MY DINNER (LUNCH) WITH ANDRE (JOHN K) #9

It was pizza for lunch and, as we all know, pizza is the food of the gods! John got there before I did and immediately started drawing background ideas for The George Liquor show. I don't know why he's always saying that he's not good at backgrounds...the drawings were great!



I talked about a party I did caricatures for the previous night. I didn't bring a camera, so I have no pictures to put up, but it's just as well because the night didn't go as well as I'd hoped. On the way to the party I got it into my head to draw the guys very, very ugly, just for fun. As it turned out I drew them so ugly that I somehow crossed the line into insult. One guy was positively grief-stricken! I felt terrible for being such a jerk. I'm amazed that I didn't get slugged!

The frame grab above is from a Popeye cartoon that Bob Jacques put up. I include it here because the ugly Bluto is where I got the notion to draw people the way I did...not in drag, but just in really extreme poses. John commiserated. Caricature can be a dirty business!



We talked some about the Maxim "Hundred Hotties" party we got to go to the night before last. I've never been to the Playboy Mansion but I imagine that this is what the parties there must have been like. Girls were everywhere! Mike should have been there...he would have thought he'd died and gone to heaven. The problem was that the music was so loud that I couldn't hear what people were saying, even when they were standing right next to me.



I met what appeared to be some pretty creative advertising people. I'd love to tell you what they said but the music was such that I only saw their lips moving. One thing I managed to get out of it: advertising, at least the kind that's geared to young guys, is all about what's perceived to be hip. If you're thinking of making a career in advertising and you're not hip, then think again.



Somehow we drifted into a discussion of "Mandrake the Magician" and "The Phantom," two newspaper strips that had the distinction of being action strips without any action. I looked it up when I came home and sure enough, they were created by the same guy, a radio writer and announcer by the name of Falk. He didn't draw, he found somebody else to do it.




Then there was the Phantom ...I think the Phantom was the first hero to dress in tights. He was pre-Superman so he didn't have any super powers, just a gun like The Shadow used to have. John said that was perfectly respectable; even Mighty Mouse had a gun in the early days. He used to shoot cats.

My childhood recollection of The Phantom was that he started as a white slave in Arabia and somehow managed to escape from his cruel slave owners. He dedicated the rest of his life to being a nemesis to the slave trade. That's not the story that's on the net but I could swear that that's what I read. He found a cave and a horse who would live in the cave with him, and he just sat around all day on a skull throne waiting for the phone to ring with news of the next slave caravan.



While John and I were talking about the Phantom, an extremely old woman was slowly walked into the restaurant by her care-giver. I've never seen a person that old in a restaurant, especially one who was walking and not riding in a wheelchair. Could she have been there to get pizza? Anyway, bear with me, I have a reason for bringing this up.

The woman's method of walking was to slowly slide her feet across the rug. She never lifted her feet, she just slid, and her attendant held her with great difficulty around the waist. This worked OK until she came to a tiny, little, insignificant wrinkle in the rug. A normal person would have walked on it without noticing it, or have just stepped over it. Not this poor woman. When she reached the crease she had to stop, just as if she'd hit a brick wall. She tried and tried to get past but couldn't. She was like a Flatlander who could be stopped by a single line!

I'm ashamed to say that while this was going on I was just sitting dumbfounded, watching it all. I can't believe I was so dense as to watch without offering to help. Fortunately some other men leaped up and managed to smooth out the wrinkle in the rug. The woman was too frail to risk lifting her. I can't help repeating what I said before...imagine being so frail as to be stopped by a single line on a carpet!

Well, that's it...No, wait! I forgot to mention the picture above...I found it on the net when I was looking for a picture of Mandrake. It's the living room of the creator of the old newspaper strip, "Mark Trail." It's a nifty room, huh? He actually did live in the outback, just like his comic strip character!

MORE ABOUT MORRICONE

Here are two more Morricone themes, again conducted by Morricone himself. The one above is from "The Untouchables" and the one below is from "The Mission." Compare this to the Leone westerns in the post below; the western music succeeds and the ones in this post fail. Of course that's only my opinion, but for the sake of argument let's suppose I'm right. The question instantly comes to mind: why was Morricone so inspired by the Leone westerns?



Come to think of it, maybe what I'm really asking is, "What kind of story lends itself to good film music?" it seems to me that that the answer is, the one with subtext. Composers like to play with subtext because that way they're providing information that the story only hints at. They get to participate in the writing. A good composer lets you know, for example, that "Batman" is really a story about the grandeur of Gotham City and the efficacy of man, even if the writers fail to mention that.

