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THE LITTLE MAN

Friday, September 19, 2008

The Little Man: The San Francisco Chronicle’s Rating System

Yesterday I read this little paragraph in Roger Ebert’s response to claims that he gives out too many stars:

The only rating system that makes any sense is the Little Man of the San Franciscio Chronicle, who is seen (1) jumping out of his seat and applauding wildly; (2) sitting up happily and applauding; (3) sitting attentively; (4) asleep in his seat; or (5) gone from his seat….The blessing of the Little Man system is that it offers a true middle position, like three on a five-star scale.

So I did a little research. The Little Man was the creation of Chronicle artist Warren Goodrich in the early 40s:

On the occasion of the Little Man’s 50th birthday, Goodrich recalled it was just another assignment that he dashed off quickly, noting, “I’m surprised (it) continued.”…Goodrich, who died last year, once recalled that a woman (possibly a disgruntled actress) once hit him on the head with her umbrella and said, “I hate the Little Man!”

The woman isn’t alone. Many of the writers at the Chronicle hate The Little Man. They boo-hoo that the picture already tells the story!

The beloved icon of this newspaper’s entertainment sections is, in fact, a complete nuisance to criticism….That’s because the Little Man gives you a visual clue to what you’re about to read.

And they complain about what Ebert loves: the middle man on the scale—the man with ambiguous feelings.

[T]he message is often unclear…when he’s merely sitting in his chair, watching. Not clapping. Not jumping out of his seat and clapping. Not slumped in his seat. Not out of his seat. Just sitting there.

I suppose a comment could be made here about how people can’t handle ambiguity in their lives: they want things to be black and white, with no shades of grey. As Ebert quotes Siskel,

“What’s the first thing people ask you? Should I see this movie? They don’t want a speech on the director’s career. Thumbs up–yes. Thumbs down–no.”

In fact, the editorial staff was so bothered by the neutral middle man that they had him redesigned:

Few are aware that the L.M. was retrofitted about 10 years ago with a more benign expression. The Little Man pose in between the politely applauding and the snoozing Little Man was redesigned in a microscopic makeover: the “alert viewer” Little Man’s expressionless mouth was tweaked with a slight upturned curve, to indicate a hint of a Mona Lisa smile, suggesting a vague amusement. His raised eyebrows indicate interest but not quite approval, denoting mixed feelings. After artistic spinal fusion, he also sat up more alertly, signifying a mixed review.

All of this came after Talmudic editorial discussions about the meaning of the enigmatic No. 3 Little Man: Did his indecipherable gaze indicate intrigue or ennui? Polite diffidence or glazed-eyed apathy? As a Datebook editor noted, “He’s the middle child, and the most unmanageable.”

the little man

I say: 3 on a 1 out of 5 scale should be ambiguous and neutral. Instead, he’s upright as if he’s engaged and smiling, as if he’s liking it. His back should be against the chair:

the little man redesign

And to be totally ambiguous, his mouth should be a straight line (or no line at all), with no eyebrows. A blank face:

the little man

An ambiguous visual calls for explanatory text! And so, the neutral man is a friend to the good critic: if the visual is ambiguous, then the reader should be more tempted to investigate the article text to get the writer’s take!

the little man - the new lineup

Note: this was a repost from my tumblelog. Apologies for doubling up.

VIZTHINK AUSTIN 9-9-08: GALLERY WALK

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

see it bigger (all apologies to those whose caricatures I botched and to Anne! I misheard her name as “Leann”)

Last night was the fourth VizThink Austin get-together, which was held at the Conjunctured house: we had a gallery walk, where our members presented their work and talked about their philosophy, practices, and challenges when using visual language. As always, when you get a group of creative people in one room and get them talking, the conversation is fantastic.

Jason Molin started and ended the evening with his songs. “I’m more of a word guy,” he said. But I say: words create images.

