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Listen here.

The Friends of the High Line, a non-profit group formed by concerned members of the community, wanted to find a viable way to preserve what was essentially a defunct piece of urban infrastructure. The last train ran on the High Line track in 1980, carrying, as they are strangely pleased to remind you, a load of cold turkeys. A small piece of urban wilderness soon took root on the track, beautifully documented in the photographs of Joel Sternfeld. Property owners in the area began to lobby for tearing the whole thing down, but by 2002, a resolution was passed reserving the High Line for reuse as a public space.

When the firms Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro took on the challenge of re‐imagining this iron behemoth as a public park, they were handling a bristling set of contradictions. They had to make people believe that they were strolling in a park while they were actually walking on a train track thirty feet off the ground. The park had to be modern, clean and sophisticated, but it also had to serve the purpose of historical preservation: both of the rusted, outdated High Line, and the wilderness that had grown on it. It had to deal with convoluted zoning laws while maintaining its integrity. The architects initially proposed to achieve these lofty aims with semi-transparent concrete threaded with fiber optics, snaking between plantings designed by the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf. What finally got built isn’t as futuristic, but it preserves the contradictions of the design brief, creating a taut solution that is stretched along those lines of tension.

The concrete that forms the path in the High Line today isn’t reinforced with fiber optics, but with gravel, creating a textured surface that tips its hat to cobbled park pathways. The architects create many features just by casting this concrete in different ways. The slabs of the path peel up from the walking level to form seating. In the water feature the slabs are subtly faceted, and on the sides of the path they lift gently to mark its boundaries. But most interesting are the places where the path rakes into the greenery, clawing at the soil below the plants with long tapered fingers. It sets up a tension that gives a vague impression of impermanence, rather than the integration the architects intended. You feel as if this pathway has only temporarily been snatched from the green patches. It is a memento mori wittingly built into the design: a subtle but unsettling hint that one day the park may well meet the same fate as the rail track did; that all this elaborate design effort may give in to the unruly growth; and that the High Line will again be as it was.

In fact, the architects have gone to great pains to retain the feel of the “High Line as it was”. The original structure has been painstakingly cleaned and restored, and repainted to a suitable industrial grey. But as a memoir of the orange rust that covered the High Line, there are judicious accents of COR-TEN steel near the entrances at Gansevoort Street and at 14^th Street. The staircase at Gansevoort brings you up from under the High Line, allowing you to see its structural components, but there will also be a cut‐out at 30th Street: a glass floor that exposes the riveted guts of the High Line. And in the plantings, Oudolf’s wilderness seeks to recreate the weeds and shrubs that had grown over the railway tracks. But this is a meticulous dissemblance, in keeping with the larger concept of an arrested unruliness: the plants are far from weeds, and will supposedly flower all year round.

This is a park that has been built on a railway track, and signifiers of movement are everywhere. The railway tracks of the High Line were tagged during the restoration so that many of them could be returned to their original positions. As you walk in the park, rusting tracks on their beautifully weathered wooden sleepers disappear into the dense plants, and gleaming tracks set in the path converge and diverge into nowhere. The starkly linear furniture, the fingers of concrete and the lines of the path are always speeding towards a vanishing point in the distance. You could be purposefully aimless on the walking path, but to call the path “meandering” (as the architects do) is a stretch of imagination. It changes levels, branches off and comes together, but it bears you inexorably forward.

This flow of traffic pools in a few islands along the High Line: such as the Diller-von Furstenberg Sundeck and Water Feature, and the 10th Avenue Square. These islands are essentially vantage points for watching the city rush by. Elevated views of New York City aren’t scarce. But knowing that you are standing in what is, nominally at least, a park, adds a certain charm to the view. Parks weren’t traditionally meant to offer views of the city. They were an escape from those views, an opportunity to replace the vista of the urban jungle with that of a pastoral idyll. The High Line, in sharp contrast, is carefully designed to give you as many eyefuls of the city as possible. Nothing, not even the lighting of the park, obstructs the panorama that is quickly filling up with the latest offerings of star architects. Large, attention seeking buildings loom all around you and, in the case of the Standard Hotel, directly above you.

And so you don’t lose your sense of what’s below you, a special viewing area has been created in the 10th  Venue Square. A wooden pit dips below the level of the high line, hovering above the speeding traffic, offering a rather unusual spectacle through its huge glass window. Nothing in the park allows you to forget that you are in the city, because this conjunction of the urban and the wild is the essential experience of the park. One small design detail proves this hypothesis: the concrete slabs of the path are laid to always run parallel to 10^th Avenue, constantly reminding you of the street below, even if the High Line itself makes angular turns away from it.

