Search Results for: log book

IT MIGHT EVEN BE AN INSULT…

Friday, November 17, 2006

I clipped this photographic cartoon of David Byrne out of a TIME OUT LONDON in April 2004. I was studying in Cambridge, England, one of the most intellectual cities in the world, and felt like a complete idiot. So I guess it was for cheering up. Even though it was torn and had all kinds of thumb-tack holes in it, I recently framed it and put it on our bookshelf.

Some links for your week-end:

great David Heatley interview. His new book for St. Martin’s is going to be 122 pages or so, with all of Deadpan #2 and a bunch of new stuff. Watch out for this guy…
John Porcellino’s “10 Records That Changed My Life“
Marjane Satrapi interview about cigarettes and Sophia Loren’s boobs
the last movie issue of the New York Times magazine was all about comedy, and it was wonderful, especially the A.O. Scott article about visual comedy

Over and out.

THE MIDWESTERN, MARRIED LIFE

Tuesday, November 7, 2006

Our house is a mess of GRE books right now, so I really don’t have the time to post much anything of any substance.

But I did come across a really great paragraph from an interview with my hero, Lynda, about being married and artistic, and a setup that sounds like everything Meg and I one day hope for:

My husband is a really good painter and a really good sculptor, and the first floor of our big old funky house is his studio. I have the third floor. We mainly live an the second floor, but there isn’t a room in the house without some sort of project going on in it. He works during the day restoring prairies and oak savannas. So at the end of the day there is always a lot to talk about. He drives a tractor around and wears bib overalls and then comes home and we eat dinner and then we both make things in out studios and run up and down the stairs and look at what the other is doing. We work on the house together – we tiled the bathrooms and put up a ceiling in my studio and painted all the walls and do all the things hardcore do-it-yourself types do. We both love to build things and fix things, and we like to hang out together. He makes me laugh really really hard. I have a Casio keyboard I got at a garage sale, and I’ve taught the dogs how to “play” it. They can select rhythms and chords and then they do nose solos. We roll around on the couch laughing a lot at the dog music. It’s a happy active household with occasional explosive scream fights that are also kind of fun. I lucked out with my home life.

And she also talks about why she chooses to live in the rural Midwest:

Well, like Goldilocks, I was looking for the place that felt just right, and it certainly is the Midwest….my first sense experiences were here and whenever I came back to the Midwest, I felt a certain unnameable excitement. like I had found a world that was lost to me. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’m living now where the light is like it was when I was very young.

And though they have nothing to do with being married or living in the Midwest, I am really digging the work of two other female cartoonists, Hope Larson and Lilli Carre. There is an interesting blog called Comic Tools where Hope has disclosed her methods/tools.

Ok, back to the flaming inferno of GRE hell…

A HALLOWEEN TREAT: GHOULARDI SAYS, “STAY SICK! TURN BLUE!”

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

“As I got older…I kept thinking, ‘What is this Ghoulardi thing? What is it? What? What?’ We went back to Cleveland once when I was 14 and we were mobbed at the airport by people chanting ‘Ghoulardi! Ghoulardi!’ And when I do interviews anywhere in the country, constantly, constantly, people who are enamored of my father or who grew up with him bring him up or even thank me for Ghoulardi!”

– PT Anderson, interview with the Toledo Blade, 2000

WMFU’s Beware of The Blog! beat me to the punch:

Cleveland’s most legendary horror host was unmistakably Ghoulardi. He was only on the air for about three years (63-66), but he left an indelible impression. His real name was Ernie Anderson, and after retiring Ghoulardi, he moved to Hollywood and become a legendary voice-over artist (he was the voice of The Love Boat, the Carol Burnett Show, and pretty much every top 40 radio station). He is also the father of none other than director Paul Thomas Anderson, who pretty much based the Philip Baker Hall character in Magnolia on him.

But most importantly, Ghoulardi used that booming, commanding voice to unleash an anarchistic spirit. Rather than just play bad movies and make jokes, he began setting up blue screens and dropping in random images over the top of the film, or making strange noises over the soundtrack. And things weren’t any better outside of the movie, where his set could be pure chaos. He was topical, he was funny as hell, he was just plain weird, he WAS the counterculture invading the average middle-American’s television. Nobody that saw a Ghoulardi show ever forgot it, and in a way he shaped the weird climate of Cleveland in the late 60s and early 70s. David Thomas of Pere Ubu was one of his disciples and describes watching his show as such:

“Everyone who saw Ghoulardi will tell a favorite story – like the night he set off a egregiously large home-made explosive device sent it by a fan – he was always setting off fireworks and blowing up things in the studio – and quite clearly off-camera crew were telling Ghoulardi not to light it up and you could see people running across the studio, the camera abandoned to skew off balance, pointing at the floor, and then the entire room was stunned senseless for some minutes… live… smoke, curtains on fire, people stumbling around…”

PAUL WAS AN APOSTLE, JUDAS WAS AN APOSTATE

Monday, October 30, 2006

Greetings from GRE-studying hell! For the next two weeks, your humble entertainer will be busy learning obscure words. Words like “adumbrate,” “bedizen,” and “calumniate.” (He admits, he has only made it past the letter “C” in his Hit Parade.)

To keep his sanity, your humble entertainer will still be scratching and posting pretty pictures, and might even continue giving those pictures silly mnemonics titles, like: “chary is to be wary!,” “asperity is severity!,” and “a minister prone to cozen, a congregation hozen!”

And if text and links are what you’re looking for, go see Jessa at Bookslut. She’s been killin’ it lately.

SKULKING AROUND BARNES AND NOBLE

Thursday, October 26, 2006

I really need to get an office.

Right now, our living room doubles as my workspace, and that’s bad, because when I step into the room in the morning, I don’t know whether to write, or take a nap on the couch.

It’s better today, because the radio’s on, and there’s actually SUNLIGHT coming in the front window.

Yesterday I got so stir-crazy I went to Barnes and Noble with my sketchbook to work. I ended up doing little work, and a lot of reading.

I spent the majority of the time reading Ivan Brunetti‘s fantastic new anthology, GRAPHIC FICTION, CARTOONS, & TRUE STORIES. (Here is the table of contents.) If you’re a newcomer to comics, this is probably the new place to start. It’s pretty amazing. I especially like the 20-page section dedicated to Peanuts, which included Art Spiegelman’s New Yorker tribute piece, “Abstract Thought Is A Warm Puppy” and an essay by Schulz himself, “Developing A Comic Strip,” which Brunetti uses in all his classes. (WMFU had an interview with him about the book a few days ago, and here’s another with Mr. Skin.)

Yale University Press has a really outstanding line of comics-related books on the market right now. In The Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists is probably the most unique: it features monologues and skethbook work by folks like Crumb, Panter, and Brunetti, but it also includes personal artifacts from each cartoonists’ stash: old magazines and comics, toys, posters, etc. The best part is Crumb talking about his current project: he’s illustrating every story from Genesis, using three different translations, and “telling it straight.” I can’t wait to see this. It’s going to be 180 pages long, and supposedly, he’s 60 or so pages into it.

But the winner yesterday was the new “graphic” issue of TIN HOUSE. It has a ten page or so excerpt from Lynda Barry’s WHAT IT IS, a new collage/book/thingie about images in progress, and an interview with her, too, not to mention stuff from Stuart Dybek, Marjane Satrapi, and a childhood comic by Dan Chaon.

I love the fact that Lynda sells her stuff over Ebay. Even her “throwaway” sketchbook pages blow my mind: