WHAT MAKES A FACE LOOK OLD?

This (above) is one of my all-time favorite movie stills: Marie Dressler as the dowager in "Dinner at Eight." One of these days I'll frame this so I can have it on my desk in whatever office I'm working in. 

 


Of course I'll have to dress like this (above), so I can play my part. That's me playing Max Fleischer in a photo essay I did last year. 

The idea is to pass the desk picture off as being my wife.  My real wife doesn't look or act this way at all, but she'll have to take an undeserved fall, because in classic cartoons middle-aged men are always married to battle axes who they address as "Schnookums," and "Sweetie Puss."

I'm a cartoonist, so the tradition must be honored. 



Writing about this age thing got me to thinking about the subject of grey hair and how aging affects the face. 

 


I only have womens' pictures to illustrate this, so I'll pick on them. Most women don't know how to to make their faces look good after 40.  

When you're in your prime your face (above) has lots of hills and valleys...

 


...but when you get older (above) your face tends to flatten out.  This coincides with the skin becoming dry and wrinkled. Women ignore the face flattening and try to compensate for the skin problem by layering on tons of make-up, but this comes from a misunderstanding of the problem.

The main problem isn't wrinkles, it's the flattening of the face. A flat face does even more than wrinkles to make you look older ("older" as I use it here doesn't refer to the characteristics of extreme old age, which are different).  Putting on lots of make-up (above) only makes that worse. The extra color evens out the facial color and makes it seem even more flat and featureless. Worse yet, women compensate for the enhanced flatness by putting extra make-up on the eyes, something that doesn't work at all. The diversion is too obvious, too artificial.

The odd thing is that nature already compensates for wrinkles by making middle-aged flesh more textured and ruddy. The increased and uneven texture takes the observer's eye to interesting places all around the face, and prevents him from seeing the overall flattening. Nature gave middle-aged women ruddy faces to compensate for the wrinkles, but a lot of women refuse the gift. 

Middle-aged women also need to re-discover grey hair.  Grey makes the skin seem even ruddier by contrast, and that makes the face look younger. I know what you're thinking; grey hair is universally recognized as a sign of aging. That's true, but it's also true that people who look at you close up will judge your age more by the face than the hair.  Grey hair may be an attempt by nature to prolong beauty, not put an end to it. 

Before I leave this subject, I can't resist reminiscing about old ladies I've known. When I was a kid I encountered a lot who struck me as mean and frightening. Oddly enough, when I got to be an older teenager I saw fewer women like this. I think it's because I stopped doing the things that irritated them, and began to see their sweeter side.  

I was born too late to see old ladies with waxed fruit on their hats (above), but I did see quite a few who had other kinds of cartoony hats, and I got to see lots of Olive Oyle dresses. They were mostly nice people with incredibly sunny dispositions.  They had lots of friends their own age, and weren't stay-at-homes unless they were forced to be. They worked hard, had enormous dignity, and were universally respected.

These final two pictures are from my favorite Life Magazine photo essay, the one about the country doctor. You can find it on google.

ARE PEOPLE STUPID?

Well, we all know that stupid people exist. I guess what I really mean to ask is, how many stupid people are there? What percentage of the population? 5%? 10%? 50? 80? My own guess is that there aren't as many as most people think.

I came to this realization a few years ago when I was on the road, and it occurred to me that if a large number of people were really stupid, then there would be a lot more traffic accidents. On the whole, most people drive pretty well. 

A lot of people we consider stupid are simply out of their element in the area that we're focused on. Or maybe they just had a bad day, or a bad hour. Who hasn't had that? The guy who holds up traffic while he thinks about which way to go, isn't necessarily a bad welder or a bad lawyer. He may have just had a lapse. Maybe we stumbled on him at the only time he did something dumb like that all year.

It's tempting to think people are stupid because they vote differently than we do. That's silly. Half the time they're just starting from a different premise, which is not so irrational, once you know what it is. 

It's hard to judge people. The modern, urban, bureaucratic state is hardly what biology equips us for.  A lot of people just aren't suited for this stuff. Their intellect and instincts are sound, but modern life punishes people who operate on instinct. You could go to jail for that. An awful lot of what we're expected to do every day is counter-intuitive. Some people don't mind that.  Others feel disoriented and out of sync, like there's no place for them, and in some cases they're right.