In some of its features, the High Line follows the traits of older parks, at least in spirit. Thus there is the mandatory water feature at the Sundeck; and the uneven topography. In the time-honored tradition of parks there is the public art in the form of Spencer Finch’s The River Flows Both Ways, and an already long list of temporary exhibitions. There are planned performances, with Felix Pitre, for instance; and spontaneous ones: the High Line Renegade Cabaret was performed on Patty Heffly’s fire escape that looks out onto the park. The favorite park pass time of people-watching is also provided for. You can present yourself to be watched on the reclining loungers at the Sundeck, or ogle the hapless guests of the Standard Hotel in their rooms and in the hotel’s glass-fronted restaurant.

The High Line also preserves another part of its history: the idea that it is a precarious place, a strip of green snatched out of the hands of real estate developers who might have built who‐ knows‐what in its place. Walking under buildings that envelop the High Line, you feel the pressure of the city around it. Legal rights over a column of air, it seems, are all that prevent them from swallowing it. The High Line wants you to feel lucky that it exists. It wants you to know that this may well be the future of parks, that the extravagances of Hyde Park and Central Park may no longer be possible in today’s urban reality.

The nineteenth‐century park was the antithesis of the industrial yard: a place where you went to purge yourself of the poisons of modern life. The High Line is something else entirely. It heavily references the industrial but is seemingly overcome by nature, a place for relaxation that is utterly surrounded by outsize billboards and fashionable architecture. It preserves a historical monument, but freezes it at the moment of its deterioration. It is a postmodern park: completely conscious of the city, easily   accommodating contradictions and continually self-referential.

Well, there were no locks on the bathroom doors of the Louis XIV, but tied to each doorknob was a three-and-a-half-foot length of leather thong to which a hook was attached. When you were in the bathroom you simply linked the two hooks together, holding both doors shut. There was no way to get back into your own room without at the same time unlocking the door for the other guest. It was memorable as the total integration of object and circumstance.

As a rule, bathrooms in themselves are notoriously ill designed, a situation that has been documented in great detail by a number of studies, most notably a massive one done at Cornell University in 1966. Bathroom fixtures may be our best illustration of the phenomenon Elizabeth Gundrey talks about—the tendency for inadequate designs to spawn product lines to make up for their inadequacy (see page 123). Bathroom boutiques and the bath departments of large department stores are all filled with conveniences that have had to be invented because the room itself was not properly designed in the first place.

Probably the worst designed feature of the bathroom is the standard toilet. As product design, it may promote disease by placing the seat too high to permit the optimal posture for complete evacuation. As situation design it is not even comfortable for reading.

The public lavatory presents special problems, most of them having to do with maintenance. Stores, restaurants, gas stations, transportation terminals—to say nothing of the planes and trains themselves—all provide public necessities that the management is unable, or unwilling, to keep clean. The pious injunction ordering all employees to wash their hands before leaving has connotations that make the whole experience less appetizing rather than reassuring.

Dirt is one problem of the public lavatory; vandalism is another. While this sometimes takes the form of stolen paper and dispensers ripped from the wall, it is more likely to be expressed as graffiti. The United States Forest Service has funded the development of improved outhouses, with both interior and exterior surfaces that resist writing and carving. In an unusually creative response to graffiti, a New York City public school at one point included in a maintenance man’s duties the transformation of the word fuck into book, with a magic marker.

While the public lavatory may be seen as a situation desperately in need of design, it is frequently also an instrument of situation design. Gas stations discourage, or even prohibit, the use of restrooms by motorists who do not buy gas. The restroom thus becomes a sort of merchandising device, just as service used to be. The withholding of relief is often incorporated into the design of service stations, stores, restaurants, and even municipal governments. In the 1960s enraged and offended by the presence of hippies, the Aspen, Colorado, City Council blocked the construction of public restroom facilities, apparently in the belief that if young people had no access to public toilets, they would go on to the next town, or even the next state. Neither nature nor rebellion works quite this way. The hippies demonstrated, in more ways than one, and eventually a public facility was built, although I could never find it.

Listen here.

Listen here.

February is the best time to visit Rio de Janeiro, and to join in the riotous mania of the Rio Carnival. Neighbourhood Samba schools design their own parades, called blocos: complete with floats, dances and outrageous costumes.  The competition of these blocos is a highlight of the carnival.  In June, Lisbon celebrates the Marchas Populares. Come August, in Mumbai, the locals celebrate in honour of the God Ganesh, ending the festivities in a procession to immerse the God’s idols in the ocean.  On the 1^st of November, the Dia de los Muertos, every building in Mexico has a specially decorated public altar. And then, at the end of November, is the Thanksgiving Parade in New York.

