VISIT WITH ROMANCE NOVELIST, REBECCA BRANDYTHISTLE

MS. CHEEZWHIZ: "Hello, ladies! This is Velveeda Cheesewhiz, Roving Editor for Theory Corner for Women! I'm so thrilled, because today I get to interview the queen of the best-selling romance novel... a woman with over twenty million books in print, and more movie deals than you could shake a stick at....REBECCA BRANDYTHISTLE!"

CHEESEWHIZ: Finding her home was no easy task. She's located in a part of town where the street signs are covered in grafitti, and the main occupation of the inhabitants appears to be begging.

CHEESEWHIZ: "Anyway, the children were helpful. 'The writer lady? She's up on the hill,' they shouted, 'She's up on the hill!' "

CHEESEWHIZ: "And they were right."

CHEESEWHIZ: "The road ended at the base of a beautiful garden. I parked and walked along a winding path which was studded with flowers and alive with fluttering butterflies.

CHEESEWHIZ: "Finally, through a break in the trees, looking past the shrubs and preening swans, I caught a glimpse of the house. Breathtaking! At the door a butler said I was expected and showed me into a sumptuous living room."

REBECCA BRANDYTHISTLE: (Leaps out from behind a curtain) "BOO!"

CHEESEWHIZ: "Oh, my Gosh!"

BRANDYTHISTLE: "Hee hee! Sorry! I just couldn't resist it!"

BRANDYTHISTLE: "Please, have a seat! Would you like some tea? How about a nice cup of Jasmine stirred with ginger leaves and spider silk? No? Well, let me show you the house, then."

BRANDYTHISTLE: "That piano used to belong to Liberace. They say you can get AIDS just by looking at it, but that's silly."

BRANDYTHISTLE: "Here's one of the bedrooms! Gee, the bed needs a few more pillows."

BRANDYTHISTLE: "Here's my 'wild place.' I get some of my best thinking done here."

BRANDYTHISTLE: "This is my dog Fluffy's room. Hmmmm. Fluffy's roses are wilting. I'll have to get him some more."

DOWNSTAIRS: They return to the living room and Cheesewhiz impulsively glances out the window.

CHEESEWHIZ: "I still haven't seen this part of the grounds yet. I'll bet it's..... GOOD LORD!!!!!! There's nothing out there but desolation! I've never seen anything like it! What happened!?"

BRANDYTHISTLE: "Yeah, it is kinda' bleak, isn't it? I had to spray to get rid of some noisy neighbors.

BRANDYTHISTLE: "But don't worry, the plants'll be back in a few months. The chemical only effects humans. Huh? What's that, on the floor!?"

BRANDYTHISTLE: "It's one of my books! Would you like me to read something? You'll be able to tell your friends that you got a personal reading from Rebecca Brandythistle!"

CHEESEWHIZ: "Why, yes! I'd be delighted!"

BRANDYTHISTLE: "Hee hee! Okay, here's a good passage. It's one of my favorites!"

BRANDYTHISTLE: "It was the time of the French Revolution! In order to escape from the handsome royalist officer, Nichole, the idealistic, perky, red-haired revolutionary, has just jumped off a cliff into the base of a waterfall."

BRANDYTHISTLE (READING): "Nearly distraught with fear, Jean Paul swam to the spot among the reeds where he saw Nichole's hair floating in the water. He hauled her out of the water, shaking her, flooded with relief when he discovered that she was still very much alive."

BRANDYTHISTLE: " 'Damn you girl! I thought you were dead! Dead!' he raged. He carried her to the cave behind the waterfall, despite her flailing. She punched and bit, struggled and kicked."

BRANDYTHISTLE: "As Jean Paul set her down, he meant to tie her up so she wouldn't escape again...but the instant he set his eyes on her naked loveliness, his intent changed. 'Dear Lord,' he whispered! Like Eve before the Fall you are!' "



BRANDYTHISTLE: "His calloused hands gently roamed her curves, and excitement numbed her thinking. Still, Nichole's fingers crept toward the dagger hidden in her furs..."

