THE MIDNIGHT SNACK

"I think I'll check my emails before I turn in.  Boy, the house is spooky this time of night."

"I'll tell you something you probably didn't know.  Two of the people who owned this house in the past were murdered. No kidding! They were axed in this very room!"

"I know what you're thinking: 'Why did you buy a house where murders took place!?, ' and I just shrug. It was cheap; what can I say?  It's not so bad.  You hear weird sounds in here sometimes, but it's OK, you get used to it."

"Like that! Did you hear that!?  What do you think that was?"

"It sounded like crying behind the walls, but that couldn't be."

The story they tell about this place is that a husband decided to do away with his wife and hide her body in the space between the walls.  Those are the walls behind me.  He dragged her dead body up into the attic then dropped it into a space between the walls of the first floor. What he didn't know was that she wasn't really dead, and that she woke up inside the sealed-up wall." 

"Um....the  next part's pretty gnarly.  Are you sure you want me to tell you about it?""

"OK, you asked for it!  Well, they say she woke up in there and couldn't get out.  She couldn't scream because her throat had been damaged by the near-strangling.  The only way she could survive was to eat the occasional roach and twist the heads off rats.  The rats resisted and would savagely bite her hand as she strangled them."  

"After  a year in the dark eating rats,  she went insane.  All she could think about was vengeance, vengeance against the horrible man who had done this to her.  Imagine her in there, covered with mildew and bacteria, wearing a tattered dress soaked in her own waste products! Every once in a while she'd reach a point where she couldn't take it anymore,  and she'd howl and bang her head against the wall."

  

HOOOOOOWWWWLLLLL!!!!!!! BANG! BANG! BANG!

"Um...er, something like that. Don't worry it was probably just the wind."

"They say that once a year, she'd get so intolerably angry that she'd manage to crawl up out of the wall into the attic, then down into the house, where she would kill the occupant of this room. The first year she killed her husband, the second and third years  she killed the next guys who bought the house."  

"It never occurred to her to leave here. In her deranged state she got used to living in the wall. After she killed her latest victim, she would always tortuously drag herself back to the comfort and security of the rat-filled dark. The police could never figure out who the murderer was. It never occurred to them that it might be someone living in the wall, at least that's the story people around here tell."

HHOOOOOOWWWWLLLLLL!!!!!!!!

"Good Grief! It's bad tonight!"

"You don't suppose that this is the night she'll crawl out, looking for vengeance?"

"They say there's an axe hidden behind a trunk in the attic that she uses to....."

"Naaaaw! That's just a story!  Don't think for one minute that I...."

HHHOOOOOOWWWWLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!       (Continued in the next post, below)

PART, THE SECOND

"I hear something moving behind the wall!  Whatever it is, it's climbing up to the rafters!"

"It stops, maybe to pick up the axe from it's place behind the trunk!"

"It's a woman,  a frail woman, painfully dragging herself across the floor, driven to lunatic exertion by a mad desire for revenge!  She reaches the trap door and lets herself down into the house!"

HOOOOOWWWLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!

"Oh, my God....she's..... she's IN  THE ROOM! She's actually IN THE ROOM!!!"

"I can SMELL her TATTERED,  URINE-STAINED DRESS!"

"I hear the BREATH escaping from her TOOTHLESS, MILDEWED lips!! I feel WHITE-HOT RAGE!  I sense her BONEY, RAT-BITTEN FINGERS tightening around a DIRTY AXE HANDLE!  "

"It's now or never! I gotta get outta here!  I GOTTA GET OUTTA HERE!!!!!"

"Wait minute! If I go, I'll never get another place this cheap."

"Hmmmm.... the housing market being what it is......"

WHY EXISTENTIALISM SUCKS!

Yes, I really do think existentialism sucks, but that doesn't mean that I think existentialists are  stupid.  They're not. I considered myself one for years. They're simply victims of the shallow thinking that engulfed Western philosophy since the time of Rousseau.

BTW, that's Sartre in the left foreground above, and his colleague Simone de Beauvoir on the extreme right.  I love the way Sartre is so often portrayed in cafes, surrounded by beautiful women.  You have to admit that it's an appealing image.

 

 
I don't claim to have a deep understanding of the philosophy.  My admittedly limited understanding is that it says life is meaningless, and if it has no meaning, then we'd do best to give it meaning by choosing to value the things we love. Our choices may be objectively valueless,  but they mean something to us, so for us they have value.  Happiness consists of deliberately valuing lots of things.

  
Well, that's not a bad idea, particularly if life really is meaningless, but is it? It seems to me that all living things are born with a strong will to survive, eat and reproduce. In addition to that, we humans are born with a desire for friendship, comfort  and understanding.  That doesn't sound like meaninglessness to me.  Sartre seems to be describing the properties of rocks when he talks about meaninglessness.  As vulnerable living things, we are by definition "meaningful."

