THE AMAZING JOHN MARTIN (1812-1875)

Arguably the greatest British landscape painter of the Romantic era was John Martin. He liked religious themes inspired by The Old Testament and Milton's "Paradise Lost."

Romantics interpreted his pictures as depictions of the landscapes of the inner mind, along the lines of what would later be associated with Freud and Dali.

Here (above) Martin depicts Macbeth but for some of his contemporaries he seemed also to convey the majesty and tumult of the inner mind. How, reasoned the Romantics, could man ever be happy as a slave or as the victim of a life of quiet desperation when his true mission is to heroically wander the vast inner landscape of the mind?

That sounds like an Eastern concept...did Indian philosophy affect the West in the 19th Century? I guess it did...look at Schopenhauer.

To judge from the pictures, Martin unconsciously sees man as a tragic, Wagnerian figure. We're warriors who will spit in the eyes of the gods if need be, and that's why they're interested in us.

It's odd to think that a hundred years after Martin's lifetime the pendulum would swing the other way and man would in some places be perceived as a hapless statistic, possessing only an outer life.

Here's (above) a picture that influenced Ray Harryhausen. Ray was a huge fan of Martin and Gustav Dore.

Americans will no doubt react to Martin with the feeling that they've seen that kind of statement before. Well, that's because they have. Our high style of Western painting derives from American painters like Thomas Cole, and Cole was a pupil of John Martin's, Over here Martin's grandiose style was put to the service of awe-inspiring landscape and the extreme Romantic philosophy was deleted. This adaption is a style that perfectly fits the American wilderness.

By the way, the picture above is by Bierstadt, who I assume was a pupil of Cole. As with most of the pictures in this post, it would benefit from a substantial enlargement. I wish I could have found a larger, high res version.

ME AS OLIVER HARDY

Thanks for all the comments concerning my computer problems. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who has them. I just finished a fix and it seems to work better now. I'm too tired to post but just so I don't appear to be dead.....here's a doodle of me as Oliver Hardy. Whaddaya think?

TZVI EREZ: ALLEGED CROOK WHO PLAYS LIKE AN ANGEL

What do you think of this three minute clip from "The Well Tempered Clavier?" I love it! The clarity, the sensitivity to what Bach seems to be saying, the fun...it's a terrific recording! The thing is, the Canadian pianist who made it is believed by the police to be a crook!

 It's alleged that he used a Ponzi scheme to cheat investors out of 27 million dollars. He runs a printing business and is accused of telling investors that he had big contracts that never existed.  He might have  gambled the money away playing internet poker. The case was never brought to court because the state couldn't afford the resources it would have taken to prosecute it. Amazing!



Well, the guy's personal life doesn't seem to influence his playing. Give a listen to this fast, Glenn Gould-style rendition of an earlier part of the Well Tempered Clavier. It's incredible! For me this is a must have CD.

NEW FACES TO DRAW (AND A FEW BODIES)

Ever the friend of our fellow cartoonists, the Theory Corner staff once again presents a tableau of thought-provoking models to draw. Let's start with Richard Widmark (above) who was a terrific psycho villain when he was young. 

A skinny, giggly sadist with a weird hat, a low class dark shirt, and a loosely hanging raincoat...what's not to like? Widmark enjoys intimidating people, and even though he's a sociopath you grudgingly like him...well, in a way. He enjoys his work, and that makes him magnetic.  

   

Basil Rathbone (above) was a great Sherlock Holmes, but he was an equally great villain. To judge from the picture above, he had it in him to play psycho-villains of the Widmark type. The look on his face seems to say, "Thanks for the favor, Pal! I come into your office to rub you out, and you save me the trouble by backing away, right out an open window. You even leave me your cigarettes!"

  

It's fun to draw women sitting (above) when they're wearing short skirts. Most women in this situation don't know what to do with their legs, and they try to hide them under purses and couch pillows. It's kinda cute.

There's one pose that's that all sitting women try to avoid, and the lady above has just taken it. It's the deadly fork pose where the legs descend in open parallel, and from an angle that makes them look oddly small and out of proportion. They look like marionette's legs.

I like the seam on the couch.

This wise woman (above) avoids the fork by taking a deliberately stylized, closed leg stance, with body thrust forward. 

Poor Victor Mature got stuck with this puppet suit (above) in one of his films. Man, one faux pas like this undid all the image building cultivated in his last half dozen gladiator films.

In real life I love to draw conversations between two people who seem to come from different worlds (above). The clash of human types is one of my favorite themes. 

GOD SAVE THE AMERICAN STATES

The videos here are all from the excellent HBO series on John Adams that aired a few years ago. I'll talk about these films in a moment, but first a word about the holiday.

