Good morning! Have some poetry…
The Raven
There once was a girl named Lenore
And a bird and a bust and a door
And a guy with depression
And a whole lot of questions
And the bird always says “Nevermore.”
I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud
There once was a poet named Will
Who tramped his way over a hill
And was speechless for hours
Over some stupid flowers
This was years before TV, but still.
Gnus sent me that link. The rest of the site is high-larious; mostly comics and Flash animations. It’s updated Mondays and Wednesdays. Go here if you want to start at the beginning and browse the lot. Lore Sjöberg. That’s his
name. Don’t wear it out. He also writes a humor column for
Wired which is pretty…humorous.
July 25, 2007 — 6:22 am
Comments: none
Richard Johnson: Postings from Afghanistan
Small Dead Animals — but do please check out the National Post of Canada blog Postings from Afghanistan.
Of course, you have to admire a guy doing it old school and flying his own ass out to Kandahar to sketch his country’s troops. That’s a given. But I have to tell you, this man is seriously good.
Yes, I know you’ve seen drawings in this general style, but they’re often not quite the quick, spontaneous sketches they seem. There’s a whole ‘nother art to laboring over a drawing and making it look like you didn’t. This guy, on the other hand, is the real deal; he’s doing these drawings on the spot, in one take, with very little underdrawing (preliminary sketching) or overdrawing (correction after the fact).
How do I know? I’m a professional artard, dammit. I can draw, but I’ve never been good at quick and fluid life drawing like this. I’m deeply envious of people who are, and I’ve made a study of them.
Like, check out the boots on the kneeling guy in the sketch above. Boots and shoes are tough (I had to draw a pair as part of my entrance exam to art school; it’s harder than drawing Binky, I can tell you). Not only does he do them well, he shows them at slight angles, natural to the pose. Novices need to draw things from clean angles: directly in front, directly from above, directly from the side. The ability to render objects slightly tilted is a sure sign the artist has grokked a shape so completely that he can rotate it in his head, three dimensionally. In other words: damn.
I traded email with him Saturday; I was lucky that his connect was good that day and he was sitting by a computer in Kandahar. He confirmed that he draws, as much as possible, quickly and from life. He takes photos as well, but refers to them sparingly. I believe it. As a technical illustrator, of necessity I’ve done a lot of drawing from photographs. It always gives itself away. Even experienced draftsmen can’t avoid a certain a stiff, flat, mechanical look when relying heavily on photos. You look at a photo and tend to think there is a dark shape next to the eye instead of there’s an indentation next to the eye. The difference shows.
His words are good, too, but I haven’t finished reading them. I hate reading a blog from the beginning; the format is so damned uncongenial. New entries are on top. You have to go to the bottom, look up until you find the top of the unread entry, read down to the end of it, then go up above that until you find the unread entry above the one you just read…well, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a pain. It’s fun to see his drawings get better over time, though. That’s natural — you gotta draw every day to get good at it, and the more the merrier.
Anyway, I think he’s over there for two months this time (he went in 2003, as well) and he looks to be about halfway through. There’s a link from the top of the Post, but I don’t think he’s getting the attention he deserves. Wander over and check it out.
July 23, 2007 — 6:24 am
Comments: 5
M.K. Brown; like the forties, but all trippy and melty
This is Mary K. Brown, my favorite cartoonist. Actually, I think most people refer to her as a surrealist rather than a cartoonist. I believe a more accurate diagnosis might be “elevator does not go to top floor.”
She did a number of cartoons for National Lampoon (during the funny years), including features like Inroads into Science and Mercury, Messenger of God. Eventually, she got a regular small strip in the cartoon section, Aunt Mary’s Kitchen. I managed to pick up more of her stuff in comic anthologies. I found Self Portrait in one of these.
She did some kids’ books (which really do not properly mine her rich vein of lunacy) and, I believe, some fine art (which I can’t seem to find online any more) but, really, has had a surprisingly small lifetime output. Also, she was born in Connecticut (eventually) and she answered my fan letter (briefly and politely). That’s all I know about her.
I don’t think I can explain what it is about her drawings (and writings) that hits me just right. Somehow she manages to capture a whole scary but somehow oddly familiar world of melted snapshots and corner-of-the-eye hallucinations. Poke around her site and see if you can see it. She had a definite influence on my work as a young artist, which was tragically unfortunate, since I was a technical illustrator.
Why now? I was squinting at giant chalk Homer, trying to work out if the feeling was amusement or embarrassment, and it made me think of Dr. N!Godatu. This was a short cartoon M.K. Brown produced that ran between segments of the Tracy Ullman show in the ’80s. It alternated with a cartoon called the Simpsons.
