#361: Serif-Spotting on the Spanish Steps

Piazza di Spagna, Rome, Italy

If you think this #361 looks good now, try looking at it from the Spanish Steps in Rome while eating a coconut and pistachio gelato, channeling Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. Some covetous window-shopping at Salvatore Ferragamo on the Via Condotti afterward and an artery-boosting espresso at La Casa del Caffe Tazza d'Oro and I was officially ready to be swept up by the bliss police. If you're not won over by either glamorous context or a well-tempered serif (shame on you), that charming caret-shaped period at the end of the 1 ought to make you swoon. If not, check for pulse.

#362: I'm Sticking With You

Greenwich Village, NYC

Band logos, billboards, and bumper stickers occupy a curious place in public space. Think of any surface -- a beer-stained sound booth, a lamppost at a crosswalk, a dive bar bathroom wall, the knife-scarred window of a toll booth -- and chances are, someone with an indie band or a turntable or bizarre political agenda has already been-there-done-that with a sticker. (My favorite bumper sticker ever, spotted on the back of a beat-up sedan? PRO-ACCORDION AND I VOTE. Steer clear of that loose cannon.)

While I haven't annexed whole rooms of brain space to the exercise, I do enjoy my occasional brushes with this transient trash. I walk around and wonder: Whatever happened to that unfortunately-named band on a wall in Tucson, Arizona? Is anyone actually going to go home and Google that Myspace address scrawled on the stairwell at the 14th Street subway after rushing to catch a transfer to the uptown 2/3 train? These names are fleeting and the city has its clean-up crews, so the life expectancy of these stickers is inevitably short. So be it. Most of them are poorly designed and pretty much a scourge. I'd even raise a rant against them myself -- if it wasn't for all that bloody pathos.

Yes, New York City is one big sticker book for everybody's broken dreams. But don't despair, sticker-makers and street teams. If there's a number attached to it and I happen to be strolling by with my camera, look out: you might just well be in for a 16th minute of so-called fame.

#363: Stencils in Venice

Venice, Italy

A dash of pleasing, well-tempered Venetian symmetry is definitely in order after yesterday's exercise in the skewed, the slapdash, and the unashamedly shoddy. Enjoy your tasteful Italian Monday palindrome before I plunge you back into the shambolic underbelly of New York City on Tuesday.

#364: They'd Sell You the Brooklyn Bridge

Baltic Street, Brooklyn

What with my aversion to Facebook, I don't get a lot of space in the interwebs to flaunt the lurid details of my many leisure-time pursuits. Sure, I've carved a wee niche for myself in the picture-taking department, and I have been known in my spare time to partake in novel-scribbing, accordion-squeezing, university-professoring, and general mucking about.

But what a lot of people don't know about me is that I'm also an entrepreneur. Oh yes. Keeping an eye on the neighborhood's numbers is busy work, but I'm never too busy on these strolls to forget to size up the nooks and crannies of my 'hood and consider ways to capitalize on crap nobody else is interested in. Take this vacant lot at 364 Baltic Street. The poor scrap of land doesn't even have a broken-down brownstone to hang a number on. A vacant lot smack in the middle of the dashingly desirable borough of Brooklyn? Isn't that, like, the sixth deadly sin?

You hear a lot these days about the gentrification of Brooklyn. As one of the landed gentry myself, I try to avoid casting too many stones at my own glass houses, but as an armchair urbanist, gentrification is an issue that concerns me. Having lived in the same tenement building for seven and a half years now, I count myself lucky that I can stay put where I am. Were I just moving into Brooklyn in this enlightened year of 2011, I doubt I'd be able to afford the paint job on the fire escape.

I'm perfectly content to bloom where I'm planted, but sometimes I still get carried away by rakish fantasies of real estate. Who knows? Maybe if the price is right I could pool together some pennies with my starving artist friends and build a nice studio space on this very spot, or maybe commission a novelist's tree house, a modern nest built by Libeskind with northern exposure and lots of pointy detailing. It's a long shot, but rather than stand idly by and watch this ideal slice of property fall prey to the greedy land-grabbers, I decided to investigate. So I did what anyone seeking salient information does: I consulted the internet.

Braced for bad news, I'd been expecting the worst. You can imagine my shock, then, when I encountered these highly competitive going rates for a slab of land on Baltic Street:

Cost of Baltic: $60 (!)