Television channels cover these events as they take place. Travel writers showcase them. But rarely does one get an insight into what goes into creating these amazing experiences. There has been no serious study of the annual design variations of these festivals, no utilization of these designs as indicators of social change. No design magazine is out there: deciding which Samba school had the best float in this year’s Carnival; or which neighbourhood’s Durga Puja pandaal was most innovative and—most importantly—why.

An enormous amount of human creativity and ingenuity goes into these events every year. Every year, design decisions are anonymously taken by numerous artisans, seamstresses and other neighbourhood talents.  Money is raised, designs are commissioned and they go into production. The designs are used and the user feedback is instantaneous.  One never hears of a traditional festival that was an utter failure. They are annual exercises in experience design at the largest scale possible, with a near one hundred percent success rate!  I doubt there is a design studio today which could make a similar claim.

Not everything is gung-ho about the design of festivals, though; and this requires public attention too. What happens to all those enormous floats, all that tinsel and plaster, on the day after the Rio Carnival? The Durga idols in Calcutta are ritually immersed in river water on the tenth day of the festival. The idols are made of sundried mud which disintegrates rapidly, but the paint on them leaches noxious chemicals into the water. The Ganesh idols from Mumbai are worse: they are made of Plaster of Paris, which is insoluble in water. Because the design of festivals is rarely discussed, they also pass under the radar as far as sustainability is concerned. Indeed, how must traditional festivals take sustainability into consideration? As of today, there are too few answers to this question.

Many festivals are religious ones, and they operate upon mechanisms of deep faith and tradition. It is faith that impels the designs of the Dia de los Muertos or the Durga Puja. Professional designers have rarely considered that religion or spirituality might influence the practice of design. But the fact remains that religious faith is a valid and essential part of the human experience. It is a social function that creates opportunities for celebration. And perhaps we cannot truly celebrate design until we understand the design of human celebration.

The term “Chopper Bike” originated with the word “Chopper,” and refers to a Chopper-style motorcycle, which got its name through the process of customization, wherein a stock motorcycle would be chopped up, parts added, and welded back together in a new shape. The 1969 film “Easy Rider” exposed the masses to the cool subculture of Choppers with extended front forks, and marked the high point of popularity for both Chopper Motorcycles and Chopper Bikes in the US.

In southern California in the late 1950s the Chopper Motorcycle and Kustom Kar countercultures were popular and growing. Frankenstein-esque T-Bucket hot rods carved from the welded carcasses and entrails of old Model T Fords were decked out in flashy paint jobs and psychedelic custom chassis by popular and eccentric artists like Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Norm Grabowski brought Kustom Kars to the masses in a 1957 issue of LIFE which photographed him working on his T-Bucket.  In the iconic image his child, no more than a year old, is strapped into a car seat on the passenger side next to Grabowski’s signature hand carved skull-shaped gear shifter knob. The scene was a shocking and cool presentation of Grabowski’s Hot Rod lifestyle and it got America hooked. Kustom Kars, Hot Rods, and T-Buckets were swiftly assimilated into the iconography of 1950s pop culture.

Kids in southern California were inspired by these cool cars and motorcycles, and desiring to partake in this badass counterculture themselves began to modify the only vehicles they could get their hands on—bicycles. Kids used traditional middleweight bikes they had outgrown or took from younger siblings, and modified them with scavenged or bought bike parts and other household items. The bikes typically had small 21” wheels and were modified with long seats that extended out over the rear wheel to accommodate the body of a bigger kid than the bike was originally intended for. This new configuration changed the center of gravity and allowed for easy wheelie popping, mimicking both the form and function of chopper motorcycles. High butterfly handle bars were also added to imitate the laid back cruising posture of the motorcycles, and in some cases guide bars made from scrap materials and skateboard wheels were added to the back of the bike—like wheelie popping training wheels.

In addition to building their bikes the kids also built ramps to ride their custom bikes off of, much like the emerging southern California skateboard culture, hammering together scraps of wood and challenging each other to perform dare-devilish stunts. And if you are sensing undertones of the contemporary BMX (“Bicycle Motocross”) bicycle movement you wouldn’t be mistaken – chopper bikes are the precursor to BMX and are the source of the bicycle design, daredevil riding techniques and target youth market that we are familiar with today.