This applies to visuals as well. A good book illustrator doesn't slavishly illustrate the events in the book. He adds to them. Take a look at the book illustrations Steve Worth put up on the ASIFA Hollywood site. Look at the illustrations by Tenggren, Dulac, Nielson, Deitmold and others. The best illustrators added to the text. In their hands Goldilock's forest is full of magic, mystery, and awe-inspiring beauty...all things never mentioned in the text.

The Mission was written by Robert Bolt who wrote the brilliant "Man for All seasons," but he goofed here because because his story had no subtext. Everything you could say about it was in the text. All that remained for the composer was to put happy music under the happy scenes and sad music under the sad scenes. Putting a creative guy like Morricone on a movie like this was a waste of talent. Not so with Leone. Sergio's characters were nuanced and mysterious, and the music helped to define them. In fact a lot of the philosophy in the film was in the music.

I'm tempted to talk about subtext and music in the Clampett and John K films, but I guess that'll have to wait for another day.

ENNIO MORRICONE

Here's (above) a Munich orchestra performing Morricone's "Ecstasy of Gold" theme from "Good the Bad and the Ugly." Wow! Surely Morriconne was one of the great classical composers of the 20th century! With films or film-like ideas for inspiration the 20th Century should have been one of the great eras of classical music. Jazz was about to enter classical music...you see it coming with Gershwin and Ellington... yet classical died with the onset of the hippie era. Why? So many golden ages were put on hold so the hippie era could be born. Something about those days sapped the confidence of non-hippie art. Maybe drugs did it.

Getting back to Morricone, he evidently needed Sergio Leone for inspiration. His post-Leone work isn't nearly as philosophical and appealing. Maybe it's worth spending a couple of minutes in an attempt to figure out what that philosophy was.





Maybe Morricone was making a religious statement. In the old days the discovery of a murdered corpse filled everyone with terror and awe. That was the time when people still believed in something. People crossed themselves, lit candles, fell on their knees. The fact that someone was deliberately killed meant that a soul was taken to judgement before its time, burdened with all its imperfections, and that another soul had undertaken to defy God and would almost certainly burn for eternity. How different than nowadays when a corpse is just a statistic.

Or maybe Morricone was making a secular statement about the value of life. Our lives are so short and being alive to witness the wonders of nature is such a precious gift. You have to wonder how people could snuff it out so casually.

In the slide show above the bad guys are portrayed as thoughtless demons of the underworld, or as people who are so stupid and debased that they casually risk the loss of life. Henry Fonda is portrayed as different. He's the head of the gang but he's fully human and he knows the horrible consequences of what he's doing, yet he does it anyway. A couple of minutes into the slide show you see him looking into camera with that look that shows the greatness of man combined with the cold indifference of pure evil.

NEW TALENT!

Wow! There's some interesting YouTube filmmakers out there! What do you think of these two guys? The first goes by the name "Forgettable" and is anything but. Here's (above) my favorite Forgettable film: "The Robber's Apprentice."






Here's (above) Forgettable making a funny film with just two kids and a couple of overcoats.





Here's Forgettable and a friend (above) doing a whole video of funny walks. Every cartoonist and animator should do the same, in fact every animation teacher should assign this.





Here's another film from Jorge, and it's a doosey. Jorge's friend's brother did it. Considering the age of the actors the film is amazingly sophisticated. It has humor, balance, character, movement, story...everything you could want. It's great to see a natural at work, somebody who's born to hold a camera.

A NEW ANIMATION EXHIBIT!

Here's Jerry Beck and I at the opening earlier this evening of the new animation exhibit at the Motion Picture Academy. Of course the camera was equipped with the usual fat-enhancing lens, which somehow managed to spare Jerry.

The exhibit was great! You wouldn't believe how much Mary Blair was on the wall, and there was some choice Jones art including layouts and backgrounds from "Rabbit of Seville" and "What's Opera Doc." Clampett was well represented with original model sheets, storyboards and story and gag synopses. You could read an early version of the story for "Piggy Bank Robbery" which included a number of gags and villains that didn't make it to the final film.

I even liked the live-action set design exhibit on the fourth floor. It's not enough to see stuff like this on the screen. You have to see it and touch it and walk around in it. When you do, you'll realize that you've lived your life wrong and that your own home is sad and pathetic and lacking in character.





Here's (above) a reprint of the fashion girl from the previous post. I put it up again because I realized that I missed something about it the first time. You know, this girl isn't really such a bad speaker. She talks too fast, and her references are too cliched and too ghetto, but she's not without skill.

I actually like the way she posits an imaginary opponent that her arguments are directed to, and I like the way she puts on a different persona when she talks to that character. I like her confidence (drugs?) and I like the way she uses facial expressions for punctuation. I also like the way she sees the world as being populated by goofballs and people who can't see the nose in front of their faces. That's classic storytelling technique. You create a caricature of the world then make fun of it.

All these are good techniques, she just plugs in the wrong words. She should caricature specific people.

ONE MORE TWYLA VIDEO

Just so you know: I do NOT have a crush on this girl. I put up another of her philosophy videos just because it's unique and I don't know what to make of it. Here she toasts the audience with a glass of wine studded with giant glass jewels, and stirred with her fingers. I don't know why but that gesture immensely impressed me. The video is 10 minutes long but I can only recommend the first four minutes.

As Chris and Matt observed about the previous post, Twyla is kind of...well, Twyla is Twyla...but you have to give her credit: she's funny and has style, at least in this
video.

I also like the fact that she likes men. I mean men in general, not just Mr. Right. Some girls have base motives for that, some girls are just flirts or love humanity in general, but then some girls do it because they seem to like playing the role of muse for the men in their lives.

When a muse makes an effort to charm a guy I think the guy should accept it as a luxurious gift. He should fall in love with the muse and accept the sting of rejection when he discovers that he took it too seriously. Stendahl said creative people should always be in love.

Like I said, in spite of appearances, I do NOT have a crush on Twyla. She's not my type. I just like the way she provokes discussion, even when she has her fingers in the wine.




Just for fun, here's another philosopher courtesy of Jorge Garrido.

GIRL PHILOSOPHERS ON YOUTUBE

When I woke up this morning I made some coffee and ate breakfast infront of the computer. While I was eating I did a YouTube search for "Girl Philosophers" and this is what I found. To my surprise girl philosophy is a whole genre. Who would have thought? Here's a sample....

PHYSICS FOR CARTOONISTS: THE HIGGS BOSON

If you're not interested in physics you should stay and read this anyway, because something major is about to happen and when it does you don't want to regret that you missed a chance to have it explained simply. I don't pretend to understand it myself, and the odds are that I'll goof up the explanation, but it's better than nothing...so read on!


CERN, the European particle accelerator lab, is going to turn on it's new 6 billion dollar LHC collider later this year. It's first task is to look for the Higgs Boson, the so-called "God particle" that's thought to be the reason other particles have mass.


According to Higgs, the natural state of all particles is be massless and to travel at the speed of light. The reason that only photons and gluons really do travel that fast is that other particles are slowed down by the medium they're forced to travel through, something called the Higgs Field.






The Higgs Field (if it really exists) is a field, just like a magnetic field. It's everywhere in the universe, that's why even the most remote part of space isn't really a vacuum. It may be clear of particles, but it's not clear of fields.



Astronomers were amazed to find that the universe is not only expanding, but that the expansion is accelerating. Nothing in our experience can account for that, so it was necessary to posit a repellent energy that existed even in the vacuum of space. Lots of theories were put up to speculate where that energy might come from, including the idea that it might be leaked into our universe from parallel universes. That remains a possibility but the theory that excites physicists the most is that it has something to do with an as yet undetected field, the Higgs Field.


The Higgs Field is so important to the current standard model of physics that if it's not discovered we'll have to throw out a lot of current ideas about quantum physics and cosmology.


One problem with the CERN experiment is that in order to discover the Higgs Boson (the particle version of the Higgs Field) they'll have to recreate the simpler condition of the universe as it was less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. That condition might be what we would call today a black hole. One group is attempting to get a restraining order against CERN, arguing that a micro black hole, once started, might be impossible to stop. Such a black hole might consume the Earth, maybe our whole solar system.


CERN says not to worry, that Hawking Radiation would sap energy from the black hole and prevent it from growing, but CERN's critics point out that Hawking Radiation is a controversial theoretical construct which has never been born out by observation. What if there is no such thing as Hawking Radiation? The black hole will keep growing.


I assume the CERN people know what they're doing, and I'm dying to know the outcome of the experiment, but I'll sleep a little easier when all this is behind us.


The first video I put up (at the top of the page) gives an overview of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) that'll become fully operational later this year. The other video shows Peter Higgs, one of the people who got the whole thing started. I don't understand a lot of what he's saying but the man is fascinating to listen to.



BTW, I forgot to mention why the question of mass is on the front burner these days. The accelerating expansion story I mentioned is one reason but there's more. The reason is that we now know the masses of all the quarks, etc. that make up matter. The problem is that when you add these masses up they don't equal the mass of the particles they're part of...not by a long shot. So where does the rest of the mass come from? It must come from something outside the quarks, maybe from a field of some sort. If it exists, that might be the Higgs Field. Interesting, huh!?

UNCLE EDDIE'S LUNCHTIME BOOK CHAT 2

Welcome to Uncle Eddie's Lunchtime Book Chat! It's a 6 minute video featuring a reading of H.P. Lovecraft's "Dunwich Horror."

