"HOW TO STOP ACTING"

That's Robert Pattinson above. I couldn't find adequate pictures to illustrate this post, so on a whim I decided to illustrate it with pictures of my daughter's favorite actor. She's a fan of the Twilight movies.

Regarding acting, I thought I'd talk about Harold Guskin. He wrote a book a lot of actors read called "How to Stop Acting." Guskin's famous students include Holly Berry and Kevin Klein. He seems to be good with actors who have to play roles they may not be suited for, but which were too good to turn down. That's a common occurrence, and I imagine Guskin has no trouble filling a class.

Guskin believes that traditional methods put too much stress on perfection and deep understanding.  That makes it hard for an actor to be natural and believable, and nearly impossible for him to have fun.  He says actors ought to do exploratory readings rather than thought out roles, even when they're on stage in front of an audience.

His advice for an audition:

Ignore the casting description. It'll limit you to handling the role in the same boring way that everybody else handles it. Surprise the director if it feels right. If you do what feels right you'll deliver your best performance.

Don't memorize. If it feels right, and you understand what the writer is trying to get across, you should improvise a bit to make the emotion your own.

Spend more time worrying about other characters' lines than your own. Get a feeling for the word music you're both creating. Listen to what the other guy says, and don't sneak a peek at your script while he's speaking.

Dress to feel the part, not look the part. Never audition in costume.

Come with your own agenda. Come with ideas and choices that interest you, but be prepared to be influenced by ideas that are thrown at you in the room.

Attack your fear the moment you become aware of it. If you're afraid your voice won't carry, then shout. Afraid of being quiet? Whisper the line. Afraid of moving? Make a bold move. Afraid of standing still? Stand dead still like a rock.  After you attack take a breath then go somewhere else...anywhere else...so you're not stuck in the same place. The best way to deal with fear is to attack it!

Finally, take control of the audition. If a chair's not where you want it to be, then move it. If people don't understand why you're moving it, that's a good thing. Make the auditioners try to figure out what you're doing, because if they don't have to do that, you won't get the part.

Fascinating, huh? What's my take on this?  I like the kind of acting that's focused on voice training, the kind of thing Cicely Berry writes about. Even so, I have to admit that there's some good practical advice here.

BTW: here's what the author looks like (above).

CARTOONS FROM A HUNDRED YEARS AGO!

From approximately 100 years ago, it's George Herriman again! I just can't get enough of this guy. I confess that I've only read a couple of the captions.  The drawings are so funny that the captions hardly matter.

Sometimes (above) he told stories. When he did he was surprisingly wordy.

Most of the time though, he just drew impressions on a theme, the way he does above. His editors kept him on a very loose leash. Today only certain writers have that kind of freedom. 

You can see (above) that Herriman could easily have made it as an illustrator if newspaper comics hadn't panned out. The guy was a killer draughtsman. 

Not everyone here likes Herriman so I thought I'd throw in some cartoons by other artists working in his time. How do you like this one (above)? Geez, there sure was a lot of ethnic humor in those days. 

Here's (above) an interesting one. The staging is a bit unorthodox, and it's very sedate. In view of that, you wonder where the strip gets its high energy level. I've seen other strips by this artist, and every one was as quietly dynamic and demented as this one. How did he manage to pull it off?

Here's (above) an ad from...er, the thirties I think. It's great that advertisers chose to use cartoons like this one to sell their wares. The public associated cartoons with entertainment by and for the common man, and advertisers naturally wanted to get in on that.

This is Allan Holtz, the benefactor of humanity, whose blog, "Stripper's Guide" (link on the right sidebar) is where I got these cartoons. 

A COOL APARTMENT

Kali turned me on to this film: "Science of Sleep." It's from 2006, I think. It's a terrific love story about two Parisian (sort of) artists who meet each other because they have apartments in the same building.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting about it is because some of the set designs are terrific. If you have a small apartment you could learn a lot about decorating it from this film. The girl in the story is a fabric artist so there's lots of niches for colorful yarn, and lots of interesting little sculptures and paintings.  It's a fun place for two young people to meet and hang out.  Click to enlarge.

