Who is Charles Foster Kane?
Posted: July 12, 2011 Filed under: movies, politics 5 Comments
Citizen Kane was one of those movies that they used to show us in school to illustrate the ‘art’ of cinema and I think most of the kids watching resented it because we really didn’t want to see some ‘old’ movie where nothing blew up, no one got shot, there was no shower scene and we had to pay attention to what people were saying in order to understand the point of the film.
Despite my immaturity at the time of the first viewing, I remember thinking Citizen Kane was a great movie, even though, as a kneejerk teenager I was probably predisposed to hate everything that a teacher might have said was worth watching. What I continue to like about it is that it is one of the few films in which the ‘hero’ (Welles’ “Kane”) transforms from a charismatic, idealistic and energetic reformer into a tyrant. Usually we get to see it go the other way around (the ‘bad man’ gets a shot at redemption).
I understand Rupert Murdoch’s career has followed a similar trajectory, except without the “once having been a nice guy” part. According to folks who knew him ‘back in the day,’ when he was in college he was an outspoken leftist and continually publically pilloried his fellow students for perceived defects in character or ideology. As the son of a wealthy Australian newspaper owner, he was apparently one of those people who claimed to ‘love the common man’ without ever wanting to actually go through the inconvenience of having to be a common man. He dropped the ‘Labour’ party bit like other folks droped flares and found his raison d’etre as a “kingmaker.”
My own hope is that, frustrated by the recent “News of the World” scandal, he will soon retire to his Xanadu where he will marinade in isolation and bitterness and eventually mutter the name of a beloved childhood toy before slipping off to the next world. Unfortunately, the real world is not like cinema and the grasping, cynical people seem to live forever.
Welcome to The Village of Hamlet
Posted: July 4, 2011 Filed under: aldeboran, art, Mines of Khunmar, picaresque 6 Comments
Click the pic to go bigger! There’s lots of bad shit going on in Hamlet!Hamlet (named in honor/satire of Gygax’s ‘Hommlet’) is/was a village in my original campaign just a short walk from Khunmar. It is a village where chamber pots are continually being dumped from upstairs windows on the heads of unsuspecting persons below, dogs fight over severed body parts in the street, executions are so commonplace and frequent that they barely draw a crowd and everything is for sale — East Saint Louis, pre-WW2 Berlin, Rome in it’s glory, NYC before Disneyfication and post-economy Detroit all distilled down to their essence and crammed into a village that will fit on one piece of graph paper.
Price lists should include standard dungeoneering items (ten and eleven foot poles, ropes, spikes, etc) as well as blow jobs, VD cures, exorcisms and whatever the medieval version of crystal meth might be.
Nihilist gaming at its best. Penis size and anal circumference size charts optional and probably not a good idea.
On Life Drawing
Posted: July 3, 2011 Filed under: art, ideas, inspiration 1 Comment
In the June 27th issue of the New Yorker, there was an article by Adam Gopnik called ‘Life Studies’ about how he took art lessons (sort of) to learn to draw. You need to be a subscriber to read it, but the link is here anyway. If this interests you, hopefully you can beg, borrow or steal a copy. My s.o., Annie, gave it to me saying I might find it interesting. She was right.
Gopnik is an art critic, and writes extensively about art and culture… but it seems he felt a bit like an imposter since he spent all that time talking, writing and thinking about what made some art good and other art bad and yet he felt he could not draw a convincing stick figure. The article tells of Gopnik forming a friendship with an artist who gives lessons in life drawing (i.e.: drawings where one draws directly from observation, striving to make the marks on the paper resemble the ‘real thing’ as much as possible). By the end of the article, Gopnik doesn’t feel that he has become a good draftsman, but he does feel like he has at least learned a new appreciation for the art of representation. There is a lot more to the article than this pat little summary (including some fascinating glimpses into how his friend tries to teach Gopnik how to draw from life), but that’s the part I found myself thinking about today.
