ABOUT GEORGE HERRIMAN

"Just one more George Herriman post. That's a Herriman self portrait, above.

Herriman was what Wikipedia calls a "Louisiana mulatto creole." who "passed" for white. His family spoke French. He might have been self conscious about his mixed ethnicity because he disdained publicity and was kidded by friends for his reluctance to take off his hat.

Early on he did a comic strip in the German style about a black guy named Mose (above) who always tries to pass himself off as white. On first glance all the humor seems to be at the expense of Mose, but that's only the McGuffin. Half the joke comes out of the whites who are over-the-top tickled to death to be Scottish or Irish and who take any opportunity to dance an Irish Jig or a Highland Fling.

I wonder if anyone ever captured Herriman on film. I'd like to hear his voice.

Herriman had one of the great hats of his era. He looked great in it! As a matter of fact, more than any other artist of his day, he looked like a cartoonist.

Of course he always looked a bit awkward in photos. He may have had naturally broad shoulders but it's also possible that he had normal shoulders and simply liked to "puff up" for pictures.

Maybe he was self conscious about being short.

So far as I know, Herriman was the best caricaturist of himself. He did a couple of frequently reproduced back shots of himself,  one of which is reproduced above. These influenced me immensely, to the point where I feel my life will have been will have been lived for naught if I don't do a project built around frequent back shots.

YIKES! A RETRACTION: According to commenter "nodnarB," that caricature of Herriman was actually done by cartoonist Tad Dorgan, who shared an office with Herriman. That's an example of Dorgan's work above.

Well, I'll be dogged! All these years I attributed that picture to Herriman. Many thanks to nodnarB for the correction!!!!!!!!!

Above, another Tad Dorgan. Geez, the world must have been a different place in that era.  The spittoon, the friendly bartender, the practical jokers who all go to the bar at night to drink together, the blank wall...it's so different than what's around now.

MY FAVORITE NEWSPAPER COMIC STRIP

 
One of my favorite funny newspaper strips...rivalling Al Capp's "Fearless Fosdick" or Feinenger's "The "Kinder Kids"...was the collected strips done by George Herriman in the years between 1904 and 1916.  I have to say "collected" because Herriman worked on many strips in these years and no single title dominates.

Some of my favorites were his sports cartoons (above). They were laid out like irregular sketchbook pages at the top of the sports page.

His editors must have liked him because on days when sports were slow he was allowed to put up little autobiographical pieces like the one above. Here the ex-mayor of a town called Independence shows Herriman the local sights.

Sometimes (above) he made fun of amateur theater.

Herriman did some color pages in this period and he sometimes tried to fit in to the formal comics format. In my opinion these pages were much inferior to his black and white "sketchbook-style" strips.

I wish I knew more about the the drawing instruments Herriman used. Evidently the brush didn't suit him. He preferred to use the kind of hard, scratchy dip pen that deters most modern artists. If you haven't used these yet, you might want to give them a try. They're hard to control but everything looks funnier when done with a pen of that type.

DISNEYLAND ARCHITECTURE

Minnie's House in Disneyland is a destination I never get tired of.  The skewered, wonky look of it would be too caricatured for everyday living. Even so, you wonder if some modification of that could be made to work in the real world. 

Wonky or not, the house has a wonderful vibe and that's hard to achieve. Whenever someone succeeds with that they should get a medal. 

Disneyland doesn't contain a reproduction of the home in "Alice in Wonderland," but I'll discuss it here anyway. 

In this frame from the film (above) Alice is a little too big for the house but I can imagine a more practical scale that would still make the visitor feel tall. 

I also like the scale of the stairs. They're the kind of stairs you see in split level houses as opposed to two story houses. In split levels the higher level is off to the side rather than on top of of the bottom level. That makes for a shorter staircase.  It's an interesting idea. 

Also, notice the slant of the ceiling.... 

From this view the film gives the ceiling a different height than it is in the establishing shot. That's okay, it's all about artistic license. 

What a beautiful bedroom (above)!