The Simpsons swiftly elbowed Dr. N!Godatu out of the nest. Can you imagine how hard that must suck? It’s like being the girl standing next to the girl discovered by the bigtime Hollywood movie producer. It’s like picking the winning lottery number the week before it’s the winning lottery number. Honest to god, I think I’d go step in front of a bus.
July 18, 2007 — 12:54 pm
Comments: 5
Excuse me, there’s a weasel in the ballpit
That’s what the web reminds me of. It’s nothing like a super highway, it doesn’t hugely feel like an interconnected web. The way I do it, it’s more like swimming in a big, colorful, bobbly pit of information balls.
I’ve never actually been in a ballpit, for I am old. Wikipedia tells me they have hygeine issues — they’re full of children and unwashed balls. Bad stuff floats to the bottom and stays there. So, see, the comparison is perfect.
Anyhow…like so: click on a link in your own blogroll, then click on a link in his blogroll, then click on a link in her blogroll…and keep clicking links until you find yourself someplace utterly strange. I do that a lot. I was hoping to come up with a cool name for this activity, but I failed.
I am also (you may have noticed) a gigantic consumer of Wikipedia (not everything hippies do is stupid). I frequent link collecting sites like Fazed and Portent. I keep a whole page of international newspaper links that I add to (and occasionally remove from).
Here’s the problem: I use Opera, the original tabbed browser. And I drink. And I leave my desktop machine on all the time. So when I come down most mornings, I am confronted with twenty cool open Web pages and no earthly idea how I got to any of them. I think it’s important to attribute stuff properly. But then, life is full of important things I don’t do.
So please, share some of my colorful balls of unknown provenance…
Did you know there was a Daily Photo Blog community? Here’s a map of current participants. I got in through Milano Daily Photo. Bath and Budapest were good, too. I only really got to the B’s before I began to skip around. Some are better about updating than others, but I enjoyed the lot of ’em.
I really love ideas like this. They feed my sick delusional yearning for godlike powers of vision and…eavesdropping. Oh, yeah, like you wouldn’t eavesdrop if you were a god.
And so continues our proven interest in all things deer anus — behold, the Butt Out Tool.
This tool is the fastest, easiest way to disconnect the anal alimentary canal from deer or similar-sized game. Immediately after harvesting game, insert the Butt-Out Tool into the anal canal and twist until it grabs the membrane. Continue twisting another half turn, then steadily pull the Butt-Out Tool out of the canal. Extract 10″ of membrane, tie the membrane off and cut.
There’s video. (I definitely got this one from Fazed).
This tattoo artist apparently specializes in bulldogs and serial killers. Okay, I don’t recognize that very last one, but the one before that is Albert Fish, Eater of Children, and the one before that is Richard Ramirez. Not just serial killers, but badly drawn, especially losery serial killers. Would it be better if these tats were all on one guy, or spread out among several scary people with bad taste? I can’t make up my mind.
This one’s almost a year old, so you’ve probably seen it if you’re into gaming. I’m not and I hadn’t. It’s 1K Project II, a thousand cars racing through a game called Trackmania. I tried a couple of different addresses for the kid who made it, in case he had any remarks, with no luck. Then I found a page explaining how he did it — in French. My French, she is not so good — but I gather he cut together multiple walkthroughs to achieve the effect. This explains why the cars seem to have collision detection in some cases and not in others.
It’s very well done and seriously cool. Sometimes they look like shoals of fish and sometimes flocks of birds and sometimes swarms of bugs and sometimes bitchin’ cars.
Finally, this guy: Tim Knowles. He’s an artist in London of the kind that does stupid shit like ink up pine trees and put paper under them and let them draw pictures in the breeze. I know, I know…I can’t help myself. I went to a poncy art school. They polluted my mind.
Like, check out this drawing, which was made by this huge seismography thing in the back of a station wagon on the way to its own exhibition. Or the slideshow he made by mailing a box rigged with a digital camera to take a picture of its journey every ten seconds for 6,994 pictures (sadly, the whole slideshow is not online). Or these surprisingly evocative pictures of the full moon reflected in water.
Or you could, you know, bite me.
July 6, 2007 — 4:36 pm
Comments: 10
Ladies of Spain, hm hm hm hm…
My dad plays Lady of Spain on the banjo. It’s my favorite. I told my mother that, and she said, “Yes, that is pretty funny.”
And I’m, like, “funny? What do you mean?”
And she said, “Honey, it’s a joke. Lady of Spain? On the banjo?”
And I go, “I don’t get it.”
And she’s like, “well…it’s not a song you associate with the banjo, is all.”
And I say, “I don’t see what’s so funny about that.”