CHOICE FEARLESS FOSDICK ON THE ASIFA SITE!!!!!!

Pinch me so I'll know I'm not dreaming! This is too good to be true!  ASIFA-Hollywood has just put up a whopping, large post on Fearless Fosdick, the best cartoon strip (actually a strip-within-a-strip) in the American newspapers of my time!

Many thanks to ace-cartoonist and Al Capp fan, Mike Fontanelli for putting this together! Mike knows what the good stuff is and he serves up only the best.  Many thanks also to ASIFA webmaster Steve Worth, for giving the drawings the star treatment.  Compare the way the drawings look here, with my layout, to the infinitely superior way they look on the ASIFA site. Steve is far and away the best web designer I know of.

  

Mike makes the point in his article that Fearless Fosdick was the major inspiration for Kurtzman's MAD.  Looking at the evidence, I don't doubt it for an instant.

Incidentally, did you know that the first 12 issues of Mad have been collected in two volumes of the set shown above?  I haven't seen them, so I don't know what they look like, but here's a link to a bookseller that stocks them:

http://www.kenpiercebooks.com/mad.htm

Talking about Archie, what do you think of the new look the comic company is giving them? 

Here's (above) a page from the new Archie, borrowed from KevinWolf.com.  When Cartoon Brew did a piece on this they were inundated with letters. 

CARTOONIST FASHION SHOW: WRINKLES

I thought I'd show off my treasured Wrinkle Jacket. The video is 3 1/2 minutes long.

BTW, I said "Moon Mullins" when I meant to say Jiggs, a character from an old newspaper strip called "Maggie and Jiggs."

A TRIBUTE TO MY GRANDFATHER

Here's a tribute to my grandfather, one of the best men I've ever known. He certainly wasn't easy to get along with, and he had no time for me, but he was a stand-up guy who deserves to be remembered.


Thinking about my grandfather always brings to mind Dickens' "Great Expectations." In that story a poor kid had a mysterious benefactor whose help allowed him to go to good schools and become a gentlemen. Late in the story the kid, now grown up, discovers that his benefactor was no less than the coarse, grungy, escaped convict that he helped as a boy. It's a story that means a lot to me because my own life unfolded in a similar way, and I also had a coarse, grungy benefactor whose identity was hidden from me.


Just a couple of corrections to the video: The Peter Sellers song I excerpted this time was "Ukulele Lady," not "Hula Hands," and "Days of Wine and Roses" was not a horrible film, rather it was a good film about a horrifying subject. The video above lasts 8 1/2 minutes. Sorry about the length.

NIGHTMARE PLAYGROUNDS

Steve Worth sent me links to a site that put up horrific playground sculptures from around the world. Holy Mackerel! These are really scary!


There's lots more that I can fit in here, so if you want to see it all go to:

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/02/nightmare-playgrounds.html



These giant hornets (above) are positively evil. the bleak, un-inspired layout of the grounds heightens the effect.


The tree strangles a guy who'd stopped to rest. That'll teach him!


Yikes! A little bunny in the hands of an evil nurse!


Some of the nightmare sculptures impressed me as imaginative and stimulating, and possibly even good for kids. I wouldn't mind seeing sculptures like this one (above) in a park. It could have used more detail, though. It looks half-finished.



Or this one (above). Who wouldn't want have their pictures taken with the skeletons?


This one (above) is really thought-provoking. Your mind races ahead, thinking of stories to explain why the devil would be apprehensive about something in a green box.


Why is this idealistic girl tied to a tree? Boy, this park certainly prompts you to think. The problem is that I have a feeling that the park itself is unimaginatively landscaped. The physical layout of a park should be its greatest attraction. You need to get that right before putting in sculptures. Not only that but the sculptures need to be skillfully done, which this isn't. Even so, it's interesting.


Why is this guy sitting on the ground? Are his legs in stocks? Is he on a throne of some kind? Is he sitting on the shoulders of some underground troll? You can't help but weave stories about visuals like this.

NEIL FOSTER: MASTER MANIPULATOR

While I was looking for Randi's video (the post below) I stumbled on this one (above) featuring two of my favorite magicians, Neil Foster and Dai Vernon. Both are what you call "manipulators." Manipulators don't levitate or saw anyone in half. They make things appear and disappear in their hands. In my opinion it's the highest form of magic, because everything takes place in a small area and is highly scrutinized. No curtains and no elaborate props. It's what you can do with your hands standing only a few feet from the audience.

The manipulation clips all occur within the first three minutes of the video.





Just for fun here's a clip (above) showing a couple of magic tricks that go horribly and painfully wrong.