  

That's a loft ladder on the left, which doubles as a book case. In the story the girl is building a loft bed, but in this picture it's not completed yet, so she sleeps on the floor. I could swear I saw that bed at IKEA a few years ago. 

Come to think of it, a lot of furniture in this room is IKEA derived. Those niches and shelves above the desk are definitely from there... 

...as are the end tables. The dark brown wall hanging might be fabric, but it also looks like a type of course art paper that you can buy in art stores. 

I like rooms like this one that invite you to sit on the floor. The rugs buckle easy, so I'm guessing they're from IKEA, too.

The film neglects this wall (above), maybe because the designer didn't know what to do with it. 

That's (above) the loft bed fully built and ready for use. This picture is from a dream sequence, so it's in a cave. 

I thought I'd focus on a few interesting details. How do you like the iron work (above) on the window? You can buy iron things like that that cheaper than you might think. I drew a version of it on acetate for one of my my kid's windows,  but it got mangled before I could put it up. 

There's the carpets (above) again. IKEA has great deals on stuff like this. 

Cotton clouds on the ceiling! Neat, huh!? I like the shadows the clouds throw.

Last but not least, a white on black, Matisse-style wall hanging. 

WHY DOES RESTAURANT FOOD TASTE BETTER?

I cook at home fairly often nowadays, but I have to admit that my food is only occasionally as good as the restaurant variety. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I use fancy cookbooks, and I try to follow the directions. Not only that, but I use fresh, or fairly fresh ingredients. Even so, the restaurants beat me almost every time. Why?

So far as I can tell the difference is that restaurants use lard, butter, sugar and MSG, even when they say they don't. I could be wrong about that, but really...if it's not that, then what could it be? Sure, restaurants have professional cooks...but, doggone it...I have the books, and the books are written by professionals! What gives?

I decided to research the question by taking one of the recipes I make and going on the net with the question: "How come my Cashew Chicken doesn't taste as good as what I get in Chinese Restaurants?" Half the responses were insults like, "Because they're professionals, stupid!" but some of the answers were pretty interesting. They did a lot to explain why you can't learn everything from a cookbook.

First off, Chinese restaurants use different kinds of soy sauce for different dishes. There's a zillion kinds. Just because you have Kikkoman at the table doesn't mean that's what they're cooking with in the back.

Secondly, they use a lot of heat when they stir fry, more heat then most people like to use at home. Not only that, but they use peanut oil, which you probably don't use for health reasons.

Third, they use Chinese vegetables rather than Western substitutions. That includes the type of mushrooms that are appropriate for the dish they're making. They also use shallots instead of onions.

Fourth, they use "Chicken powder." Can you imagine that...CHICKEN POWDER!!! I had no idea there was such a thing. Restaurants use real chicken too, but they supplement it with chicken stock in powdered form. It's not the same as bouillon. You can get it at Chinese markets.

I wonder if the best Chinese restaurants use homemade stock? Stock is one of the secrets of classic French cooking. There's all kinds of stock...even mushroom stock!


Fifth: they steam vegetables using "court" bullion instead of plain water. It consists of water, spices like pepper and garlic, and an acidic ingredient like lemon juice, vinegar or wine.

Lastly, they use ingredients not mentioned in cookbooks, like fresh ginger juice, brown sugar, honey, fat or lard, MSG, and lots of salt.

The reason you don't see some of these ingredients in cookbooks is that modern readers won't buy books with recipes that contain things like lard and MSG. Our era regards food as medicine. Taste isn't primary. The poor restaurateurs are forced to give lip service to that, but to stay in business they have no choice but to add these ingredients on the sly, because the food simply doesn't taste as good without them.

Well, that's what the people on the internet are saying, at any rate. I haven't tried some of these ingredients yet, so I'm in no position to judge.

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF ACTING?

The illustrations for this piece are all of playwrights, but what I really want to talk about here is actors and acting. I want to ask, what is the purpose of acting? How does an actor know when he's doing it right? I've been spot reading in acting books lately and the consensus of opinion in these books seems to be that dramatic acting is all about creating  believable and appealing characters...but is it? I'm no expert on the subject, but somehow that seems inadequate.