I get it now. I guess. Anyhow, this lady of Spain is a large cast metal bust of a lady. From Spain. My grandfather picked it up somewhere and she’s been smirking in my livingroom ever since. When I was a child, her jewelry was touched with different colors of shiny enamel. My grandfather again. He had outbursts of taste and spasms of tacky. A real Renaissance man.
We call her Chastity. I didn’t get that joke for years, either. See, she’s destined to remain chaste. Because…no snootch. Her map doesn’t have the Netherlands on it, know’m saying?
Later, Mother had her bronzed. Turns out, the original casting material was…zinc or something.
Mother didn’t like Chastity. It’s that prim smile. Looks a touch judgmental for her comfort. Mother was no better than she should have been, as the saying goes. She couldn’t afford to have a lot of judgment aimed in her direction.
Chastity gets decorated at Christmas time. The rest of the year, she’s mostly a hat rack. Yep, I’m still Spring cleaning. I have a feeling y’all will get to meet a lot of my stuff.
July 2, 2007 — 3:52 pm
Comments: 119
Bringing the worst of art to the widest of audiences
How is it one seldom takes advantage of the cultural attractions in one’s own back yard? I’ve worked around the corner from the Museum of Bad Art since its creation in 1994, and I have yet to visit.
Perhaps it’s because the museum is located in the basement of the Dedham Community Center, next to the men’s room. Not open during my lunch hour. Okay, lunch half hour. You wormed that out of me!
Perhaps it’s because so much of the collection is available for viewing online, with thoughtful captions and useful histories.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “how is this artwork any worse than all that awful modern crap that sells for thousands and is celebrated by millions, like just about anything in the collection at the Hirshhorn?” See? I don’t have to take the cheap and obvious shot; my cheap and obvious readers are thinking it anyway.
Give their website a browse (MOBA, not the Hirshhorn. Yuck, man). It’s more compelling than you think. Because I know what you think. Remember?
June 27, 2007 — 10:15 am
Comments: 13
Monday dog’s breakfast
Dog’s breakfast. I’ve always loved that expression. It’s a Britishism for ‘mess’, but it conveys a cheerful appreciation of assorted vilenesses. Like a Whitman’s sampler of rotting garbage. I imagine Queenie loping through the neighborhood, going, “ooo! A delicious dead squirrel’s bottom! And — oh look! Fresh cat shit!”
Anyhow, here’s some carrion. Enjoy!
Uncle Badger introduced me to the vehicle above, the Mazda Bongo Friendee. Okay, I’m not sure that one’s a Friendee (a subspecies of the Bongo line), but as “Mazda Bongo Friendee” is the gayest car name ever, I’m running with it. It came out in 1966 (I didn’t know there was a Mazda in 1966!) and is sold in the States as the Ford Econovan.
Gnus called my attention to this image (detail at right) and wondered if a minion we know might be moonlighting. Since McGoo isn’t here to defend himself, I figured now was a good time to post it.
The whole site is worth clicking around. Some pretty pictures. Some strange pictures. Some mildly pornographic ones. All in Portuguese, for extra added WTF?!
Bloody Mess
Half an hour ago, I was moving a chair to clean behind it, and I caught the leg against my right big toenail, tearing it half away. What a bloody mess. And by “bloody mess” I don’t mean, “I say, Rupert, this New Delhi business is a bit of a bloody mess, eh wot?” I mean, “Oh fucking hell! Blood! Everywhere! What a mess!”
See? Cleaning is unnatural.
I don’t appear to own any bandaids. I used to. What happened? I’m thinking of putting a strip of duct tape around it, but the idea of tearing it off again gives me the vapors. The nail is going to go, but I’d like to see it go gently into that dark night.
The really rotten part? I was stone cold sober. I mean, then. Not now. Certainly not now.
Finally, Dawn thinks “amok” deserves its own thread. It’s pretty interesting, I admit. I did not know this:
Running amok, sometimes referred to as simply amok (also spelled amuck or amuk), is derived from the Malay word mengamuk, meaning “to go mad with rage” (uncontrollable rage). In typical cases of running amok, someone, although having shown no previous sign of anger and/or any inclination to resort to violence, will acquire a weapon and in a sudden frenzy will attempt to kill or seriously injure everyone they meet. Amok episodes of this kind normally end with the amok-runner being killed by bystanders.
[…]
The explanation which is now most widely accepted is that amok is closely related to male honor (amok by women is virtually unknown). In many cases where the background of the amok-runner is known, there seems to have been some element of deep shame which prevented the man from living honorably, as he saw it, in his own society. Running amok was both a way of escaping the world (since perpetrators were normally killed) and re-establishing one’s reputation as a man to be feared and respected. Some observers have related this explanation to Islam’s ban on suicide, which, it is suggested, drove Malay men to create circumstances in which others would kill them. Evidence for this explanation is that the incidence of amok seems to be less where amok runners are captured and tried, rather than being beaten to death on the spot.
