DORE'S WONDERFUL FORESTS

This should be a treat for the artists who come here: rare Dore illustrations from  Chateaubriand's 19th Century novel "Atala." According to Wikipedia, the book was written to debunk the European idea that American indians were noble savages. Maybe it does...I haven't read it...but most of the illustrations I saw seem to say the opposite. Dore portrays America as a majestic Garden of Eden, and the indians as its ideal inhabitants.

Actually I'm glad that Dore added his own take to the story. Whatever the truth about native Americans, the portrayal of this country as an Earthly paradise is a useful one.  This is nature the way we'd all like it to be. It's a partly Utopian vision that should spur us on to make it a reality.

American swamps (above) really are like this in places, except Dore neglected to mention bugs. In real life the two women sitting on the water's edge would be buried under a mound of army ants and mosquitoes.   

Gee, this picture (above) fills me with memories of happy times around campfires at night. Fortunately places like this aren't that rare. You can find lots of places like this in America, some of them not far from cities and towns. Sometimes I wish it were against the law to build in or even near primeval forests. Maybe we shouldn't even build nature trails and roads there. We should just let it alone. 

Or not. I'm always amazed that Yosemite and Seqouia National Park look so unspoiled, and that in spite of the kazillion plus tourists who go there every year. How does the park service manage to pull that off?

I wish I knew the story of Atala. This looks like two "Noble Savages" wearing togas, taking a swim in America's life-giving water. Geez, Dore was so sentimental.

Seeing these pictures reminds me of the way Africa used to be portrayed in the media. When I was a kid sub-Saharan Africa was portrayed as being mostly jungle, like the kind you see in Tarzan movies.  But was it? The Africa I see on TV these days seems to be mostly grassland and scrub. What happened to the African trees?

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.