It's amazing how many normally intelligent people are mistakenly considered stupid. That's because they have no challenging job or activity to discipline their minds. Lots of teenagers are like that. They're restless and energetic and not really ready to settle down to school work, so they do bad in school. Most don't know any crafsmen who would teach them a trade. What are they supposed to do? You can call people like that stupid when you see them unemployed and clowning around the mall, but are they?

It's a fact that every era favors one kind of personality type and penalizes another. Sometimes more than half the population can be on the outs. It's scary! 

I used to think a lot of old people were stupid. Well, actually I still do, but I feel guilty about it. I'm getting older myself and I'm becoming more aware of the obstacles those people face. Recently the elderly father of a friend told me how many different pills he takes every day: fourteen!  Fourteen, and I'll bet every one of the bottles has a dizziness warning on it. The amount of medication the average old person takes is staggering, and who knows what effect all those pills have on each other? I wonder how alert some of those old people would be if they could safely chuck the pills? 

Teenagers also seem stupid, but they're influenced by drugs too.  In their case it's hormones. 

My own view of other people is benign...at least it is when nobody's cutting me off in traffic. I don't think most people are stupid. I rely on other people. I can't even understand most things without the help of other people.

 I'll go farther and admit that when I choose my beliefs, I choose between the common ideas that are in the air in my time. Everybody does. I feel guilty about that, and once in a while I take the time to really think things out, but even then I sometimes have to borrow. It's frightening to think how much we all rely on other people's ideas. Our brains don't seem to work right unless we connect to other brains. We need other people to function as information gatherers for us. Stay-at-homes aren't just socially impaired...they can't even think.

THE GREAT GRETA GARBO

This is all about one of my favorite actresses: the infinitely mysterious and intriguingly unknowable Greta Garbo. For years I only knew her through "Ninotchka" and "Queen Christina," which are fine films, but are not the ones you want to see if you want to understand the famous Garbo mystique.

If you want to understand the mystique, if you want to know why she was the subject of so many caricatures and parodies, you'll have to dig deeper than Ninotchka. 

You'll have to watch films like "Romance," "Grand Hotel," "Anna Christie," and "Camille."

Garbo was one of a kind, but she wasn't always like that. When she started she was just another pretty face who could act a little. When she came to Hollywood from Sweden she paniced because she realized the studios were loaded to the gills with pretty faces, who would all be obsolete the day they flashed their first wrinkle.

A documentary I saw credited her manager with the breakthrough idea that she should separate herself from the pack by carving a niche for herself as a mysterious vamp. I think a manager might have helped Marylin Monroe to create her identity. Boy, the right manager is worth his weight in gold!

 





She began to dress differently than the other girls, even differently than the other vamps. She picked a hair style that would emphasize her big forehead, rather than compensate for it. 

It was a big risk. If she failed she wouldn't even get the pretty young thing roles. 

Early on she developed the idea that she looked good in aspirational poses, and she liked to be photographed looking up, into the light. 

Somewhere along the line she got the idea that she looked good when brooding, so she brooded and brooded. She brooded so much that whole of Sweden started to brood in imitation. The Swedish film director, Ingmar Bergman made a career out of brooding. Now everybody expects Swedes to brood, and are disappointed when they discover they're mostly happy. 

I love her brooding poses.  She was the first of the great brooders like Peter Lorre and Brando. 

The idea is that life is pointless and horrific, and can only be answered with silent anguish. Garbo raised brooding to an art form.

Her look seemed to say, "How shallow happy people are! Look at them all, running around and laughing!! If they had any brains, if they realized how stupid the world really is, they'd brood just like I do!"

Actually she wasn't quite as one-dimensional as I portray her here. Her films are full of exquisitely happy moments too, even if the happiness is always crushed. 

Sometimes her brooding made her look sickly. Maybe that's what got her cast in the ultimate sickly film...



..."Camille!" Camille is a film about a dying woman who heroically declines to tell her fiance about her condition, for fear of depressing him.

She was always collapsing in his arms, and he thought she was just being emotional.

No matter how many times she dropped her food and fell like a rag doll to the floor, he thought it was because she was being refined and lady-like. Her boyfriend wasn't the brightest bulb in the box. 

