GLOOM!!!!

Nothing today, I'm afraid. I've been having computer problems so I figured I'd buy some time by reposting one of my very favorite photo stories, the one where a poet writes a romantic poem (2007). I loved that story, even though I looked fat in it.

Well, Blogger just erased it (no, the back button wouldn't recover it).

Things like that don't happen with Blogger the way it's currently set up, but way back in 2007 it happened all the time. Blogger had real stability issues back then, and users who fiddled with a previously posted blog risked losing it. I should have known better than to mess with the old stuff.

I've gotta take a day off to mourn.

TIKI HOUSES

I just stumbled on a TV reality show called "Monster House," where a homeowner allows a friend to completely redo his house. In this case (above) the friend was artist Kim Larson (and company), and she decided to give the house a Tiki look.

She fashioned this fireplace out of chicken wire and insulating foam. I think she did all the work in this room in a day, which isn't bad considering that she wasn't used to the materials. She also changed the shower so it would deliver lots of mist rather than a steady stream of water. That's an interesting idea. Could you get clean that way? Would breathing all that mist be good for you? I'm not sure. I'd like to try it, though.

She also rigged up a mister and a big, Hollywood wind machine on the roof, looking down onto the pool. The idea was to simulate tropical storms. Fascinating!

Larson was apologetic about the fireplace sculpture. She wanted to do something more detailed like the green fireplace above, but had to settle for something that could be done fast. She only had five days to do everything.

The show made me curious to see what renovations other people did on a Tiki theme, so I googled it. What came up were mostly computer images like this one (above). It looks like the Tarzan/Swiss Family Robinson house at Disneyland. I love stuff like this! I even like the way it's on an island or a sand bar. Very nice as long as the weather's okay. 

Here's (above) another beach-style house built over water. Nice. Imagine a house like this built in the suburbs over an artificial deep pond. Imagine tunas swimming in the water. Not very realistic, but fun to think about.

Here's (above) a novel idea for a beach house...I think the caption called it a "Tahiti Wind House." Fascinating! I wouldn't mind a wind house if the furniture was weather proof and nailed down, and the structure was sturdy. Imagine sitting in your walless living room while a thunderstorm raged all around you. Imagine the waves smashing against the nearby rocks. Sigh! But it's impractical, I know.

I can't help thinking, though, that one day it will be possible. One day you'll be able to walk around your walless, temperature controlled house in your pajamas, and nobody walking by will be able to see you. All they'll see in the window slots will be black.

You, on the other hand, will be able to observe passersby as if there was no barrier at all between you and them. Total security, too. No one enters unless you want them too. How will all this be done? That's for the people after us to figure out.

Let them figure this one (above) out, too. A tree house offshore in the ocean! How do you tease a forest tree like this one to grow in the ocean shallows? I don't know. I figure that just about anything we can think of will become possible sooner or later.

DICK VAN DYKE: SLAPSTICK COMEDIAN

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I'm too sleepy to post now, but I thought I'd put up an interesting video as a placeholder: it's the first episode of the old Dick Van Dyke Show from the early 60s. There's no need to watch the whole thing...it was the first show and they didn't quite get the rhythm right... but you have to see Dick's drunk routine which starts at 19:45. Watch it even if you don't like drunk sketches. It's great!

I'm reading Dick's autobiography. It's not very revealing, and he doesn't talk about how he acquired that famous personality and rubbery slapstick technique, but that's par for the course for biographies. I did come across one interesting tidbit, though...he said Stan Laurel told him that he got that cool walk by having the heels removed from his shoes. Where are my shoes? I'm getting them modified!

One final thought: I said they didn't get the rhythm of the whole show right, and that's true. Even so, watch how expertly most of the entire party sequence is shot and cut. Watch how that sequence is paced and how well the music was laid in. PRO-fesh-ee-yon-nal!!!!

P.S. For some reason the YouTube video above isn't embedding. Here's a link to the site:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIn8mPy5_jA

MORE EARLY NEWSPAPER STRIPS

Here's (above) a newspaper comic from 1896! I've blogged about this artist before, but I can't help doing it again...I guess I just can't decide whether I like him or not. Good technical draughtsmen were abundant in the 1890s, so the primitive drawing style must be deliberate. Maybe readers regarded this artist the same way we regard Edward Lear or Steinberg now, as primitive and sophisticated at the same time. 

Be sure to click to enlarge all the pictures in this post.

Ahhhh...refreshed at the fountain of Herriman (above)! Here he is caricaturing Opper's style.