Believable and appealing are important building blocks, but surely that's all they are...building blocks. We need to ask, what's an actor supposed to build with them?

In my humble opinion, what the actor needs to build is... a work of art. It's not enough to hold a mirror up to reality. The actor's job is to create something entertaining and profound that's better than reality. When he does his job right he stylizes his voice and movement to create a thing of awe-inspiring beauty and force. Through sound and motion, through his personal philosophy and a sense of vocal and visual music...he creates a force of nature. He blows the mind of his audience.

To make my second point I'll have to lapse into mysticism. I'm sticking my neck out here, and I may regard this as utter nonsense when I wake up tomorrow, but it seems to me that some of the best live action dramatic actors deliberately take a story and use it as a springboard to explore the mysterious universe that underpins our own. Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani did that in "The Fugitive Kind." What they were expressing in that film seems true, but it's very difficult to put into words.

It seems to me that the world is full of strange rules, patterns, tensions and assumptions that none of us can articulate, but which we all know exist. Some actors thrive in that world. They deliberately go for nuanced motivations that defy description. My mystical way of saying it is that they step sideways into the true architecture of reality.

I don't believe that it's necessary for most good actors to do what I just described, but aren't you glad that some do? Tennessee Williams' plays demand that kind of actor.

That's pretty vague, isn't it? Aaaargh! Maybe I'll return to this subject when I've had a chance to think about it a little more.

BTW: The caricatures shown here are all by David Levine. They are in descending order: Chekhov, Odets, Ibsen, and Tennessee Williams.

MORE ABOUT NEW FASHIONS

Amazingly crumpled fabrics...the ones that look like crumpled paper in a wastebasket...are back. I guess some people envy what they see in their trash. Maybe they get off on the idea of disposability. Maybe they're attracted to the diamond-like crumple facets. Maybe it's the thought of the adventure awaiting the brave little piece of paper as it travels through chutes and trucks to either grand immolation or a timeless existence in a landfill.

I'm not a crumple man myself, but I like seersucker and I feel that that gives me an insight into the crumple mentality. This guy (above) is no doubt proud of the light, airy, thin paper bag look of his suit. People have pleasant associations with little paper bags. They're fun to pop next to the ear of a friend.

Girls have been wearing the crumpled look for years. I think they like the idea that the crumpled dress has a life and shape of its own, and by slipping into it they somehow participate in that life. 

This look on a girl is also sexy, maybe because it always looks like at any moment a wind could come up and blow the dress down the street.

Nowadays people who wear short pants like to crumple their socks around the ankle. I looked for a picture to illustrate that and I stumbled on this photo (above) by a sock designer who's trying to do away with the shoe. The idea is to dispense with shoes and wear socks (above) with Kevlar bottoms. This gives the wearer the benefit of close hippie contact with Mother Earth, coupled with protection against nails and broken glass.

The Frankenstein look (above) is still with us. This was most popular in the 80s when it was seen as a sort of Post Modern joke. It was a way to wear formal clothes while showing that you had disdain for formality.

This (above) is an example of the wrinkled look, which is not at all the same as the crumple. Wrinkle enthusiasts delight in calling attention to wrinkles that seem to be in the wrong place, like the magnificent pectoral wrinkle above. I treasure my own wrinkle jacket.

When cartoonists take over the world they'll no doubt favor the kind of fashion that compels the wearer to walk in a stylized, cartoony way. In the example above the mysterious wearer (a guy or a girl, I can't tell) walks in a rigid, upright fashion that favors the line of the cape.

A frock coat combined with thick, flat-bottomed shoes (above) would favor a smooth, hipster slide walk. You slidewalk down the sidewalk.  I wonder if tiny rollers under the shoe would help?

Finally, how about a skirt fabric that deliberately flies up when it encounters the slightest wind? The girl would wear cheerleader underpants that are more pants than underwear, and don't really show anything. 

MORE ABOUT THE YOUNG BOB CLAMPETT

This excerpt from Bob Clampett's audio taped biography is a swipe from "Beany and Cecil's Official Site," linked to below. Refer to that site for coryright info. My heavily-edited excerpt is just a teaser. To read the whole fascinating article be sure to click on the link at the bottom. 


