PHILOSOPHY CORNER

UNCLE EDDIE: "Sophie! So you think it's wrong to label people. Tell me why!"

SOPHIE: "It's very simple, Uncle Eddie. Labeling a person reduces them to a simplistic cliche. You don't listen to the real argument people make because you're addressing yourself to a cardboard caricature."

UNCLE EDDIE: "But Sophie, labeling is necessary. Most people's thinking does fall into an existing category of belief, even if they're not aware of it. Recognizing that allows you to take shortcuts and get to the center of their argument quickly."

SOPHIE: "But each man is unique, especially the thinking man. Maybe each individual has his own deviations from the mainstream thinking of his side."

UNCLE EDDIE: "Of course he has his own deviations but it's still usefull to open up an argument by attacking the generalization he represents. This forces the man to quickly shed the indefensible parts of his argument. Doing that clears the air quickly and

focuses the argument on the real areas of disagreement."

SOPHIE: "Hmmmm...I never thought of that before. Uncle Eddie, it's difficult to argue with you. You're eyes...a woman could... a woman could get lost in them."

UNCLE EDDIE: "Many do, inquisitive one. Many do."

Note: Thanks to Mad magazine for the graphics. Buy Mad so I don't get sued.

YEARBOOK PHOTOS: A DIP INTO MY PRIVATE RESERVE

Here it is, some of my choicest yearbook pictures. Some were xeroxed from the Spumco library, some from my own collection and some (above, bottom right) from my kid's yearbook. Boy, yearbook photography sure has declined in the last 30 years, but I've posted on that subject already.

I don't know about you but these pictures make me want to draw. I womder, besides yearbooks, what other sources contain good pictures of ordinary people?

ARE THE SUBURBS A FIT SUBJECT FOR ART?

Yes, absolutely! Especially for cartooning! By way of an example how about this picture (above) of a suburban sidewalk by Crumb. The kid looking at the girl with the funny hat reminds me of the Thomas Hart Benton picture of the farmer peeking at a sleeping nude woman. Both beautifully capture a sensual moment and both seem to have something to say about the enviornment the subjects are in. Farms and suburbs are the products of human thought and are therefore charged with sexuality.

Suburbans (above) must go to work, all at the same time. Wood found a rough beauty in that.

A Crumb girl (above) takes time to read her notebook in a suburban greasy spoon. A wonderful depiction of a quiet moment in the city.

This (above) is an old sketchbook page (previously published on this blog) that I did of my daughter when she was a kid. I did it in a suburban fast food restaurant. Life happens in fast food places just like it does in arab street bazaars and picturesque Provence streets. Why are so many modern artists blind to that?

BOTTICELLI'S PROBLEM

I am sooooo sleepy and I need to do put up something quickly before I doze off at the keyboard. How about this: the incredible backward men's fashions in Renaissance Italy around 1480 or so?

Both of these Botticelli portraits have the same problem, the heads look they're twisted backwards, Exorcist-style. The faces seems to be looming over the subjects' backs! I used to think that the fault was Botticelli's, that he just couldn't draw a decent male chest to save his life, but I think I was mistaken. I've seen the same problem in other portraits from that era. Apparently backwards fashions were all the rage in those days.

I shouldn't be surprised. In my own time I've seen Ultra-baggy pants, stove-pipe pants, Jogging shorts over long pants, maxi skirts, mini-skirts, girls' shorts with lace trim that looked like underpants, camel-toe jeans, fanny packs over stretch bike-racing pants, formal shapeless grey Frankenstein jackets for men, checkered sneakers, cars designed to look like sneakers, girls' goth outfits complete with metal lunchbox and voodoo doll, big combs left in male afros, gold chains worn with T-shirts, tongue studs, day-glow fishnet T-shirts, mass-market shirts with "BUM" written on them. torpedo bras, no bras, penciled-in eyebrows, bee sting lips....well, it would be a long list. What modern person is entitled to look with disdain on the Italians for wearing backwards clothing?

CARTOONISTS VS. ILLUSTRATORS

What I'm about to say was inspired by a recent blog entry by John Kricfalusi: "Dan Gordon and What Makes a Cartoonist," on "All Kinds of Stuff," Jan. 16, '07. I congratulated John on the article but when I quoted my favorite parts he was appalled that I seemed to have misunderstood the point he was making. Well, John's certainly the expert on what his intended message was but I still like my own deviation from it, which is presented below.