BRANDYTHISTLE: "....even as he expertly roused her senses to a fever pitch she'd never before experienced. 'Nichole,' he whispered, drawing her shivering body against his warmth...his urgent need! Her fingers tightened on the knife..."

BRANYTHISTLE: "Okay! That's enough heat, even for me! I can't take any more!"



GARDENER: "I'm sorry to interrupt, Miss Brandythistle, but is this how you want the crew to wear the shirts you gave them?

BRANDYTHISTLE: "The shirts? Goodness, no! They're supposed to be torn! You gotta rip them to shreds! Let them hang down! And...um...I don't know how to tell you this, but the pants...they're too...um...too...too..."

GARDENER: "Too tight?"

BRANDYTHISTLE: "Tight!!!??? Heavens, no! They're too LOOSE!!!! Don't you read my books!? Get the tailor to tighten them up!"

BRANDYTHISTLE: "Oh, dear...I'm afraid it's time for me to go. I have to take Fluffy out to have his fur braided. I hope you got everything you needed.'

CHEESEWHIZ: "More than enough! Thank you very much!"

BRANDYTHISTLE: "And remember:It's not the face behind the heart, but the heart behind the face. No, that's not it...It's not the body behind...not the heart behind...not...well, you know what I mean!"

Postscript: Thanks to John for the cool name, "Velveeda Cheesewhiz."

WHAT WOULD TRULY ROMANTIC VALENTINES LOOK LIKE?

You know, it's funny....modern girls all think they're above this sort of thing....but they're not. The models in the picture may look plastic, the writing may come off as insincere or cliched, but the card is effective nevertheless.

People respond to elevated speech, to words that conjure up a romantic ideal. It doesn't matter that people don't talk that way in real life. That's precisely why we like it.

Romance is too important to be spoken about in the same language that we use to buy aspirin.

Johnny Depp (above) demonstrates how to seduce with with words alone.

For the curmudgeons out there, here's (above) some valentine vitriol.

DOO WOP AND CIGARETTES

Just when I was in a quandary about what to post about, Kali sent me this video(above). What a pal! What a pal! How do you like the moves the blond-haired guy makes?

"Bread and Butter" got me started watching doo wop videos (above). I still don't understand what happened to do wop. Where did it go?

"Blue Moon" (above) was considered prime makeout music.

I noticed this anti-smoking ad on one of the do wop sidebars. I had to include it here because it contains the most accurate depiction I've ever seen of what every day life was like when I was a kid. People smoked like bandits! Old ladies smoked, doctors smoked, nuns smoked...everybody smoked! Sidewalk gutters were awash with cigarette stubs, and subway platforms had regular sand dunes of stubs sprawling over the tracks. It was great! I miss it!

BTW: I think the blond-haired guy in the Bread and Butter video is the same as the guy who sings "High Boots" in the video above.

CARICATURES OF PAUL MOYSE

You've probably seen Paul Moyse's work before, but just don't remember the name. The guy's brilliant!

He's done a lot of caricatures for The Weekly Standard in England and they get re-printed over here in all sorts of venues. I highly recommend his web site:

http://www.wackyfeatures.co.uk/me-by-them.html

Actually, this link will take you to the page on his web site where he put up caricatures of himself done by other artists. It's VERY instructive!

I thought it might be interesting to study some of these caricatures. Maybe they'll give us an insight into how far a caricature can deviate and still retain a likeness.

Let's start with the way Paul Moyse really looks. In the snapshot above his face appears to have two parts: a rounded, slightly squared-off top, and a weighty, imposing muzzle. The parts are unified by a big nose (Geez, I hope Moyse never reads this!).

Here's (above) Moyse's own caricature of himself. It's a great picture but, being a self-portrait, it attempts to flatter. The head is somewhat unified in design, and not so much in two distinct parts, as in the photo. A unified design is a sign of youth (I talk about this in my previous post on faces). The skin is also robust and tight, also a youthful characteristic. What the heck! When I do pictures of myself I always shave off a few years. That's an artists perogative.

