Here's Jerry Beck and I at the opening earlier this evening of the new animation exhibit at the Motion Picture Academy. Of course the camera was equipped with the usual fat-enhancing lens, which somehow managed to spare Jerry.
The exhibit was great! You wouldn't believe how much Mary Blair was on the wall, and there was some choice Jones art including layouts and backgrounds from "Rabbit of Seville" and "What's Opera Doc." Clampett was well represented with original model sheets, storyboards and story and gag synopses. You could read an early version of the story for "Piggy Bank Robbery" which included a number of gags and villains that didn't make it to the final film.
I even liked the live-action set design exhibit on the fourth floor. It's not enough to see stuff like this on the screen. You have to see it and touch it and walk around in it. When you do, you'll realize that you've lived your life wrong and that your own home is sad and pathetic and lacking in character.
Here's (above) a reprint of the fashion girl from the previous post. I put it up again because I realized that I missed something about it the first time. You know, this girl isn't really such a bad speaker. She talks too fast, and her references are too cliched and too ghetto, but she's not without skill.
I actually like the way she posits an imaginary opponent that her arguments are directed to, and I like the way she puts on a different persona when she talks to that character. I like her confidence (drugs?) and I like the way she uses facial expressions for punctuation. I also like the way she sees the world as being populated by goofballs and people who can't see the nose in front of their faces. That's classic storytelling technique. You create a caricature of the world then make fun of it.
All these are good techniques, she just plugs in the wrong words. She should caricature specific people.
Just so you know: I do NOT have a crush on this girl. I put up another of her philosophy videos just because it's unique and I don't know what to make of it. Here she toasts the audience with a glass of wine studded with giant glass jewels, and stirred with her fingers. I don't know why but that gesture immensely impressed me. The video is 10 minutes long but I can only recommend the first four minutes.
As Chris and Matt observed about the previous post, Twyla is kind of...well, Twyla is Twyla...but you have to give her credit: she's funny and has style, at least in this video.
I also like the fact that she likes men. I mean men in general, not just Mr. Right. Some girls have base motives for that, some girls are just flirts or love humanity in general, but then some girls do it because they seem to like playing the role of muse for the men in their lives.
When a muse makes an effort to charm a guy I think the guy should accept it as a luxurious gift. He should fall in love with the muse and accept the sting of rejection when he discovers that he took it too seriously. Stendahl said creative people should always be in love.
Like I said, in spite of appearances, I do NOT have a crush on Twyla. She's not my type. I just like the way she provokes discussion, even when she has her fingers in the wine.
Just for fun, here's another philosopher courtesy of Jorge Garrido.
When I woke up this morning I made some coffee and ate breakfast infront of the computer. While I was eating I did a YouTube search for "Girl Philosophers" and this is what I found. To my surprise girl philosophy is a whole genre. Who would have thought? Here's a sample....
If you're not interested in physics you should stay and read this anyway, because something major is about to happen and when it does you don't want to regret that you missed a chance to have it explained simply. I don't pretend to understand it myself, and the odds are that I'll goof up the explanation, but it's better than nothing...so read on!
CERN, the European particle accelerator lab, is going to turn on it's new 6 billion dollar LHC collider later this year. It's first task is to look for the Higgs Boson, the so-called "God particle" that's thought to be the reason other particles have mass.
According to Higgs, the natural state of all particles is be massless and to travel at the speed of light. The reason that only photons and gluons really do travel that fast is that other particles are slowed down by the medium they're forced to travel through, something called the Higgs Field.
The Higgs Field (if it really exists) is a field, just like a magnetic field. It's everywhere in the universe, that's why even the most remote part of space isn't really a vacuum. It may be clear of particles, but it's not clear of fields.
Astronomers were amazed to find that the universe is not only expanding, but that the expansion is accelerating. Nothing in our experience can account for that, so it was necessary to posit a repellent energy that existed even in the vacuum of space. Lots of theories were put up to speculate where that energy might come from, including the idea that it might be leaked into our universe from parallel universes. That remains a possibility but the theory that excites physicists the most is that it has something to do with an as yet undetected field, the Higgs Field.
The Higgs Field is so important to the current standard model of physics that if it's not discovered we'll have to throw out a lot of current ideas about quantum physics and cosmology.
One problem with the CERN experiment is that in order to discover the Higgs Boson (the particle version of the Higgs Field) they'll have to recreate the simpler condition of the universe as it was less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. That condition might be what we would call today a black hole. One group is attempting to get a restraining order against CERN, arguing that a micro black hole, once started, might be impossible to stop. Such a black hole might consume the Earth, maybe our whole solar system.
CERN says not to worry, that Hawking Radiation would sap energy from the black hole and prevent it from growing, but CERN's critics point out that Hawking Radiation is a controversial theoretical construct which has never been born out by observation. What if there is no such thing as Hawking Radiation? The black hole will keep growing.
I assume the CERN people know what they're doing, and I'm dying to know the outcome of the experiment, but I'll sleep a little easier when all this is behind us.
The first video I put up (at the top of the page) gives an overview of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) that'll become fully operational later this year. The other video shows Peter Higgs, one of the people who got the whole thing started. I don't understand a lot of what he's saying but the man is fascinating to listen to.
BTW, I forgot to mention why the question of mass is on the front burner these days. The accelerating expansion story I mentioned is one reason but there's more. The reason is that we now know the masses of all the quarks, etc. that make up matter. The problem is that when you add these masses up they don't equal the mass of the particles they're part of...not by a long shot. So where does the rest of the mass come from? It must come from something outside the quarks, maybe from a field of some sort. If it exists, that might be the Higgs Field. Interesting, huh!?
Pinch me so I'll know I'm not dreaming! This is too good to be true! ASIFA-Hollywood has just put up a whopping, large post on Fearless Fosdick, the best cartoon strip (actually a strip-within-a-strip) in the American newspapers of my time!
Many thanks to ace-cartoonist and Al Capp fan, Mike Fontanelli for putting this together! Mike knows what the good stuff is and he serves up only the best. Many thanks also to ASIFA webmaster Steve Worth, for giving the drawings the star treatment. Compare the way the drawings look here, with my layout, to the infinitely superior way they look on the ASIFA site. Steve is far and away the best web designer I know of.
Mike makes the point in his article that Fearless Fosdick was the major inspiration for Kurtzman's MAD. Looking at the evidence, I don't doubt it for an instant.
Incidentally, did you know that the first 12 issues of Mad have been collected in two volumes of the set shown above? I haven't seen them, so I don't know what they look like, but here's a link to a bookseller that stocks them:
http://www.kenpiercebooks.com/mad.htm
Talking about Archie, what do you think of the new look the comic company is giving them?
Here's (above) a page from the new Archie, borrowed from KevinWolf.com. When Cartoon Brew did a piece on this they were inundated with letters.