I was tempted to celebrate the Fourth by putting up a bunch of pinups of beautiful girls in stars and stripes bikinis...tempted, but I just couldn't do it. It seems to me that the holiday is too serious for that. I intend to celebrate with raucous beer and barbecue like everybody else, but first I'll remember with gratitude the people who made possible my happiness in this country.

Some people are quiet souls who could thrive under any system that was at least minimally tolerable. I envy them, and I wish I could be like them. Unfortunately I'm a goofy and sometimes silly romantic, the kind of person who foolishly provokes the powers that be and ends up being killed for it, or spending his life in jail. My type of person needs the American freedoms; I can't survive without them. Thank God I was born in a time and place that tolerates my kind of person, and allows me to find my own way.



Here ( the video immediately above) are three clips from different episodes of the Adams TV series. They show Adams' stormy relationship with Benjamin Franklin. They were both good men, but they just couldn't get along. It underlined the question that was on everybody's mind in the late eighteenth century: can temperamentally different people and states ever combine into a functional  republic?



Here's (above) an exquisitely awkward sequence where newly-appointed ambassador Adams meets King George III for the first time. Adams is awed by the sophistication and grandeur of the English court, but is mindful of the equal grandeur of the American ideals he represents.

Well, here's a glass to the Founding Fathers, and their powdered wigs!

BEST COMMERCIALS

Here are three of my favorite ladies in current TV commercials.

The first one (above) takes Abilify, which is a pill for Bi-Polar disorder. The haggard, Bi-Polar lady walks along the darkest, most terrifying beach in the universe, then takes Abilify and frolics in the sunny uplands. It ends ominously with her and her skeptical boyfriend leaving the sunny fields and walking over to the edge of a dark cliff.



Let me digress to say that the Abilify commercial got me interested in the subject of Bi Polar, and I just watched some videos on the subject. That's one, above. The jittery girl goes through several mood swings right infront of our eyes. It doesn't look like she's having much fun. Other videos made the point that if you have this disorder,  the chances are you have other related problems, and each can require a separate medication with a separate, horrifying side effect.

It's more treatable when you get it early and the symptoms are still subtle, but the attempt to spot it early has resulted in a large number of misdiagnoses and a bunch of overmedicated kids. Over two million Americans are said to have it, including a large number of rock singers, which doesn't surprise me. It's a condition you never really get rid of, and the pills can be very pricey.



Here's (above) an interesting video. It's creepy but it has the feel of an authentic cry of anguish from someone who speaks from experience. He says the illness has catapulted him into a higher evolution, but has it?  My guess is the sufferer listens to a lot of depressing goth music, which is like trying to put out a fire by dousing it with gasoline.



I'd love to introduce the Abilify lady to the diabetes cookbook lady, former Miss America Nicole Johnson (above). Surely she's the most happy, giggly (not "jiggly"), thrilled-to-be-alive, highly caffeinated woman on TV.  'Think they'd hit it off?




Maybe they'd both benefit from meeting the Zestra lady...not the lady above,  but rather the horny, blond-haired woman (below) who's always getting so tingly high on Zestra that she has to brace herself against a pillar. Boy, somebody throw cold water on that lady! Don't let her get a hold of your pets!

I researched Zestra on the net. Some women who used it complained of heat, and an unpleasant burnt oil smell. Others said you can get something cheaper that works just as well. Still others swore by it. I wonder what the truth is.

BASIL WOLVERTON'S "CULTURE CORNER"

I wish I knew more about this strip. Was it popular? Did kids like it? Me and my grade school friends would have gone nuts over it if we'd known about it. I would have saved it in a scrapbook.  

I'd be surprised if women liked it.  It's slapstick humor about deliberately ugly people. That means it was probably meant for guys. I wonder why girls don't like stuff like this? Maybe it's because they're so focused on looking good. We men, on the other hand, know we're ugly. We know we're the butt of a cosmic joke, so we decide to make the best of it and laugh.  

Wolverton drew in that "bigfoot" style that was as much influenced by black and white era gag animation as by print media. Wolverton gives it a big, thick line to make it more gritty. 

Being a true cartoonist, Wolverton instinctively knows that feet are funny.  They wouldn't be funny if they were covered with fur and had leathery bottoms. They make us laugh because they're so delicate and fru-fru, and yet we're forced to walk through the dirt with them. 

Many thanks to John Glenn Taylor, who put up these pictures on his "Easily Mused" blog.

http://johnglenntaylor.blogspot.com/2009/03/basil-wolvertons-culture-corner.html

BLACK AND WHITE OR COLOR?

In my humble opinion, black and white is a better medium for funny cartoons. Drawings read better in this medium, and the limited palette doesn't tempt us into fruitless attempts at realism.

The decision whether or not to use color will effect  everything you do in a cartoon. Believe it or not, it'll even effect the staging. 

It's no accident that old time black and white animators preferred to stage action on long downshots (above).  That comes natural in a funny cartoon, because it allows for more gag possibilities and sets off the foreground action with musical and visual counterpoints in the background.