Here's (above) another self-portrait. Wow! A terrific picture! It looks like something Virgil Parch might have drawn. You could say that the nose is too big and the eyes are too close, but it's so funny that it doesn't matter. Boy, if a drawing's funny, people accept it as an accurate caricature, even if it isn't.

Here's an interpretation of Moyse (above) by another artist, one that's more realistic (well, sort of). The eyes are just as close as in the previous picture but here they don't work. You forgive close eyes on a deliberately distorted picture, but on a more realistic picture like this, they seem out of place.

Another snapshot (above). Moyse's dome is round, but it's also squared off a little. The top of the head is de-emphasized and the wide-angle muzzle is thrust at the camera. .



Here's (above) a caricature by another artist that emphasizes the wide angle even more than the photo. The cheeks are less thick than his real cheeks, and the lips are bigger. You could argue that the top of the head might have been smaller, and more detail on the shirt might have been nice.

By another artist (above). The face has a puffy, bee-stung look to it, as if it's pushed out from the inside. The line work is beautiful, but the artist was so intent on capturing the puffy quality that he lost some of the likeness. As in the picture above this one, the dome seems to distract.

In general I think it's a mistake for a caricature to emphasize irregular puffiness, even if the subject really is puffy. I don't know why that is. It's a law laid down by Zeus, and we mortals would do best to follow it without question.

In a comment Niki mentioned that the puffiness makes the face look black. I never thought about it before, but I guess it does.

Here (above) the artist emphasizes the chin. Lots of artists do this, and I have to admit that the effect is appealing. It certainly helps in establishing volume and weight. Even so, it seems inappropriate to the subject.

Being a caricaturist can be scary. Sometimes you realize halfway through that you're starting to lose the likeness, but the drawing is succeeding on its own terms as a work of art, and it demands that you continue as before, subject be damned! You have no choice but to do that, but how do you justify it to the person you're drawing?

Wow! A highly-skilled picture (above) that emphasizes a just-woke-out-of-a-deep-sleep look in the subject's eyes. The technique is so wonderful that I hesitate to criticize, but Zeus compels me to remind artists that this quality of the eyes is forbidden to caricaturists. Only Zeus knows why, and he's not telling.

The hairy muzzle is given an emphasis that isn't in the photo reference, but it's done so well that you can't complain. The artist seems to be insinuating his own belief that facial hair is bizarre and unnatural, and I admire him for doing that.

Artists should insinuate their own opinions about the world into their work. That's because an artists first responsibility, even a caricaturists first responsibility, is to create a beautiful work of art that reveals something interesting about the natural world.

MY MEMORY OF THE CIRCUS

The other day Steve Worth showed me his new $200 book on the circus. Well, actually it cost $126 on Amazon, but it was big and heavy, and I found myself wondering if the publisher could really make a profit on it, even at full price.

With that in mind, I thought I'd reminisce a little about my own two trips to the circus with my dad when I was a kid. Both were really big shows: one was in a convention center, and the other was in huge circus tents, just like the ones in "Dumbo."



The one in tents was my favorite. They were surrounded on three sides by a fence (above). To find the entrance you just followed the crowd.

There were was a side show (above), and it was so interesting that I didn't want to leave it, but once inside the canvas I completely forgot about it. The thrill of the interior volumes took my breath away and the smells and the hurly burly of the crowd were unforgettable.

There were audience "warmers" just like today, and a terrific band to whip the crowd into a frenzy. Just when the crowd was ready to burst a parade commenced and the ringmaster came out.

Every guy in the audience must have envied the ringmaster. He was completely masculine, intelligent, confident, impeccably dressed, and had a booming voice. He introduced all the acts, beginning with a horse show (above). after that came clowns splashing around in a pool.

Then came the aerialists (above) and tight rope walkers. You ended up falling in love with the women in the act, who had the knack of catching every man's eye and giving him the impression that he and he alone had been singled out for their special affection.

Then the sound of roaring lions heralded the lion tamer, and when he was done seals came out on a ramp and flopped into the clown pool.

The seals were great! They actually seemed to enjoy performing, then they left and human divers took their place. I can only guess at the condition of the water.