Gopnik’s artist friend, Jacob Collins, considers himself a bit of an ‘artistic throwback’ to art’s past. He doesn’t draw or paint anything other than what he sees with his own eyes. Collins impresses upon Gopnik that when most people sit down to draw something, they don’t look at the thing they are drawing — they look at the paper and draw what they think that thing looks like. So we are drawing ‘symbols’ rather than the thing itself.
I had occassion to think about this when I was talking to someone about some drawings I have been working on for a collaborative project. She was explaining why the drawings didn’t quite work for her, and that was frustrating for me (who likes to hear that they have to do something over again?). Suddenly I wondered if part of the problem was that I wasn’t drawing anything other than the ‘representation stuck in my head’ of things. As I looked at the drawings under discussion, all of the faces of the characters started looking alike to me — these were not individuals, they were just place markers or chess pieces. Perhaps I had to at least spend more time looking at source materials and inspiration before drawing something rather than just relying on my imagination, simply because my imagination may have started to travel down some very well worn paths recently, especially as I have gotten busier and some drawings have felt more like ‘work’ than ‘fun.’
One goal for the coming months is to try to do a bit more research and preparation before I sit down to draw. I can’t hire models or limit myself to drawing/painting plaster casts, wine bottles and drapes, but I can at least try to find photographs and attempt to make the people in the pictures a bit more differentiated. Expect to hear more about this current experiment, especially in about 3 weeks when I (hopefully) will have finally finished the big mosaic commission that is kicking my butt right now.
(above, left: some studies of hands by Da Vinci)
With a side of Mugwumps, please…
Posted: July 2, 2011 Filed under: art, blogs, inspiration, monsters 5 CommentsFound these delightfully pervy pictures by Mat Brown via Monsterbrains today. Brown’s work reminds me of some dinosaur books I had as a youngster, but with more perversion than I recall seeing in those illustrations of trilobites and pterodactyls. If you don’t visit Monsterbrains regularly, do yourself a favor and sign up — good stuff.
"Try the whitefish…I’ll be here all week!"
Posted: July 1, 2011 Filed under: history, philosophy 6 Comments
So my s.o. and I are in the kitchen this afternoon and she tells me she wants me to chop up all of the vegetables for our dinner tonight. “You are going to be the cut-up,” she says.
“This horse walks into a bar,” I respond, attempting to affect the simultaneously nonchalant and manic delivery of Sheckey Greene and failing utterly. “Bartender says, ‘Heya pal, whats with the long face?’ Bud-ump-bump-tish!”
“Never gets old, does it?” she responds, having heard that tired joke many times before.
“Try the whitefish,” I repond, “I’ll be here all week!”
“Why did they say that?” she wonders aloud. “Were they trying to get rid of it?” (it=whitefish)
“I have no idea,” I reply. As a midwestern kid, we all told jokes with all of these Borscht-belt references… and I doubt we even knew where the Catskills were. Annie grew up in Denville, just outside N.Y.C., but, even if she were Jewish, she would have been too young to know about the Jewish supper clubs in the Catskills. By the time she came on the scene I’m guessing those clubs were long gone. And I grew up in Missouri; pretty far from Milton Berle’s stage. I guess we grew up listening to commedians who admired the work of Berle, Greene and the other commedians of that time and place. “Try the whitefish,” is something we say after having repeated an old joke. Growing up, my friends and I repeated it endlessly, as well as cribbing lines from Marxs or the Howards/Fines (“If you moved any slower, you would be walkin’ backwards,” or, “Roy Rogers never met you, did he?” and the like). We admired the unflappable wise guys who were never at a loss for words.
It wasn’t ‘our’ culture any more than ‘Gangsta Rap’ is really the culture of my 13 year old solidly middle class private schooled nephew… but we sucked up and regurgitated those jokes from Three Stooges routines the same way he soaks up Grand Theft Auto and we dropped references to trying the whitefish like he mentions ‘loading the nine.’ We also watched Looney Tunes cartoons, many of which dated back to The Second World War, so we had access to references to coupon books, rationing, blackout regulations and Carmen Miranda without really understanding those things. It’s really strange when you think about it.