Stage the same scene in color (pretend the shot above is in color), and it would have to be shot closer and from a low angle. That's because color promotes realism, and realism (at least cartoon realism) gives us the desire to get a closer look. Color staging sometimes strikes me as claustrophobic, and less gag friendly. It tempts us to rely on dialogue to carry the scene.

And let's face it: black and white (above) is innately more funny. It's easier to convey a dumb, class clown feel when color doesn't complicate things. 

Look at the color picture above. See how the color distracts? It's conveying a message of its own that fights the gags. I absolutely love good color in a cartoon but if you draw funny and don't work with a first-rate colorist, then you're in real trouble. 

Are there exceptions? Of course! This Avery gag (above) works fine in color.....

.....as does this John K. set-up. You wouldn't want to change a thing.  But these are exceptions to the rule! 

Thanks to these sites for the great frame grabs:

http://journeytojohnsbrain.blogspot.com/2008/08/dirty-pan.html

http://bestcartoongallery.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=50

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/

IMAGINING THE IDEAL CITY (PART II)

Wouldn't it be great if New York City was home to a lot of imaginative temporary structures? I'm talking about festive buildings that are meant to stand up for only two or three years, before being taken down and...and what? Discarded? Packed up and sent somewhere else? It would transform parts of the city into a permanent fairground, without dispacing the structures that are already there.

I love the idea of disposable or collapsible structures like circus tents. Their impermanence is their charm.  For small industrial exhibits and temporary shops, they're just the thing. Of course, even temporary structures can be expensive to put up.

This brings me to the subject of scaffolds, which is the real focus of this post.  Believe it or not, I'm a fan of the stupid things. I just like the way they look. They're often a lot more fun to watch than the buildings they're attached to, and I like to see skilled workers performing for the public. Add to that, that they're fast and easy to put up. What's not to like?

It seems to me that a few improvements in scaffolding technology could make possible cheap, temporary buildings on a large scale.

Here's (above) an easy-to-make temporary office building. You drive a few pylons into the ground to give it a secure base and a bit of a spine, put up the scaffolding real fast, then use a crane to slide in room modules. Sanitation and power lines through flexible rubber hoses.  Elevators would be nicer versions of the no frills kind that scaffolds use now...after all, they are intended for temporary use...two years, maybe three.

Areas that are temporary structure friendly might even have permanent pylons or holes for pylons.

Of course scaffolding comes in all sorts of shapes and styles. How do you like this (above) compact, portable park?

I wouldn't be surprised if foam scaffolding began to appear soon. Nothing to bolt together...you just spray it onto chicken wire forms and it dries rock hard. Such foam could have a lateral sheer vulnerability that would allow it to be demolished quickly by a teenager with a baseball bat. If the pieces fall on you, you might not even be hurt.

A nice feature of foam is that it's easily and cheaply moldable, something like styrofoam is now.  Foam scaffolding could resemble Mayan Temples, or any design we have molds for.

Beautiful structures like this could be so cheap to make that it wouldn't be worth the money to disassemble them and ship them to another city. Just send the molds.

How about a little foam mountain for kids to climb on for a couple of years?  Put them on some of those  empty lots that dot the city.

How about filling in the odd alleyway with a fake woodland path? The grass could be real. Grass grows fast.

Is any of this practical? I don't know, I'm just free associating. New York City already possesses a lot of charm. Those heavy, Empire-style buildings make the town unique and I dread the thought that future planners might be tempted to bulldoze them and substitute a shanty town of temporaries.  Even so, it's a town that provokes speculation. It's fun to think about stuff like this and...who knows?...one idea in a hundred might turn out to be workable.

IMAGINING THE IDEAL CITY

That's (above) not photoshopped...that's a real jet about to touch down at St. Maarten's airport in the Caribbean.  Tourists don't seem to mind, in fact they go out of their way to be under the big planes.

Takeoffs there are interesting, too. People grab onto the chain link fence and allow themselves to be lifted off their feet by the thrust from the jet engines.



Runways are getting shorter these days, and they're increasingly in urban areas. That's a good thing. Planes are seen to best advantage when they're close up.

I'm less worried about accidents, which are rare,  than I am about noise, but that may be less of a problem in the near future. Noise cancellation technology gets better every year. When it's feasible, I want to see giant planes fly close up over the main streets of our big cities. I want to see the rivets.

Our cities are in desperate need of exotic trees of all kinds. I don't see why they can't be grown on private tree farms with root systems made compact enough to allow for easy transportation and replanting. This should be a thriving business.

We should aim to bring the jungle into the big city. Parks are fine, but we also need lots of foliage in the rest of the town. How do we combine greenery with high-density living? I'll bet it's already been figured out. Michael Sporn posts examples sometimes. 