Then came a solemn time as the lights lowered and the men billed as the strongest in the world came on. Before they performed they strutted around the front of the crowd flexing their muscles for the ladies.

Then came the pugilists...well, not really. There were no pugilists when I was there, but this poster I found (above) makes a strong case that there should have been. Did they really fight all together as in the picture above? I wouldn't be surprised if they did, at least in the grand finale!

Enough testosterone! Next came the clowns again...a dozen of them at least!

The star clowns (above) got the center ring.

Next came the grand finale where everybody came out and performed all at once, then peeled off, one by one, to participate in a grand parade. Guys with stilts played instruments, girls on horseback shot balloons, clowns went bananas, and elephants did fancy walks, all at the same time.

The band went into overdrive, and at the creschendo of the music multiple canons went off, and all assembled gracefully bowed to the audience as a rain of baloons fell from the tent tops. The crowd went nuts and applauded almost til the skin came off their hands.

That was quite a show. Quite a show.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, GENIUS

One of my guilty pleasures is this stuffed goat sculpture by Robert Rauschenberg. If you try to argue me out of this I'll have no choice but to turn and run. That's 'cause I don't have the slightest idea why I like it, I just do.

I confess that I like some of his environmental art, too. My favorite is the large, enclosed field of bubbling mud, above. I don't blame you if you're skeptical, but trust me, I've seen it and it looks a lot better than it reads in print. In real life it oozes, plops, bubbles and slaps, and you can't take your eyes off it.

Architects were dying to figure out a way to incorporate it into buildings, but nobody could think of how. It's not structural. You can't walk on it. Eveybody agrees that it's somehow architectural, but how? Nobody knows...but it certainly is inspiring. It's all about bringing nature into buildings. Rauschenberg made us want to see the wonders of the natural world inside our homes and workplaces, not just in zoos or museums.

Here's (above) some workers in an ugly modern room. But wait, what's that above their heads? You can't see it clearly here, but the designer put LCD screens above the workers' heads, and on the screens are videos of moving clouds, including thunder clouds. Imagine if the whole ceiling were like that. Imagine your overhead light being alternately dappled or partly cloudy. Imagine the mood of such an office at night with video moonlight illuminating the rims of clouds, and moody low-level lighting taking up the slack. The spirit of Rauschenberg strikes again!

Everybody wants to try out flight simulators. Soon LCD displays (above) will be so cheap that, sitting at home or at work, we'll see what an airline pilot sees outside his window, or what a ship captain sees when he's caught in a hurricane, or what a submarine commander sees when he looks out into the Marianas Trench. Maybe we can put little cameras on ants and see what they're seeing when they work all day inside their hill. Imagine that as a background while you work at a desk filling out insurance forms. Rauschenberg would have loved it.

Or maybe he wouldn't. I picture him saying, "No, no, no! What I meant was that we should bring real nature indoors!" That seems to imply indoor trees or birds, or aquariums.

Imagine a quarter mile-long, giant aquarium with mysterious caves and corals, as well as fish. Imagine if various businesses along its length shared walls with it. That may not be practical now, but you know it will be somewhere down the line.

Or maybe it's cheaper to have people look at other people rather than fish. If more buildings were shaped like inverted pyramids, we could have floors like this (above).

It would be best if the floor was clear, structural glass (above), with a minimum of metal bars. Here we're bringing nature indoors, but it's not trees or plants...it's the awesome fact of gargantuan real world volumes and spaces.

Rauschenberg did a lot to popularize the idea that architecture (above) should be fun. It doesn't have to cost a lot of money.

Thanks to the site "Crooked Brain" for most of these pictures. That's a terrific design site, frequently updated. Check it out!

http://www.crookedbrains.net/

MILGRAM'S FATALLY FLAWED EXPERIMENT

I'm afraid I have only a limited respect for psychology. The field attracts too many quacks and sloppy thinkers. One of the most famous sloppy thinkers was Stanley Milgram whose famous experiment in the 6os was said to have proved that a large number of people are capable of cruelty when authorities sanction it. That's certainly possible, I just don't think Milgram proved it, or even came close to proving it.

