Wednesday, June 14, 2006

SHODDY, POST-SURGERY ARTICLE #6A


A CHINESE BRIDGE

Actually these are pictures of two similar bridges but I'm having trouble figuring out which close shot belongs to which bridge so, what the heck, for our purpose they're all the same bridge.




What a pleasure it must be to walk on this bridge! The texture and complexity of the wood, the beautiful proportions of the enclosed space, the way the outside world is framed and presented to the walker, the smells and sounds, the moving air....I'm always amazed that architects can repackage reality for us in such a pleasing way.

I love how each step forward reveals new details. I love the mystery of what's behind a corner being gradually unravelled. I love incompletely-glimpsed distant shapes that require us to make sense out of them.

I also like the way architects can make simple tasks, like crossing an obstacle to get to the other side, into profound and insightful experiences. I'll bet people decided to get married while crossing this bridge. I'll bet kids decided what they wanted to do with their lives while crossing the bridge to go to the store.

I love the lack of ornament. The structure itself is so beautiful that no ornament is needed! This is vernacular architecture meant for everyday use by ordinary people.


A glimpse up is like a glimpse into heaven, a reminder of the pleasure we take in the intellect of others and of how good it feels to be part of a community.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

WHY I LIKE KATIE RICE'S GIRL DRAWINGS



I don't know if I'm up to the task of explaining why I like Katie's drawings so much. After all she draws beautiful girls wearing girlie fashions and I'm a guy. Guy's aren't interested in fashion! But I am interested in ideas. I love it when someone with talent seduces me into liking something that I wouldn't ordinarily like. It may be something I don't want to like, like fashion, but these seducers invest their their world and their vision with so much magic that I'm drawn in against my will. Katie's one of those people.

Maybe it's because her girls are so doggone happy. Katie makes it seem like being a girl is fun and I guess we're all magnetically drawn to people who are having fun. Even more important, she knows how to draw fun. It's hard. I've tried. It's not enough to draw smiles on people. The quality of the line itself has to be fun. The lines have to playfull. The shapes have to be playfull. The reader has to believe the artist had fun drawing it.



On the other hand, the lines have to have confidence. Most people are intuitively repelled by lines that appear aimless and pointless. You have to know what you want and in a playfull way not know what you want at the same time. It's a tough balance to maintain. You can see why artists like Katie are so rare.


One of the things that makes fun so hard to draw is that the mediums we all work in are so resistant to that subject. All media express some things better than other things. Television seems to favor intimate, Jay Leno-type shows and film seems to favor car chases and broad action. In the same way pen drawings seem to favor the grotesque and pencil favors super-realistic drawings. Whenever you try to draw fun, like Katie does, you'll find the medium you're using attempting to pull you away to its own bias. Katie imposed her will on the medium and tamed it.

OK, I've been saying nice things about Katie and I feel it's my responsibility as an impartial observer to try to find a dark side. If there is a dark side in Katie's future it may come about because she's a thoughtfull person and may one day wake up thinking that she's lived her life wrong and that it's an artist's duty to portray famine and pestilence. It's the serious disease and it's ruined many an artist. She says this is impossible. I hope she's right.



Monday, June 12, 2006

SHODDY, POST-SURGERY ARTICLE #5


My Four Weeks as a Gag Man

Gagman is the most coveted job in the industry but jobs of that description are rarer than hen's teeth and tend not to last very long. A gagman isn't a story man, that's somebody else's responsibility. A gagman's job is to come up with visual jokes that can plug into a pre-existing story. In other words, you get paid to be funny all day. While the poor story people labor over how to stage nine emotionally complicated characters in a scene the gagman draws two people who hate each other but have to wear the same pair of pants. Nice job if you can get it!



Once I almost got a gag job working with a famous gagman of the past, who'll remain nameless here for a reason that'll become obvious. My producer/benefactor knocked on the famous man's door and introduced me as...well, it was very flattering,...and ended with, "You two probably have a lot to talk about! I'm going to leave you two lovable nuts together so you can get to know each other!" And then, mischievously on the way out: "Now don't laugh too loud now!"

Up till now the famous man was beaming with the friendliest smile I'd ever seen but the moment the door closed he raced up to me with clenched fists (OK, I added the fists) and leaned into me with a grimace that was unmistakable. It said wordlessly: "Look buddy, There's only room for one lovable nut here and I'm it! Now beat it!" I was shocked into stammering! Eventually the benefactor came back and hugged us both and said he wished he could have been a fly on the wall so he could have heard the jokes the two of us must have come up with. The famous man beamed a sunny smile and an hour later I ended up on the street, unemployed.

I tell you this so you'll have some idea how difficult it is to get lovable nut jobs. Even lovable nuts don't want to see other lovable nuts.

The time I actually got paid for it only lasted for four weeks but it was a dream. There I was at the same studio that pioneered the concept of gagmen for animation and... Sigh! It looks like I used up my available space with the digression about the famous man. I'll pick up this story later!