Newspaper cartoonists back in the day must have been under a lot of pressure to come up with funny poses. This artist (above) doesn't seem to have a knack for that, but you gotta give him credit for trying. 

Slapstick was king in those days (above). I wish it was today. 

Herriman again (above). I love the guy in the white suit, who's standing in profile. I also like the guys on the lower left and right.  

I like the way this artist (above) lays out his page. He finishes the gag but still has space to fill at the bottom, so he ends the page with a bunch of random afterthoughts. Artists were free to pioneer new formats in those days. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't. 

I'm amazed at how common plagiarism was in those days. How do you like the Dick Tracy rip-off above?

Here's (above) an interesting one. Helen Kane had just lost her lawsuit against the Fleischers (the judge claimed he couldn't see the similarity between her voice and that of Betty Boop), so she decided to stake her claim on her personna with a comic strip character of her own that looked just like Betty. It didn't do very well, and Helen Kane slowly slipped out of the public eye.

BTW: I heard a contradictory story, that Kane lost her lawsuit because it was determined that she had stolen her character from yet another singer. I have no idea what the truth is. 

Thanks to Allan Holz from "Stripper's Guide" for the comics. A link to his terrific blog can be found in the right sidebar.

DORE'S WONDERFUL FORESTS

This should be a treat for the artists who come here: rare Dore illustrations from  Chateaubriand's 19th Century novel "Atala." According to Wikipedia, the book was written to debunk the European idea that American indians were noble savages. Maybe it does...I haven't read it...but most of the illustrations I saw seem to say the opposite. Dore portrays America as a majestic Garden of Eden, and the indians as its ideal inhabitants.

Actually I'm glad that Dore added his own take to the story. Whatever the truth about native Americans, the portrayal of this country as an Earthly paradise is a useful one.  This is nature the way we'd all like it to be. It's a partly Utopian vision that should spur us on to make it a reality.

American swamps (above) really are like this in places, except Dore neglected to mention bugs. In real life the two women sitting on the water's edge would be buried under a mound of army ants and mosquitoes.   

Gee, this picture (above) fills me with memories of happy times around campfires at night. Fortunately places like this aren't that rare. You can find lots of places like this in America, some of them not far from cities and towns. Sometimes I wish it were against the law to build in or even near primeval forests. Maybe we shouldn't even build nature trails and roads there. We should just let it alone. 

Or not. I'm always amazed that Yosemite and Seqouia National Park look so unspoiled, and that in spite of the kazillion plus tourists who go there every year. How does the park service manage to pull that off?

I wish I knew the story of Atala. This looks like two "Noble Savages" wearing togas, taking a swim in America's life-giving water. Geez, Dore was so sentimental.

Seeing these pictures reminds me of the way Africa used to be portrayed in the media. When I was a kid sub-Saharan Africa was portrayed as being mostly jungle, like the kind you see in Tarzan movies.  But was it? The Africa I see on TV these days seems to be mostly grassland and scrub. What happened to the African trees?

THE AMAZING JOHN MARTIN (1812-1875)

Arguably the greatest British landscape painter of the Romantic era was John Martin. He liked religious themes inspired by The Old Testament and Milton's "Paradise Lost."

Romantics interpreted his pictures as depictions of the landscapes of the inner mind, along the lines of what would later be associated with Freud and Dali.

Here (above) Martin depicts Macbeth but for some of his contemporaries he seemed also to convey the majesty and tumult of the inner mind. How, reasoned the Romantics, could man ever be happy as a slave or as the victim of a life of quiet desperation when his true mission is to heroically wander the vast inner landscape of the mind?

That sounds like an Eastern concept...did Indian philosophy affect the West in the 19th Century? I guess it did...look at Schopenhauer.

To judge from the pictures, Martin unconsciously sees man as a tragic, Wagnerian figure. We're warriors who will spit in the eyes of the gods if need be, and that's why they're interested in us.

It's odd to think that a hundred years after Martin's lifetime the pendulum would swing the other way and man would in some places be perceived as a hapless statistic, possessing only an outer life.

Here's (above) a picture that influenced Ray Harryhausen. Ray was a huge fan of Martin and Gustav Dore.

Americans will no doubt react to Martin with the feeling that they've seen that kind of statement before. Well, that's because they have. Our high style of Western painting derives from American painters like Thomas Cole, and Cole was a pupil of John Martin's, Over here Martin's grandiose style was put to the service of awe-inspiring landscape and the extreme Romantic philosophy was deleted. This adaption is a style that perfectly fits the American wilderness.

By the way, the picture above is by Bierstadt, who I assume was a pupil of Cole. As with most of the pictures in this post, it would benefit from a substantial enlargement. I wish I could have found a larger, high res version.

ME AS OLIVER HARDY

Thanks for all the comments concerning my computer problems. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who has them. I just finished a fix and it seems to work better now. I'm too tired to post but just so I don't appear to be dead.....here's a doodle of me as Oliver Hardy. Whaddaya think?

TZVI EREZ: ALLEGED CROOK WHO PLAYS LIKE AN ANGEL

What do you think of this three minute clip from "The Well Tempered Clavier?" I love it! The clarity, the sensitivity to what Bach seems to be saying, the fun...it's a terrific recording! The thing is, the Canadian pianist who made it is believed by the police to be a crook!

 It's alleged that he used a Ponzi scheme to cheat investors out of 27 million dollars. He runs a printing business and is accused of telling investors that he had big contracts that never existed.  He might have  gambled the money away playing internet poker. The case was never brought to court because the state couldn't afford the resources it would have taken to prosecute it. Amazing!



Well, the guy's personal life doesn't seem to influence his playing. Give a listen to this fast, Glenn Gould-style rendition of an earlier part of the Well Tempered Clavier. It's incredible! For me this is a must have CD.

NEW FACES TO DRAW (AND A FEW BODIES)

Ever the friend of our fellow cartoonists, the Theory Corner staff once again presents a tableau of thought-provoking models to draw. Let's start with Richard Widmark (above) who was a terrific psycho villain when he was young. 

A skinny, giggly sadist with a weird hat, a low class dark shirt, and a loosely hanging raincoat...what's not to like? Widmark enjoys intimidating people, and even though he's a sociopath you grudgingly like him...well, in a way. He enjoys his work, and that makes him magnetic.  

   

Basil Rathbone (above) was a great Sherlock Holmes, but he was an equally great villain. To judge from the picture above, he had it in him to play psycho-villains of the Widmark type. The look on his face seems to say, "Thanks for the favor, Pal! I come into your office to rub you out, and you save me the trouble by backing away, right out an open window. You even leave me your cigarettes!"

  

It's fun to draw women sitting (above) when they're wearing short skirts. Most women in this situation don't know what to do with their legs, and they try to hide them under purses and couch pillows. It's kinda cute.

There's one pose that's that all sitting women try to avoid, and the lady above has just taken it. It's the deadly fork pose where the legs descend in open parallel, and from an angle that makes them look oddly small and out of proportion. They look like marionette's legs.

I like the seam on the couch.

This wise woman (above) avoids the fork by taking a deliberately stylized, closed leg stance, with body thrust forward. 

Poor Victor Mature got stuck with this puppet suit (above) in one of his films. Man, one faux pas like this undid all the image building cultivated in his last half dozen gladiator films.

In real life I love to draw conversations between two people who seem to come from different worlds (above). The clash of human types is one of my favorite themes. 

GOD SAVE THE AMERICAN STATES

The videos here are all from the excellent HBO series on John Adams that aired a few years ago. I'll talk about these films in a moment, but first a word about the holiday.

I was tempted to celebrate the Fourth by putting up a bunch of pinups of beautiful girls in stars and stripes bikinis...tempted, but I just couldn't do it. It seems to me that the holiday is too serious for that. I intend to celebrate with raucous beer and barbecue like everybody else, but first I'll remember with gratitude the people who made possible my happiness in this country.

Some people are quiet souls who could thrive under any system that was at least minimally tolerable. I envy them, and I wish I could be like them. Unfortunately I'm a goofy and sometimes silly romantic, the kind of person who foolishly provokes the powers that be and ends up being killed for it, or spending his life in jail. My type of person needs the American freedoms; I can't survive without them. Thank God I was born in a time and place that tolerates my kind of person, and allows me to find my own way.



Here ( the video immediately above) are three clips from different episodes of the Adams TV series. They show Adams' stormy relationship with Benjamin Franklin. They were both good men, but they just couldn't get along. It underlined the question that was on everybody's mind in the late eighteenth century: can temperamentally different people and states ever combine into a functional  republic?



Here's (above) an exquisitely awkward sequence where newly-appointed ambassador Adams meets King George III for the first time. Adams is awed by the sophistication and grandeur of the English court, but is mindful of the equal grandeur of the American ideals he represents.

Well, here's a glass to the Founding Fathers, and their powdered wigs!

BEST COMMERCIALS

Here are three of my favorite ladies in current TV commercials.