Could Milgram's experiment have been as obviously flawed as this BBC re-do of the experiment? Here the victim's screaming voice is obviously fake. It sounds speeded up and is obviously pre-recorded to boot. Most of the students administering the charge must sense, at least unconsciously, that something's up, and the situation isn't to be taken seriously.

The controls in front of the scientist (who's dressed like a doctor, and acts like one) are never explained, and are plausibly misunderstood by the student to be a means of modifying the charge or keeping track of the subject's vital signs. It shouldn't be surprising that that most of the students weren't terribly worried about the health of someone who's under close medical supervision.

Add this to the fact that in the lawyered-up age we live in everybody knows that a university would never allow a casual test subject to be put in serious jeopardy. Further add that the researcher continuously assures the student that no lasting injury will be done to the subject, who can quit at any time. The student administering the charge has to conclude that the screaming man is probably not in real jeopardy. The fact that 30% of the students still refused to hurt an obvious or near-obvious fake could actually be taken as a ringing endorsement for the goodness in man.

A good experiment is one that definitely confirms or excludes an explanation and this experiment does neither. I'm amazed that Milgram didn't realize that, and even more amazed that subsequent academics failed to see it.

Milgram was an odd person. He's also famous for the "Lost Letter Experiment" in which he demonstrated that found mail addressed to unpopular people like famous nazis were less likely to be re-mailed than letters addressed to normal people. I hope my taxes didn't have to pay for that.

Psychology does have a place, but it seems like its misused as often as not. It's very trendy, very faddish. Here's (above) a cover of Psychology Today from 1974. It informs us that psychosurgery (remember the fake Philipino guys that removed chicken entrails from people's stomachs without breaking the skin?) is on the level, and that Yuri Geller (a magician who claimed to be a psychic, exposed by Randi ) is on the up and up. Other issues touted open marriage (how many of these ended in divorce?), kibbutz-style raising of children (since dropped by Israel), and a bunch of other later discredited ideas. This was an influential magazine in its day. What does that tell you about standards in the field of psychology?

As a footnote, here's a link to 5 experiments which the author says prove that humanity is doomed. Milgram's is number one. I liked the article myself, but then again, I don't take things like this too seriously. Most isolate the unsocial or uncaring thing the subjects did when tested, and ignore the social and caring things the subjects did during the rest of the day. A fun read, but not very good science.

http://www.cracked.com/article_16239_5-psychological-experiments-that-prove-humanity-doomed.html

SOME GOOD NEWS, AND SOME BAD NEWS

First the bad news: I tried to finish a post making fun of Chris Mathews' "Hardball" (sample frame above) in time to post it for Thursday morning, but it's not gonna happen. I bit off more than I could chew given the time I'm able to give this. Sorry about that.

Now the good news: have you seen the video introduction of the new ipad that debuted today? If not, go to apple.com and check it out. Be sure to watch the whole hour long video. Your first impression will be disappointment, because the machine Jobs describes at the start sounds like nothing more than a tablet-sized iphone...but stick with it. The Devil is in the details! You'll be cheering by the time the video's over.

Apple is revising their whole business model! Their idea is to give away the computer (I mean, sell it cheap) and make their money on the aps, which promise to be very appealing. The ap for Pages, which is Apple's version of word, is only 10 bucks, and it works faster and more intuitively than the regular version. Even if the ap version is scaled down, it's a bargain at 10 bucks. And the ibook ap...it'll put Kindle out of business.

It's also revolutionary in that it promises over time to make all consumer programs work by simple touch and drag and drop manipulation. I don't expect programs like Photoshop to convert overnight, but I wouldn't be surprised if a year or so from now an easy to learn, easy to use version of Photoshop Elements appeared. Apple has thrown down the gauntlet to the whole software industry: simplify or die! I loooove it! Steve Jobs is a genius!!!!!

FORENSIC TV IS CREEPING ME OUT!