OK,  life is more meaningful if we value more things, but do we need a philosopher to tell us that?

Sartre's ideas about "bad faith" and "things in themselves" seem derived in spirit from Heiddeger,  who resisted logic and attempted to piece together a philosophy from unrelated enthusiasms he had.  Bertrand Russell refused to concede that existentialism was a real and consistent  philosophy, and I agree with him.  It's a literary creation.  It reflects a feeling of futility and a yearning for heroism that we all feel sometimes, and that's it's true value.  

 

 (Blogger just dropped my final picture so I'll have to struggle on without it)

What existentialism doesn't do is provide answers.  Sartre was a long-time communist in the era when Stalin was murdering people right and left.  During Mao's Cultural revolution, when millions were killed and sent to gulags for thoughts that no reasonable person would consider a crime, Sartre proudly wore a Mao button.  This from the reputed champion of freedom.  What was he thinking of?  

What I do like about Sartre is the nifty images he comes up with in his biography and plays.  "Nausea" contains an unforgettable description of the world as a gigantic warehouse filled with a black ocean where floating objects randomly, pointlessly,  bump each other in the darkness.  Wow!  Bleak, but beautiful!

VAMPING TIL I GET TO KNOW HOW MAC WORKS

"Hi, everybody!  It's just me, Uncle Eddie!"

"This isn't my room, it's my son's. He's a baseball guy and a philosophy major."

"He's a stoic, so the decoration in the room is pretty minimal.  I begged him to let me decorate it! I'm an artist...think of what I could have done with it! We could have been in the LA Times! In Architectural Digest!!! This could have been a big deal!!!!!"

"But like I said, he's a stoic.  He likes Heidegger too. I can't stand Heiddeger!  At least he's not an existentialist.  That's such a shallow philosophy."

 

"Good Grief!!! My hand turned white!!!!!"

"Hmmm, can't go around with white hands! You know what I'm gonna do about that?"

 
"Yes sir... I'll tell you what I'm gonna do about that....I got the solution right here.  Lemme see....yeah, here it is...right...here..........."

"SMELLY SHOE!!!! SMELLY SHOE!!!!"

Sniff! Sniff!

"Good Lord and Tarnation!!!!!!!!!!"

"That was gross! Sorry! I kid! I kid!"

UNCLE EDDIE'S DAD ANSWERS THE MAIL!

"Um...hello! It is I who am Uncle Eddie's father!  John's dad answers his mail sometimes, so my son  thought I should do this thigamajig, too!  Heh, heh. My son's a card, no?"

"Ok,  let's take a look at these letters....."

"What's all this Mac vs. PC stuff?"

"I hate to tell you but my kid's converting to being a Mac fan!  Mac isn't always faster or better...but Eddie says it's more fun."

"I don't know, I don't get all this computer stuff."

"It's good for pictures of girls, though!  Some of them have two-piece bathing suits!"

"OK, that's all for now!"

"No, wait a minute!!!"

"I forgot to say that, according to Eddie,  there's another Mac operating system called "Camino." He said Camino's  a Linux-based system that's easier to use than Safari.  He'll try that out after he posts this."

"Well that's it for real this time! Be seeing you!  Eddie, if you're reading this, be sure to take out the trash!  Your place was stinky last time I was there!  Um...bye!

Eddie says:  Whew! This was my first post on my new Mac. It took me FOREVER to do this,  but I guess it'll get easier.

Also, a plug for ace girl-artist Katie Rice's latest ebay auction!  I'm afraid to link to her site  because I'm probably just one electron away from exceeding my bandwidth here.  I didn't know how to reduce my pictures so I posted them all huge.  Anyway, to see Katie's pictures, just Google "FunnyCute!"

WINDOWS XP BETTER THAN MAC LEOPARD!!!!!!

Sorry I don't have graphics to put up with this post. I can't figure out how to do that on my new  Mac.  With Windows you just go to your "My Pictures" and grab a picture. It's intuitive. With Mac....OK, I give up, where do you store your graphics? In the photo bin?

MAC SUCKS!  The default size of the Mac windows are thin and unattractive, and it's not clear how to widen them.  With windows you just pull on the sides.  The Mac welcoming screen should be called "the unwelcoming screen" because it's loaded to the gills with garish ads for Apple products, and the tiny sliver where you type in searches is lost in the clutter.  Making a picture larger or smaller on Windows is done with icons that visually describe your choices. I still haven't figured out how to do it on a Mac.

Confusing? Fear not! Mac has seen fit to answer questions on a free-for-all "forum" where you can mingle with random, confused users of all the Mac products and attempt to find something useful, if you don't die of exhaustion first. Dopey old Windows provides a manual, both physical and virtual, and it has an index.

