"THE OTHER PARIS"

I'm reading a recent book called "The Other Paris." It's mostly about that city in it's heyday in the 19th and early 20th Century. People used to say about the city, "I'd rather be poor in Paris than rich anywhere else."

You can see why they felt that way. The city's narrow streets remained beautiful even when flooded as they were when this picture (above) was taken in 1909. 

Above,  the exterior of a famous artists' cabaret in Clichy.

It was pretty nice inside (above).

But there were even fancier places (above) for those who could afford it.

Above, Monjol, where the poorest, most desperate women of the night offered their wares. It's odd to see it on a picture postcard.

It was cleaned up a bit by 1922 when this picture (above) was taken. The clean-up had unintended consequences, though. The enforced closing of bordellos put the women on the street where they needed tough guy pimps for protection.

This (above) is the gigantic Les Halles market. Lots of the poor lived directly and indirectly off the market.

The market was renovated and made more sanitary in (I think) 1960. That put a lot of poor out of work, necessitating broader social programs and more taxes.

Today the city is still wonderful and now it's mostly well lit and well ordered...maybe too much so. The book seems to ask the question: can any modern city ever achieve the magic of the old Paris? Exactly what did the magic of the old city consist of? Those are interesting questions.  

THE ULTIMATE HOME OFFICE

Thanks to Alexander Calder I found it! The ultimate home office!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Of course it's a kitchen in the photo but it's not hard to imagine the kind of accessory changes that would transform it into an artist's workplace.

The Chinese kite's a great idea as is the homemade copper baking mold lights and the Moroccan tapestry.

Nice, eh?

ELVIS GIFs

Gee, I miss Elvis. I was only a little kid when he was at his peak, but even kids knew there was something special there.

Above, my favorite Elvis GIF.

Very nice!!!!

Elvis was the all time best projector of teen angst. He did it even better than James Dean. Amazingly, some men of my generation never got over their angst. It's weird to see it in an adult. Maybe they hung on to it because it looked so good on Elvis.

Ah, I see it clearly now. The moves are all in the footwork.

A FATHER'S DAY GIFT!

As a Father's Day gift to you dads out there I offer two songs. Both are completely inappropriate for the holiday but I'm in a hurry and the songs just happened to be on my mind. Anyway, I know you'll like them, so I won't have to feel guilty for wasting anyone's time.

The first song is The Queen of the Night song from Ingmar Bergman's version of Mozart's "Magic Flute." The young princess has been kidnapped by a lecherous troll so that she may be brought to her mysterious father, who she's never met. Her crazy, vengeful mother, the Queen of the Night, appears and gives the princess a dagger so that she can kill her dad. That's what the Queen's singing about in the video above.

I didn't choose this song because it had any special significance for Father's Day but, coincidentally, the opera...especially this version of it... does take the stand that a good father has necessary virtues that only a male can impart to a child...yes, even if that child is a girl.



Here's (above) another of my favorite Mozart songs, this one sung by a woman in drag, pretending to be a man. It's from "Marriage of Figaro." This also is inappropriate for the holiday but I found myself singing it for days in the shower so it's found a place here.

The lyrics don't fit what the melody is saying very well. Lots of songs were like that up to about 150 years ago...I don't know why. The music without lyrics seems to be pleading for understanding, for some ideal combination of human intellect and passion. That's only partly reflected in the lyrics. Go figure. Anyway, it's beautiful.

So, Happy Fathers' Day all you dads!

GREEK ISLAND ARCHITECTURE

Boy, I'd like to visit the Greek Islands and see how life is lived in those beautiful hillside towns. Imagine what the architecture must be like!

I wonder what it's like to live in homes (above) that are like theatrical stage sets.

And on hills. What's that like?

Greek exteriors are great, but everybody knows that already. I wonder what the homes are like inside.

 The interiors you see in books (above) are radically different than anything you'd find in America. Do they work? I don't know. I'd have to spend some time in them before I could tell. There's no doubt that they're beautiful, though. 

When I researched this I was surprised to find that a lot of island interiors looked Turkish. An internet site says the Greeks were slaves of the Turks from the fall of Constantinople in the 1400s to Greek independence in 1830, so I guess that explains it.

Here's another home with a similar bedroom. The beds are on what appears to be a theatrical stage, complete with theater curtains. Wow! What an interesting idea!

