Posting on the Go

This posting comes to you via e-mail. Not sure how it will work. The previous postings came from a mobile phone, though after the first two, new posts are not appearing... Will e-mail work? If it does be sure to check out what's below!

http://machineanimalcollages.com/Pages/Installations/AttentionChicken.html

Youth is not wasted

This post comes to you from my phone... hopefully...

Don't Bug Me!

More posting this weekend... as long as I do not run into Red Kryptonite -- in which case postings will be delayed another twenty-four hours.

Thank you for your patience! And don't forget to support your locals in tomorrow's Race for the Cure!!

Another new line for playtime

Yet another free web tool: sketchcast.com. Business applications aside, for me it's another way to keep the mold from taking over the inside of my rusty brain pan. Let's see what pops out when you click the 'Play' button below...



It's probably my favorite of what I've sketched so far. Decide for yourself, by examining the rest of the bunch here.

Jung at Heart

Conversation going on about the new Indiana Jones movie -- questions whether Indy is a Communist sympathizer, a ‘pinko.’

When Indy and Co. entered the alien room, my first thought was "sleeper cell of fellow travelers." Then we hear the dialogue about the collective unconscious. During all the loud sights and sounds, as Cate Blanchett’s Soviet agent met her fate near the end, didn't she scream, "I was wrong!"? I thought perhaps there she was realizing this collective was not the ideal for which she had hoped...or did I not hear her correctly?

Speaking of collectives: what about those prairie dogs, monkeys, and ants? Do they not all exhibit some sort of collective unconscious? The behavior of these creatures has been one of the most-criticized portions of the film. Nevertheless, could not their actions be purposeful, planted clues to the nature of the skull?

I don't really care, mind you. Indiana Jones has always been an apolitical cuss, whose passions are for the acquisition and sharing of knowledge. If you want to judge his actions and the film within the framework of a political system, how about calling it instead a parliament – which is a group of owls, which is a hoot…?

Rack 'em Stack 'em Robots!

Though not as ticklish to the imagination as Kapla blocks, these wooden Stacking Robots from Schylling still manage to strike enough of my fancy that I am already thinking about when I will be picking up a second set. Right side up, up side down, sideways left, sideways right: does not matter which direction you go, as long as there is balance and every robot works together the population will hold together. Of what does that remind me?

Following the Heard - 2008

Above is the cover image for the first part of this year's musical mix.

See if you can figure out who's on it by the image alone. I'll update later with the rundown....

And the answers are:

1) Strange Times – The Black Keys
2) Do U Buy It? - Lyrics Born
3) Voices - Madonna
4) We Call Upon the Author to Explain - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
5) Puppets - Atmosphere
6) The Rip - Portishead
7) This is How You Spell HAHAHA - Los Campesinos!
8) Can't Be Beat - Quiet Village
9) Old Enough - The Raconteurs
10) Fatalist Palmistry - Why?
11) 3 Dimes Down - Drive-By Truckers
12) Out at the Pictures - Hot Chip
13) Alice - Moby
14) That Hump -Erykah Badu
15) Sober Driver - Dengue Fever
16) Surprise - Gnarls Barkley
17) Blind - Hercules and Love Affair
18) Faulkner Street - Hayes Carll

Now, how many of these artists can you recognize? What images from the cover above can you associate with these artists and their 2008 work?

You can hear many of these songs randomly streamed from my 2008 radio 'station' on last.fm.

No Time for the Future

Starclipper of St. Louis hosted another gallery of local artists rendering and re-modeling Munnies, in celebration of the shop’s 20^th anniversary. The theme this time: “The Future” and, appropriately enough it was a series of unexpected events (what do you expect from “The Future”, anyhow?) which kept us from finishing ours in time for the opening. But finish them we did.

First off: “Yet Pack Man!”

While most robotic Munnies wear jet packs, “Yet Pack Man!” wears a pack for flying ahead into days yet to come, hence the “yet” instead of “jet.” Completely designed and decorated by my co-designer with Model Magic, Munny markers, cotton balls and paint. He got his goggles courtesy of a glow-in-the-dark Munny who would not need them.

Unexpected moment: marking up the goggles’ lens gave us a cool reflective surface…

And then there’s this one: “Riding a Head into the Future”

Unexpected moment: every step of the way. The original plan for this one involved cutting out the head of a glow-in-the-dark Munny and attaching a working clock, setting its time one hour into the future. As per usual, my vision exceeded my abilities and the cutting of the head came out more ragged than I had planned.

I attempted fitting two old broken watches (left to me by my grandfather) inside the goggles which came with the Munny, but found the fit too tight, so opted for making my own goggles out of Model Magic. I also took the top of his skull and glued it over the front mishap of a hole for a more-interesting shape. A third broken heirloom became a timely belt. Then I took some glittery silver gel to sparkle in contrast to the phosphorescence of the main body. It still lacked some balance in my eyes, so I took a miniature white Munny (to match the Model Magic) gave him a clock face and painted him with the silver gel then glued the final ragged leftover piece from the glow-in-the-dark model to the top of his head. