MY BOUT WITH SICKNESS

I thought I'd talk about how much fun it was to be sick for a week. I mean that literally...on some level it actually was fun.

When I realized the sickness was serious, when I shivered through two or three freezing, sweaty, virtually sleepless nights, I did what I always do in situations like that and went into my Ralph Phillips/Calvin and Hobbes routine where I psyched my self into believing that I was at death's door.  Boy, did I have fantasies!

What fantasies? Well there was the one where I gave a brave speech to the U.N. from my deathbed which had been halled onto the stage of the General Assembly pavilion . The audience cried as I took them through anecdotes of the ups and downs of my tumultuous life. There wasn't a dry eye in the house. Everyone saw himself, indeed the whole pathos and greatness of the human condition reflected in my stories. I bowed my head humbly to accept a standing ovation.

And my family? That was another fantasy. Tearfully they gathered round my bedside while grief stricken plantation workers sang spirituals under the Magnolias outside my window.  My children bade me goodbye and fessed up to lending my Halloween masks to their stupid friends when I wasn't looking. They assured me that they'd memorized every word of my priceless lectures, and would pass the precious-as-rubies words to their own children when they came along.

Last of all was my wife. With tears flowing down her cheeks she forgave me for not being a rich doctor or a lawyer, and admitted that I was probably the better cook. She confessed that all my tirades against Bill Gates and Japanese engineers were justified, and that she had secretly kept scrupulous notes so that what I said could be shared with the world in a posthumous book.

No, I didn't fantasize about being levitated up into heaven in flowing white robes, that's silly, but I did imagine friends and visitors to this site swamping my family with telegrams claiming that I had transformed the animation industry. A collection was gotten up to install a bench of meditation and remembrance of me in the middle of the highway, at the juncture of the 101 and the 405, where I had spent so many unwilling hours in life.

I could go on, but you get the idea. When the flu finally abated, I was slowly brought back to the real world. After grappling for long hours on my back with the great philosophical issues, after listening to the creaks in the lonely house made by the wind and the rattling pipes, after watching endless TV documentaries in which Australians reached into Python holes, I made my way into the blinding sunlight of the workaday world.
I felt like I had been away in a foreign country, and I had.

GLORIOUS IKEA!!!!!

After more than a week spent mostly in bed with a flu,  I finally felt well enough to venture into the world to buy a present for my kid. I ended up at Ikea. Man, what an experience!

I love the place. It's so bright and inviting, and full of ideas. An awful lot of them are bad ideas, but you forgive that because every once in a while you stumble on something that's a brilliant rethinking of something you thought couldn't be improved.

But like I said, it's not all good. Some of the kids rooms (above) bordered on child abuse. How do you like those High Kitsch flat-colored cabinets or the deliberately generic design of the ladybug? Why is the yellow stool so dorky?

On the other hand, you gotta love these bunk beds. Kids like stuff like that!

What do you think of this work space (above)? It's so tiny! Surely big ideas require big writing surfaces. Ikea does make beautiful, sturdy wooden desks but they're called dinner tables. I have lots of ideas for desk designs. Maybe I'll do a blog about them sometime.

Boy, Ikea sure is good at cheery! It's hard not to smile when you see a room like this, even if you'd go nuts if you had to live in it. This is the kind of place Stimpy would design for Ren, the kind of place that would provoke a curmudgeon into homicidal rage.

I think here in America we're shielded from the weirdest stuff (above). It would be great to go to Sweden and see what's for sale in the Ikeas there.

I think the native Swedish Ikea is chock full of promotions for their prefab houses and office buildings, and for plans for office interiors. Come to think of it, I think Ikea designs whole communities. Fascinating! Disney might have gone this route if he'd lived longer.

BTW: I haven't forgotten the Beatnik stuff. I'm working on it now, and it's a ton of fun. I was just too spaced out to do it earlier in the week!

TYPES OF FACES

I thought I'd blog about faces again.

It occurred to me that there are two kinds of faces in the world. In one kind (above) the elements are unified. All the features seem to fit with each other. You would expect a girl with eyes like the ones above to have a small mouth, and a girl with those kind of rounded cheeks to have a rounded nose. Everything harmonizes, as if the face were sculpted from a carefully made blueprint.