MILTON GRAY:  Hi, this is Milton Gray.  The oral history you are about to hear was actually edited together from several different taped interviews, done mostly in the 1970s.  The audio quality varies widely, from one recording to another, since none of these were intended to be heard as recordings.

Bob Clampett was born on May 8, 1913.  And here, to tell us the rest, in his own words, is Bob Clampett.


I, very early, was drawing comic strips -- I would be doing the characters of Happy Hooligan, or Boob McNutt, or Jiggs and Maggie, and so forth.  I would actually learn to draw those characters.  And then I would take whatever the Sunday paper was, where it ended after, say, twelve frames, I  would then start making new frames in which I would carry on the characters doing a continuation of the story, and so forth, and I would go on for maybe a great number of frames, and so I was actually writing original material, and putting the characters through new things.

For different years I was emulating different styles of cartoonists -- one year it was Pat Sullivan's Felix, and another year it was Milt Gross, and at other times other people.  But I got Milt Gross down to where I could draw Nize Baby and Mr. Feetlebaum and Louie Dot Dope very well.  And then the kids started coming to me, and they were paying me what was then a very big amount, I think it was fifty cents to a dollar, to make drawings on their sweatshirts, or on their yellow raincoats.  If you see some of those early John Held Jr. drawings of college boys wearing slickers, and they've got things drawn or painted -- you know, wording all over their car, their Tin Lizzie, or over their raincoat -- that's what I was doing, and they were paying me to do this.

When I was twelve I had some cartoons published in the L.A. Times -- colored pages of a pussy cat and so forth -- and Hearst saw it.  He was real big, he used to look for future comic strip artists.  So they offered me a contract, for $75 a week when I got out of school.  Then I went down every Saturday to the Examiner and worked in the Art Department. 


You know Robert Day of the New Yorker?  He was there, and Webb Smith who became one of Disney's original great story men, the one that's credited for that first Pluto sequence, he was there.  And I was there with these wonderful newspaper artists, and they'd show me how to do it, y'know.  And then the Examiner paid my way to Otis Art School, and they would every so often publish one of my drawings in the paper, to encourage me.

Originally, I had a contract to go to be a newspaper cartoonist for King Features when I got out of high school.  My dad had that contract for several years.  Now when sound came in, and Disney's came out with the first Mickey Mouse, suddenly all the things that I wanted, hoped to do at some point in my life, seemed to all merge together, y'know?  Making comedies for theaters -- doing some voices -- drawing -- writing -- directing -- all the things that I tried to do in isolated instances as a kid all seemed to come together.  So I got so excited about it that I insisted on trying to get out of the Hearst contract -- $75 a week was the starting salary -- and go to work in a cartoon studio, for $10 a week.  

Now my uncles were very good business men, and when I told them I'd rather do this, they said, "You're crazy, because animated cartoons will be just kind of a passing novelty."  But in spite of all the advice, I made the move, I told Walt I wanted to get into animation when I got out of school.  He says fine, and he gave me some of the comic strips, the first Mickey Mouse comic strips to work from, and some other sketches.  And I worked on Mickey Mouse, and so I was expecting to go to work for Walt.  But right at the time I got out of school, and I said, "Okay, I'm ready," they were at that time building -- they had animators working across the street, across Hyperion there in garages, and in apartments, I think.  They said, "Gee, we have no room, we're building on this annex, it'll take a month or so, and when we do that there's plenty of room and you're with us." And you know how it is when you get out of school, you think, "Wow, two months seems like a lifetime," y'know?  At that very moment I got the idea to go over to Warners.  I took my sketches and so forth ....

That's the end of my swipe from the Beany and Cecil site. There are four installments of the Clampett story on that site, with several more on the way.This has been an excerpt from installment number four. 

The site...

http://beanyandcecil.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=46&Itemid=34&limitstart=3

...and, while I'm at it, here's a link to an article Milt wrote about building cartoon web sites:

http://www.viagriampleten.com/cartoon-site-index/