Whatever happened to front porches? They don't cost much to build and they make a house a lot cozier.

I'm a big believer in sleeping porches (above); in fact I have one attached to the back of my own house. We sleep out there in the summer. With screens all around it's like camping out. You end up looking forward to storms and thundershowers, and it's wonderful to wake up to bird songs.

We need lots more walking bridges in the cities.

Ditto balconies (above). 

In some areas we should build houses right up to the sea. You should get wet when you walk along the sidewalk.

Somehow we have to figure out a way to release wild animals in the big city. I want to see lions and tigers and monkeys outside my widow. Isn't there a way to make that happen?

We should build in the tornado belt. With the right stretchable materials maybe we could have wind resistant houses. We might even begin to think of the recreational uses of tornadoes. 

Maybe we need little ledge-like roads that would wind around the sides of our tall buildings.  Electronic guidance would prevent most accidents. 

Aaaargh, there's lots more to discuss, but I'll have to save it for another post. 

EGG McMUFFINS: THE THEORY CORNER WAY

I'm over the sickness, and now I'm ready for a hardy breakfast! Read on....

That's (above) Herb Peterson,  the benefactor of humanity who invented the Egg McMuffin way back in 1972. I think it's the best thing McDonalds makes, and it only costs a buck. What a deal!

Lately I've been making my own Egg McMuffins at home. I make them more dietetic than McDonalds does, and they're just as delicious. No doubt they'd be even better with fattier ingredients, but they're still pretty darn good. Here's how I make them:

INGREDIENTS:

1 soft cinnamon raisin English muffin
1 egg
1 tablespoon (or more) shredded mozzarella (the kind that comes in a bag)
1 or 2 slices Canadian bacon
1 teaspoon butter
1 teaspoon vinegar

First off,  start water boiling so you can poach the egg. Unlike the chef in the picture below, I use a small pot to make cleaning up easier, and I make the water about an inch deep.

While the water is heating up, grab a muffin and some Canadian bacon from the freezer. Thaw them  in the microwave for about 15 seconds. After that, cut the muffin in half and pop it into the toaster.

The water is almost ready to boil now, and that's exactly where it's supposed to be...almost ready.  Turn down the heat a bit to keep it just below boiling. After that,  carefully break an egg into a saucer or small glass bowl. Don't break the yolk.

Add a half teaspoon of vinegar to the water, then stir it to create a whirlpool in the center. Slip the raw egg out of the bowl into the middle of the whirlpool. The whirlpool will keep the egg from spreading out, and will give it a nice, round shape...well, sort of. Let the egg cook (poach) by floating on top of the near boiling water.

While that's going on, take the muffin out of the toaster, sprinkle lots of shredded mozzarella on the inside of one of the slices, and microwave it for 20 seconds. This'll melt the cheese into the bun. Spread a little butter over the cheese, and put the Canadian bacon slice(s) on top.

Return to the stove to see how the egg's coming along. If the yolk is still yellow, spoon some hot water over it to speed up the cooking. After a total of about about 3 1/2 minutes cooking, remove the egg with a slotted spoon and put it on top of the melted cheese and bacon on the muffin.  Put the other muffin slice on top to make a sandwich, and that's it!

Actually the whole process is quick and easy...don't be deterred by the written-out length of the recipe.

A couple of caveats: don't use crumpets...they're dense like a bagel, and they don't make good McMuffins. And don't skip the vinegar, it helps to keep the cooking egg together. Lastly, don't worry if some of the egg squeezes out of the sandwich while you're eating. You could fix that by cooking the egg longer, but then it wouldn't taste as good. Learn to love the messiness!

(GROAN!) I'M SICK!

I get sick about twice a year. Usually it only lasts for a day or two. I'll be back before most people know I'm missing!

Neat cards, eh?

THE DAY I MET HARVEY KURTZMAN

Joel Brinkerhoff wrote a comment to my last post about Harvey Kurtzman, and thinking about the man reminded me of the one and only time that I actually met him. For what it's worth, here's the story.

It was at a comics convention. I stumbled on Harvey when he was alone behind a pillar with an outrageously beautiful fan girl. She was standing inches away from his face, telling him how great he was, and how she'd do anything to show her devotion.

The reason I know what they were saying is that I walked up close and stood beside them, hoping to get an autograph. I guess I must have looked impatient because when the girl noticed me the spell was broken, and she apologized and left.

I tried to get Harvey's attention but he was totally fixated on the girl. He had a cold sweat and turned his head slowly as he watched her leave the room. She looked pretty good, even from the back.

When he finally turned to me I cheerfully offered him a pen and a cocktail napkin to write on, and he gave me a crazed look like he wanted to kill me. He muttered something like "No autographs!"  and lit a cigarette to calm his nerves.

That was my only up close encounter with Harvey Kurtzman.