The archetypical Schwinn Sting-Ray was directly inspired by DIY hacked together southern California mini-bikes. In 1963 Al Fritz, an engineer at Schwinn in Chicago got a tip from one of the company’s west coast sales managers about the chopper bike craze and, and according to Schwinn, went to check it out in person. He thought it was a fantastic idea and returned to Chicago to build a prototype in the “high-rise” fashion (as adults at the time referred to the chopper bikes by their “high-rise” handle bars. They are also known as “ape bars” because the rider appears to be hanging from them like a primate). Fritz wanted kids who owned one of these new bikes to be able to carry on the practice of customization that was so integral the chopper concept. In addition to the bicycle, accessories like special seats, lights, tassels, and hand grips that could be bought separately and added on were also developed and sold by Schwinn. The result was the world’s first mass produced chopper bike. The new bikes sacrificed the act of chopping, but maintained the essential concept of customization.

However the Schwinn Stingrays that we consider icons worthy of appreciation and large price tags today were not originally accepted with such open arms, and open wallets. The prototype that established this new form of bicycle was initially met with resistance from the Schwinn’s management. They felt that it was such an incredibly ugly bicycle that putting it into production would be a huge financial risk. Fritz, the Sting-Ray’s designer, was confident that it was the next big thing, and showing his prototype to customers he was able to collect enough orders (an astounding 50,000 the first year) to convince Schwinn to put the bike into production. It was expensive in comparison to other bikes on the market, but despite it’s large price tag the Sting-Ray was wildly popular among children, and it grew to become the dominant bicycle type in the US in the 1960s.

Fritz named the new bike the Sting-Ray most likely after the Corvette Sing Ray that was released the same year in 1963, and the bike came in two versions: the Sting-Ray, and the Sting-Ray Deluxe. Five colors were produced, Flamboyant Red, Flamboyant Lime, Coppertone, Violet and Sky Blue, which were inspired by the eye-catching metal flecked Kustom Kar automotive paint of the era. Each paint job was finished with white lettering that looked hand written, and pinstripes and chrome accents reminiscent of a hot rod. The bikes also had what was called the “Solo Polo” seat, which is a long saddle in white vinyl that is today called a “banana seat” because of its shape. The deluxe version of the saddle had more padding than the standard, and other deluxe features on the bike included front and rear chrome fenders and optional tassels.In this first most basic line of Sting-Rays the type form was set and the four defining characteristics of a chopper bike were established:

1. The most noticeable trait is that both wheels are smaller than the standard 26” diameter, they are typically 21” or less as derived from children’s bike wheels.
2. The second characteristic is that the bicycle must have a Sissy Bar. This is not in fact an assault on anyone’s manhood, but a term derived from motorcycles. “Sissy Bar” refers to a biker’s “sister” or girl that sits behind him, and the metal bars behind the seat are there for her to hold and lean on. They also serve as a post for strapping gear onto a motorcycle and stabilizing the long banana seat that hangs out over the rear wheel on Schwinn Sting-Ray chopper bicycles .
3. The banana seat is a crucial part of every chopper bike because it is an immediately recognizable form that identifies the typology, and because it made the bike accessible to a larger number of people. It allowed children of varying sizes to fit on the same bicycle, adjusting their position on the saddle as they grew larger. This allowed Schwinn and other manufacturers to produce mainly one size of bicycle (and cut costs while increasing profit), rather than the industry standard, which was to manufacture two or three sizes of children’s bicycles to fit their growing bodies. After the introduction of the Sting-Ray the market for traditional kids bikes of varying sizes diminished as kids and their parents preferred to purchase the uber-cool Sting-Ray that their child could grow into.
4. The last defining characteristic of any chopper bike are Ape handle bars, which combined with the seat and small wheels cause the rider to adopt a unique posture that mimics a chopper motorcyclist. Schwinn even went so far as to angle the kick stand in such a way that when the Sting-Ray is parked it imitates the stance of a motorcycle. While Schwinn produced Ape-style handlebars in many forms over the years, such as Butterfly, and Rams Horns, the main high-rise form remained the same, with the handlebars extending vertically rather than horizontally.

In its first year, 1963, the Sting-Ray exceeded Schwinn’s sales expectations and the following year, 1964, a girls version was introduced, called the “Fair Lady” probably after the popular movie “My Fair Lady” which came out the same year. The new Sting-Ray model captured a larger part of the bicycle market by enticing girls to buy chopper bikes with standard perks like a pink paint job, a flowery white woven basket and tassels.

In 1965 an update to the Sting-Ray was added, the “Sting-Ray Super Deluxe” which came in the same colors available for the past two years with a few new details like the Quilted Super Solo Polo saddle seat in the newly introduced material, “Tufted Glow.” It was a white plastic material with silver sparkles and backed with extra padding for comfort. White wall tires reminiscent of a car, and a larger rear reflector and chrome fenders were also added to the new model. However the biggest innovation was the front suspension system reminiscent of the exposed workings of a T-Bucket hot rod. The Super Deluxe’s chrome spiral shock became a signature element of the Schwinn Sting-Ray range going forward.