Recently I started watching TV shows like "Forensic files" and "Cold Case Files." I watch them a couple of times a week for an hour before going to bed. Most of the crimes are solved by the testimony of disgruntled ex-wives or by simple physical evidence like tennis shoe tracks left on a bloody floor. It's hard to believe, but an awful lot of murders are solved because the murderer can't bear to part with a pair of cool shoes that he got for 50% off list price.

What keeps me hooked are the really bizarre cases. The best one had to do with a hospital doctor who raped his women patients while they were sedated. None of the women saw him do it but they all deduced that it must have been him because no one else was in a position to do it. Police took blood samples from him a few times and the DNA never matched the rapist's. Finally one women insisted that the blood sample be taken with witnesses present and with a film camera running. To her astonishment, the blood still didn't match.

Years passed and the frustrated woman finally convinced the police to take yet another sample in front of witnesses. By this time the police thought the woman was crazy, and they warned her that no further tests would be made. Another doctor extracted the blood, and to everybody's surprise the syringe filled with rust-colored powder. What the heck!!!???

In the lab it was confirmed that the powder was dried blood. It turned out that the doctor had slipped little condiment-size packets of someone else's blood under his skin, and the blood taken through the years really belonged to an old patient of his. He refrigerated the blood so he'd always have a fresh sample for the tests, but over time the blood got old and turned to powder. Now THAT was a TV show worth watching!

After you see dozens of these shows you begin to get a sense of how tragic life is for some people, even for the murderers sometimes. Imagine that you're a nice guy, a good neighbor and all that, but you attempt to buy some marijuana and the seller deliberately gyps you. You can't complain to the police, so for a couple of days you entertain thoughts of violent revenge. For most people it wouldn't go any farther because most people can't stay mad very long, and because taking revenge would more than likely result in serious grief for the revenge taker. But what if....

What if you had an irresponsible friend who at the height of your anger kept saying, "You're not gonna let him get away with that, are ya? Man, if someone did that to me I'd take a baseball bat and..." Geez, maybe some of us are just lucky that nobody gave us that kind of stupid advice at the time of our lives when we were most vulnerable.

I'm also amazed at how many modern murders result in multiple plausible suspects. In older times you could assume that the seedy stalker who was seen to have followed the victim for weeks before the crime, was probably the killer. Nowadays seedy stalkers are in abundance, and any one of them could have done it. I just saw a show where a girl was killed and police managed to find surveillance tapes of the places she'd shopped at during the day. It turned out that two unrelated seedy guys followed her at different times, though neither one turned out to be the killer. The killer was a third seedy guy.

Aaaaargh! Okay, all this is creeping me out. Maybe I should lay off these shows for a while.

BTW: Sorry there's no attribution for the nifty pictures. I lost the name of the site I got them from.

EDWARD G. ROBINSON IN "TWO SECONDS"

Wow! Mike turned John and Kali and I onto a great film tonight: Edward G, Robinson's "Two Seconds (excerpt above)." If you liked Peter Lorre in "Stranger on the Third Floor," Lugosi in "The Raven," or John's favorite Kirk Douglas and Robert Ryan films, then you'll love Two Seconds.

After seeing the film I marvel that so many animation producers could be so clueless about what the real revolution in animation consists of....acting, or more specifically: stylized acting. Sometimes I think that animation is better suited for acting than live action because our industry can deliver the kind of funny, caricatured movement and expressions that really drive home an emotion, something live action can only dream about.

While I'm on the subject of live action acting I should mention Orson Welles' performance in another film I saw recently: "Prince of Foxes." Welles isn't funny like the actors mentioned above, but he does play a convincing Cesare Borgia. How did he do it? What did he do that's different than what other actors do?

It's a simplification I know, but the answer I'm looking for is that he wasn't afraid to employ stylized acting. Welles' method is to make his style so transparent that we're aware that he's playing a game with us. He's a game player and people love game players, especially when they're really skilled at it. That's why we like people like Billy Mays (spelled right?) and the guy who does the "Shamwow" commercials. I'll bet real-world con men don't even attempt to conceal that they're playing a game, so much do their victims crave to play roles in a great game.

Of course in real life Cesare Borgia was a master manipulator and game player. Who better to play him than a game player like Orson Welles?