Frank Ragan showed his photography and talked about “what to do when you get stalled…how to find that jumping off point.” He quoted somebody (I forget who…he digs Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, so maybe one of those two) Michael Clark as saying, “When you get stuck, there’s two things you can do. 1) Take more photos 2) Take a vacation.” In other words, when you get stuck, work more, or walk away.

Anne Webb showed her work with Austin Voices for Education and Youth, some of which you can see here. She said her work is about “teaching students what it’s like to be a human being,” working with others and collaborating on art.

Greg Claxton showed an example of his work on neighborhood planning for the City of Austin. He talked about the “tension between what’s there and what could be there,” and struggle of giving folks enough detail to help them think “big picture” about what they want their neighborhood to look like, but not so much detail that they get bogged down on particulars. Abstract maps seem to be the tool that makes this happen. (This made me think about a recent article I read on web design where the author proposed thinking of web design as cartography vs. architecture.) The detail of the picture you show people depends on what kind of thinking you want them to do.

Sunni Brown showed her information design work, and talked about a recent experience with a client, the problems of reading the flow of a chart, and being so close to something you can’t tell whether it sucks or not. She said it’s good to be “dumb” about the subject you’re designing for. You want to look at it like an outsider, and ask questions that an amateur would ask to help your client step back and think “big picture.”

Then I blathered on about my work, and showed around some top-secret never-before-seen poems, including a few broadsheets. Somebody had the idea of doing a flipbook in the margins of the book to show a poem being made…I liked that idea!

Honoria Starbuck showed her graphic recording and 1-minute life-drawings. I don’t remember the context of this quote about graphic recording, but I liked it: “finding haikus in conversation.” She also gave me a ride home. Thanks, Honoria!

Eric Beverly showed his paintings and talked about painting on non-traditional surfaces. His dad’s a painter, and he learned how to paint by painting over the paintings his dad didn’t like! He had a great quote from Bob Dylan on songwriting: you get the first line, then it’s like riding a bull…either you stick with it or you don’t.

Last but definitely not least, my buddy Lindsay Wolff Logdson talked about her HR work for Frog Design and the struggle to convey linear, text-heavy information to visual thinkers. She showed us her stick figure drawings of HR processes, and how she visually explains taxes and health plans. It was really rad, and a great way to end the night.

You can see everyone and their work in my flickr set of the evening.

For the next meeting, we’re talking about doing a collaborative artwork, something like a visual exquisite corpse. You should come!

THE POWER OF CAPTIONS: WORDS ADDED TO PICTURES

Monday, September 1, 2008

Yesterday, I was thinking about telling a story in pictures without words, and so today, in the aftermath of all the Sarah Palin pregnancy conspiracy theory madness, I started thinking about telling a story with words added to pictures.

The documentary filmmaker Errol Morris had it nailed in his NYTimes article, “Photography As A Weapon,” about photoshopping, forgeries, image processing, captions (and John Heartfield and King Geedorah!):

Doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.

I don’t know what these buildings were really used for. I don’t know whether they were used for chemical weapons at one time, and then transformed into something relatively innocuous, in order to hide the reality of what was going on from weapons inspectors. But I do know that the yellow captions influence how we see the pictures. “Chemical Munitions Bunker” is different from “Empty Warehouse” which is different from “International House of Pancakes.” The image remains the same but we see it differently.

Change the yellow labels, change the caption and you change the meaning of the photographs. You don’t need Photoshop. That’s the disturbing part. Captions do the heavy lifting as far as deception is concerned.

If you read through this Daily Kos piece, the writer presents pictures of Palin at various stages of her pregnancy looking thin and trim as “evidence” that she wasn’t really pregnant with her fifth child, but it was her daughter, Bristol, who was pregnant. The article is simply a list of photographs with captions—and the captions control how we read the photographs.

Many folks pointed to this picture as evidence of a Bristol Palin “baby bump”:

Palin Family

A picture which would otherwise be an innocuous portrait of a nice-looking family is turned into a sinister conspiracy by the words, or caption, adjacent to it.

bristol palin is pregnant

The moral of the story is that pictures can say whatever we want them to say, provided we use the right words.

