Austin Kleon – Page 556

WHAT! EMBRYOS ARE BABIES!

Saturday, November 25, 2006

One of the things I love about holiday road trips is all the ridiculous stuff you see along the highway. I like to keep the digital camera up front with us, just in case we see some gold…

For the past month, there’s been a billboard over on Carnegie Ave (in between the Hot Sauce Williams BBQ and the QuikCash) that sends Meg and me into hilarious gut laughs every time we drive by:

It’s the design of this billboard that cracks me up. With the overly-bright primary colors and a baby that looks absolutely ecstatic to be alive, it has to take the prize for the cheeriest pro-life billboard ever made. But best of all is the caption: try saying it to yourself out loud. I can’t figure it out! I could understand, “What? Embryos are babies???? or “What? Embryos are babies!??? or even, “What! Embryos are Babies???? But the double exclaimation points just don’t make any sense.

The sign is by a group called Prolife Across America, whose mission is to “create an ‘Atmosphere of Life’ in a ‘culture of death.'”

They should get Lil’ John to be their spokesman: “What! Embryos are babies! Yeah!”

WHY NOT MAKE IT A MONOLOGUE?

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

For someone who loves stories so much, I’m a terrible oral storyteller. I get the pacing wrong, bungle the chain of events, forget who said what when…. Oral storytelling is a performance, and I’ve always had a hard time with performance. It’s one of the reasons I knew I’d never be a real musician: I always preferred recording on a four-track to singing at the open mic night.

I spent a good hour yesterday in the barber’s chair, telling “The Ballad of Austin and Meghan” to the girl cutting my hair. Since getting engaged, I’ve told the story at least a dozen times, and each time I feel like I never do it justice. Maybe that’s why for our wedding favors, Meg and I want to make a mini-comic about our lives together up until this point. To tell the story and to get it right!

For months I’ve been thinking about what form it should take. At first I thought it should look like a Lynda Barry or a James Kochalka, with the narration covering large gaps of time, and the pictures singling out individual moments and bits of dialogue. (This might be a good place to point out that the usual adage in creative writing class, “show don’t tell,” is useless in the medium of comics — you can show and tell all you want.) But somehow, that idea just didn’t seem right, so I put off starting on it.

Then I started going through my old American Splendor anthology, and came across one of my favorite Crumb/Pekar collaborations:

(If you’ve seen the movie, this story was adapted into a great Paul Giamatti monologue.)

With background, facial expressions, hand gestures, pauses, and other visual cues, comics turns out to be a great way to approximate the experience of oral storytelling. Better yet, you’re not a passive listener — unlike the real-time experience of film or real life, you get to set the rate at which you receive the story. The only thing you don’t get is the sound of the storyteller’s voice.

So, for our mini-comic, it’ll essentially be Meg and I talking to our guests, telling them our story. Only afterwards, they can stick us in their pocket and take us home.

DOUBLE-SPACED, 12 POINT, TIMES NEW ROMAN STRAIGHTJACKET

Monday, November 20, 2006

Short week, this week, what with the holiday coming up and all.

Had a marvelous weekend full of running around and reading books. My reading habits are fluctuating wildly these days between non-fiction, books on design, and comic books. Not too much interest in prose fiction at the moment, although I’ve been dipping into Oliver Twist (which is pretty hilarious, actually, and kind of like a verbal cartoon) here and there.

I spent a lot of this weekend watching football (!): Michigan vs. Ohio State, Notre Dame vs. Army, and the Browns vs. Steelers. This guy named Frank Caliendo does a hilarious John Madden impression. There’s something about John Madden’s voice that makes me depressed — all those wasted Sunday afternoons in front of the TV with my uncles.

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Oh, and Taxi Driver was on AMC Saturday while we were at Meg’s parents. DeNiro is such an absolute joy to watch:

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* * *

This is a quote from a book called Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design:

Until now, language, especially written language, was the most highly valued, the most frequently analysed, the most prescriptively taught and the most meticulously policed code in our society. [If] this is now changing in favour of visual communication, educationalists should perhaps begin to rethink what ‘literacy’ ought to include, and what should be taught under the heading of ‘writing’ in schools. If schools are to equip students adequately for the new semiotic order, if they are not to produce people unable to use the ‘new writing’ actively and effectively, then the old boundaries between ‘writing’ on the one hand, traditionally the form of literacy without which people cannot adequately function as citizens, and, on the other hand, the ‘visual arts’, a marginal subject for the specially gifted, and ‘technical drawing’, a technical subject with limited and specialized application , should be redrawn.

Yep, double-spaced, 12 point, Times New Roman font is a straightjacket that I won’t wear any more. I won’t do it. No sir.

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 POWER OF GUNSMOKE AND PERRY MASON

Thursday, November 16, 2006

This is the script excerpt from one of my favorite parts of the three-hour BBC documentary The Power Of Nightmares, where the godfather of the Neocons, Leo Strauss, is discussed, along with his favorite TV programs:

VO: Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to question everything—all values, all moral truths. Instead, people were led by their own selfish desires. And this threatened to tear apart the shared values which held society together. But there was a way to stop this, Strauss believed. It was for politicians to assert powerful and inspiring myths that everyone could believe in. They might not be true, but they were necessary illusions. One of these was religion; the other was the myth of the nation. And in America, that was the idea that the country had a unique destiny to battle the forces of evil throughout the world. This myth was epitomized, Strauss told his students, in his favorite television program: Gunsmoke.

Professor STANLEY ROSEN, Pupil of Leo Strauss 1949: Strauss was a great fan of American television. Gunsmoke was his great favorite, and he would hurry home from the seminar, which would end at, you know, 5:30 or so, and have a quick dinner so he could be at his seat before the television set when Gunsmoke came on. And he felt that this was good, this show. This had a salutary effect on the American public, because it showed the conflict between good and evil in a way that would be immediately intelligible to everyone.

BAD MAN on Gunsmoke: Let’s see what happens!

JAMES ARNESS: No! [ SHOOTS bad man; bad man DROPS to the ground ]

ROSEN: The hero has a white hat; he’s faster on the draw than the bad man; the good guy wins. And it’s not just that the good guy wins, but that values are clear. That’s America! We’re gonna triumph over the evils of… of… that are trying to destroy us and the virtues of the Western frontier. Good and evil.

VO: Leo Strauss’ other favorite program was Perry Mason. And this, he told his students, epitomized the role that they, the élite, had to play. In public, they should promote the myths necessary to rescue America from decay. But in private, they didn’t have to believe in them.

ROSEN: Perry Mason was different from Gunsmoke. The extremely cunning man who, as far as we can see, is very virtuous and uses his great intelligence and quickness of mind to rescue his clients from dangers, but who could be fooling us—because he’s cleverer than we are. Is he really telling the truth? Maybe his client is guilty!

This is a fantastic documentary, that, of course, has never been shown on American television. You have no excuse not to watch it, though, as it’s available for free download/watching at archive.org and Google video.