VIOLET: "Well, maybe she's right, Gladys. Rand says we're born with fundamental rights, which no Nietzchean Superman or Leviathan state can morally withdraw." |
Sunday, August 15, 2010
PHILOSOPHY GIRLS AUDITIONS (PART 2)
Thursday, August 12, 2010
THEORYBOY INTERVIEWS MILT GRAY
Well, slightly exaggerating. Above, the heroine of Milt Gray's new web comic, "Ms. Viagri Ampleten." |
Sepia sketches by John Kricfalusi |
UNCLE EDDIE: "I'll put a few of the panels up (that's them above, cropped badly by me, and in a different format than the one Milt uses. I was just too sleepy to do it right). Boy, you can tell that an animator drew them."
MILT: "Thanks. There's a lot that's different about this comic. I hope it influences things. The web is a great vehicle for comics, and it'll get even better if we continue to experiment."
Milts web comic: http://www.viagriampleten.com
Labels:
caricatiures,
john k,
Milt,
milt gray,
viagri
Sunday, August 08, 2010
WHAT MADE JOHNATHAN WINTERS SO GREAT?
I'm not sure. Maybe it had something to do with Winters being mischievous. People like that quality. Maybe that's why mischievous people make good joke tellers. They make you aware of the absurdity of the fact that you just dropped something important to listen to something that's going to be incredibly stupid.
I don't remember many jokes, and I'm not really good at telling them. What I do remember is the way they were told. I love the way joke tellers look both ways then grab your arm and lean in furtively. I love the whole ritual that's associated with joke telling. Mischievous people are experts at creating the atmosphere that precedes a joke.
Saturday, August 07, 2010
JONATHAN WINTERS IMPROV
All three of these YouTube videos are of Jonathan Winters, from the period when he first started to do improv on TV.
He was far and away the greatest hero of my childhood. Unfortunately he was only on late at night when I wasn't allowed to watch. To see him I had to wait til my folks went to sleep, then sneak downstairs in the dark, taking care to avoid creaking floorboards and barking pets. I'd feel around for the TV controls in the dark, then with infinite patience slowly turn on the set, with the brightness and sound almost as low as they could be.
The films you see here include some of the very same sketches that I watched in the dark. I never saw them with this clarity, though. The screen was always so black that I could barely make out the shapes as human, and I had to press my ear hard against the speaker to hear what was happening. My grandfather was a light sleeper and more than once he caught me and terrible yelling ensued. Then there were the ghosts, but I won't go into that.
I guess you appreciate what you have to make sacrifices for. All these videos have great meaning for me.
I read somewhere that the young Bach had to do something similar in order to get access to his dad's music library. His father was certain that his oldest son would be the musically gifted one, and didn't want Bach, the little kid, to get a taste for something that was so obviously beyond his meagre ability.
Thursday, August 05, 2010
ROBERT CRUMB'S SURPRISING NEW BOOK
The book (above)..... |
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
HAVE YOU HEARD OF THE "DANDIZETTE?"
The dandizette is a female English dandy. Their peek period coincided with that of the male dandy, roughly from 1810 to 1820. |
Girls are strange. They seem to prefer men who are either ultra-masculine, or who look and act like girls. No doubt the truth is more complicated, but I make no claim to possessing the truth.
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Were dandies of the Regency period really as over the top as they were portrayed in etchings?
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I hope so. It makes the period much more interesting. |
Sunday, August 01, 2010
ABOUT ELMORE LEONARD
2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."
3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.
4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".
5 Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.
8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.
9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
BTW: I added something important to the Bette Davis post immediately below, to the part about Mankiewicz. Take a look!
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
MY LAST (AND BEST) BETTE DAVIS POST
Sunday, July 25, 2010
WAS BETTE DAVIS CRAZY?
The way I heard it, John Huston was so taken with Bette's over the top rage in "Of Human Bondage," that he was hot to do a film with her which would be one long mad scene. With "In This Our Life" (1942) (above) he finally got his chance. |
The expressions Betty makes in this film are not to be believed. She must have spent a lot of time in front of mirrors at home, figuring it all out. |
You have to admire her for putting so much into a role that made her look evil and crazy. |
Bette was a live action cartoon character. I can't believe that no modern animation studio except Spumco ever attempted to use poses like this. |
Animation fans talk about Disney's Cruella de Vil as if she were the ultimate example of villainous cartoon acting. She's okay, but she can't hold a candle to Bette (above). Disney should have pushed Cruella farther. |
Here (above) Bette begs a dying old man to help her get out of a crime she committed. He's only moments away from meeting his maker and can't force himself to pay attention to her. |
She's outraged at his self-absorption (above) and gives him a piece of her mind. The last thing he sees on Earth is Bette screaming at him. What a scene! |
Oooch! Big mistake (above)! Never slap a crazy person, not unless you want to find arsenic in your morning tea. Look at the way Bette reacts to the slap. |
Bette plays crazy so well, that it's hard to resist wondering if she was crazy in real life. I wish I knew. She certainly had a reputation for being hard to get along with. Her daughter wrote a vitriolic "Mommy Dearest"-type biography, called "My Mother's Keeper" which I'm reading right now, but there's no way of telling if the book is reliable.