In 1966 The Fastback Sting-Ray was introduced in a new color – black, and it was the first year for the iconic, Kustom Kar derived stick shifter. A new sleeker frame shape was introduced, thinner tires were added and two new handle bar shapes – a variation on the ape bar that came standard, and an upgrade, the new “Rams Horn” style were added to the line. The Stick shifter really stole the show for this model, and was a direct derivation from the “8 Ball” gear shifter knobs found on Kustom Kars, and in Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s famous illustrations. Schwinn adapted the stick shifter with the number “5” for the five gear speeds of the bike, adding a new feature irresistible to the public, and sealing the Schwinn Sting-Ray’s status as a souped-up icon of the 1960s.

By 1968 Schwinn had dominated the American bicycle market; over 70% of all children’s bikes sold were Schwinn Sting-Rays, or a knockoff by another brand. In five years they had changed the shape of American children’s bicycles from their traditional form (known as “middle weight”) to the chopper bike. After capturing most of the market with the Sting-Ray, Schwinn had to try a new strategy to keep their business rolling, and they picked two directions. The first idea was to combine the most iconic details from different Sting-Ray models into one bike. They combined the Fastback with the Super Deluxe to create the most iconic, and beloved Schwinn Sting-Ray of all time: The Krate. It had the best of all worlds—the Fastback’s gear shifter, and the Super Deluxe’s front suspension all on the original Sting-Ray frame. It had ape handlebars, chrome fenders, and for the first time, an even smaller front tire, smaller than 21” which made the bike feel more like a hot rod or chopper motorcycle than ever before. The bikes came with adorable color names emblazoned on the chain guards in faux hand written decals. They had names like “Apple Krate,” “Orange Krate,” “Lemon Peeler,” and “Pea-Picker,” and eye-catchingly bright paint jobs to match.
The Krate series was the high point of the Schwinn Sting-Ray line, and the most memorable.

It continued to be manufactured with only slight variations in overall quality and construction until 1974, when the American Consumer Product Safety Commission, in the wake of automotive safety reform, deemed the shifter too dangerous for children. The denuded bike lost one of it’s most exciting and defining elements, and though the bike had been declining in popularity in the early 1970s due to a market saturated with imitations, it was likely this change that sealed its fate and caused it to fall completely out of popularity. What took it’s place in the market were BMX bikes, another motorcycle inspired design that, in the case of Schwinn, was just a Sting-Ray frame with a new BMX-style paint job, drabber than it’s predecessor.

But before the Sting-Ray, and all other brands of chopper bikes succumbed to the BMX trend they experienced an astronomical jump in popularity fueled by the 1969 hit movie “Easy Rider.” The movie features two chopper motorcycles and it encouraged every manufacturer the world over that had not already jumped on the chopper bike band wagon to do so. Manufacturers created thousands of variations that looked more like literal interpretations of a motorcycle than Schwinn’s candy-colored icon. Schwinn’s largest competitor, The English brand Raleigh even went so far as to trade mark the word “Chopper” as the name of their most popular chopper bike during the craze.

In the face of competition Schwinn decided to stick to its guns and original notion of customization, keeping all of its older models of the Sting-Ray in line, and offering new motorcycle-inspired accessories that kids could add on. Schwinn and other accessory dealers offered windshields, headlights, taller sissy bars, new types of fenders, an upgrade to motorcycle-style disk brakes and car-inspired chrome steering wheels as replacements to earlier ape-bars.

In 1968 Schwinn also responded to its competitor Raleigh, who was successfully selling a collapsible bike throughout the 1960s. Schwinn introduced an awkward looking scaled-down collapsible version of the Sting-Ray called the “Sting-Ray Run-About” aimed at adults who wanted a folding bike to fit into the trunk of their car – it was not a success and was even more oddly proportioned than the other Sting-Rays, making for an incredibly ugly bike. Schwinn’s other unpopular diversification of the line that year was the “Sting-Ray Mini-Twin,” a tandem bike derived from the original Sting-Ray with bare bones features like coaster brakes. It was another awkward looking design, morphing the long and low banana seat chopper bike into an even longer tandem chopper.

Though some rather unmemorable styles were introduced in 1968, it was still the most profitable year to date for the Schwinn Sting-Ray due to the wildly successful and iconic Sting-Ray Krate series. The following year, in 1969 they did not introduce any new styles, but did introduce one new color, the racially offensive “Cotton Picker Krate,” an all white version that hit the market only months after one of the Civil Rights Movement’s figureheads, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and the Civil Rights Act was signed into law.

