Means Bad News, and What Am I Doing on Your Table? Have fun wandering the stacks.

#77

#77, train between Vienna & Budapest

In one of the dozens of black binders laying about my apartment, enclosed in a rope-tie envelope, is a clipping from very old issue of Print magazine. The article is called "Trainspotting." While it's just as likely that at the time the article appeared, I was avidly clipping magazine pictures of Ewan MacGregor for his role in the movie by the same name, the article is in fact about trainspotting itself: the odd pastime of watching trains and obsessively remarking on the serial numbers, details, and arrival and departure times. It's what I would spend all my days doing if I was, in fact, an eccentric British man living in, say, Leeds with a walking stick and two mangy dogs who could get away with that sort of thing. In fact, I think all of this number & typography business of mine is just a gateway drug.

The article, written by the designer Philip Krayna, is part photo essay, part meditation on the pleasures of observing not trains in general but more specifically, the typography of railway cars. At the time that I clipped it, I had no interest in photographing numbers or writing about type and space and buildings or trains, but it spoke to me. For who knows what reason, I fell in love with this article and Krayna's accompanying photographs, many of which resemble this 77. I hadn't thought of the article in years. I wonder now if I had it all along in the back of my mind and didn't even realize its influence. It's strange to find the seed of a project that dates back so far. (Was it seven years ago? Ten?) I wanted to share an excerpt from the article here:

My fascination with railroad typography began a few years ago when my car overheated on a desolate stretch of highway in California's San Joaquin Valley. While I waited for the car to cool down, I wandered to a nearby railway siding that paralleled the road.

As I moved among the rows of massive steel boxcars parked on the train tracks, I discovered a larger-than-life specimen book of curious and corroded letterforms. Stenciled onto the sides of the train cars were words and symbols, numbers and safety warnings. They were rusted, repainted, and retouched to create unexpected compositions of type and color. Time and the elements had further worn these letters, and sometimes their messages were cryptic or indecipherable. One boxcar, scrawled with mathematical calculations, had been used as a giant blackboard, perhaps for the trackside reckonings of a brakeman.

. . . More than a hundred years ago, Warner Bailey, a clerk working for the Boston and Maine Railroad, noticed a plethora of lettering styles painted on boxcars. As he traveled throughout the Northeast on business trips, he sketched the various ampersands he saw during his free time. He counted more than 140 type styles, which he meticulously copied into his notebook like an industrial-age scribe.

I would love a glimpse of that notebook of hand-drawn ampersands.

Krayna's article is beautifully written, and the article's pictures are no less beguiling. I'd link to it but, ya know, these were them dark ages. In the meantime, my mind will turn over certain phrases and store them away for future blog titles once I've moved on to my true calling, when typespotting gives way to trainspotting: "Curious and Corroded." "Trackside Reckonings of a Brakeman." And so on, and so on.

#68

#68, Buda, Budapest

#64

Here's the picture:

#64, Terror Haza, Budapest

Here's the thousand words.

#57

#57, Pest, Budapest

A few years back, I was in the company of an Irish taxi driver who harbored a particular contempt for establishments with the word "Quality" in the title. "Quality Inn," he scoffed as we sailed past a four-star hotel in the docklands. He proceeded, for my entertainment, to mimic the two sides of an imaginary conversation. "What hotel ya stayin' at? Oh, I'm stayin' at a Quality Hotel. Well, ya wouldn't want to be staying at a bleedin' non-quality hotel now would ya?" I've no idea what's inside the Quality 57 here in Budapest but I'm sure it's of the utmost excellence, fineness, distinction, eminence, greatness, worth, and . . . what's that word I'm looking for? Starts with a . . . Q . . .

#48

#48, near Széchenyi Bridge, Budapest

Stencils are about as straightforward as can be, but the logic of this wall escaped me when I took the photograph and continues to puzzle me to this day.  A simple white wall stretching alongside the River Danube, it is covered with the numbers "48", "56", and "89".  The sizes vary and the placement of the numbers is jaunty and random, but everywhere you look are these three numbers repeated again and again.  Now maybe I've just been watching too many episodes of The Prisoner, but I couldn't help but feel someone was trying to send me a secret message.  But if there is a code hidden in this image, it remains, as of yet, uncracked.

#42

#42, Ferihegyi Nemzetközi Repülőtér, Budapest

Yes, that's all a very fancy way of saying "the airport" but let's face it: with little to distinguish this image from the thousands of other airports in the world just like it, we could all do with a handful of umlauts.

I've been reading architecture critic Witold Rybczynski's collection of essays Looking Around. He's got a great bit on airports where he describes perfectly the abhorrence we feel at the prospect of a too-long layover:

Like most people, I dislike airports. I am either walking too far or sitting too long. The food is bad, the chairs are uncomfortable, and the irritating public-address system squawks unintelligibly. The tired potted plants do little to dispel the obsessively mechanical atmosphere. Above all, there is the dispiriting feeling of inactivity reflected in the weary faces of my fellow passengers, for whom ennui has replaced anticipation. They are just as torpid as I am. If Fritz Lang's Metropolis showed the underground city of the enslaved workers as a kind of hell, then the airport waiting room could serve as a convincing vision of purgatory.

But then this was written about ten years ago, before the advent of iPods and text messaging and any other manner of Crackberrying, which now, of course, have replaced any outward appearance of ennui in our fellow passengers. Everyone is continually otherwise engaged. You may see a lot of indifferent faces and bad moods, but you have to go a long way to find torpid. I do on occasion plug into my tunes, but I do still try to dabble in the tried and true airport layover pastimes: listless magazine flipping, wandering between newsstands comparing snack mixes, spritzing perfumes and sampling whiskeys in the duty free, and best of all, people watching. You know, like looking for men in gabardine suits with cameras in their bow ties? Ah, the good old days of low-fi, DIY purgatory.

#5

#5, Pest, Budapest

Some days it's about the number itself, other days it's all about the context. Besides, when you live in New York and have certain rooms of the Met fixed in your head, it's hard to fathom ever competing with Demuth's stunning I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. So here, we don't try. Instead, we just Frame the Figure 5 in Gold.