So it’s basically Islamic suicide by cop.
What worries me is why Dawn wants a whole thread to talk about it. I’m thinking…cry for help. Then I’m thinking, “hey, I don’t live anywhere near this woman. What do I care?”
I’m practicing my [cyber]neighbor-of-the-perp speech: “No, I’m shocked. Absolutely shocked. She was a quiet woman, kept to herself. None of us knew her all that well. Still, we never expected anything like this.”
Ow. Here comes the toe hurty.
June 25, 2007 — 5:42 pm
Comments: 34
Deer Butt Alien Heads
Man, now I know I’ve hit the bigtime: I got people sending me sick links (that you, Gnus?). Plus, this thing hit Dave Barry’s blog a month ago, so it’s also old. Get me! I’m practically Ace!
Here we have decorative sculpture fashioned from the ass-ends of various game animals. This guy is the Martha Stewart of ruminant rectums.
Many people say that the real red neck art is the shaping of the deer anus to look like a mouth. This is the true test of the artists loving hand. The anus can be made very simple, or you can stretch the anus for realistic effects such as smiles and frowns. In general, the leading deer butt artists concentrate on the details of the mouth.
My mother and I were in a pawnshop in Lebanon, Tennessee once when she began to wheeze and point. The ordinary deer head mounted over the counter had been fitted with bear teeth and taxidermed making the grrrrr face. She damn near lost control of her bladder.
Anyhow, scroll down his page for some more fine examples. I’m partial to the doorbell, myself. Though the tasteful kitty cat butt refrigerator decoration and the attractive rat butt plaque are also very nice.
Remember: make sure to tie-off the hiney hole. Words to live by.
June 18, 2007 — 3:56 pm
Comments: 69
Dustball
Check out this cool Shockwave. I know…you’ve seen stuff like this before, but this one is an especially good exploit of Flash’s animation characteristics. Style, as the man say, is based on limitations.
See, in Flash, little chunks of animation are wrapped into packages called symbols. Symbols can be nested (so you could have an eye-blink animation inside a larger head animation as part of a larger character animation) and can include sound. Symbols only have to be downloaded once and can then be used multiple times in the larger animation — a whole lot of shaking for a very small download.
By using symbols in different sizes, with different starting points, flipped in different directions, apparent crowd scenes can be built out of a few components. You can zoom in and pan around and move characters and it’s all, in bandwidth terms, free. It’s a technique you’ll see used a lot in animated banner ads, which are almost always Flash these days.
This is also an obvious use of rotoscoping — animation derived from tracing live action film footage. Rotoscoping was invented by Max Fleischer (later the father of Betty Boop) in the teens. It’s been in use ever since — most recently in A Scanner Darkly, a 2006 animated film made from a Philip K. Dick novel. It’s supposed to be really impressive…ummm…so I’ve just ordered a copy, because I totally meant to see it in the theaters.
Rotoscoping is easy to spot. It always has a certain look to it. It’s fun to watch, but there’s a stiffness about the animation that conventionally-drawn characters don’t have. Disney often used rotoscope characters for the humans in his films. Contrast the rotoscoped Snow White with the conventionally animated Seven Dwarves to see what I’m getting at.
It works very well in this example. He’s thrown a fat vector line around (presumably) himself. It takes half a dozen of these clips to build an effective percussion set out of himself. The intro and outro movements of each character are separate animations.
Not to take anything away from this guy — he’s done quite a bit of animation — but one of the neatest things about this piece is that it didn’t take insane art or animation or programming skillz. Just a good idea. I’m really enjoying this whole interwotzit democratization of content thing.
Anyhoo, the artist is Dustin McClean, aka Dustball. And now I’d better get back to my desk before somebody realizes I’ve nipped over to the lobby of the building next door.
June 5, 2007 — 12:00 pm
Comments: 5
Five centuries of faces
Click the image to see this great YouTube, 500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art.
The guy has taken a series of portrait paintings in chronological order and morphed between them. Ho-hum, right? Yes, but he’s done a fantastic job choosing the right examples so that the sequence looks less like morphs between disparate images, and more like one continuous animation of a single woman’s face.
I started watching with the expectation that I would see the standard of feminine beauty shift continually and noticeably over time, but it doesn’t. Well, it does really, but not in this film. The particular faces he’s chosen are more alike than different and all would be recognizably beautiful to everyone in the time span. (Until, of course, we get to the puddle of sick that is ‘modern’ art).
Anyhow, I wrote to the guy who posted it to make sure he was the actual creator. He is (sign your stuff, man! Cast your bread upon the waters and the ducks will eat it). Check out eggman913. He does nice work.
June 4, 2007 — 1:13 am
Comments: 7