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That's Olivia de Havilland above. I digress to include her here just to call attention to the number of good manhandling scenes there are in the Huston film. We could do this easily in 2D animation, but you're not likely to see it in computer films. In 3D the polygons would interfere with each other and produce a hideous monster.
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Back to Bette acting crazy: Vincent Sherman, the director of my favorite Bette film, "Old Acquaintance," had an interesting story to tell about it. He said Bette gave him a lot of trouble at the outset of the film but eventually became friendly. Even so he got the feeling that he was walking on eggs, and had to be very careful.
One day, near the end of the project, Bette confided to him that she loved him, and he didn't know how to respond. Soon after her husband (or boyfriend...I can't remember) came to visit Sherman and advised him, for his own good, to be careful, that having an affair with Bette would be like taking a bull by the horns. The implication was that Bette was crazy. The affair never occurred, and Bette and Sherman parted amicably.
Sherman looked forward to working with his old friend on their next film together, "Mr. Skeffington," and was shocked when, with no warning, Bette showed up on the set ready for war, and loudly refused to co-operate with Sherman on absolutely anything. The entire shooting became a famous disaster. So was Bette crazy? I don't know, but does it matter? If she was crazy we can be grateful that she channeled that craziness into her art, and by doing so redefined film acting. |
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
MY RANT ABOUT MODERN ARCHITECTURE
Where would you rather live? Here (above)......... |
....or here (above)?
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Which is easier on the eye? This (above).......... |
....or this (above)? |
Listen to my rant against modern architecture on the latest ASIFA Archive podcast, link below:
And on another subject.....
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Holy Cow! It's time for The San Diego Comic Con!!!!!!! In a few hours all the LA cartoonists will have migrated to San Diego. Almost none of our ilk will be left in the city. The studios will be dark and empty. Computer screens will flicker aimlessly, and automatic urinals will flush needlessly. Here and there a lonely and unloved curmudgeon will do his miserable work in silence, believing that his absence down South is somehow making a statement. |
To everybody else: may you find what you're looking for in San Diego! Good hunting!
This blog will resume after the convention, on Sunday night, July 25th!
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Sunday, July 18, 2010
WHAT KIND OF ADS SUCCEED ON THE NET?
The answer is: Almost none. Almost no ads succeed big on the internet. The truth is, it's a lousy place to advertise. It's kinda sad because advertisers are throwing dollars at the net these days, and they're not going to get most of them back.
Okay: iTunes, ebay, Amazon, porn, airline and hotel booking agents, gambling and dating services are making out like bandits on the net....but, really, who else is? Try to sell detergent or coffee on the net. You can't.
Try asking your friends this question, and see what answers you get: "Can you name an ad for a product you discovered on the net, (but not on Amazon or eBay) that gave you an intense desire to own it?" I bet you'll draw a blank. Nobody takes internet ads seriously. It's odd because we can all name print and TV ads that had that made us salivate. I'd kill to have TV products like AirHog or a Fushigiball or a bladeless fan. I'll bet my daughter is mulling over Boody Pop right now.
Maybe the net's a bad place to advertise because it's a bad place to tell stories. Print and TV excel at stories, and the net doesn't. That's important to know because fiction, or documentary that's structured like fiction, is what drives sales on TV. You buy Donald Duck Orange Juice because you've grown to like and trust Donald Duck on TV, and you secretly believe that Donald will somehow know you've bought his juice.
In my opinion advertisers made a big mistake in not supporting print and broadcast media, even when their audiences declined. The net's not a great place to discover a new product, but it's a killer place to follow up on a desire that's been planted in your head by another medium.
BTW: John K just told me how he would advertise on the net if given the chance, and the ideas were brilliant. That prompts me to amend what I said here to something like, SO FAR advertising hasn't worked well on the net.
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