BTW, I'm no fan of Uri Geller (refers to the post below) because he tried to pass himself off as a real psychic and not a magician, but I do admire the guy's skill. He may be one of the most skilled magicians of his generation. Think about it. He often did what he did in front of cameras, with people sitting all around him, often shoulder to shoulder. The scrutiny was infinitely more intense than usual, and sometimes he actually did use keys and spoons that he'd never seen before. The guy had talent, no doubt about it.

THE AMAZING RANDI

As most Theory Corner readers know, The Amazing Randi is a professional magician who's made a second career out of debunking charlatans. Randi's the reason you don't hear about the psychic key bender Uri Geller anymore. Now if you already know this, why am I bothering to talk about it?

The reason is that this video is the best debunking video I've ever seen. Uri actually bends the key -- I mean physically bends it, not mentally -- right in front of your eyes, and if you're like me you won't notice it until Randi runs the film back and shows it to you! When it's pointed out it'll seem obvious, but up until then you'll be puddy in Geller's hands, just like I was. It's proof that you can't always trust what you see.





The post is really about key bending, but I can't resist throwing in a couple of other 3 0r 4 minute videos. Here (above) Randi takes on Philippine psychic surgery. This was a very big deal a while back and it had a big following in this country. I'll bet some of the people reading this were taken in by it.





Here's (above) Randi exposing Peter Popoff (spelled right?), a popular faith healer on TV a while back. Randi exposed him and he vanished from TV for years, but he's back again, this time selling healing water. You'll hear Popoff's wife transmitting information to him at the very same moment that you'll see Popoff receiving the same information from heaven on the stage.

FRANCES LANGFORD'S "LOVELY HULA HANDS"

Here's a couple of songs by Frances Langford, a popular singer and actress in the Big Band era. I wouldn't say that Langford is a great singer, but she's a really good one and that's no small thing. She has a great feel for pace. Some songs pay better when they're sung Langford-style: straight and sincere, with no mugging...songs like "Lovely Hula Hands (above).





I thought I'd add another Langford song just for the heck of it. Here she is (above) with Jimmy Cagney, singing "Over There." Once again she sings the song straight and that turns out to be just the right way to sell it.

MY HERO: WILLIAM BLACKSTONE

Here's a 3 1/2 minute video about one of my heroes, William Blackstone. Blackstone was the English lawyer who in the 1760s wrote the influential four volume "Commentaries on the Laws of England," an attempt to explain the principles and origins of English law. This is the law as it stood in the 18th century, where the king could do no wrong and, together with parliament, was considered the guarantor of English freedom.

You don't have to agree with what Blackstone said in order to see that the argument was masterful and infinitely romantic and enriching. Blackstone chronicles the attempt of fragile, fallible humanity to understand the principles of governance implicit in nature and the mind of what he considered the Supreme Being. Watch out, if you read this you might drop everything and become a lawyer!





That's Blackstone on the very top of the post, replete with powdered wig and robes, and below that is Jeremy Bentham, his nemesis. Blackstone not only believed in monarchy but in individual liberty and what we call today "checks and balances." This seemed stupid to Bentham who couldn't see the point of deliberately having a government that was forever at war with itself. Bentham was wrong in my opinion but the debate is an interesting one. All of us should have studied this stuff in high school.


BTW, if you decide to buy a volume I recommend looking for one that's set in a modern typeface. One of the old-style facsimile editions that's on Amazon is hard to read. Google's book archive has a free edition but that might be hard to read as well (I haven't seen it). Look on the net. I'll bet somebody put up a copy that easier on the eye. The problem there is that backlit computer books are hard to read for very long, even if the type is OK.






Blogger decided to put my video on the very bottom, so here it is. It's only 3 1/2 minutes, which will either go by quickly or feel like an eternity, depending on whether you like stuff like this.

FOR THE GRADUATES: "GAUDEAMUS IGITOR"

This is for the students out there who will be graduating this year: three versions of the medieval song of student life and academia, "Gaudeamus Igitor." I love this song. Find out if it's on the agenda for your graduation ceremony and if it's not then get it there, even if you and a few friends have to sing it yourselves.






Here's (above) Mario Lanza's version. It's very beautiful but a little strange since the song is meant to be sung by a group. You could argue that it's best sung by earnest amateurs. Very often academics would sing this in informal ceremonies to honor one of their own. It would be a high honor indeed since it indicates that your peers believe that you somehow exemplify a tradition, that you've kept alive the spirit of something that's vital to everyone in the room. It reminds me of the ceremony of the pens in the Russell Crowe film about the mathematician.