In an interview, Robert Crumb says he thinks he internalized all kinds of ‘cultural junk’ when he was a kid — like ‘Little Rascals’ serials, Bazooka Joe cartoons and the like. Recently I’ve been thinking of all the crap I’ve absorbed (or steeped myself in) over the years, and wonder how it ‘comes out’ in how I view the world and what I do.
Exquisite Corpses v2 is slowed but still coming…
Posted: June 30, 2011 Filed under: exquisite corpses, LotFP, project, publishing 1 Comment
A friend sent me an email asking ‘why are you redoing Exquisite Corpses?’ and I thought I would reproduce my answer here, since if he is wondering why, others may be wondering why too (Hopefully I’m not revealing anything here that Jim LotFP does not want to be general knowledge, but as far as I know, all of this has been scattered through several posts on LotFP anyway)
(if it matters, the pic at right is not from my book — I just thought it was cool).
Anyway, message reproduced below:
…The publisher wants to print ‘Exquisite Corpses’ with perforated tabs
rather than ‘cut-em-yourself’ pages and the printer has restrictions on numbers
of pages, etc., for these special print jobs. So the base number of monsters
(40) was chosen because of the number of signatures in a print run (multiples of
32 or 8 are our options— so we added 32+8=40!)To make the book possible as a
commercial product, we have had to make certain changes… which will also
(hopefully) make it more appealing to the users. Instead of having lots of info
scattered through the text AND the illustrations so the user has to flip back
and forth, the current idea from Jim (which I think is a winner) is to have it
all in one place — on the illustration itself and the facing page. So if you
lay the book down flat and flip the tabs so you have a lizard head, woman’s body
and bird’s feet, hopefully we can cram all the info you need to know to run with
that critter with options on that two page spread. That’s the idea, anyway…
and that’s the part I am struggling with.It’s been a long series of me emailing
the guy (Jim) who is publishing it back and forth to arrive at this point. In
the process one of us might come up with an idea and email it to the other, then
I would mull it over and Jim would go to his printer and talk about it, come
back to me and say, “I don’t think that’s going to work but how about this,”
etc., rinse and repeat. So v2 of Exquisite Corpses is going to be very different
than v1 in execution, although concept is the same — hopefully v2 will be more
user friendly.It was originally hoped it would be ready for Gencon, but there
were a lot of changes and I had a ‘crisis of confidence’ in some of my artistic
decisions and needed more time on them, so finally Jim said, “Take your time;
don’t worry about deadlines, let’s just try to make it as good as possible.” In
the meanwhile I’ve had my other comissions and some ‘life stuff’ to worry about,
so E.C.v2 has moved to the back burner, although I am trying to remember to stir
the pot occassionally so it doesn’t burn or spoil. In other news, last night I
finished 4 more drawings for (blank).
Thanks for the interest — I miss playing with you guys… please have
someone write a session report!
Music and Salesmanship
Posted: June 30, 2011 Filed under: bitching, consumer, crass commercialism, debord, douchebaggery, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, music, politics, situationalism, stupidity, weird, wierd stuff 11 Comments
Anyone else remember those pictures of Boris Yeltsin doing ‘The Funky Chicken?’ I can’t decide whether I like Boris more or less after seeing them — sort of the same feeling I got when watching our former President, George W. Bush, funk out with African drummers on the Whitehouse lawn.
Michelle Bachmann recently got taken to task by musician Tom Petty because her crew used his song, “American Girl,’ at one of her rallies. I’m not that familiar with Petty’s “American Girl” pop anthem, but, if memory serves, it’s lyrics might be a bit at odds with Bachmann’s Bible Beater values (something about “making it last all night” makes me think Petty’s American Girl is a bit of a libertine). But I guess since the song has ‘American’ in it, her team feels this gives it relevance. Plus Petty is probably popular with a demographic that doesn’t find much traction in her bible-thumpin’ ways. Anything to appear hip, I guess. But this is apparently just one of a growing number of cases in which a pop star has said to a political candidate, “Hey, stop using my song!”
