WHY ARE KIDS SO SURLY?

Boy, teenagers are a surly lot! I should know, I was a surly teen myself.

I grew up with my grandparents who in many ways resembled Archie and Edith Bunker from the famous TV series. My grandad was a lot bigger and meaner than Archie but he had a similar attitude about life. During the whole time I was growing up he never said a kind word to me. He either yelled or maintained an icy silence. My grandmother was kind-hearted, sentimental and a little bit ditsy, just like Edith. She did like kids and lavished loving attention on me even when I was a surly teen and probably didn't deserve it.

Now I was a cute, obedient kid when I was young but somehow I turned into a surly teenager. I communicated with my grandparents through an inch-wide crack in my bedroom door and showed signs of being insufferably bored and restless whenever they tried to talk to me. I ascribe it to hormones but who knows what the real reasons were? Maybe I felt justified for being rebelious because my grandfather was such a Type-A and my grandmother was so suffocating.

Fast forward to the the present. I have college-age kids of my own who were in their turn surly to me (the kids in the photos aren't mine, I got the pictures from the internet). Don't get me wrong, they're not like that now, and they were never as bad as I was, but when they were 16 I only knew them as eyes who appeared through a crack in their bedroom doors and said, "Whaddaya want?" It's a shocking example of karma. I snubbed others and later became the snubbed.

Anyway, here's the really interesting part. When I grew up and my grandparents had passed away I found out the truth about my grouchy grandfather. It turns out that he was all worn out from working a lifelong job that he hated in order to provide a home for my Dad and his brothers and sisters. He just wanted a quiet retirement. He was always grouchy even when he was young, but he raised his family well and they all became effective adults. When I was dumped in his arms as a baby he was crest-fallen. He could have sent me to an orphanage, I'm sure he thought about it, but he didn't. Out of a sense of duty he kept me and it made all the difference.

Now my grandfather didn't like kids, not even cute ones like me, but he really didn't like surly teenagers. It must have really grated on him that I did minimal chores, resisted any kind of responsibility, kept all the money I made from kid jobs, ate his food, wore the clothes he bought, hogged the TV, snubbed him at every opportunity, and never once thanked him. He didn't like me but he persevered through this abuse every day because he thought it was the right thing to do.

As a consequence I grew up in a nice neighborhood, went to a nice school and had nice friends. It could easily have been otherwise. The grouchy, icy-kid hater I grew up resenting turned out to be a massive benefactor. Sounds like the kid and the convict in "Great Expectations" doesn't it?

So there it is: I owe everything to an irritable grouch who didn't like me, and he died before I could acknowledge it. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep for worrying about it. My message to surly teenagers and ex-teenagers is....buy sleep insurance by forgiving your parents their faults. Forgive them 100%, meaning that you'll never again even think of their past mistakes. You can get mad at them for what they do next week but never again for anything they did in the past. You simply don't have the perspective to see those past events objectively. Forgive them, thank them, help them if they need it, then carry on with your life unburdened with surliness.

THE ORIGIN OF COMIC STRIPS

Here, so far as I can tell, is the origin of the modern comic strip. Caveat: take this with a grain of salt; I'm no expert on the subject and I might have over-simplified things.

Well, you could argue that it all began with Daumier (example above). Sure there was Hogarth, Cruikshank and others but Daumier was different. His lithographs weren't just beautiful and funny, they retained the fluid feel of the original sketches. Not only that but Daumier was a famous easel painter and that bought a lot of credibility for his cartoons. Cartooning was considered a low-class activity in Daumier's time and his fine art reputation did a lot to make it acceptable to the middle class.


Success always breeds imitators and Daumier's imitator was a guy named Cham (example above). Cham got his foot in the door by offering simplified Daumier-style drawings in a series for the same price that Daumier got for just one picture. Cham might have been a weasel but he did help to popularize the idea that cartoons should tell a story using multiple pictures.

Cham was so successful that he inspired a German named Rodolphe Topffler to try his hand. Topffler used Cham's serial panel technique but drew the characters in what he called the "outline method," a technique that didn't require Daumier's painterly tones and shadows. I don't know if Topffler was an aristocrat but he seemed to want the public to think that he was. His outline method was executed in a deliberately crude style so that it would appear that he just dashed them out for his own amusement and had no thought of making money with them.

Back in France, Dore saw what Topffler was doing and approved, only he thought the outline method worked better if the characters were a bit more realistic and were carefully inked. Dore wasn't very fond of the serial picture method. He preferred big, Jack Davis-type crowd scenes like the one above.

Back in Germany Wilhelm Busch (example above) combined the best ideas of all the artists I just mentioned: Daumier's belief that cartoons could be fine art, Cham's multiple panel idea, Topffler's outline technique and Dore's clean-up theories. Busch was the first artist to make a good living exclusively by doing funny panel cartoons. People say he was the first truly modern master of the comic strip. After him comes the great German-American newspaper artists like Dirks, the creator of "The Katzenjammer Kids." You know the rest.