Young women in particular have faces like this.

The other type of face (above) is diversified. In this example the lips seem out of sync with the rest of the face. I picked a pretty extreme example just to prove a point. On most women the out of sync quality isn't this drastic, and doesn't detract at all.

Older people tend to be out of sync more than younger people. I guess that's because different parts of the face age in different ways. A face can be in sync in youth, and out of sync in middle age. Oddly enough, extreme old age tends to put the face back in sync again.

In the case of the woman above, whole facial masses are out of sync. The upper half of the face is broad and wide. The lower part is long and slender. She's still pretty. Every detail within the two masses is in sync, only the two large masses are off.

Here's (above) a woman with three major masses that are out of sync: the forehead and eyes are one mass, the cheeks and nose are another, and the mouth and chin are still another. Three separate design groups on one face! I kinda like it.

Here (above) we're back to a unified design again. What harmonizes this face is the repetition of rounded chevron shapes, not only in the details of the face, but in the shape of the jaw.

That's all I have to say about faces. I hope I haven't given the women on the site something to worry about. Most people have out of sync faces after 25 or so...that's what gives them character. Look what it did for Jeanne Moreau (above).

I have nothing else to say about facial structure, but while searching for faces on the net I discovered the interesting pictures above and below, so I thought I'd pass them on.

What do you think of the picture of the two sisters above (click to enlarge)? I like it a lot. It's so happy, so full of good vibes. It brings back pleasant memories of family members I met when I was a kid.

Okay, this is gruesome. Sometime after this picture (above) was taken, this woman was shot in the face with a shotgun. After shooting her, her husband shot himself. Miraculously both survived, but the wife required a facial transplant, possibly the world's first.

Here she is before surgery (above, left), and after (above, right). I assume the swelling in the jaw'll go down when the face heals. If you cover the overly-broad part of the face, you can see that the middle is a big improvement. Maybe I'll donate my face to somebody before I kick the bucket. It won't mean much without the buck teeth, though.

NOW I GET TO USE MY NEW BERET!

Sorry, I wasn't able to finish the blog post on time. I'm still just too sick. Just for the heck of it, I thought I'd show you a few outtakes of the beatnik story I was working on when the flu descended, and I had to stop. No story here, just random stuff.

Er...this didn't turn out the way I intended. Actually, I was going for a "dismissive "tut, tut" and didn't realize how it would look to the camera.

How do you like the beats in the background? They're so delightfully decadent!

It occurred to me that Beats were always angry, so I tried an angry pose. Geez, is my head really that big?

Beatniks smoked a lot, so I thought I'd throw that in.

While I was fooling around with beatnik pictures like these I chanced on a one act play about the subject that turned out to be brilliant, so I decided to illustrate that story instead of my own. The problem is that I had to change it a bit in order to squeeze it into a single post. I'll give the author full credit, but I doubt that will deter him from coming after me with a meat cleaver!

Aaaaargh! Now I'm going to drag myself back into my sick bed!

I'M SICK!!!!!!

I am SICK AS A DOG! I got a flu shot a month ago, but it looks like I caught something the shot didn't cover.  I can't read very long, and I'm tired unto death of watching bad daytime TV. Well, at least I'm losing weight.

If I can I'll be back on Tuesday morning.

MORE HALLOWEEN PHOTOS

I have plenty of photos that I somehow neglected to put up in the weeks preceding Halloween. I could file them away for next year, but what if I got hit by a car...you'd most likely never see some of this stuff. No, I'll put them up now, even though the holiday's over.

My favorite picture of the lot is this one (above), of a mildew ridden old shop that sells used masks as well as new ones. What a rational idea! Gee, seeing this reminds me of beloved old used book stores that were everywhere only a short time ago. Store like that were usually run by retired eccentrics who had difficulty counting the change, but who somehow managed to get books that no one else did.

Above, the classic Jack Davis Frankenstein.

Above, Dali's famous skull made of girls.

Two of my favorite Halloween movies are out of print now: "Burn Witch Burn," and a Stephen King adaptation for TV called, "The Langoliers." Burn Witch is based on a novel by Fritz Leiber  called "Conjure Wife," which I highly recommend. 