Of course no graduation ceremony should be completely solemn and it's fitting to end with a second version of Gaudeamus, something like the one above. you can see why this has to be the closing number... no serious business will be conducted after a song done like this.

Here (below) are the lyrics to Gaudeamus, which is always sung in Latin. I love the part that wishes long life to mature women and the state.




Latin English
Gaudeamus igitur

Juvenes dum sumus.
Post jucundam juventutem
Post molestam senectutem
Nos habebit humus.
Let us rejoice therefore

While we are young.
After a pleasant youth
After the troubles of old age
The earth will have us.
Ubi sunt qui ante nos

In mundo fuere?
Vadite ad superos
Transite in inferos
Hos si vis videre.
Where are they

Who were in the world before us?
Go up to heaven
Or cross over into hell
If you wish to see them.
Vita nostra brevis est

Brevi finietur.
Venit mors velociter
Rapit nos atrociter
Nemini parcetur.
Our life is brief

It will be finished all too soon.
Death comes quickly
We are cruelly snatched away.
No one is spared.
Vivat academia!

Vivant professores!
Vivat membrum quodlibet
Vivant membra quaelibet
Semper sint in flore.
Long live the academy!

Long live the teachers!
Long live each student!
Long live all the students!
May they always flourish!
Vivant omnes virgines

Faciles, formosae.
Vivant et mulieres
Tenerae amabiles
Bonae laboriosae.
Long live the virgins

Easy and beautiful!
Long live mature women also,
Tender and lovable
And full of good labor.
Vivant et res publica

et qui illam regit.
Vivat nostra civitas,
Maecenatum caritas
Quae nos hic protegit.
Long live the state as well

And he who rules it!
Long live our city
[And] the charity of benefactors
Which protects us here!
Pereat tristitia,

Pereant osores.
Pereat diabolus,
Quivis antiburschius
Atque irrisores.
Let sadness perish!

Let haters perish!
Let the devil perish!
Let whoever is anti-student
Who laughs at us, perish!

HOT PROSPECTS AT "MATCH.COM"

I got a great comment from Cynthia where she talked about both of us doing a parody of the match.com ads that are all over myspace right now. I looked up the ads and they were great! Match.com is now one of my favorite companies!

I can't believe how smart these ads are! They're funny, so they're viral, and they sell the product like crazy! It was a genius idea to get the customers to make short, silent films of themselves. How many times have you seen somebody who looked great with the volume down and who came off like a gorilla with the volume up? Let's face it, it's no accident that romantic film stars are always silent types!

When you speak, even if it's just a few words, you reveal your culture, income level, personality, education, sexual experience, philosophy...everything! There's bound to be something in there that's a turn-off to the person you're trying to impress. Better to sell yourself silently, and that's what the geniuses at match.com do!





Anyway, here's (above) my fake highlight reel of match.comers pitching themselves. Many thanks for the great idea, Cynthia!

LETS TALK ABOUT FRANK GEHRY

Here's "Merzbau,"(above) a terrific corner of a room by German Dada artist, Kurt Schwitters.


I'm a big fan of Schwitters. Starting in the 1920s he'd build these constructions (above) in every house or apartment building he lived in. Almost all of them survive only in photos he took, casualties of war or indifferent landlords. He had faith that someday these sculptures would influence things, and he was right, they did.



The old Dadaists work survives today mostly in the architecture of Frank Gehry. Gehry likes to make buildings out of dynamic, chaotic, confusing shapes, just like Schwitters. Some of them, like the one above, are very exciting, at least when viewed from the outside.



Of course he sometimes goes too far. This model (above) is for the administration building of a playground. There are so many non-structural decorative elements that there can't be much room left over for the offices.



Here's (above) the Disney concert hall in downtown L.A. It strikes me as a conservative, sterile, fairly standard post-modern structure embellished by extraneous twisted shapes, but maybe I'm wrong. I haven't been inside yet.




You've got to give it to Gehry, he seems to have gotten better with age. His earlier buildings were just too sterile. Here (above) are two views of Gehry's famous Winton Guest House. I wish I could have found a wider aerial shot of the house because when you see it in context, with all the trees around, you realize that this design has no fit with its location at all. It's bad enough to see arid stuff like this in the city but in the country it comes off as a jarring incongruity.



Here's (above) one corner of the California Science Center. You can't see the airplane attached to the side of the building from this angle which is OK because the design of the airplane, which is a genuine work of art, had nothing to do with Frank Gehry. I can't stand this building. It contains so much wasted space that there's not much room left over for actual exhibits.



Here's (above) Gehry's design for Loyola's law school, here in LA. What have we got? I see a plain, blank wall with the standard post-modern windows and the standard industrial stairs. Gehry's firm built a lot of things I bet he wishes he could take back now.

