Stunning
Mmmmm…nope. No idea. But he and an hundred-fifty of his friends can be yours, p’raps, for the modest sum of £150.
I get at least one mailing a day for an upcoming auction. This one is from Fraser’s Autographs and there are some interesting things in the catalogue. Not just plain autographs, but sketches and photographs. Worth a browse.
Because this one is being handled online by The Saleroom, you — yes, even you! — can sign up, give them a credit card and bid in the auction, either ahead of time or in real time on the day, though I don’t know if I’d trust a webcam across the Atlantic for anything involving money. And because these are little things, you could probably get them to put your items in an envelope and stick them in the mail.
Don’t ask me about the time I was the winning bid for a lovely…a big, lovely mahogany chest in Shropshire.
September 12, 2013 — 10:01 pm
Comments: 16
Getting closer
I love this thing. Meet the Venus of Cupertino. Here she is an iPad docking station — and she can be yours for £150. She and a companion are soon to be in the lamp biz. You can follow her adventures by signing up for her newsletter.
The artist is Scott Eaton an anatomist who works mostly in the 3D modeling program ZBrush. He teaches what looks like awesome anatomy classes, online and in IRL, to people like the character developers at Valve software.
I so would like to take his anatomy class. For that matter, I so would love my very own copy of ZBrush. Oh, why are my wants cost so many moneys?
Anyway, you guys don’t have Galaxy chocolate in the States, do you? So you probably haven’t seen this TV ad. Go watch it. I’ll wait. (Assuming it’ll play outside the UK).
We’ve seen this kind of thing before, I know. But this one is eerily good. I assumed, like earlier such, this was cleverly stitched together modern footage and classic film.
Nope. She’s a computer model. Well, she’s an actress with a computer model attached to her face. Eaton sculpted her head and the people at Framestore did the rigging (and all the rest of production). Very worth reading about.
Dead film star resurrection day — that we have been promised for so long — is on hand at last.
September 10, 2013 — 9:48 pm
Comments: 22
presidential
I had never seen this before. Had you? It’s a chunk of Hillary’s offical first lady portrait. I love the near randomness of her props. That’s a weenus picture of the White House, a blue glass…candle holder? A copy of It Takes a Village and a chair.
In the annals of royal iconography, that’s…probably not at all what she was looking for. Why not…oh, a paperweight, a gym sock, an onion and a stepladder?
Anyway, I was browsing pictures of Hillary because I noticed in today’s speech photo, she has a new ‘do. Made me wonder if this is her runnin’-for-president look.
I still think her Bond Villain getup is totally the way to go if she wants to be a world leader, but I’m not holding my breath. Hillary has had so many, many different hairs.
Incidentally, I’m all in favor of Kerry’s accidental gaffe/plan to put Russia in charge of taking stock of Syria’s WMD’s. Sure, it’s pointless — but pointless is a big improvement over all the other options. It would put an end to this thing, save face, extricate our military from this slow-motion clusterfuck and put Vlad on the hook if any more brown people get gassed.
I wonder if any of these bozos has the smarts to go for it.
September 9, 2013 — 11:01 pm
Comments: 21
And then this lady
This is Cecilia Gimenez. You know her as the elderly Spanish cleaning lady who effed up that mural of Jesus last year. I know, she looks so normal. I pictured her as a tiny hunched up old thing, dressed in a big black sack and shuffling around with a besom. I guess my national mental stereotypes need a little touching up.
Well, she’s rich. Well, not rich rich, but her art has made about $66,000 for her little town, which has gone to a local charity. They charged admission to the church to peep at it. Behold, the power of the internet.
Now Cecilia’s going to get a little. She’s penning an agreement that gives her 49% of the profits of the merchandizing. T-shirts, coffee mugs, that sort of thing.
I suspect Cecilia’s about to learn something else remarkable about the internet: it has the attention span of a fruit fly. Monkey Jesus was, like, a whole year ago.
August 14, 2013 — 10:49 pm
Comments: 16
Annnnnd…it’s too late
There was an art auction this morning in California of sketches and animation cels from a lot of cartoon greats. So we’ve missed it. Sorry. BUT the catalogue is online and if you like that sort of thing, it’s just the sort of thing you’ll like.
I like that sort of thing very much, so let me direct your attention to some specifics.
■Page 4. My hero, Winsor McKay, and a frame from his 1914 cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur. Expected to fetch $3,000-5,000.