Sickly and heroic: stars love roles like that! As Jennifer said in the comments, this is a flawed film that's only good when Garbo is in it. Even then, she was a little too restrained, a little too reluctant to take it over the top. I'll bet that was the director's doing. I like the film because I can easily imagine the performance that might have been, and because the plot is one of the funniest I've ever seen. I'd love to do a short cartoon parody of this!

Garbo also experimented with roles where the girls were too existential, too serious to dally with the silly men who pursued them.



At first Garbo preferred that her leading men take her in their arms and give her "The Look." Eventually she decided that it was better if she took them in her arms, and gave them the look!

Yes, Garbo picked her men! Unfortunately as she neared retirement she started to lose her confidence in the persona she'd so carefully cultivated, and attempted to play more conventional, less over-the-top roles.  Peter Lorre did the same thing. I wonder what it is about age that makes actors do that?

I NEED A REST, SO THIS IS MY LAST POST FOR A FEW DAYS. I'LL BE BACK FRIDAY NIGHT! SEE YOU THEN!!!!

TWO GUILTY PLEASURES: STELLA AND CALDER

People are going to hate me for this. I'm about to admit to a guilty pleasure that for most of my friends is the equivalent of dog torture or child molesting.  That guilty pleasure is the painting and sculpture of abstract expressionist Frank Stella.

To be honest, I don't know why I like it. I admit up front that it sometimes seems uncomfortably safe and and restrained, the kind of thing you'd see in banks and dentist offices.  You don't get the feeling that some rebellious genius worked on it.  And yet....

 


I have to admit that some of Stella's older pictures haven't aged well.  Like everybody else at the time I thought the picture above was a profound and dazzling revelation when I first saw it. Now it seems like a logo for a bus company. 

So why do I like this stuff? Maybe because it makes me think. I get ideas every time I look at it. It's all about order in the middle of chaos.  Other artists manage to juggle a few incongruities and make them work...Stella manages to take a really large number of them and not only make them work, but actually find meaning in it all. And life is a jumble isn't it? I spend an enormous amount of time trying to figure it out, and so does Stella, only he does it better than I do. 

Stella's work is an interesting blend of the intuitive and the intellectual.  It's very human in that respect. It seems to me that a real understanding and enjoyment of life requires that we use intellect and intuition simultaneously. When I walk down the street I, and probably everybody else, take in both kinds of information. I'm amazed that the brain can process all that, and still allow us to count our change at the grocery store. Actually, the job might be too big for our brains because few of us ever come to a conclusion about the things we see, but you get the feeling that agonizing over it is somehow good for us. Stella seems to understand that.

 

Here (above) he seems to have been influenced by Hockney, or maybe it was Hockney that was influenced by Stella. Very happy and pretty.

In recent years Stella's gotten interested in architecture. He does a lot of sculptures that seem like they could be buildings. The idea isn't to create finished models of workable buildings, rather it's to provoke the viewer to come up with his own ideas. For example, what do you see in the picture above? Me, I see a dark matrix that contains a house made of glass walls, and even glass floors.  Then again, I sometimes think of the matrix itself as the building. It's one continuous skyscraper, a city-size building that snakes along, and has offshoots that take different paths.

Even this sculpture (above) seems architectural to me. I don't know why, because there's no hint of walls or a roof.  I usually don't like Frank Gehry-type architecture that looks like sculpture blown up large. It wastes space, and often has disappointing interiors. In spite of that, I like Stella when he does the same thing in miniature. Maybe it's because Stella doesn't attempt to force his design solutions on us. He's just asking questions.



Above is what looks like the love child of a bag of fish tails with a stationary store.  I don't don't know why I like it, but I do. 

I wish I had a poster-size picture of this (above) abstract chaos for my bedroom wall.

On a completely different subject, let me ask if you've seen this book (above) yet. It's way overpiced, but it contains a lot of Calder's best wire caricatures.

 





Imitating Caulder, I did some of these myself and hung them in windows. It's a great effect because the wire is so thin and delicate that you're not even aware it's there at first. It's a treat for people who randomly happen to change their focus while looking out the window, and are rewarded with seeing a face that no one else sees. 

The trick is to use one continuous piece of wire. 

Here's (above) a student effort. Not bad, huh?