A visit to a Disney park would be inconceivable without a visit to Tarzan's Treehouse and The Swiss Family Robinson walkthrough, but wouldn't it be even more fun to actually live in something like that? No, we don't have to wait for the far future when we can grow trees fast. We can do it now, with realistic synthetic tree trunks and fast growing real-biology leaves and buds stuffed into fake branches.

I have to admit that most people would rightly rebel against the idea of synthetic trees in real neighborhoods.  I'm only introducing the idea as a thought experiment.

Let me digress for a moment to ask, "Why haven't architects made use of real-size Banzai-type trees?" Can Bamboo, which is fast-growing, be trained to bend in useful ways?

Disneyland attractions are impeccably lit. It seems to me that all new houses should incorporate that kind of professional Hollywood-type lighting. By "professional" I don't mean the expensive quartz lights that are actually used for stage and film, but artistic arrangements of more safe and affordable lights that can mimic stage lighting.

Little old ladies shouldn't have to figure out these lighting schemes themselves. Professional designers should do it and install it before the first owners move in.

 Gee, there's lots more to say about this, but I'm running out of space. I'll pick this up again in another post.

A VALENTINE ESSAY: "HOW I MET MY WIFE"

My computer room is in disarray so I can't shoot the fresh visuals I'd need to illustrate this story. Instead I'll borrow some pictures of myself from previous blogs and hope for the best. Here goes....

Having acknowledged, at a very early age, the indispensability of women, I had to find the answer to only one question: which one?

The girl I found was a hormone driven boy's dream come true, but she was also given to outbursts of sentimentality. She's still that way today. She's a buddy. Women bore her. She insists on buying her round, but she secretly hopes that doors will be opened for her because she's really a quivering jelly of feminine sensitivity.

She writes mystery stories which I'm not allowed to read. She used to paint, but the possibilities of two dimensions have been exhausted, and, besides, the brushes are stiff with neglect. She subscribes to a literary magazine but doesn't always read it because of the demands of her career, of being a mother, and of being a righter of her husband's wrongs.

She crawls from room to room, gratefully whimpering when she finds masculine disorder and piteously hurt by any indications of masculine independence.  She is what writer Patrick Catling described as a "sweetly scented pink octopus of maternal solicitude."

She keeps looking up from her Sudoku (above) to smile. She wields a thermometer like a magic wand.

She's a terrible weight pressing hotly on the shoulders,  a hobble, a blindfold, a distracting sound, a thick wad of fly-paper in the Kleenex box. But she is necessary.

The tests have been numerous, but the final outcome had already been decided long ago when we were both councilors at the same Summer camp.

In the dark, in a rowboat beached under a sheltering cave of pine needles, in spite of awful fear, I first kissed Woman. Though it was an inaccurate kiss, just a touch of the lips, it was a kiss of total commitment. I hadn't yet come across Yeats' advice: "Never give all the heart." I intuitively spurned the advice then and gave all the heart there was, and I give it still.

BTW: This is a much altered version of a tome by children's author, Patrick Skene Catling.

VALENTINE'S DAY FOR WRITERS

Valentine's day is almost here! Guys are supposed to be above it, as if were a holiday made only for women. I just don't see it that way. I like everything about it. Even the cliches make complete sense to me. 

Well...everything except Vermont Teddy Bears. Who thought of that, anyway?

Romance is a writers dream. Stories of that sort practically write themselves, maybe because there's so many kinds of romance. 

There's tough guy romances for the worldly types...

...and over-the-top sentimental stories for those who like their emotion full-strength. 

You don't have to locate your story in exotic locations. Romance happens everywhere, even in small town America. The character types are all people we're familiar with.

Like the guy who muscles in.  It happens when you're least expecting it. A total stranger opens the car door for your girl, which on the face of it is harmless, but once in a while there's a palpable subtext that says, "Why don't you dump this loser and go out with a real man?" Yikes! 

The intruder usually has the advantage. He has plausible deniability on his side. After all, he was just being friendly. 

There's not a lot that you can do, unless it happens frequently. If you overreact your girl'll think you're crazy. Boy, love can be painful...but for a writer, all that suffering is pure gold. Nobody's going to put a book down in the middle of an intruder scene.