Oh, yes! The drawings above are rejected fragments I did from the paid gagman gig.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

SHODDY, POST-SURGERY ARTICLE #4


This is a story I've been dying to illustrate with drawings of my own but since that's not possible right now I'll let Norman Rockwell sub for me. Here's the story of ...

MY FIRST DATE

I was in 8th grade and I finally got up the courage to ask Patty Fulweider to go to the movies with me. She was a real nice girl from a good family: pretty and shy, even more shy than I was. Maybe it was her first date too. I don't remember a word of what must have been the excrutiatingly awkward conversation, I only remember how wonderful it was to be alone with a real live girl, someone with thin, tiny little wrists, a fuzzy sweater and a gold locket on an unbelievably thin chain. "Were girls really the same species as boys?", I wondered. They seemed so different!

Inside the theater we watched the movie while nervously shoveling popcorn into our faces. It was something to do with our hands and I wondered what we would do when the popcorn ran out. Really, I'd gotten much more than my money's worth already. Just sitting next to all that mysterious femininity was almost more than I could bear! Even so, I was curious about that other side of girls that guys talk about...the PHYSICAL side!

After about half an hour I made my move. I pretended to cough into my hand and instead of returning it to my lap I put it on the seat behind Patty! Painfully I inched it up to to the far shoulder of her fuzzy sweater and let it rest there. I half expected her to slap me but she didn't! I didn't look at her but I could tell she continued to stare rigidly ahead at the movie screen just like I was. I was in heaven! My first date and I had already scored a shoulder!

Now I was only in 8th grade and it didn't occur to me to push my luck any farther. After all, I'd already exceeded my expectations by a mile! I decided to revel in the luck I already had. Still staring straight ahead I squeezed the shoulder and sort of played with it a lot. I mushed it and puffed it up, I twirled my fingers in the angora, I grabbed it and sort of jiggled it. I was having a wonderful time till it occurred to me that you could never do any of that with a guy's shoulder. Guys have solid shoulders. This girl appeared to be boneless!

I was profoundly shaken! What this meant was that girls don't have the same kind of skeletons as boys! Their shoulders must have lots of little bones like boys have in their wrists. Why hadn't anyone told me this before!? I wiggled the shoulder this way and that and , sure enough, it was soft as soft could be. Finally I could hold it in no longer and I turned around to Patty to ask her to explain to me why girls don't have shoulders. To my amazement she was stiff as a board, staring straight ahead, and frozen out of her mind with fear. I looked at my hand and it wasn't on her shoulder...it was on her breast! I did what I'd call now a Tex Avery take and whipped my hand away like a bullet!I didn't know what to do so I did what she did and withdrew into myself, staring rigidly ahead at the screen for the rest of the insufferably long show.

I haven't the slightest idea what happened after that! My mind is a blank! Somehow we made it home, that's all I know! I don't know if I ever saw the girl again.

OK, that was my first date.

What was yours like?

Friday, June 09, 2006

SHODDY, SECOND-RATE, POST-SURGERY ARTICLE #2

By the time you read this I will have had my eye cut up and I'll be on my sofa sporting a towel-size bandage on my face. I probably won't be in a mood to post anything much so here's the solution, a dip into Uncle Eddie's extensive photo archive. I call these...


MY ''INDIANA JONES'' PICTURES

The man in the first picture (above) is an executioner at the court the court of an Indian maharaja, circa 1910. All of these pictures were taken in the i910s and 20s.

Above, 3 Sikh police officers from the Punjab. Below a Cambodian monarch.



Above a somewhat European-looking Algerian woman. Possibly her mother was a European captured and enslaved by Barbery pirates. Below: I don't know. I've never seen buildings like this before.



Above: a Bhuddist temple in India. Below: a chieftain in Gambia



Above: a sultan of the island of Celebes, surrounded by his bodyguard. Below: a narrow rattan bridge spans a chasm across a Formosan jungle.



Above: an island chief in the Solomons. Below:?

Above: war canoe, Solomon Islands

Thursday, June 08, 2006

SHODDY, SECOND-RATE, POST-SURGERY ARTICLE #1


I'm recovering from cataract surgery and so have to foist woefully inadequate and esoteric posts on you for a few days. My hunch is that a few readers are going to like them. The first one has to do with...

THE ASTONISHING DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ANCIENT AND RENNAISANCE SCULPTURE

The top five scuptures were executed in Rome sometime in the 1st or 2nd century A.D. The bottom two are Rennaisance scuptures by Donatello and Michaelangelo. Look at the difference! The Romans seem stern, manly and efficient. The Rennaisance heads seem thoughtful, sensitive and subject to doubt. What a difference! Click on the pictures and see for yourself!







Here are the two Rennaisance sculptures. What are these heads trying to tell us? Would modern heads resemble either of them?



