my first attempt at a webcomic…enjoy.
BROKEBACK PHONEBOOK
Sean had big-time problems with the movie, but the weirdest criticism was on the subject of names:
The story was inane — characters named “Lureen” and “Alma” and “Ennis Del Mar.” A gay cowboy named “Jack Twist.” Jack Twist? You’ve got to be kidding me. E. Annie Proulx lived in Wyoming, but I’ll guarantee you that if you threw a rock into a roadhouse in the early ’60s, you wouldn’t hit a single “Alma” or “Lureen” or “Ennis.” Stephanie Zacharek has a funny line about this in her review:
Their names — straight out of a boy’s adventure book of the 1930s, or maybe just the result of a long think on the front porch at some writers’ colony…
When I first read the story, I thought, ooh, great names. But then I started to doubt myself. Are the names too much? Could you really throw a rock into a rockhouse and not hit a single Alma or Ennis or Lureen? My suspicion was no. (But then, I did grow up in a town that had a resident listed as “Butts, Caressa”).
Armed with my handy reference librarian skills, I set out on a quest to dissect the heart of America’s phone listings, and here’s what I came up with:
- 839 guys named Ennis
- 583 Almas
- 63 Del Mars
- 26 Lureens (one from Bowling Green, Ohio!)
- 3 listings for a “Twist, Jack” : one in Audubon, IA, one in Catonsville, MD, and one in Jackson, MI
But the biggest kicker:
- Twist, J, Riverton, WY
Someone living under an alias?
COMING SOON
teaching myself Flash, and working on a webcomic that’s taking over my life. should be up tomorrow.
in the meantime, BROKEBACK TO THE FUTURE. sheer genius.
GLASSBLOWING YOUR MIND!
This weekend we went to the Cleveland Institute of Art with Don and Amanda to watch Amanda’s friend Mike blow glass. Here’s a drawing of him.
When we weren’t playing video games, Don and I talked quite a bit. He wants to do a thesis paper in the form of a choose-your-own-adventure book. I told him I thought that was a great idea.
I watched Jimi Hendrix play guitar today during lunch, and it reminded me that music is the coolest thing on the planet, and that if practicing art can teach you anything, it’s this: sometimes mistakes can be made into miracles, and take you places you never would have gone otherwise, whether you’re playing guitar, or blowing glass, or making soup.
GRAPHIC FACILITATION
While browsing Drew Dernavich’s website (his woodcut-like comics regularly appear in the New Yorker), I came across a page labelled “Graphic Facilitation.” On this page, Drew has examples of drawings and charts he’s done in real-time, sometimes on foam board, sometimes on white board, to capture the content of lectures, business meetings, and conferences.
Now, I’ve been doing this kind of thing in my notebooks for a while now, but I never knew it had a name, let alone that it’s an emerging field. Check out Peter Durand’s Center for Graphic Facilitation blog. There are registered Graphic Facilitators all around the country that are available for hire to “use visual learning to solve problems.” Here’s how to get started.
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