Using John's article as a springboard I now see character artists in the animation industry as being divided into two camps, the illustrators and the cartoonists. Illustrators, like the guy who designed the Robin Hood fox below, draw beautiful, well-proportioned pictures. Cartoonists (like Mad magazine artist Don Martin, above) draw funny pictures. Obviously some artists can do both but most have a bias in one direction or the other. There's no reason for these groups to be antagonistic, after all a good cartoon requires both skills. The problem is that employers, who are almost never cartoonists themselves, favor the illustrators. After all, illustrators make the most professional-looking drawings. Writers, who often have employer's ear, also favor illustrators. Cartoonists chafe at unfunny scripts and will usually try to finess them. Illustrators make the perfect employee because they actually like the guidance provided by long and usually unfunny scripts, they just want to make the pictures look professional. Anyway, the consequence of all this is that cartoonists have to do a lot of hustling to get work, even in the cartoon industry.

Unfortunately a new group has arrived which is ambivilent to both cartoonists and illustrators: the 3D animator. A lot of 3D animators don't see the point in learning how to draw. They never had time to learn in school because 3D is so labor-intensive and besides, they reason that the people they work for will provide the characters. In my darkest moments I sometimes imagine a world where art school graduates not only can't draw but can't even imagine why anyone would want to draw. I rush to add that this is an admittedly unrealistic fantasy. Anime is coming up fast and is still drawing-intensive, even if it favors illustrators. John Kricfalusi loves cartoonists and continues to train them and at least three studios have put the word out that they're interested in hearing pitches for 2D projects.

Talking about John, I forgot to say why he was so disturbed by my talk about cartoonist/illustrator differences. John believes that there's no reason why caroonists shouldn't be able to draw as well as illustrators, if not better. Cartoonists in the past did it routinely, why shouldn't we? In spite of what I said in the opening paragraphs I have to admit that he has a point.

UPDATING SUPERMAN

Superman's gone through drastic design changes in the last 25 years. Here's a few of them...

First of all (above) there's the stocky, Robbie-the-Robot, bag-of-grapefruits Superman. Photoshop highlights abound.

Here's (above) a prissy Superman, done in purple.

Here's a long-haired Superman.

Here's (above) a Jack Kirby-meets-Bruce Timm-style Superman. It's fun to imagine what the comic would have been like if the whole story had been posed as extreme as the cover.

Here (above) is the German Expressionist Superman. I'd have bought this one, just for the weirdness of it.

Here's (above) the Superman-as-Stud Superman. It looks a parody of Wood and Frazetta. If the story inside had matched the cover I'd have bought it.

For contrast here's (above) my favorite old-school Superman artist, Wayne Boring. Boring took the stories very, very seriously. His Superman was manly and heroic, a guy not to be messed with. John K is a big Boring fan. I wonder how many other fans are out there.

SOME INTERESTING MATISSE

This is not going to be a popular post. Most of the people who come here are cartoonists and cartoonists are indifferent to Matisse. Maybe it's because his love of pattern seems effeminate, maybe it's because line artists are instictively hostile to colorists. I don't know, maybe a commenter can explain it.

Anyway, I have a real treat for the small handfull of Matisse enthusiasts here. Here (above) is the original cloth that inspired several of his later paintings, including the blue and green painting above (topmost). It's a chance to compare the inspiration with the final product.

The blue and green painting is shocking. The colors seem to burn off of the canvas. I'm amazed that Matisse was able to look at the cloth and derive the ideal of pure, vibrant color from it. Of course to get across the idea of pure color he had to use mixed, textured color. This doesn't suprise me because psychologically intense color is almost always textured. That's why a colorist like Matisse was bound to be attracted to fabric. Hold up a red card then hold up

a piece of cloth colored with the same red. The cloth always seems redder. It may not really be redder but our brains are wired to perceive it that way.

I think we get misled about how color and texture work because we look at the mid-day sky and the sky seems brilliant even though it's only a light, graded blue and seems to have no texture at all. That's because the sky is backlit in a sense. It's all about the difference between additive and subtractive color. A pigment of sky blue (one that really is the same blue as the sky) straight out of the tube won't appear bright unless it's textured.

I'm always surprised that liberated color appears so agressive and so...well, evil and alien. The energy in color is usually locked up and hidden under a matrix of other colors and distractions. When released through texture and contrast it goes wild and seems to attack the viewer. Don't you feel that when you look at the blue painting above? If I were a colorist I might find myself talking to the color as it develops because it definitely seems to have an agenda opposed to my own.