A few questions remain. Where were the English while all this was going on? Why did the creative torch pass to the United States? Who invented the modern version of the word balloon?

BE BACK SUNDAY!

THE ALL-TIME BEST PALMISTRY BOOK...LOST!

A few weeks ago I read part of a palmistry book, not just any palmistry book but a really neat one that emphasized the horrific aspects. It was full of dire warnings lest you ever encounter someone who has airspaces between the bottoms of their fingers (a serial killer) or fourth fingers longer than the third (chronic misfits). What a find! I thought it would be a great subject for a blog!

Unfortunately in an addled state I returned it unfinished to the library to avoid paying a ten cent fine. Now I've recovered my senses but I can't remember the name of the book or which branch I got it from. Too bad! Anyway, I'm not likely to get it back any time soon so I thought I'd post the doodles I did while reading it. Here they are....

MY ANALYSIS OF THE "NAKED CITY" CLIP

Alright, I watched the chase clip ("Naked City," above) again and here's my very tentative analysis....

The villain represents evil, an evil that had successfully hid itself inside the body of the city, but which is now isolated and squeezed out into the outside world. I love the opening shot: the evil demon is now isolated against the huge abstraction of the white billboard. He'd like to ferret back into the city again but he can't, it won't accept him. He runs into an arcade of some sort but the crowd goes about its own business and offers him no shelter. He adjusts his hat on the way out but I like to think that he's tipping his hat to the ladies, pathetically trying to ingratiate himself, but that no longer works.

On the sidewalk we track along with him as he takes big, confident strides down the streets. I LOVE tracking shots like this! That technique helped to kill film comedy but it was a big shot in the arm for drama. Now we see evil in it's full glory, confident and contmptuous of the human beings surrounding it. But he has to stop to pretend to look at a tie...maybe he's not as in control as he thought. A policeman rudely stops him in his tracks. The humans have the upper hand! From this point on we think of him as a fox frantically fleeing the hounds, his doom pre-destined.

He enters the enclosed stairway leading up to the bridge, a Joseph Cambell-type symbol for gates of Hell. The gates are guarded by a dog which bites him...more Cambell! He shoots the dog and runs up onto the wide bridge walkway. People run out of his way, everybody knows he's evil now. The music is frenetic! In what I consider the best shot of the film we see him running away from the distant city down the surreal landscape of a vast, concrete runway. The sheltering city is closed to him now. The fool thinks he can escape into Hell!

Well, the clip ends there, just about. That's my take on it.

NAKED CITY

One of my favorite 50s crime films is "Naked City" starring my namesake Barry Fitzgerald. The brilliant 15-minute opening narration is unavailable on YouTube but I thought I'd put up a couple of clips from the long chase sequence at the end.


The half-minute clip above is the from the playground sequence where a cop asks a kid if she knows where the villain lives. It's here because it illustrates how important it is to pack a live-action film (not an animated one) with extras. If you're making a film, even an amateur film just for fun, cram every relative and friend you can find into the background. And use deep perspective when it fits. Don't shoot everything against a wall! Film teacher Bruce Block has some interesting opinions on this subject but that's a topic for another time.





Here's (above) part of the famous chase scene, made more famous by the lengthy discussion of it in the Karel Reiz book, "Technique of Film Editing." A whole generation of filmmakers learned their craft from this book. Don't rush out to buy it because there's probably better books on the shelves now.

I'm dying to try a commentary on a few scenes but I'm sleepy and it would take more thought than I can give it now. I get the feeling that there's an interesting sub-text going on but I can't figure it out what it is. OK, the city's like a character and the villain's like an animal running away from tormenters, but there seems to be more than that here. What do you think?

WHAT WOMEN TALK ABOUT WHEN MEN AREN'T AROUND

Magnolia: "It's so nice here! Isn't it great to be away from men for a while?"

Mildred: "You bet! We can finally do the kinds of things WE like to do! Uh...Gladys, the ball's over here."

Petunia: "Oooo, look! A bus transfer!

Violet: "Yeah, men always want to talk about sex! Everything to them is phallic!"

Rodneyetta: "Violet, what are we going to do with you? You're so naive!"

Queen Elizabeth: "Hi girls! Do you mind if I hang out with you for a while? It's ever so stuffy in the palace!"

Magnolia: "(Gasp!) It's the Queen! And she's hanging out with us!!! Why that's...Uh, oh......Oh, dear..........Oh, no............" BRAAAAAP!!!

Mildred: "OH Jeez, Magnolia!



Gladys: "That darn Magnolia! She should do what I do. Whenever I want to do something gross like smell my armpits, I go behind a rock and do it in the shadows."


MILDRED: "We better go, girls! We have to get back to the Theory Mansion! Mike's going to be there tonight!

VIOLET: "Mike!?  You mean the world-famous cartoonist studmuffin?! I'm there!"