The power of captions can be used for good, or it can be used for evil. For a cartoonist, it’s a potent weapon, which can take any drawing and turn it in many different ways. Take this hasty doodle:

captions

Depending on which captions I use, you’ll get a different picture of who I am, yes? In comics, it seems, the old creative writing adage “show don’t tell” is useless—you can certainly tell as much as you show, show what you tell, or tell what you show.

this is not a pipe

I’d love to hear your own thoughts on the use of captions in the comments below. I also recommend taking a look at Derik Badman‘s article, “Text In Comics.”

WILLIAM BURROUGHS 1965 PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

In 1965, the writer William Burroughs was interviewed by the Paris Review. He was 50, living in a hotel in his hometown of St. Louis. A short time later, across the pond, an artist named Tom Phillips read the interview, and decided to play with Burroughs’ cut-up method by doing “column-edge” poems with the New Statesman. He decided to take the method a bit further. He walked to a bookshop, and grabbed the first book he could find for 3 pence. He started blacking out the words, first with just a pen. It was beginning of a 40-year project now known as A Humument.

It’s easy to see how Phillips was inspired: this interview presents a brilliant mind at work, thinking about images and words and writing and how they go together. Burroughs claimed he was most interested in “dreams” and the “juxtaposition of word and image”: “precisely how word and image get around on very, very complex association lines.” He was an avid user of scrapbooks, kept files of newspaper clippings and photographs for character studies, and always wrote down his dreams. He also had a really interesting method of journaling: in three parallel columns, he would record the day’s events, his memories and what he was thinking at the time, and quotes from what he was reading. He called all this “taking coordinates”—a kind of “time travel” to see if he could “project” himself into one single point in time.

Combine this interview with the terrific Beat exhibit I saw earlier this year, and consider me impressed. (I confess that I’ve never made it through any of his books—first up on my list is his collaboration with Brion Gysin [the man who REALLY deserves most of the credit for the cut-up technique…more on that later], The Third Mind.)

Some of my favorite bits:

Seeing

Most people don’t see what’s going on around them. That’s my principal message to writers: For Godsake, keep your *eyes* open. Notice what’s going on around you. I mean, I walk down the street with friends. I ask, “Did you see him, that person who just walked by?” No, they didn’t notice him.

Writers and technology

I think that words are an around-the-world, oxcart way of doing things, awkward instruments, and they will be laid aside eventually, probably sooner than we think. This is something that will happen in the space age. Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I’ve never been able to understand this sort of fear. Many of them are afraid of tape recorders and the idea of using any mechanical means for literary purposes seems to them some sort of a sacrilege.

The origins of the cut-up technique

A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, Minutes to Go, was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this was after the publication there of Naked Lunch. I became interested in the possibilities of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of course, when you think of it, The Waste Land was the first great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in ‘The Camera Eye’ sequences in USA. I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done.

Objections to the cut-up technique

There’s been a lot of [objections to the cut-ups], a sort of a superstitious reverence for the word. My God, they say, you can’t cut up these words. Why can’t I? I find it much easier to get interest in the cut-ups from people who are not writers—doctors, lawyers, or engineers, any open-minded, fairly intelligent person—than from those who are….People say to me, “Oh, this is all very good, but you got it by cutting up.” I say that has nothing to do with it, how I got it. What is any writing but a cut-up? Somebody has to…*do* the cutting up. Remember that I first made selections. Out of hundreds of possible sentences that I might have used, I chose one.

World-building

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I’m creating an imaginary—it’s always imaginary—world in which I would like to live.

Read the complete article.

Any fans of Gysin or Burroughs out there? What texts would you recommend?

THE ART OF LIVING BY SAUL STEINBERG

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Saul Steinberg is one of my favorite cartoonists of all time. Tonight I found this 1949 first edition of his second book, THE ART OF LIVING, in a Half Price Books for $12. (See my other posts on Steinberg.)