SCIENCE CORNER: HOW WE SMILE

"Hey, all you artists out there! Since I have a face model I thought I'd take a crack at describing how some simple expression plays out on the face. How about a smile...that's pretty basic!"



"I mugged in the mirror for a while before writing this, and I'm already forgetting what I saw, so I better hurry up."


"OK, in the mirror I leaned back and registered surprise before smiling but I need to simplify things so I'll skip the lean. Here I just tried to look mildly surprised. You can see that all the features are flattened out. "


"My type of smile begins with the eyelids. They close softly and gently. It happens fast but if you could see it slowed down you'd be impressed by how innocent and tranquil the expression looks."


"Now the cheeks begin to dominate. They go up, out and in under the eye, describing (in the picture above) the letter "C" It's not symmetrical...one cheek usually gets a head start on the other. While all this is going on, the eyebrow begins to push the eyelash area farther down."


"This is the part I like the most. There comes a point when the scrinching eyes and cheek look like they've gone as far as they can go. It looks like the smile is over, but wait...."



"....it's not over at all! The eyebrow unexpectedly becomes dominant and violently forces a farther, deeper, more intense squinch. Even the cheeks are drawn into it. It fattens and wrinkles up the whole area around the eyes. But that's not all!

Toward the end of all this, before the face is completely wrinkled, the mouth suddenly springs to life. It had been busy traveling outward in order to help push the cheek upward, but now it asserts itself and makes a bid to dominate. It redoubles its effort, forcefully stretching the chin waaaay back and really far up before it settles to a red hot, smoking stop. When that ends, that's the end of the smiling mechanics. Fascinating, huh?

To summarize all this, what we have here is a quick fight for dominance. First the eye lids dominate, then the cheeks, then the eyebrows, then the mouth. It all happens very fast and a lot of it overlaps. I had to do this over and over before I could isolate the steps.

Of course, this is how I smile. Maybe you're different."


"Well, that's it! See ya next time on....'Science Corner!' "

IT'S LI'L ABNER SEASON AT ASIFA!!!!!!

I couldn't believe my eyes! It was just too good to be true!  Steve and Mike did a tribute to Al Capp on the ASIFA-Hollywood Archive site! What's up there now is the first installment and they say there's more to come! 

http/www.animationarchive.org/ 

This is a major, major event because the people putting it up are hardcore fans who know what the good stuff is.  Capp was immensely popular in his day. If you've only seen the second-rate strips then here's your chance to see what all the fuss was about!

"L'il Abner" was far and away the best comic strip ever to appear in American newspapers. From the vantage point of the minimalist present, it's hard to understand how Capp could have put so much detail and creativity into a daily strip.  Even with assistants, you wonder how he managed to get any sleep!

No doubt about it, Capp could draw women! He seemed to believe there were two types of women, the ugly and the beautiful. It's not surprising that he thought that way because that's not too far from the way that he caricatured men. His cartoonist instincts told him that humor lay at the extremes, a good lesson for us all!

 
According to Mike, Capp's assistant for a time was Frank Frazetta, one of the greatest girl artists of all time, but even when Frazetta drew the bodies (from Capp's rough layouts) Capp still insisted on drawing the heads and hands.  Capp's style of drawing female faces was absolutely unique.

 
I see Capp's influence on other stylists like Wood, Kurtzman, Elder and Davis, but who were Capp's influences? Maybe we'll find out during The ASIFA Season of Capp!

 
I don't know about you, but reading Capp makes me want to draw, which is the highest compliment one artist can give another. For cartoonists who can't afford art school here's a whole art education for the price of a few large paperback books!

L'il Abner lent itself mightily to merchandising. Collectors' stores are full of Capp stuff even now...most of it still worth having!

I'd buy anything endorsed by Fearless Fosdick! Can you still buy Wildroot? I want to get some, right now!

MAKE WAY FOR "ROCKET ROBINHOOD!"

What were the formative influences on John Kricfalusi? Clampett, Jones, Avery, Yogi and Quickdraw, right? Well, not exactly; there's one name missing from that list, and that name is...."Rocket Robin Hood!"


John's mentioned this show in the past, but I'll bet a lot of readers still haven't seen it. I just spent an hour looking at YouTube clips of it, and found myself laughing out loud the whole time. The limited animation cheats are hilarious, and some of the poses are to die for! How do you like the one above? The show is full of gems like that!

Rocket Robin Hood was a funky Canadian TV show made in the late 60s. It looks a little like a Filmation product, which is not surprising since Filmation's top layout supervisor, Alberto DiMello, worked on it. Shamus Culhane is credited as executive producer, but I don't see much of his influence on the art. Maybe he supervised the scripts.



