ADVICE FROM A CHICK MAGNET

I'd like to introduce all my readers to my friend Scott. No, that's not him above. That's simply the subject of his expertise. Scott is one of the world's formost experts on women. He's also a chick magnet. He isn't quite at Vincent Waller's level but he's only a couple of notches below and that's saying a lot. Scott and I worked together on Tiny Toons and I can tell you that the hall outside of his room was the site of an endless traffic jam caused by all the girls in the office passing and repassing his room on any excuse they could think of. He could have papered the wall with all the phone numbers he got.

The reason I mention Scott is that one day he told me his secret for finding the right women to date. When I heard it my jaw dropped. It was the best advice about women I'd ever heard! In fact, everybody I told it to thought it was the best advice THEY'D ever heard! Honestly, when I told this secret at parties you could have heard a pin drop afterward. This is the atomic bomb of dating secrets. It has to do with two questions that the potential date, or her friends, must answer affirmatively.

Question #1: Does the girl like her dad? Scott will only date women who like their fathers. He reasons that if a girl feels mistreated by her dad she'll spend the rest of her life making other men suffer for it.

Question #2: Does she have brothers or sisters? Scott reasons that only- children are selfish and self-centered. The girl must have siblings. He's also a big believer in birth order. Avoid the last girl born into a big family because she's probably wild.

There it is. Scott told it to me and now I've told it to you.

TWO OVER-RATED "MASTERPIECES"

Here's (above) Manet's famous Olympia painting. It's said to be the painting that began modern art. If that's true then I'll concede it's historical significance but that doesn't mean I have to like it. The lighting is flat, the head looks grafted on, the body is just a line drawing which makes almost no impression on the bed and the woman is sterile and uninspiring. I like most of Manet's paintings but this Mel Ramos-style pop art just doesn't do it for me.

This (above) is a famous Carravagio. I don't like the man. He's a good technician but he has no soul. David Hockney thinks this picture was painted using projection optics and I'll bet he's right. And has there ever been a more bored, kitchy and uninspiring model in the history of fine art? Alright, there's "Olympia" but I'm not counting her.

THE INCAS WERE FUNNY!

I'm amazed at how often funny sculptures appear in collections of Pre-Columbian (i.e., before Columbus) art. The pictures I've been able to post here are just the tip of the iceberg. They get a lot funnier than this. The L.A. County Museum of Art has a terrific collection of funny, Virgil Parch-type sculptures, some of them more than 1500 years old. I'll post some pictures whenever I can find some good ones. You'll laugh out loud when you see them.


It's disconcerting to think that the earliest known peoples to appreciate formal comedy might have been the Central and South Americans. Among the 4 or 5 major nations only the Aztecs seemed to be serious and straight-laced about art. The others got jokes in every chance they could.

Maybe ancient South American comedy isn't better known because serious South Americans of the present are embarrassed by it. Or maybe the scuptures just don't seem like high art because they're funny. Anyway, my advice to time travelers going back to the golden age of that continent is to carry plenty of whoopee cushions and joy buzzers.

LOVE THOSE CALIFORNIA WATERCOLORISTS

More pictures from the super-cool California Watercolor movement of the 1940s: Hardy Gramatky (above), Erle Loran (middle), and Dong Kingman (below). Click to enlarge.

HAS ALCOHOL CONTRIBUTED TO ANIMATION?

Even though I have no desire to drink on the job myself I sometimes wonder if other people should.

I began to think about this a long, long time ago when I got a farm laborer's job hoing cabbages. I remember the sinking feeling in my stomach when the farmer showed the three of us the field. It was sundrenched and acres wide with long, straight rows of cabbages diminishing in railroad perspective to the horizon. Our job was to rake out unwanted cabbages so the that every wanted cabbage had a foot of space to grow. He showed us how to do it then left us there, faced with the stark reality of sun, flies and endless vegetable rows. One of the experienced guys offered me a drink from his flask and I, with a look of superiority, declined. Boy, did I regret that! That was the roughest work I ever did!

I did learn something from it, though. Some jobs are so mind-numbingly tedious that they can't be done without liquor. Prohibition must have made some forms of work nearly impossible. I imagine that the only thing that made hoing possible was the knowledge that there was a jug in the bush at the end of each cabbage row.

Maybe this applies to animation. It's a creative job but there's a certain amount of tedium too. Maybe the old, golden-age animators were right to to get soused at lunch. Maybe liquor is the lubricant that made it possible to do all the great work they did. I say maybe because I don't know. Having an mp3 player and headphones is my substitute for booze and it seems to work... but everybody's different.

thanks to Jenny for the Freddy Moore picture that I stole from her site.

LANDSCAPERS ARE MY NEW HEROES

I promised to write something about the Japanese Garden near where I live. It's at Balboa Park on Balboa near Woodley. The park covinced me of something important.

That something is that landscaping is an art which is worthy of the respect we give to architects. Why aren't landscapers consulted before a major building is built? Why can't a new building be built to conform to a landscaping idea instead of the other way around? Maybe landscaping is the beacon that can lead us out of the dark age that Bauhaus plunged us into.
This is the only life we have. Everybody reading this will be dead in a few decades. we need beauty in our lives now, while we can still enjoy it. Architects don't seem to care about this. They're invoved in some insane competition to see who can build the most alienating concrete wind-trap. I wish someone would write a book explaining how architecture became corrupted and irrelevant, which is certainly where things stand today. Anyway Japanese gardens like the one in Balboa Park suggest another way of doing things. Somebody should ask landscapers how they'd solve the problem of urban blight.

WHAT IS THE PROPER ROLE OF AN ANIMATOR?

No, Leon Schlesinger wasn't an animator but this is the closest picture I could find on the net to an animator wearing a crown. Anyway, to get back to the title question....

What is the proper role of an animator in an animated cartoon? That's easy. I can answer in one word..."king!" In animation the animator is king. Everybody else's job exists to make the animator look good. The rest of us, even the director, are like the hairdressers and make-up people on a live-action set. We exist to make the actor, i.e., the animator, look good. We exist to maximize his chance of achieving glory on the screen.

In a saner world the animator would be a star. His name would be known to the public and the public would argue over who the best animators are. Animators would have groupies, artistic pique, scandalous divorces, punch-outs with paparazzi, would get fat for parts and write tell-all biographies. The best of them would also break their backs to make the performances that will be remembered forever.

It seems to me that the best way to achieve this is to bring the animation back under the roof of the parent studio. Why we ever let it leave is beyond me. Animators are our performers. In their absence we've had decades of souless cartoons. We've been trying to tell stories without actors.

We need to start training animators now. The studios should help art schools to organize their animation programs more efficiently. Good animators should be rewarded with good salaries and stories should be written with the kind of scenes that animators like to work on. Most of all we need cheap and easy to use pencil test programs and internet tutorials on their use.