For me surrealism (above) has always been a comfortable fit with Halloween. Maybe that's because some of the scariest dreams are ones have to do with dislocation and disorientation. Somehow a feeling of dread arises from situations like that. They're the stuff of nightmares, but with humor added. 

Here's a nice shot of what in my fantasy I imagine to be an abandoned Victorian mental institution. Wow, if only the walls could talk! 

Above, a scary Aztec. It makes sense. Aztecs really were scary. 

My hometown library had a framed copy of this picture (above) hanging in the kids section. Putting it there was a great idea. It made me associate reading with high adventure.

Here (above) is the very essence of a scare: something jumps out at you from the shadows with the intention of killing you. Real life is sometimes like that. No one gets through life without being irrationally and unexpectedly attacked. 

Geez, that feeling of dislocation again.Water (above) isn't supposed to flow through streets like that. Seeing things the way they're not supposed to be can make you feel violated. 

How would you like to have this bust (above) in your living room?

Above, my guess is that this is from a recent East European version of "Nosferatu."

MUG SHOTS COULD REVIVE NEWSPAPERS!

If newspapers are going to build circulation again, they'll need to show more photos, and few things are more interesting to look at than photos of criminals (above).

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Dramatic crime photos like the one above are better suited for magazines than newspapers. Newspaper readers prefer something more sedate. They like to see unposed criminal faces that they can study at leisure. Maybe that's because most people want to confirm their belief that they're good at judging people by their appearance.

I like crime portraits that beg to tell a story. Take the one above, for example. The woman looks intelligent. In another life she might have been the District Attorney rather than a prisoner in the dock. How did she end up in jail? Did a man lead her astray? Was she born bad? Is she actually evil? You want to know more about her, and that sells newspapers.

Some criminals (above) look bad through and through. You need pictures of those people, too. Maybe seeing them caught and held up for public display satisfies the part of us that yearns to grab a torch and a pitchfork and storm Frankenstein's castle.

Most newspaper photos are served up in bad resolution, but that's an asset, not a liability. Marshal McLuhan said that old black and white TV was more emotionally involving than modern color TV. The mental effort we were forced to exert in order to construct images from the old TV scan lines compelled us to get involved with what we were seeing. Well, dot printing has the same effect.

Hazy newspaper reproduction forces us to become involved with the pictures. Newspapers are actually a perfect medium for a certain type of picture. By "certain type" I mean that  the subject matter has to be at least potentially interesting, something which current newspaper photos never are.

RANDOM THOUGHTS ABOUT SMOKING

No wonder people smoke. Smokers look sooooo cool!!!!

Unfortunately smoking can also make you mean. The reason is an aesthetic one: cigarettes and mean expressions just go together, why I don't know. In his quest to look good the smoker finds himself practicing mean smoking expressions til they inadvertently become permanent. 

I feel sorry for cruel and heartless people because they're forced to smoke whether they want to or not. If they don't, other cruel people won't hang out with them. 

Me (above), demonstrating how girls smoke. The cigarette is always held at the tips of the fingers. The 6th finger of the other hand is always raised.

Here's a smart smoker (above). He smokes in the shadows and lets the smoke drift up and develop in a shaft of bright sunlight. I imagine smart smokers also pick a part of the room with minimal air currents. Dead air favors the development of strings and spirals. Moving air destroys them. 

How do you create strings? It's the easiest thing in the world! A properly held filterless cigarette will create strings all by itself. Here (above) a cigarette has strings coming from both ends!

After a smoker masters his strings, he'll want to work on his crawls (above). The smoker learns to push out the smoke rather than blow it out. He learns to allow the smoke to crawl  up his face. On the first try, the smoke will probably go around the nose. That's not good because it then heads straight for the eyes, and becomes an irritant.

The smoker will need to train the smoke to go over the nose, and not in it, or around it. He'll want the smoke to rise over the nose, and up the forehead to the edge of the hairline. Observe how beautifully this smoker (above) does that.

Man, this (above) is Olympic level smoking!  Here she allows the crawl to split over the nose then she directs it outwards, like bull's horns. How on Earth does she do that?

BTW: Thanks to commenter Shawn Luke for the great quote about smoking, which I'll print below. I still don't recommend smoking because of the health risk, but this positive statement about it deserves to be heard because of the beauty of its expression. From Ayn Rand:

“I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind--and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."