After 1979 the Chopper Bike trend had reached its peak and began to decline. Schwinn continued to produce the Sting-Ray Series, rolling-out the “Grey-Ghost Krate” in 1971, and selling smaller and smaller quantities of the other Sting-Ray styles that were still in production. In 1976, after 13 years of Sting-Ray success Schwinn introduced the future of bicycles, the “Scrambler,” a new BMX style bike that used the same frame, banana seat, and sissy bar as the Sting-Ray.

The Scrambler’s new features that differed from the Sting-Ray were BMX style handlebars, hand grips, and a new paint job with dark matte finishes reminiscent of a Motocross Motorcycle. The new bikes were used much like the Sting-Ray was originally intended—as a customizable bike for rough riding and jumps—but it lost the colorful flamboyance and chrome of the Sting-Ray. The Kustom Kar and Chopper Motorcycle countercultures that were once the Sting-Ray’s inspiration were replaced by a growing American interest in Bicycle Motocross Racing. It was the beginning of the BMX era, and a new breed of children’s bikes began to evolve, though not without the benefit of America’s most popular chopper bike, the Schwinn Sting-Ray.

Vampires materialize from the shadows, forming adaptable villains for varied narratives of corruption. They’re changeable stunt doubles who stand in for the real problem—whether it’s immigrants flooding into countries where they aren’t wanted, or the infected carriers of fearsome diseases and plagues, or symbols of the lost purity of virgins. Vampires appear at times of social flux because we can project whatever we like onto them, creating concrete visualizations of intangible fears and threats. The unpredictable and ever-present dangers of terrorism, global warming and a dreadful world economy have created a climate of widespread social anxiety. The vampire endures because an enemy with a clear-cut set of ways to defeat it—drive a stake through its heart, cut off its head, burn it—presents a tidy, easy-to-achieve solution.

The visual language of vampires is remarkably consistent, derived from two distinct types: Nosferatu and Dracula. Transfusing and mingling these types—one gruesome and the other sophisticated—allows the vampire metaphor to remain flexible and suited to situations from horrifying to comical. The changeable forms of the vampire—human, bat, wolf, green fog, swarm of rats—parallel his ability to represent a wide range of woes.

Nosferatu (1922), the first cinematic portrayal of a vampire, looms over us, corpse-like and ghastly—the true undead. His fangs extend from his top incisors, like a rat’s (which is fitting since the movie uses a plague metaphor throughout). His burning eyes are mesmerizing, his fingers taper into fearsome talons, his attire is most kindly described as grave-wear. Other vampires that seem at first glance to be 100-percent Dracula often borrow at least one detail from Nosferatu. His all-out gruesome look is not usually literally translated to the others, though; the only recent one as consistently repellent in appearance as he, without any of Dracula’s more alluring components, is Eli, the child vampire in the Swedish film Let the Right One In (2008). Even when she’s just standing around, she’s scary. Her little friend Oskar says, “You smell weird,” and we don’t doubt it for a moment.

The portrait of the sexy, cultured vampire arose from the Romantic era in full swing when Stoker penned Dracula. Its continuing popular appeal can be traced to Bela Lugosi’s suave appearance in the 1931 film, with his dramatic cape, medallion on a ribbon around the neck, widow’s peak, white tie and tails. The elegant vampire type lent itself easily to parody, creating a sort of harmless, neutered vampire. Watered-down and safe for children, this vampire doesn’t recall the frightful Nosferatu. Think of Grandpa Munster and Sesame Street’s Count von Count.

Looking sharp is a mainstay of the Dracula-based vampire. The Hunger’s (1983) perfectly-coiffed Catherine Deneuve substituted couture for a cape, neatly avoiding the camp trap. Vicious little Tom Cruise as Lestat in Interview with the Vampire (1994) flounced around in campy dandified elegance (when he wasn’t a festering, flaming cadaver, that is). In Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992) Gary Oldman alternately depicts a terrifying Nosferatu-like figure in the world’s longest-trailing red cape and a top-hatted Victorian fop. But I like the Simpsons’ parody of him as Mr. Burns even better. How about the biker-chic outfits of The Lost Boys (1987)? Though laughably dated today, that full-on ’80s leather-and-mullets style translated the look for a younger contemporary audience.

Fangs are perhaps the most obviously critical component of vampire typology—although, surprisingly, Lugosi’s Dracula did not have them at all. Later vampires introduced the familiarly fanged canine. Cereal-villain Count Chocula mirrors Dracula in almost every way, but his fangs sprout down from the middle like Nosferatu’s (though the most recently redrawn character has them blunted into a squared-off shape, looking more like Bugs Bunny dressed for Halloween). Most portrayals of vampire dentition hew to a single pair of long dagger-like canines. On the TV show Blood Ties (2007) the vampires flash an extra set of chompers. In The Hunger, vampires David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve are fangless, deploying tiny, wicked Egyptian ankh pendant-knives to do their bloodletting. (Yet Susan Sarandon’s arm is mysteriously perforated with two distinct round holes the morning after her visit to the fabulous vampire townhouse. Accessory fangs?)