The real excitement in seeing the cloth pattern is in the realization that the alien blue Matisse coaxed out of it was there all along. It makes you see other common objects in a different light.

Just for the heck of it I think I'll throw in a couple of other Matisse-related pictures. Here's an Egyptian tapestry that appears in a couple of his pictures. The wreath seems to spin and inject color into the field around it. I wish I could see the original.

MY DINNER WITH MIKE FONTANELLI

'BE BACK IN A COUPLE OF DAYS!

I TAKE MY SNOOTY FRIEND TO GET SOME FAST FOOD

I don't know why so many people hate fast food restaurants. I understand why they got a bad reputation early on when they were crowded and noisy with plastic seats, but that was then and this is now. My local Carl Jr.'s is quiet and comfortable and the food isn't bad if you know what to order. Anyway, yesterday I finally convinced my food snob friend Mike to try it.

I guess I picked the wrong day because the restaurant was full of mentally challenged people with carts filled with teddy bears and "Lion King' memorabelia. There must have been a convention nearby. They were all shouting incoherently and of course they all seemed to gravitate to Mike.

I forgot that using a door is a learned skill. A man who hadn't learned it yet came to the door, saw his friends inside, but couldn't get in because a slab (the door) was in the way. After making a few tentative little pushes he opened the door about 20% of the way, then tried to squeeze in through the narrow opening. The door, which had a normal amount of spring tension, gently began to close on him, pinning him there by the shoulders. The man painstakingly turned sideways to get more room but the door closed on him in that position too, forcing him to wheedle through sideways, like a crab. I'm embarrassed to say that I was so suprised by what I was seeing that I forgot to offer to help. Besides I was distracted by a little kid who was trying to hit Mike on the head with a DVD box.

I also forgot that using a cup is a learned skill. A man settled into a booth with a cup of coffee and looked wistfully out the window. Nothing wrong with that, just a citizen enjoying a cup of coffee. "Ah!" you could almost hear him thinking, "Life is good!" He took a sip then went to take another sip and was shocked to discover that the cup was empty. He looked at the kitchen angrily then got up and filled it again. Back in the booth he took another long, relaxed sip. "Aaaaah!", you could hear him think, "That's good!" But wait a minute! When he went to take a another sip nothing was there! What kind of restaurant are they running here? Once again he angrily looked at the kitchen then went up and got more coffee. This went on and on, with him looking suprised that he had nothing in his cup then filling it with only one sip's worth of coffee. Once again I didn't offer to help because the kid was back hitting Mike with the DVD box again.

I should add that Mike was sitting close to the aisle. Every time the coffee man passed he would fart next to Mike's head. And when I say "passed," I mean passed in both directions. Mike would get a fart in his face on the guy's way up to the counter and a fart in the face on the guy's way back.


I suggested to Mike that we slide farther in on our seats so we could get away from the aisle but when we did that the woman in the booth behind us cast a murderous stare at Mike, probably thinking that he was the father who abused her and now deserved to be stabbed. Regretfully we slid back to the aisle where Mike was promptly farted on.

So that was my lunch with food snob Mike. I guess we won't be eating at Carl's again any time soon.

THE ROOFTOPS OF PARIS

I got a great book called "The Rooftops of Paris" for Christmas. Thumbing through it I found myself asking, "What are these rooftops trying to tell us?" They seem to be saying something, I just can't figure out what it is.

In the 19th century, when a lot of these buildings were put up, the poorest people lived on the top floor. That's because there were few mechanical elevators and getting up there required an arduous climb. What a good deal for the poor! They not only got a terrific view of the city but they were able to look out over the surreal, mysterious, innovative, historic, artistic wonderland of the rooftops!

Some rooftops seemed to be planned and ornate, others seeme to be gerry-rigged and put up almost as an afterthought. Maybe some featured add-on rooms, built without knowledge of the law. Some of the most creative designs might have been add-ons.

Rooftops like these provoke so many interesting questions. Are we wasting the best part of buildings by putting them so high above the street that nobody can see them? Should we build rooftop-type structures on the street level? Should we promote a world above the ground by bridging rooftops? Should we deliberately send our eccentrics up there to live in the hope that they'll create an interesting world up there? Should we have trolleys up there so rooftop people could visit each other without going down to the ground?

Matbe witches or Dickensian criminal types like Fagin should live up there. Maybe ninjas. Maybe thatched cottages and trees should be permitted. Maybe a foreign country should be allowed to exist up there.