Cost of houses and hotel: $50 per house, $50 plus four houses for hotel (not bad!)

Rent: $20 for one house, $60 for two houses, $180 for three and $320 for four, $450 for hotel

Location of property: Space #3, between Community Chest and Income Tax

Well, dear readers, I had a rude shock when, armed with this enticing information, I wandered into a nearby deli and asked where I could find the Community Chest. It was some time before I realized my mistake and saw I'd been consulting the wrong property listing all along. Ah well. If only I'd played more Monopoly over Christmas break and a little less Balderdash.

#365: The Eye in the Door

Hell's Kitchen, NYC

For the record, posting a picture from midtown Manhattan on January 1st is as close as I'm ever getting to Times Square on New Year's Eve. This skull-like hand-drawn creature lives in, where else, Hell's Kitchen, tucked away inside a brick-lined corridor at #365 on a street in the west thirties that's seen better days.

Lest the dizzy layers of images behind the 365 wreak havoc with your post-champagne brain, if you look closely, you can also make out the reflected images of buildings; the number is pasted onto a glass door. I thought this hand-scrawled monster would make a suitable mascot for those of you who may be suffering through a less-than-clear head on this fine first day of the new year. Whatever your state of mind, I'd like to extend a very happy 2011 to friends both old and new. Now then. Let's get the real countdown started.

#999,999,999,999,999

North Philadelphia, PA

Another round of 365 numbers in 365 days begins at the bubbly pop of midnight tonight as the ball drops in snow-encrusted Times Square and one short-lived, enthusiastic countdown gives way to a much longer, though equally enthusiastic, one. Am I excited for the new year of Ampersand Seven? Heck yes. Apprehensive? A little. After all, it's a commitment, this virtual page-a-day catalogue of typographical treats, and the &7 arsenal is by no means fully stocked. But if I need any reminders of why I did it before and why I'm ready to do it again, it's this picture. Snapped furtively through the window of a hurtling Acela train from Washington, D.C. to New York earlier this year, this bewildering congregation of nines stands as my reminder that you can take the girl away from the number-hunting, but you can't take the number-hunting out of the girl.

This bizarre mural first winked at me on a train trip down to D.C., standing out like a sentinel amid the grim, swiftly passing run-down dregs of north Philadelphia. The bubbly turquoise background and pattern of repeating nines snagged my attention as I was looking up wistfully from the first paragraph of a short story I'd just begun. I knocked Alice Munro's Ontario clean out of my lap in my effort to capture this snippet of blighted post-industrial Philadelphia, but alas, I was not fast enough. I had to wait a full 24 hours before I could spend the entire Philly portion of the train trip back to New York gazing anxiously out the window, camera at the ready, for the weirdly bright vision to reveal itself on the landscape once again. When it did, I was ready. But this was 2010, my reasoning brain told me. Hadn't I given up the number line? And if so, why was I behaving like a demented kid on a safari, nearly breaking my neck for a picture of a bunch of nines painted on a couple of bright turquoise thought bubbles? No, it seemed that even in the new year, my attention continued to be drawn by numbers.

Some of the thrill is the hunt itself. But I've become a collector, and like most collectors, I imagine, I find great joy in sharing the highlights of my collection with anyone whose attention I can cajole long enough to say, "Hey! Would ya look at this crazy bunch of nines on the Cabrun Ink Products Corp. building?" And so after another year of collecting, I'm happy to be back, kicking off another year of linear-themed pictures with some decidedly non-linear digressions and impressions. And no, I won't be counting down from #999,999,999,999,999. Not yet anyway. But you never know. There's always next year.

The Count

College Green, Dublin

Remember that thing? That thing called chronology? You know, that organizing principle on which this humble blog was built, a simple-to-grasp numerical structure that created a pleasant slog of a journey, number by number, through an entire year? Yeah, I remember it too. And while it pains my Helvetica postcard-making heart to go public with this confession, I must: I've been missing it.

There's something nice about chronology. Call me a lapsed Catholic, but over the course of &7's first year, I'd grown to think of the daily numbers here as a typographical Stations of the Cross, a place to pause and think for a few minutes and look more closely at things normally overlooked in day-to-day life. Some days I zipped past in a hurry and others I rambled on about Clearview, complicated drinks in tiki bars, and the joys of dressing up as W.B. Yeats. But I liked that there was the challenge of posting one number every single day. I found some excellent company along the way in my readers and commenters, and if you've been following in any sort of way over the past two years, I thank you. And I do hope you'll stay on board for the next stage of the journey.