When they aren’t being pilloried as infectious/corruptive agents or disease vectors (providing numerous medical metaphors: the plague, AIDS), vampires are often portrayed as outsiders or misfits: they long to fit in, to be like everyone else, to be loved. Since they stand in equally well for temporal and confusing life stages as they do for world issues, vampires are ideal for teen-based shows, movies and novels. Right now we can be entertained by teen-vampire football players and slackers and prom dates. Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, released in time for Halloween, features John C. Reilly as an older vampire who offers an apprenticeship to a teen searching for a life path that won’t make the expected stops at college-job-family. Becoming a vampire will give him membership in a different sort of family, though—a typical postmodern, alternative, non-traditional one.

The current crop of teenage vampires is typically square-jawed, dark-haired and sensitive—a conflicted Byronic male in love with a mortal girl he (usually) doesn’t want to corrupt. Fangs, like the other kind of arousal, appear only at the moment they’re needed. Some teen vampires take an almost abstinent or vegetarian approach to their diet, preferring to feed upon lower life forms because a remaining shred of conscience causes them to feel guilty about taking human life. True Blood’s (2008) Bill Compton is trying to make do on a diet of synthetic blood imported from Japan. Edward, of the Twilight saga, sticks to animal blood. The tortured Stefan in The Vampire Diaries even writes of his feelings in a (centuries old) leather-bound journal. The last scraps of humanity left in these guys give them audience appeal as bad boys who maybe can still be redeemed through the power of romantic love. Teen vampires’ struggles against their dark natures win the sympathy of adolescent viewers on their own difficult journeys to adult identity.

No matter what metaphor is in use, vampires represent a threat offering a fool’s bargain. They pit our human desire to defy the ravages of age and death through immortality against their cruel and bloody disregard for others. Still, we find entertainment in these seductive invaders whispering of eternal youth, because in a way they are familiarly reassuring. Although we can’t prevent their arrival, we know what to do when vampires fly in the window or onto our screens—assuming we trust ourselves to resist the allure of the forbidden. The vampire has always been sexier than a mummy, better-looking than a zombie, sleeker than a werewolf. It isn’t surprising that he’s held on to his status as attractive all-purpose villain for so long. He’s a compelling jack of all trades in the category of cinematic monsters; as an audience we continue to offer up our delicious necks to the vampire rather than putting out garlic to ward him off.

Heavy metal has evolved visually as well. Gone are the fantasy illustrations of radioactive zombies and band logos composed of overlapping swords. After a generation of sprouting subgenres, the heavy metal field is littered with a diversity of styles that even the most hardy metalhead will have trouble encompassing. As Ian Christe, author of Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal and publisher of the metal-oriented press Bazillion Points says, “Heavy metal design is not a monolithic form at all. You have everything from junior high school kids in Iowa drawing skulls and pentagrams and band logos to Norwegian design houses making skulls and pentagrams and band logos. There are all levels of sophistication and intention—and execution.”

Heavy metal design today comprises a vast field of images that no longer compulsively refer to adolescent power and provocation fantasies. The genre’s pervading preoccupation with the occult yields far less goat and pentagram iconography—which became self-conscious clichés almost instantly anyway—than more ambiguously dark imagery. A few designers, some of the key musicians of the scene in their own right, have emerged to torque graphic conventions, and use strategies to indicate that metal, as a visual genre, is more multivalent and eloquent than mainstream design aficionados probably ever imagined.

In part through the growing success of his doom metal band SUNN O))), Stephen O’Malley is arguably the most visible of these designers. Like SUNN O))), which is named for a vintage amp brand (and pronounced, “sun”), O’Malley keeps a toe in classical metal tropes but contributes an aesthete’s sensibility. Having designed album covers and limited-edition packaging for his own projects and dozens of other bands, O’Malley literally put his mark on the scene through a simple yet radical reevaluation of that nexus of metal band identity—the logo. He abandoned hoary Blackletter-derived gothic ornamentalism and opted instead for a medium-weight sans serif for SUNN O)))’s logo, which he jokingly calls “Portland modernism.” The move signaled not just a departure from custom: He visually cues the sonic hallmarks of the band—mass, mood, and deceptive simplicity. For the logo for his now defunct band Khanate, O’Malley distilled and crashed the Helvetica ultralight letterforms to such an extreme that only a tangle of nonreferential geometry remains—”vector madness,” he calls it. “I see Stephen exploiting the very nature of [Adobe] Illustrator itself with that logo,” says Ian Christe, suggesting that even this level of sophistication retains a core of the heavy metal ethos: “I would say it’s a metal trait to not stop at the bounds of sensibility.”