Romance is especially painful for the young and klutzy.  Here (above) our guy attempts to hold the door open for a special girl who's racing for the elevator.  Maybe he pushes the "Door Open" button to help her out. 

Only he pushes the "Door Close" button by mistake. That's what young people do. In real life these kinds of gaffs really aren't very important. If a girl holds them against you then she probably wasn't meant for you anyway.

The girl who really is meant for you will be blind to your faults, as you are to hers. That's the delightful, wonderful thing about love. It truly is blind!

I believe in it. It's a noble thought, both practical and transcendent; well worth endless novels and well worth a day of the year devoted exclusively to it. .

RECENT ASTRONOMICAL PICTURES 2/2016

Here it is, the barbell-shaped Comet 67P as seen from the Rosetta probe this time last year. The amount of water discovered there locates the origin as the Kyper Belt or maybe the even more distant Oort Cloud. The question that needs to be answered is, how did it get here, in the Inner Solar System?

If it came from the Oort Cloud the possibility exists that it was kicked in our direction by the gravitational influence of Nemisis, a hypothetical brown dwarf star that might be a companion of our Sun.

Since no one has found Nemesis, it may not exist. If it doesn't then a rogue planet the size of Earth could have done the trick, or even events in the Alpha Centauri System which is next to ours.

Gee, Ceres (above) turned out to be disappointing. It's just a big ball with a couple of puzzling white spots. The asteroid is so big and round that it's been promoted to the status of Dwarf Planet.

This picture of Pluto shows Wright Mons, the largest volcano in the outer Solar System. The magma consisted mostly of molten water. Few craters are in evidence near the volcano indicating that the last big eruption must have been  recent.

I'll end with this (above) picture of "light pillars" in Alaska. They appear when fog brings in a rain of tiny, flat ice chips. I almost didn't post this because fluky things like this always seem to be happening somewhere on the Earth these days, but, when you think about it, that's why flukes like this are worth noting...because they're so common.

The latest advances in photography and satellites are revealing just how common the uncommon events are. I don't know about you, but I can't think of thunderstorms now without imagining the red, jellyfish-shaped "sprites" that have recently been discovered above storm clouds. Weird events in the sky have presumably been happening for eons, but we just haven't been able to record them til now.

MY WIFE'S OFFICE

A couple of posts back I hinted that my wife was a sentimental romantic who, if given free reign, would decorate our house like Laura Ashley or Thomas Kincaid.  That's not exactly true, as you'll see in a moment.

I just said that about her because her recent choices struck me that way, but now I feel guilty about it. Just so I don't burn forever in Liar's Hell, I'll try to compensate by giving a more balanced view of her here. I'll show you how she decorated her own workroom, which I find endlessly fascinating.

Well, to start off, she's had a technical education so she hung a number of framed photos of old-time civil engineering projects on the wall.  The one above shows a wooden trestle leading to a logging camp in Oregon.

Then she has a number of funky wooden shelves to hold her rock collection. They're mostly samples she collected herself on her travels. Inbetween the rocks, on the wood-paneled walls, she's hung canteens, old oil lamps, camping paraphernalia and a Navajo Indian rug.

There's a few geological maps up there.

And a nifty forest poster.

And animal posters. She loves wildlife.

She's an archer and put up a couple of target posters with animals on them, but they're for show and she'd almost rather die than shoot anything that's alive.

She likes chemistry...

...and she's very fond of this Fragonard print (above) showing a girl reading. She's read a gazillion Agatha Christie-type mysteries and collects Kipling, Karl May, Jean Straton Porter and the Travers Mary Poppins books .

She put up this replica of a Renaissance bas-relief and it looks great.

Well, that's it more or less. There's family photos and stuff like that but I won't bother you with that. Um, there's one more picture you need to see, but it's not from my wife's workroom.

Haw! It's a picture I assembled.  It shows me as Mr. Meek with a portrait of my fictional wife in the background. It's funny for Mr. Meek to have a wife like that and my real-life wife...who's very sweet...will hopefully understand when she sees herself slandered on the wall over my desk.  Sigh! I hope she realizes that sometimes you just have to take it on the chin for art.

Yikes! I made myself transparent! I'll fix it!