The first one (above) takes Abilify, which is a pill for Bi-Polar disorder. The haggard, Bi-Polar lady walks along the darkest, most terrifying beach in the universe, then takes Abilify and frolics in the sunny uplands. It ends ominously with her and her skeptical boyfriend leaving the sunny fields and walking over to the edge of a dark cliff.



Let me digress to say that the Abilify commercial got me interested in the subject of Bi Polar, and I just watched some videos on the subject. That's one, above. The jittery girl goes through several mood swings right infront of our eyes. It doesn't look like she's having much fun. Other videos made the point that if you have this disorder,  the chances are you have other related problems, and each can require a separate medication with a separate, horrifying side effect.

It's more treatable when you get it early and the symptoms are still subtle, but the attempt to spot it early has resulted in a large number of misdiagnoses and a bunch of overmedicated kids. Over two million Americans are said to have it, including a large number of rock singers, which doesn't surprise me. It's a condition you never really get rid of, and the pills can be very pricey.



Here's (above) an interesting video. It's creepy but it has the feel of an authentic cry of anguish from someone who speaks from experience. He says the illness has catapulted him into a higher evolution, but has it?  My guess is the sufferer listens to a lot of depressing goth music, which is like trying to put out a fire by dousing it with gasoline.



I'd love to introduce the Abilify lady to the diabetes cookbook lady, former Miss America Nicole Johnson (above). Surely she's the most happy, giggly (not "jiggly"), thrilled-to-be-alive, highly caffeinated woman on TV.  'Think they'd hit it off?




Maybe they'd both benefit from meeting the Zestra lady...not the lady above,  but rather the horny, blond-haired woman (below) who's always getting so tingly high on Zestra that she has to brace herself against a pillar. Boy, somebody throw cold water on that lady! Don't let her get a hold of your pets!

I researched Zestra on the net. Some women who used it complained of heat, and an unpleasant burnt oil smell. Others said you can get something cheaper that works just as well. Still others swore by it. I wonder what the truth is.

BASIL WOLVERTON'S "CULTURE CORNER"

I wish I knew more about this strip. Was it popular? Did kids like it? Me and my grade school friends would have gone nuts over it if we'd known about it. I would have saved it in a scrapbook.  

I'd be surprised if women liked it.  It's slapstick humor about deliberately ugly people. That means it was probably meant for guys. I wonder why girls don't like stuff like this? Maybe it's because they're so focused on looking good. We men, on the other hand, know we're ugly. We know we're the butt of a cosmic joke, so we decide to make the best of it and laugh.  

Wolverton drew in that "bigfoot" style that was as much influenced by black and white era gag animation as by print media. Wolverton gives it a big, thick line to make it more gritty. 

Being a true cartoonist, Wolverton instinctively knows that feet are funny.  They wouldn't be funny if they were covered with fur and had leathery bottoms. They make us laugh because they're so delicate and fru-fru, and yet we're forced to walk through the dirt with them. 

Many thanks to John Glenn Taylor, who put up these pictures on his "Easily Mused" blog.

http://johnglenntaylor.blogspot.com/2009/03/basil-wolvertons-culture-corner.html

BLACK AND WHITE OR COLOR?

In my humble opinion, black and white is a better medium for funny cartoons. Drawings read better in this medium, and the limited palette doesn't tempt us into fruitless attempts at realism.

The decision whether or not to use color will effect  everything you do in a cartoon. Believe it or not, it'll even effect the staging. 

It's no accident that old time black and white animators preferred to stage action on long downshots (above).  That comes natural in a funny cartoon, because it allows for more gag possibilities and sets off the foreground action with musical and visual counterpoints in the background.

Stage the same scene in color (pretend the shot above is in color), and it would have to be shot closer and from a low angle. That's because color promotes realism, and realism (at least cartoon realism) gives us the desire to get a closer look. Color staging sometimes strikes me as claustrophobic, and less gag friendly. It tempts us to rely on dialogue to carry the scene.

And let's face it: black and white (above) is innately more funny. It's easier to convey a dumb, class clown feel when color doesn't complicate things. 

Look at the color picture above. See how the color distracts? It's conveying a message of its own that fights the gags. I absolutely love good color in a cartoon but if you draw funny and don't work with a first-rate colorist, then you're in real trouble. 

Are there exceptions? Of course! This Avery gag (above) works fine in color.....

.....as does this John K. set-up. You wouldn't want to change a thing.  But these are exceptions to the rule! 

Thanks to these sites for the great frame grabs:

http://journeytojohnsbrain.blogspot.com/2008/08/dirty-pan.html

http://bestcartoongallery.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=50

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/