While I make no apologies for the mish-mash of the past year's posts (after all, I'd have conked out if I didn't take a breather, and I really was dying to give that rotting Newmarket Potatoes sign a happy online home), I'm ready to move on. Or go back. Or a sort of "move on in a somewhat backward way." Which is why, on January 1st, I've decided to start the number line all over again. Starting from 365 and counting down to 1. A number a day, every day. That's how &7 was conceived, and it feels right to be going back to the original format. You see, blogs are kind of like Coca-Cola. If you've got a winning recipe, no need to go getting all "New Coke" on everyone's ass.

There will be ever-so-slight changes, mind. I'll be counting down this coming year instead of up. (A curious choice as I have a deathly, if irrational, fear of countdowns. We'll see how that particular psychodrama plays out.) I'll be collecting an entirely new batch of numbers for the new year. And I may throw in a few more entries with multiple photos if they go along with the day's number. But in 2011, there'll be one thing you can count on: the number line.

Take Me Home I'm Finished

Francis Street, Dublin

"You write until you come to a place where you will still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again... When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through."

--Ernest Hemingway

Skull Hunting in Venice

Venice, Italy

The bus from Venice trundled down the long causeway, carting a dazed load of passengers away from the world's most improbable city. I was one of them that day, weary and delirious on a still-bright July evening after my first day of exploring this odd settlement, this treasure nest, this town built on sticks in a swamp.

It's easy to fall in love with Venice. But for me, it isn't about the picture-perfect vistas or the Guggenheim or the 80 cent prosecco you can by from a kiosk alongside the Grand Canal. OK, it's kind of about the 80 cent prosecco you can buy from a kiosk alongside the Grand Canal. But Venice, with its serpentine lanes and secret bridges and dead-ends, is the sort of place where I feel like someone took a screwdriver, dug into the control panel in my brain where the deepest dreams are stored, and programmed a place just for me. My map was useless. I just gave up, and let myself be led.

Just when I thought I'd succumbed to Stendhal Syndrome -- that condition where you pretty much drop dead from overexposure to culture and beauty -- just when I thought it couldn't get any better, I gazed out of the bus window on the way back to the hotel and -- what was that blur I saw? -- SKULLS! Skull signs! Skull signs on a rusty railway bridge! First one, then the next zipped past while I craned my neck to gawk at these high-speed flashes of silver and rust. A morbid procession of eerie warnings flashed past my vision, an entire typographical ossuary. The Rialto Bridge? Yeah, yeah. Sipping prosecco on a gondola on the Grand Canal? Uh-huh. Whatevs. Whisk me off to Venice and all I'm gonna do is slum for skull signs.

The bus passed over the bridge before I could dig up my camera, carting me off to the Hotel Ambasciatori. There I dragged my luggage into the lobby, checked in, and obsessed. About the skull signs. I knew there'd be no rest in my head till I went back to find them and photograph them. Time and distance can be hard to judge in a foreign city with a fizzy head full of bubbly. I knew this. Nevertheless, I gave my head an optimistic scratch and thought to myself whimsically: Well then, how about I just pop out a minute with my camera and take a little stroll to that bridge over the railroad tracks? How far could it possibly be?

Forty-five minutes later, eyes squinting in the hot sun, I arrived to my destination. Skullbridge. Granted, trudging uphill through the industrialized outskirts of Venice isn't everyone's cuppa tea, but it's not a bad way to spend an afternoon. And granted, skull signs are their own reward. But I do recall the weird feeling as I stood by the side of the road, alone in my derelict pilgrimage, stared at by well-to-do Venetians on Vespas as I angled my camera over the rusted railroad tracks. One reason is as good as any when it comes to collecting images. It was a long slog, yes. But worth it. You do it for the love of the quest.

Skull Orchard

Temple Bar, Dublin

I'm two days late for Halloween. I'm up to my neck in offline writing. This image doesn't have any typography in it. Or numbers. Or ampersands. What does it have, then, you ask? Skulls. Lots and lots of skulls. And when you're racing toward a deadline, it's good to have a couple of these fellas grinning at you. Perspective, call it.