My PC monitor had controls for brightness and saturation  that were on the front of the monitor, where everybody could see them.  You could use keyboard commands or just turn the knob. Ditto the volume knob on my PC speakers.  Not so with Mac. Mac even hides the on/off button.   

The set-up was alternately easy and confusing.  Mac wanted to know if I wanted to subscribe to .Mac but stupidly neglected to tell me what the heck .Mac was.  I was told I could get this mysterious, precious  thing on a free trial for 60 days, but I had to type in a password. The same password I use to log on?  Who knows?  It didn't say. I still don't know how to eject my installation CD.  With my PC I pushed a button next to the CD tray. 

So far almost every operation I've encountered, the ones that both Windows and Mac perform in a similar way, can be done more intuitively and with fewer steps on my PC.  Sorry, but there it is.  Probably I'll get used to the Mac system soon and will grow to prefer it like everybody else, but I want to record my first negative impressions now, before I forget them.

 

MY FAVORITE CARICATURIST

Here's some sketches by my very favorite caricaturist, Max Beerbohm. Beerbohm was part of Oscar Wilde's circle and is best known for his humorous essays. He's a terrific writer, very dry and understated: "A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, were they not?" I imagine that I can see his influence on people like Noel Coward, Peter Cook, and Stephen Fry.

According to Wikipedia, Beerbohm's gifts bottomed out when he hit middle age. That's odd. You'd think a dry wit would hit a peak at that time of life. I wonder if he became a stay-at-home like Peter Cook, who's said to have spent his middle years in front of the TV set.

BTW, I may be off the net for a day or two. I just got a new Apple computer but I'm a Windows guy and it may take me a couple of days (or more) to get everything hooked up and running. I'll still continue to read comments, even if I'm unable to reply.

WERE SCRIPTS EVER USED IN ANIMATION'S GOLDEN AGE?

I'm not an animation historian and I've done no original research on the subject. If I had to make a guess I'd say some scripts must have been written because it's inconceivable that penny-pinching studio owners would have always, in all situations, resisted the common practice of live action, which was to use scripts. Also, just guessing again, I'd say that scripts couldn't have been very common. If they were, then where are they now? Why did books and articles written at the time (like "Art of Animation", above and below) emphasize story boards as the preferred way to write stories? Walt himself is on record in print and film saying that he didn't use scripts.

Bob Jaques says he owns a Fleischer script and Floyd Norman said he saw scripts being written while he worked at Disney's. Mike Barrier interviewed non-artist Bill Cottrell who wrote for Disney, and Mike put up Cottrell's script for "Cock Robin" on his site. Steve Worth was not impressed and says Cottrell's script was probably written after the storyboards were made, as a sort of handy synopsis or recording script. Mike disagrees and wants to throttle Steve, but Steve remains adamant. Here's an example of Cottrell's script, below:

It certainly looks like it was written after the story was already made and shot, at least as a Leica reel, but Mike says it contains things that weren't in the finished film, so it must have originated earlier. Maybe it was made from an early Leica reel. Gee, if a script this detailed and anal-retentive was written early, at the creative stage, it would certainly lead me to pity the poor animators whose creative input would have been zilch.

Steve says no scripts (meaning, I assume, creative scripts by non-artists that were more than just dictation) were written during animation's Golden Age. I winced when I heard that because there are exceptions to every rule, and I could imagine someone pulling out that exception from an attic somewhere. Mike says "Snow White" used scripts in addition to storyboards. Animation critic Charles Solomon says no scripts were used at Disney until "101 Dalmatians." I'm not an historian so I can't comment.

Myself, I think scripts are an absolutely terrible way to write animation, but I imagine that I can occasionally see the influence of non-artist writers in some classic films. "Lady and the Tramp" looked beautiful but the writing was full of cliches that are still used by non-artists today. "Aristocats" made after Walt's death, had an abundance of them. I simply can't imagine artists coming up with ideas as visually impaired as these. But maybe I'm wrong.

A BRUTAL, BRUTAL CARICATURE!!!!

Man, I should get the Mother Theresa Award for Taking IT on the Chin for Humanity. Why? Because nobody but a world-class altruist would ever share such a spectacularly withering and unflattering caricature of himself with the public! I do it to further the sacred cause of caricature, and to do penance for my sins.

The artist, of course, is John K. Click to enlarge.

BTW, I'm not offended and the reason is that the picture is so doggoned insightful. John's best caricatures always seem to ridicule nature even more than the person he's drawing. The picture shows someone who's full of self importance and doesn't seem to grasp that he's a shapeless bag of guts, doomed to live a pathetically short lifespan and turn to dust. The viewer laughs at the caricature then realizes that he himself is in the same boat.