■Beginning page 5. Betty Boop sketches in pencil ($400-$600) and other Fleischer Studios.
■Popeye, beginning page 8.
■Beginning page 9, ladies and gentlemen, the Sixties: Mister Magoo, Beany and Cecil, Chilly Willy, Tom Slick, Super Chicken, Pink Panther. A cel from Yellow Submarine and one from Fritz the Cat.
■Beginning page 17: Peanuts. (Not a fan, me).
■Warner Brothers, Loony Tunes, starting page 22.
■Page 37. Production stills from The Grinch ($1,000-$1,500).
■Hanna-Barbera’s crap starts page 40.
■Page 95 is interesting. Artist Bill Mack bought the “Hollywood” sign in 2007 (the original was taken down and put into storage in 1978) and did paint upon it a very good homage to Steamboat Willy, Disney’s landmark Mickey Mouse cartoon. He managed to keep much of the grunge from the original weathered sign material. $20,000 – $40,000.
And from there on, it’s Disney, in more or less chronological order, to the end (total of over 250 pages and almost a thousand objects). The drawing at the top of the post (p. 136 $400-$600) was by Disney’s best caricature artist (no points for guessing the subject). His name was Thornton Hee, so of course he signed himself T. Hee.
Of course he did.
July 31, 2013 — 10:31 pm
Comments: 29
I found what I was looking for, and it was full of poo
I don’t like drawing on pure white paper, but I don’t really like the really dark ridged paper intended for pastels and chalk, either. My favorite papers, hippie nonsense aside, are many of the unbleached 100% recycled papers, because they’re usually slightly off white and have these delightfully random speckles in. I’ve been looking for a good source of supply by the sheets.
These people. These people rule. They make recycled paper out of 100% post-consumer waste collected from schools and offices, and then they put stuff in it.
Elephant shit. Rhino shit. Reindeer shit. Herbivores only. They wash it down to the roughage. Also, grass, straw, banana peel, old blue jeans and chewed up twenty-pound banknotes. Sawdust from particular building projects.
Also, flower petals and viable seeds. So you can write your friend a note and say, “bury this note in the garden and lavender will grow out of it.” And a lavender will grow out of it. I’m sorry, hippie bullshit or not, that is so cool.
I exchanged emails with someone there about the archival properties. He reassured me about the manufacturing process. They can’t call it archival because of the inclusions — which will likely change color with age — but the end product is neutral to slightly alkaline and likely to last an acceptably long time for an art paper.
So I bought a bunch of it. As papers go (particularly recycled ones) it isn’t terribly expensive. A sampler at first so I could pick out my favorite. Definitely elliepoo. Dark and warm, with little flecks of….well, you know.
So there it is: Elliepoo. The new official dick paper of the Dead Pool.
I was born to type that sentence.
July 23, 2013 — 11:00 pm
Comments: 25
Don’t despair, my imaginary friends on the internet!
Y’all know I have been down on politics lately. I despair of the weakness and mediocrity of ‘our guys’ as much as the duplicity and overreach of ‘the other guys.’ Well, I read an article in the Weekly Standard this morning that cheered me up a little.
The 25 Republican state Attorneys General are hunting in packs. They’re aggressive, they’re activist, they’re libertarian (whether they call it that or not), they have each other on speed dial and they’re banding together to block the worst excesses of the Obama administration.
The AGs are committed — “ruthlessly committed” is how Pruitt puts it — to obstructing the expansion of the federal government at the expense of the states. They are champions of federalism, the Tenth Amendment, states’ rights, and a defanged federal government. […] Republican AGs regard themselves as “the last line of defense” against Washington and its blob-like tendency to grow. It’s a conceit, but a defensible one.
It’s a trick they learned off Democrat AG’s, who (you may recall) would oft band together to turn companies upside down and shake them for $billions. Once in a while, I have to remind myself there are some very smart people in government, they just aren’t very visible.
Anyway, go read it. This is where Ted Cruz came from — he was one of the scrappy young lawyers in the Texas AG’s office. More like him, please.
The illustrator is Gary Locke. You may recognize his stuff; he’s done many covers for the Weekly Standard, among other clients. Drove me nuts squinting at the tiny thumbnails on the Standard’s site (if you click them, you don’t get a bigger picture, you get a subscription form) until I thought to Google Gary’s name.
Go look at purty art. He does a wicked good Barack Obama, and an excellent David Cameron.
