Soooo…it’s a Jewish banana, then?
Repper is a design program that makes it easy to design big, complex, repetitive patterns. It works like a kaleidoscope — or a bunch of them — and then outputs a high resolution file suitable for textiles production and other fun artsy stuff.
Why anyone would use it to laser-engrave tiny Stars of David all over a banana, I could not say.
Anyhow, they’ll let you play with a trimmed-down online version for free. Which is fun. For about five minutes.
Hey, five minutes of fun! You’re welcome!
What, you expected me to weigh in on Egypt? I don’t think so. Too early to tell, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this one (mind you, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this one” is pretty much the only intuition I have. About anything. Ever).
Question: how come the US always seems to support the bad guy in the Middle East.
Answer: because they’re all bad guys.
January 31, 2011 — 9:34 pm
Comments: 17
Gumby and Clokey
How did I miss this? Art Clokey died a year ago.
Yeah, you know — the man who gave us Gumby and Pokey. Among other psychedelic horrors.
After undergraduate work in geology and a stint in WWII, Clokey studied film under surreal filmmaker and master of the montage Slavko Vorkapich.
Cokey’s USC graduate project was a short clay animation called Gumbasia — a play on Fantasia. Watch it; it’s worth three minutes of your time.
The president of the Motion Pictures Producers Association saw Gumbasia and funded Clokey’s next project, which turned out to be Gumby.
Oh, and lest we forget, Art and his wife Gloria created the doll-based animations Davey and Goliath (admit it, the words, “oh, Davey” just went through your head in Goliath’s goofy-ass voice). Yeah. That’s weird, because Clokey was a Buddhist or some shit, and D&G was a product of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.
I read that Davey appeared in a late Gumby cartoon acting like a dick, but I can’t find a copy of it online.
Gumby’s wonk-head was inspired by this picture of Clokey’s dad, who died in a car accident when Art was nine. As tributes go, that’s a weirdy.
I’m fascinated by Clokey’s work in particular and clay animation in general (the term “claymation” was trademarked by Will Vinton in 1978), mostly because it skeeves the hell out of me. In 1975, I sat through the Fantastic Animation Festival, like, seven times, mostly to see the short Closed Mondays over and over.
I tried my hand at stop-motion animation in my teens, but all I had available was a video camera. That’s no good at all — you get a little jump and snow whenever the heads start and stop, which is every frame. I soon gave up, so you’re spared that horror.
Anyhow, RIP Art Clokey. Here are some links:
The intro to Gumby Dharma, a documentary about Art Clokey. Mandala, another Clokey film for adults (really, really stoned ones). Clokey’s animated credits for Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965). A print interview of Art and Gloria from Omni. Part one of a six-part interview with Clokey. And finally, Marv Newland’s famous 1967 student animation Bambi Meets Godzilla — just because.
January 14, 2011 — 9:37 pm
Comments: 30
Nice puss
This handsome feller is from the inside of the church of St Peter and St Paul, the Norman church next to Peasmarsh Place.
The village of Peasmarsh is a mile from the church. Legend blames the Black Death. Originally, homes were built all around the church, as usual. But when the Plague came, they burned the houses to the ground and rebuilt a mile off. The rector had three symbols carved into the church to keep death away: a stag to ward off rats from the drains, a unicorn to keep plague from the door, and a bird to keep plague from coming in the roof.
Or so they say.
This guy, however, is a leopard — one of two on either side of the arch leading to the altar. It was his job to protect from leprosy. There was a lot of it about.
Charming place.
I love exploring village churches. They are traditionally kept unlocked, and they’re chock full of Norman bits and weird pagan-y iconography.
Christianity came to Britain bass-ackwards — the early evangelists were told not to disparage pagan tradition, but to quietly absorb it. By, for example, building churches near sacred trees and groves.
The result is kind of Jesus meets Harry Potter. I honestly don’t know how else to describe it.
We recently watched a very interesting BBC program called Churches: How To Read Them on the history of British church imagery. Presented by a man with a seriously annoying lisp.
BBC loves doing that.
October 28, 2010 — 11:11 pm
Comments: 8
Happy birthday, bucket o’ suck
The first episode of The Flintstones aired fifty years ago on this day. Also, that’s Stony Curtis! Who is dead! Plus, I saw a guy walking down the street today wearing a Quick Draw McGraw t-shirt, no lie.
That’s enough synchronicity to make your eyes bleed.
And speaking of things that make your eyes bleed — Hanna-Barbera Cartoons!
I once worked for a man who loved H-B cartoons for the same reason I hate them — they were forever finding new and innovative ways to be cheap-ass. Like, when Barney’s talking the camera’s on Fred and when Fred is talking the camera’s on Barney so they don’t have to pay for so much of that gosh-darned moving mouth animation.
The downside? Making your viewers stare at a big ugly drawing of a head that doesn’t do anything but blink occasionally.
These guys had hundreds of titles. I mentally divide Hanna-Barbera cartoons into the following categories:
The Early Suck: the three or so decades from Huckleberry Hound through to Josie and the Pussycats, inclusive of the whole Scooby Doo oeuvre.