I do wonder, though, how you get sex privacy if everyone sleeps in the same room. Also, what do you do about snoring?

Beds are frequently left unmade during the day. Even so, the rooms still look good.

Meals are often eaten outside.

Sometimes dining areas are similar to outdoor rooms (above).

This idea of a room that's both indoors and outdoors is intriguing.

I'll end with this open-air basement for drying clothes. Geez, a place that can make the drying of clothes look interesting sounds like a destination to me.

JOHN K CARICATURE

HAW! Fresh from a box in the garage...another caricature of me by John K. Geez, that guy can draw!

NEWSPAPER COMICS' GOLDEN AGE

Good old Milt Gross! That's his work above. Sometimes I think the man was incapable of making an unfunny drawing.

And Rube Goldberg (above), cartoonist extraordinaire! I love the way he thinks of excuses for people to hold their own heads, hands and knees... just what you weren't supposed to do in polite society. The thinking at the time was that poses like that made you look dumb and low class.

Here (above) Milt Gross tries his hand at the same thing. I love the opening pose with the raised shoulders and clutched arms. How do you like the mustachioed head with hair greased back?

I also like the shaking fist in the middle drawing. The pointing finger on the other hand is the perfect counterpoint. He's no doubt pointing at his own image in the mirror, but it (probably unintentionally) also looks like he's pointing at his elbow, as if he was making a dirty gesture of some kind.


  Back to Rube Goldberg (above). I like the way he used to draw strange heads then think of funny biographies to justify them.

Geez, this was drawn over a hundred years ago!

MILT GROSS AND RUBE GOLDBERG

Two of my favorite cartoonists were Milt Gross and Rube Goldberg. Milt Gross often gave top flight poses to all the players in the frame, both the aggressors and the reactors. 

Rube Goldberg staged everybody in the same shot too, but frequently gave the best poses to the reactors, as in the in the strip above.

Okay, he sometimes gave the aggressor (above) the best poses, but you you see what I'm getting at.

I've been influenced by Goldberg so in photo stories, like the kind I do on this blog, I usually give the emphasis to the listener.

 Here's excerpts from a photo story I did in June, 2009. The girl (played by me) is surprised when her stupid ex-boyfriend (off screen) approaches her in a restaurant. I'll leave out the dialogue.

 She humors him, hoping he'll go away.

 But he doesn't.

He says that, now that he knows she hangs out at this restaurant, he'll hang out there too.

 Yes sir, they'll be inseparable from now on.

 The boyfriend bids goodbye for now...

 ...but adds that he'll be back.

 Well, it goes on. You can link to the whole thing on the side bar. The story's called "The Ex-boyfriend."

The odd thing is that, despite my affection for reactive acting, the animation I worked on usually put the emphasis on the speaker.

That's because I like to work with aggressive characters. They're appealing. The audience naturally wants to see what they're doing, and so do I. Even so, I had a lot of Goldbergian fun working on the reactive scenes and I wish I could have done more of them.

BTW: the last two pictures above aren't mine.

HOW SHAKESPEARE SETS UP A SCENE

I've often thought that modern screen writers take too much time to set up a scene. They're too wedded to realism, where everything takes forever to do. To make my point I thought I'd compare two versions of a classic scene that everybody's already familiar with, and what could be more classic than the famous balcony scene in "Romeo and Juliet?"

You know the story. Here's how a modern screen writer would write the same scene:

A doorbell rings. It rings long enough for the maid in another part of the house to hear it. She drops what she's doing and answers the door. Romeo identifies himself, says what he's come for. The maid invites him in and offers to see if Juliet is home. The frightened Romeo steps inside and sits down, maybe wishing he'd never come. Juliet unexpectedly appears on the stairs as Romeo looks around the room. She dismisses the maid and greets Romeo. 

After an awkward moment Romeo offers Juliet a breath mint...not that she needs it, he explains...and asks about her father. He also admires her hair, inquires about a painting on the wall, and says he was just passing by.  Juliet is nervous too and to ease the tension she talks about a mutual acquaintance and there's some light laughter.

Romeo offers to go and Juliet says its not that late yet. Romeo sits down again, thoughtfully picking at lint balls on his socks. In and around the small talk there's little meaningful glances between them. Finally Romeo takes her hand. 

Well, it goes on.

Here's (below) how Shakespeare set up the same kind of scene:

"But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?"

'Nuff said.