Wikipedia credits "Fritz the Cat" producer Steve Krantz as executive producer and Ralph Bakshi as director. Holy Cow! Ralph really had to pay his dues! Anyway, there's a cartload of clips from this show on YouTube. The clip I was dying to use was the one showing the end titles, but YouTube wouldn't allow it to be embedded.


Here's a clip that john K recommends, also not embeddable : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7pcqYtKwJs&NR=1


And be sure to read John's comment on the comments page!

ABOUT "JANE EYRE"

I must be going out of my mind! NOBODY wants to watch a ten-minute YouTube video, especially when it's about a novel! Oh well, if you don't have time for it, I'll understand.

The audio clips are from the film starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine. Maybe I should add Peggy Ann Garner who got an oscar for her role as the kid in this film. Does anyone know who I'm talking about? She was the idealistic girl in "A Tree grows in Brooklyn." Whatever happened to her? She was a genius! And Henry Daniell who plays the school master, might have delivered his best-ever performance here. I feel sorry for Garner and Daniell.  They were both brilliant but Hollywood didn't often make the kind of film that could take advantage of their kind of talent.  Two great performers, wasted!

Wasting classically eloquent actors was a common practice in old Hollywood. Maybe eloquent actors required eloquent scripts, and writers who could do that were in short supply.  Maybe Daniell's talent was perceived as being uniquely English, or suitable only for the stage. Maybe articulate actors suffered from the false perception that film was a visual medium that didn't require great dialogue. The feeling might have been, "Don't have an actor ask for the salt if he can accomplish that by just pointing." Actually I agree with that..most of the time...but if you have eloquent performers like Garner and Daniell then I want to see them beg for the salt, demand the salt, cry over the salt, have lordly disdain for the salt, get on their knees and cradle the salt. I want the ultimate request for salt that will forever after change the way I think about asking for salt!

I love the scene where Jane talks to the schoolmaster. In the hands of lesser actors and a lesser writer it would only have been about the collision between stern age and idealistic youth. Here it's much more nuanced. The schoolmaster takes pride in his ability with words. He spits them out like weapons. He's obviously bright and skilled, but the audience is repelled to think of the small-mindedness that must have led him to use these assets against a child.  The kid is earnest and full of passionate goodness, but she's also reckless.  She's ready to throw her life away over small things, and that makes her tragically vulnerable to the predatory adults. Two opposites are brought into conflict and given beautiful words to say...sheer bliss for the audience!

THE MEANING OF MUSIC

Here I am talking about the meaning of music. I don't mean the meaning of specific lyrics, I mean the meaning expressed by music itself, unencumbered by words. If anyone has thoughts about this I'd love to hear them.

The video is ten minutes long. Sorry about the length.

THIS WILL BORE EVERYBODY!

This afternoon I spent a couple of hours on the floor of my local Borders perusing a couple of new books on the subject of fascism.  Holy Mackeral! There's a lot that I didn't know before! Apparently Mussolini was heavily influenced by the American pragmatist writers like William James (pragmatism = whatever works is good). Mussolini was a socialist, in fact he edited Italy's biggest socialist newspaper, but reading the Americans led him to think that there was a third way, which was neither capitalist nor socialist. It consisted of doing whatever seemed to work, whether the solution was a private or a public sector one.  The important thing for the pragmatists was to get things done!

This philosophy eventually created the Progressive movement in America, exemplified by Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Wilson believed in drastically beefing up the power of the central government so that, when that power was needed, it would be there to solve problems quickly and definitively, without the ball and chain of endless arguments by local politicians.  Putting the power in the hands of higher ups meant a lot less power for individuals and Wilson and Roosevelt were fine with that.  They felt that parts of the American founding documents were fine for their time but were antiquated in the modern world, which demanded fast, decisive action.  

Of course the problem faced by the pragmatists was how to break it to people that the new ideas involved less freedom, and the solution was education to produce a new citizen who was so hyped up and so civic-minded that he wouldn't mind giving up some of his traditional freedoms. Wow! Shades of the French Revolution! 

In America and Britain the pragmatist philosophy was diluted by long held traditions favoring individual rights, but in continental Europe the concept of American and British-style rights were still controversial.  For them the idea of centralizing power led to power being vested in Marxist-style authoritarian parties,  and leaders who were like kings.  Since pragmatism involved using any solution that seemed like it would work, and since the party leader(s) decided what worked, European pragmatism degenerated into the whims of tyrants.

Is this a fair analysis? I haven't the slightest idea since I know very little about the period.  If the books are wrong then I'm wrong.  I just find it interesting that an American philosophy like pragmatism may have had a bigger impact than I'd previously thought.

Is anybody still awake out there?