July 15, 2013 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 12
Mmmm…oatmeal…
This here contraption weds a camera to a kite for some intriguing low-aerial photography. (Ummm…I was sent the link by email and forgot to ask if I could say by whom). There are some cracking good pictures at the link.
The head photographer and my old art gig requisitioned (and got!) quite a large a remote-control helicopter to use as a photography platform. It didn’t turn out so well. Gear in those days was bulky, remotes were hinky and the camera shake was fierce. On the other hand, he spent weeks playing with a big, expensive toy and got the company to pay for it. So, w00t, really.
Also in my inbox today, also from someone who will remain anonymous because I forgot to ask, this link to an excellent album of some dude playing classical guitar pieces on a ukulele. Two ukes, actually, I think. It works surprisingly well.
You have to sign up at the link to download the album (it’s kind of interesting what they’re trying to do there, but no thanks)…but they’ll let you listen to the whole thing for free.
Me, I’ve got my annual bloodwork tomorrow morning early. I really, really don’t want to go on a statin, but I really, really don’t want to pick a fight with my doctor, either. He’s a crabby sod as it is. So I’ve been living on a diet that includes lots of oat bran, almonds, lecithin granules, apples and niacin. Does this shit really lower cholesterol? I don’t know and, in the bigger scheme of things, I don’t much care. I don’t think they’ve worked out the role of cholesterol yet; I’m just trying to queer the test.
I’m about an hour into my 14-hour fast and I’m feeling a lot of class envy at the moment. You people in the “sure, I’m going to eat dinner tonight” class, you really frost my ass. You know that?
April 29, 2013 — 7:44 pm
Comments: 41
Not quite as awesome as that last one
This, on the other hand, is Luo Dan, a Chinese painter who has worn this deer’s head mask at work and play for four years (the headline says five, the article says “since 2009” — oh, you won’t fool me with your tricksy ways, Mister Smarty Headline Writer). He does this because…oh, let’s face it — painters the world over are balls-out crazy.
Check him out playing the bongos in his deer head.
Lame. I know. I was playing Skyrim tonight for the first time in months, and my quest encountered a glitch, so I’ve spent the evening chasing console codes. For you non-gaming folks, this occasionally happens in big, complicated games — the computer farts and a thing that is supposed to be there, isn’t. Or a person who’s vital to helping you do something dies unexpectedly. And then you have to reach into the switchbox, yank a few wires and raise somebody from the dead.
I was thinking. Playing Skyrim is like being Kim Jong Un. You sign up to a few magic classes at community college, next thing you know you’re Arch Mage of Everywhere. You slay dragons with your voice. You can kill anybody you like, steal anything you want, and everywhere you go, people gasp, “you! You are the one the prophecies foretold!”
No wonder the little porker is utterly mad. His real life is a video game. He prolly thinks he has a reset.
April 3, 2013 — 10:48 pm
Comments: 9
When in doubt, go with the willy joke
I bet you thought Canterbury was all cathedrals and Chaucer and dignified shit like that. Well, it turns out all the naughty seaside postcards confiscated by the police in Kent ended up in the University Library. They’re on display in Canterbury at the moment.
I’ve written about the tradition of naughty postcards before. For a brief period in the Fifties, Britain got a huge case of the vapors (or ‘vapours’ I suppose) about it and confiscated the ones they considered over the line. Donald McGill, the most famous maker-of-rude-postcards, even got hauled into court and had to swear on a bzillion Bibles that he didn’t get the joke and certainly didn’t intend any rude double meanings in his illustrations.
Poor old Canterbury (changing the subject). It’s just inside our traveling distance for a day trip, but I find it a sad place to visit.
Hitler bombed it flat, quite on purpose, along with any other historic towns he could reach. They’re called the Baedecker raids, because it’s believed der Führer picked up a Baedecker guidebook to Britain and ordered explosives dropped on every place with a three star rating.
This probably makes me a horrible person, but thinking about that makes me feel sicker than all the WWII carnage and human misery we see endlessly on the History Channel.
Anyway, he somehow missed the honking huge cathedral in the middle of the town. And the Roman wall. The rest of it, pretty much blowed up or burned out. It’s kind of like a big shopping mall now. Every once in a while, you’ll turn a corner and see a 15th Century pub between the greeting card shops and book stores and get a glimpse of what the place must have looked like seventy years ago.
March 4, 2013 — 11:56 pm
Comments: 27