The band logo has always been the nexus of identity for metal bands. Mike Essl, head of graphic design at Cooper Union and an avowed metalhead himself, sees it as parcel of attentive branding: “I think the thing we can take away from these metal logos is the craft involved in making them, the attention to form. If you look back at some of those ’80s logos, it looks like they inherited a little bit from the New York school of design, like Herb Lubalin fast-forwarded. That attention to detail, the custom drawing and interlocking of typefaces, is what I try to use in my work and what inspires me.”

The genre’s sense of restless invention saw the logo enter new territories, taking a notorious turn from neo-Lubalin to the perversely illegible with the arrival of European black metal. A Satanic and paganistic movement that solidified in the Scandinavian countries in the early ’90s, many black metal bands played lightning fast, howling and screeching their vocals. Band personae tended toward the extremely theatrical—donning spikes and robes, covering their faces with white corpse-paint—while album covers often used imagery of wintry northern forests. But it was the spindly, spiky, branching logos that defined this subgenre for years. A game of international runic one-upmanship ensued, in which the band with the least legible logo was the most authentic. Such extremes couldn’t last forever of course, and Christe observes that a knowing readability has crept back in. “If you trace generations of heavy metal through the band logo styles, the newest is this suburban death metal, with bands like Job for a Cowboy, whose logo looks like it’s made of stretched-out internal organs pinned to a lab dish—but it’s legible instantly. It has all the markings of being completely out of control, but you can read it at first glance, which is always a sign of commercial intent.”

It’s also impossible for metal graphics to ignore the design culture at large. O’Malley sees the resurgence of the “dirty” manual look as one of the more intriguing trends in contemporary graphics, citing the work of Justin Bartlett and Aaron Turner: “The move back to DIY hand-drawn illustration looks pretty cool and suits underground metal.” Turner is also a highly visible member of the metal graphics scene through his label Hydra Head, which he founded while still in college in 1993, and his band Isis is known for its heavily layered and complex songs. After studying painting and printmaking at Boston University, Turner, like O’Malley, taught himself Photoshop and Illustrator. “Once I understood the realm of possibility with digital apps, I explored them full-bore,” says Turner. “After two or three years of focusing on the computer, I wanted to take what I learned with that and integrate it with the more hand-drawn approach I had started out with.” Employing a distinctive line reminiscent of woodcuts, Turner’s abstract, sometimes vermiform designs grace all of the packaging for Isis, and more than half of all Hydra Head releases. “For me, generating stuff by hand is a more direct and connected approach to making work,” he continues. “It is more intimate and carries more of my personality than computer designs.”

Among the few designers Turner trusts to design for Hydra Head (including some Isis merch like posters and tees) are O’Malley and Brooklyn-based Australian Seldon Hunt, who deranges his work with a pointillist intensity of detail and mirror-imaging. His work treats ostensibly predictable metal tropes like skulls and desolate natural vistas yet eschews diabolism. He transfers an almost psychedelic power through dense information and rigorous symmetry. But he disavows the mantle of a metallized Fred Tomaselli: “I think the psychedelic nature of the work is there but I’ve never been influenced by psychedelic art, which I’ve always hated,” says Hunt. “I do want people to be hypnotized, and the arrangement and detail is part of that. I want my work to look impossible, for someone to look at it and find through the level of detail that the work has a life of its own. But I don’t think it’s ‘trippy.’ It’s colder than that.”

While O’Malley, Turner, and Hunt may plot three key points on the map of avant-garde metal design, their stylistic divergences support Christe’s claim that diversification is inherently part of the aesthetic. Hunt agrees, and he’s skeptical that metal’s newfound coolness presages mainstream attention: “There’s no one aesthetic really … we like to say there’s an aesthetic, but it’s really just the logo on the T-shirt that differentiates us from people in the fashion industry or architects or computer programmers—they all tend to wear black as well. It’s just that most of the stuff we make and wear tends to have something negative on it. I don’t think it’s got a huge capacity to be involved in mainstream society.”

The nature of heavy metal, based as it is in countless suspensions of disbelief—of imagination, or as O’Malley posits, even of “transcendence”—may reveal itself to be ultimately quixotic. But the music and its corresponding visual messages are far more refined today, if still abrasive to the mainstream, and its practitioners continue to evolve these themes out of restlessness. “Metal is interesting because it really encompasses so many different types of music,” says O’Malley. “It has a strong aesthetic teetering on taboo, but isn’t really taboo. It’s just a little bit outsider.”