The Doesn’t Actually Suck: which includes most of their adventure cartoons of the same era. Jonny Quest, Birdman and the Galaxy Trio, The Herculoids, the Fantastic Four. Character design by the excellent comic artist Alex Toth and non-comedy storylines make the difference.
The Later Suck: the Eighties were full of cartoons (from many studios) that had slick production values but still somehow managed to suck even harder than Magilla Gorilla. The Smurfs, Pac Man, Scrappy Doo, Snorks. There was a plague of “familiar cartoon characters as babies” shows, too. The Flintstone Kids, A Pup Named Scooby Doo. There’s something peculiarly horrible and soulless about this era.
The Aren’t Really H-B Cartoons cartoons: Turner bought the Hanna-Barbera studio and library in the early Nineties and launched the Cartoon Network to showcase them. H-B studios then encouraged in-house staff to pitch cartoon ideas, which were shown as World Premiere Toons. This gave rise to several excellent cartoons: Dexter’s Laboratory, Cow and Chicken, I Am Weasel, The Powerpuff Girls. You might think of them as HBINOs.
I must say, I’m awfully tempted to buy the Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Sound Efx collection, but I just can’t work out how to sync up life events with the appropriate sound effect.
September 30, 2010 — 10:33 pm
Comments: 55
Want that jacket!
Behold, Boy in a Bitching Distressed Jean Jacket Eating a Fruit Pie by the Master of Blue Jeans.
Not kidding. Okay, maybe I made up the name of the pitcher.
The Canesso Gallery thinks they have identified a previously unknown Seventeenth Century painter they’re calling the Master of Blue Jeans. It’s not that these paintings have just turned up after 400 years, of course. It’s just that somebody stared into the huge reservoir of anonymous paintings of the era noticed a similarity in style and subject matter in these few.
Namely, they’re pictures of poor people wearing denim.
The word “denim” comes from “serge de Nîmes” — which I assume you knew — and “blue jeans” comes from “Bleu de Genes” (aka Genoa) — which you may have known, Meester Smarty Britches, but I didn’t. Both cities claim to have made denim clothes for hundreds of years, but there hasn’t been much evidence of the early years. Until these pictures.
I was a bit dubious at first, but I had a squint at the catalogue and…yeah, the way the fabric is dark blue but the worn bits are white, that’s pretty much denim behavior right there. (That online catalogue is neat, by the way. I mean, you can turn pages and shit, just like a real exhibition catalogue).
The show is sponsored by fashion house Marithe + Francois Girbaud, who pioneered stonewashed jeans 40 years ago and are marketing their new thang, Wattwash jeans. Those are jeans aged with lasers rather than bleaching and washing. The hippies are raving and drooling about it because the process only takes 5 liters of water, as opposed to the 170 liters used by the acid process. Thereby saving the planet or some shit.
HEY HIPPIES! If you care that much, why not do what we used to do: buy them blue and wear them until they look like that.
Via Kottke by way of the History Blog.
September 29, 2010 — 10:11 pm
Comments: 33
Let the mockery begin!
Or “How the Democratic Party Lost its Cool.”
On Tuesday, this enchanting whiff of bullshit was released into the ‘sphere:
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine plans to make what’s being billed as a major announcement Wednesday about the future of the party, according to a Democratic source with knowledge of the speech.
The source tells CNN that Kaine will announce something that will excite Democrats across the country. Kaine’s event comes as Democrats face the difficult task of holding onto their majorities in the House and Senate this November.
And finally it was Wednesday, and lo the big, exciting surprise was…a D with a circle around it!
Some may think: it’s just a logo—it’s just a brand. Well I don’t believe the Democratic Party is a logo or a brand—we are much more than that. We are Democrats. We create change that matters. Ours is a party of ideas and ideals, of policies and people, history and purpose.
Really. A new logo. That would be chock full of all kinds of FAIL right there, if it had turned out to be a GOOD new logo. But it’s not. It’s awful.
Let’s make fun of it.
September 16, 2010 — 7:40 pm
Comments: 64
Never trust an artard
I’ve designed publications for a living, too — magazines and brochures and stuff. I can tell you, when pictures are chosen, they are always the ones that best support the narrative.
I mean, duh, right? You run a story about Obama’s falling poll numbers, you’re going to run it under a picture of Obama looking all cross and grumpy. If you ran it with with a picture of him all sunny and happy, it would look stupid. Even if he was actually in a terrific mood when today’s pictures were taken, you have to comb through and find one where he’s blinking or looking down or something.
I know this isn’t a profound revelation. But it’s worth bearing in mind, because we react to images way down at the lizard level. Even when they aren’t actually meaningful.
Drudge ran the headline, “Thousands Riot in Afghanistan” or something with the picture above left. I count three guys, two of them are grinning like raccoons. The dude with the knife and the stupid red beard (no really — it was an awful henna job with gray roots) grabs our eyeballs and won’t let go, so we don’t see the smilies on either side.
When you look for it, it’s amazing how many people in these angry mobs look happy to be there. Most wire services ran the picture at right. Uncropped, I count ten men, about half of whom are smiling (a bit hard to see at this size, sorry). Yeah, you know why — that big white hand against that big black cloud. Pure sex to a photo editor.
I’m not suggesting angry third-world mobs are happy funtime carnivals. Or that thousands didn’t pour out in protest this weekend. Apparently they did, with some fatal results. But nobody seems to have gotten any good pictures of it, so they had to run with small bands of yoohoos (mugging directly into the camera!) and crop it to look like legions.
News photos like this aren’t wrong, but they’re often the most contrived, least informative part of the information we get.
September 13, 2010 — 9:44 pm
Comments: 20
Just trying to get some of that sweet, sweet image search traffic
Y’all know what you’re looking at here, right? Thanks to Pablo for the suggestion.
Speaking of nicking pictures off the internet (you don’t think I keep surplus day-old chicks in the kitchen, do you?), they set Shepard Fairey‘s trial date today.
He’s the dude who created the HOPE poster that went viral during the Obama campaign. Problem is, he pinched his photo reference from AP.
There’s much about this case I don’t get. Fairey sued AP first, to establish himself as the author of the work — why would he do that? — so this is the AP countersuit. In the initial case, Fairey claimed it was some other photo he used — but that also belonged to AP, so I don’t get why a) he used that as a defense and b) the fact he was wrong is a legal problem for him.
Incidentally, illustrators nick photos all the time to use as reference (and Photoshoppists live to nick photos). In the days before Google, most professional illustrators kept a clip file — thousands of book and magazine photos cut out and filed away for future reference.
I inherited the kernel of mine from the RISD library, which was clearing out some of its gigantic room-sized clipfile. Mine filled four filing cabinets in its final glory, and it hurt like a bastiche to throw it away.
You’re only supposed to refresh your memory from a file photo, though. If the resemblance of your final illo is recognizably close to the reference, the original owner has a case against you. I don’t think there’s ever been much actual suin’ going on, but it’s a sort of squidgy area of law.
Me, I cheerfully nick photos for blog posts, but never, EVER for something I’m going to sell. That’s not actual legal advice — unless you’re covered under parody or something, it’s equally illegal whether you make money or not — but I figure: no moneys, no incentive.
My general sympathies might be with Fairey on this one — and not just because we went to the same art school — but it turns out he’s a real asshole when other people copy HIS stuff. So I hope he gets his pansy ass kicked.
Final question: with a name like Shepard Fairey, did this guy pretty much have to go to art school?
August 23, 2010 — 10:01 pm
Comments: 23
Screwing with the classics
The current topic at Freaking News is Degas. Which just cried out for the weasel treatment (The Absinthe Drinker meets plop-plop, fizz-fizz).
I really dislike the Impressionists. Not so much for their work — though some of it is truly hideous, some is okay — but because they have been so grossly overestimated and overpraised in my lifetime — and roundly congratulated for overthrowing the art that preceded them. They aren’t nearly good enough to be put forward as the bestest art that ever was.
I believed that before I got a look at the art they “overthrew” — the pre-Raphaelites and Victorian narrative painting. And when I did, my dislike of the Impressionists ripened into ripe dislike.
Late Victorian painting too often strayed into the silly and the sloppy-sentimental, I’ll cop to that, but it was by-god the most technically accomplished use of oil paint ever. Pre-impressionist Victorians loved to paint lush, creamy textures — polished wood, oriental carpets, mother of pearl, alabaster, fur, feathers — and they were irrepressible show-offs.
Sadly, “overthrow” is the right word. You couldn’t give away Victorian paintings for the longest time (there’s a persistent rumor that one of Alma Tadema‘s canvases was rescued off a trash heap). Museums that hold them seldom show them. I learned to keep an eye on side passages and other inauspicious hanging spots, in the hope of catching some stray bit of the 19th C collection accidentally on display.
That’s changing a bit, thanks in large part to Andrew Lloyd Weber. Hate his musicals, love his art collection.
July 19, 2010 — 11:11 pm
Comments: 23
Rockin’ the Chicoms
One of the great things about being an artard — I can have a whale of a time just looking at stuff. Give me stuff to look at and I’m a happy weasel.
I love the internet.
I don’t know what led me to this site, but they sell reproductions of Chinese propaganda posters from 1925 to the present. Hours of wholesome, snarky amusement.
Most of them have titles like “let us strive to forthrightly repel the foreign invader through Mao Tse Tung Thought.” The artwork ranges from really very good to “yikes!”
And then there’s this.
Published in 1986, titled Youthful dancesteps. The description: “Disco is a huge craze in the 1980s. The poster shows that it is accepted and should no longer be condemned as a form of Western decadence.”
There is so much wrong with this picture. His mom jeans. Her capri pants. The finger snapping. The fact that their “disco” band includes a flute and somebody sawing on a bass fiddle with a bow.
Man, what I wouldn’t give to listen to whatever they’re playing back there. (Listening to stuff is my other great pastime. I really, really love the internet).
Anyhow, start at the beginning and have a browse through their gallery. If that doesn’t make you happy to be a Namerican, I don’t know what will.
July 5, 2010 — 9:44 pm
Comments: 13