THEORY CORNER GUEST RANT #1













Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Guests Can Sit in the Theory Chair (But Don't Leave Crumbs)!


It's true!!!!! You can sit in the Theory Chair and rant just like Uncle Eddie! Here's how it works...


Draw a quick-and-dirty comic of yourself on the Theory Chair, explaining your (probably completely erroneous) theory to Uncle Eddie and the Theory Corner readers. Take as many panels as you need. Do any subject you like except politics, which Uncle Eddie hasn't got a clue about. Post it to your site and send me a link or a URL. I'll dupe it, add or subtract a little, and print it here when I'm able.

Don't worry about the quality of the drawing, just the quality of the theory. It's OK to have a theory like, "Men suck and this is why!"


Tuesday, June 06, 2006

THEORY CORNER MAILBAG #2


Was it Jesse who asked to see this caricature by Tex Avery? It's a drawing of a close friend of his but I don't know anything about her. She's holding a pipe, is in her bare feet and wearing a simple dress which makes me think this was done in the 6os.


A couple of theory Corner readers asked to see more sketchbook drawings of my daughter. I'll put some up when I can but I thought someone out there might be interested in seeing a picture of my son when he was a baby (he's in graduate school now). It's by John Krisfaluci.

I hope I'm not boring anybody with this sentimental father-and-son picture. I don't know why my tongue looks like something out of a horror movie. Maybe that's John's way of saying I had bad breath that night. My kid was fully clothed but John drew him as if with X-ray vision. The anatomy on the back is remakable!

Monday, June 05, 2006

THEORY CORNER MAILBAG #1




Saturday, June 03, 2006

SHOULD YOU HAVE KIDS?


The anwer is, "Yes! Yes! A thousand times YES!!!" Here are the reasons:

1) KIDS ARE CUTE: I mean REALLY cute. OK, so kittens and cute too and they're admittedly a lot easier to take care of, but consider this: a kitten stays cute for a few months. A kid stays cute for 13 years! If you had two kids spaced four years apart thats 17 years of non-stop extreme cuteness!

The picture above is from a sketchbook of drawings I did of my daughter when she was 12 yrs. old (she's older now, away at college) The reason I include these sketches is because I want to show you what it was like to be with her while we waited for our food in a fast food restaurant. This wasn't a special event, we were just waiting for our burgers to come up. Look how eager, idealistic and playful she is, how happy she is to be alive...just like your kid would be. I probably saw her act this way a half dozen times on the same day. It's interesting to think that something really terrible may have happened to me that day but this is what my mind chose to remember, just the simple pleasure of waiting for food with my kid.

Face it, you're biologically hot-wired to like what kids have to offer. Why deny yourself the intense pleasure that nature planned for you, a pleasure that feels so right when you finally commit to it?

2) KIDS ARE NATURALLY WELL-BEHAVED: it's true! The kids you see throwing tantrums in the mall aren't doing what your kids would do. They yell like that because their parents won't answer them unless they yell. You wouldn't do that would you?

I used to hate kids. In a way I still do. But you won't hate your own kids, I guarantee it. Your kid may be normal and unexciting in the eyes of strangers but for you, with the wonderful blinders that nature provides, they're endlessly fascinating. Endlessly! It's all you can do to take your eyes off them!

3) KIDS ARE CHEAP TO RAISE WHEN THEY'RE YOUNG...as long as they're healthy, which they usually are.

4) KIDS ARE PROFOUND: or at least they're good at provoking your own deep thoughts. If you haven't had kids you can't begin to understand why society is the way it is, why events in history happened the way they did.

5) IT'S SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE: the depopulation movement had the unintended consequence of removing a large number of intelligent, socially responsible people from the gene pool. The world of the future is going to need every person of character or intelligence it can get. My hunch is that they'll be plenty glad to get them.

The downside? Brace yourself, it's big. The downside is that you'll suffer the worst moments of anguish you'll ever experience as you worry about how to get the money to raise your kids safely and well. Good jobs may be hard to get. You may have to raise your kids in a bad neighborhood. It's very scarey. But consider this...

Human beings weren't made to be yuppies. We're the same species that fended off sabertooth tigers in the shadows of glaciers, that took up pitchforks against Vikings. Somewhere within us we have the guts to tough it out. It's in our DNA. It's what we're built for! I like the old saying,"A harbor is a safe place for ships but ships weren't made to rest in harbors."

What do you think?

My Favorite One-Panel Cartoon

Friday, June 02, 2006

What Happened to Yearbook Photography?

This (above) is the way it used to be!

This is the way it is now. What happened? Where did the fun go?

Is color photography responsible? The lighting? Maybe the bottom pictures were flattened out with a long lens and the top ones shot with a normal 50mm one. Maybe the top ones were shot with variable lighting and the bottom with one technique for all. Does anyone here know about photography? What's responsible for the difference?