I remember being a bit taken aback when I heard “London Calling” by the Clash being used to sell Jaguar cars on TV. The context in which I first heard that song seemed greatly at odds with the idea of a luxury automobile. As I recall, the ad just had a few strident guitar riffs and Joe Strummer barking out, “London Calling” and leaving out all those depressing lyrics about the end of the world… perhaps the admen thought that maybe the American ex-punker who had given up on revolution and gotten a career and was now rolling in it would feel the siren song of the half remembered dreams of his former self and head on down to the dealership and buy a really expensive car without really stopping to think about it. Devo as pitchmen for Honda scooters seemed a much better fit.
The world is just getting so fucking weird. Guy DeBord had no idea how right he was.
Zombies, as a genre, have probably officially jumped the shark…
Posted: June 29, 2011 Filed under: douchebaggery, post apocalypse, zombies 7 Comments
This ad came in the mail recently. “In a world devastated by lack of sleep…” I don’t know what to say.
Updates for Khunmar / other work
Posted: June 27, 2011 Filed under: Mines of Khunmar, portfolio, project 9 CommentsI’m still thinking / working on the new version of Exquisite Corpses; the entire concept/layout has changed several times in the course of the past 2 months and I need a bit of time to stew it over.
A while back I did a few illustrations for ‘Mines of Khunmar.’ I was thinking of doing a 1/2 pager to introduce each level, but that is probably too much work for a freebie. Perhaps after I win the lottery. See some previews below.
Meanwhile, I have more work for another client coming up, but that’s all I can say for right now.
Below is a picture for level 1b (which I believe is just east of level 1; I don’t think this level appeared in the free preview pdf I released a few years ago). It looks like the party’s torchbearer is finding out that the Vargouille’s bite is worse than it’s bark. I’m not sure if ‘Vargouille’ is released under the OGL and if I need to make a subsitution or create an ‘offbrand’ version. I haven’t decided what kind of compatibility the public version of Khunmar will have when and if I ever finish it.
This is level 1 — the entrance to the kobold caves. My only regret is that I made the kobolds about 2x the size they ought to have been… I dunno if I can fix that or not. The challenge is getting across the bridge alive — the bridge is defended by spearmen and archers on the kobold side. Hopefully that magic user brought a ‘sleep’ spell along.
Updates for Khunmar / other work
Posted: June 27, 2011 Filed under: ideas, Mines of Khunmar, portfolio, project 9 CommentsI’m still thinking / working on the new version of Exquisite Corpses; the entire concept/layout has changed several times in the course of the past 2 months and I need a bit of time to stew it over.
A while back I did a few illustrations for ‘Mines of Khunmar.’ I was thinking of doing a 1/2 pager to introduce each level, but that is probably too much work for a freebie. Perhaps after I win the lottery. See some previews below.
Meanwhile, I have more work for another client coming up, but that’s all I can say for right now.
Below is a picture for level 1b (which I believe is just east of level 1; I don’t think this level appeared in the free preview pdf I released a few years ago). It looks like the party’s torchbearer is finding out that the Vargouille’s bite is worse than it’s bark. I’m not sure if ‘Vargouille’ is released under the OGL and if I need to make a subsitution or create an ‘offbrand’ version. I haven’t decided what kind of compatibility the public version of Khunmar will have when and if I ever finish it.
This is level 1 — the entrance to the kobold caves. My only regret is that I made the kobolds about 2x the size they ought to have been… I dunno if I can fix that or not. The challenge is getting across the bridge alive — the bridge is defended by spearmen and archers on the kobold side. Hopefully that magic user brought a ‘sleep’ spell along.