I borrowed this picture from a previous post. This suggests that people in higher rooftops could lean over a railing and enjoy the antics of people on lower rooftops. Or maybe it suggests a kind of pedestrian highway enabling fast travel on the rooftops.

WHAT BIRDS ARE TRYING TO TELL US

Everybody loves the sound of chirping birds. There's something soothing and peacefull about waking up in the morning to the sound of bird calls. It's as if the birds said to each other, "Let's fill this neighborhood with song so the humans will reflect on how glorious and full of happiness the world is!" At least that's what I used to think.

After seeing a TV documentary on the subject I now know what they're really saying:

"I'm hungry!"

"This is my tree!"

"Where's the women!"

Fascinating!

Maybe this is the universal message that the animal world is trying to communicate to us. I remember that years ago the hippies used to talk about communicating with dolphins. A researcher named Lily wrote a book about his ongoing attempt to teach language to dolphins and his book was on every hippie bookshelf. Lily speculated that when we learn to talk to them dolphins will share with us their rich culture and philosophy along with a history of the oceans going back to the time before man.

Lily died before he could finish his work but others took it up and after years of arduous labor they finally achieved what they were after. A dolphin who learned to manipulate a typewriter with his nose painstakingly typed out a message to his hippie friends who were waiting with abated breath. The message, which was the culmination of tears of work, read:

"I'm hungry!"

"This is my water."

"Where's the women?"

I guess that's the universal message.

I JUST BOUGHT A WATER PEN!

I just bought a water pen and I'm delighted with it! How long have these been around? How come I never heard of them before? I only discovered it because Enrico, who runs the Sketchcrawl website did a watercolor sketch of it (above). He seemed to awear by it so I made a trip to the art store to see what he was talking about. Man, am I glad I did!

What it is, is a refillable brush pen loaded with water. If you have a little portable set of watercolors like the Windsor & Newton set above then you're all set to color pictures on the move, any time, anywhere. No fuss, no mess, the brush has it's own water. It's easy to clean and easy to remove the old color to make way for a new one.

I like funny subjects so my pictures aren't likely to look like the ones above. I'm just grateful to Sketchcrawl for turning me on to the materials. The sketchbook he recommended looked pretty interesting too. I never used the Mikado pencil.

THEORY CORNER - SCIENCE SECTION

The reason is that the normal human attention span for just about anything is probably only two or three minutes. When the limit is reached people collapse then have to summon the strength to begin a new round of attention. The guy in the drawings wasn't bored, he was actually intensely interested in what was going on around him. He simply reached the end of his attention span.

So far as I know this important phenomenon was discovered by John Krisfalusi. One day I met John for lunch and I found him animating flipbooks on the restaurant table. Most of the books were funny, I wish you could have seen them, but one one book in particular stood out. It showed a guy getting a glassey-eyed stare, collapsing then straightening up again. I asked John what it was and he said he was just animating what the people at the other tables were doing. I stared at those people while John made more flipbooks and that's when I noticed what I drew above. Every single person at every table got a glassey stare and collapsed every few minutes. It's subtle, and I probably would never have noticed it if I hadn't been for the flipbook, but when you know what to look for it's unmistakable.

Interesting, huh?

I WANT TO PODCAST!

The more I hear about podcasting the more I like it. What it amounts to is radio that you can listen to at any time, almost anywhere, with no commercials. That's amazing! I'd love to try that on this site, maybe a 10 or 15 minute podcast once a week in addition to everything else that's here.

What kind of format? Not theories, they come off better in print. I'm dying to tell original stories: horror, sci-fi, comedy, kids'show etc. The first one I want to do would be a romance serial. Man, I can't wait!
I have no idea how to go about this. I got a book from the library, "Podcasting for Dummies" that mentions one way so I'll describe that here and see if anyone knows how to do it better. The method: 1) buy an iRiver T-10 portable mp3 player. It contains a microphone and converts voice recordings to digital mp3 files, 2) use Audacity software (for PCs, free off the internet) to edit, and 3) get an audio card installed in the computer. The book recommends the Audiophile2496 PCI digital Audio Card for Windows XP users. According to the book If you have this stuff you're ready to go.

I'll add that Kali told me about another possibility: use the microphone on any digital camera. I know that Windows XP contains some kind of sound editing program. Maybe that can do what Audacity does. Maybe it's not necessary to buy anything!

BTW, the pictures above are of radio personalities Orson Welles (topmost) and Jean Shepherd (below Welles).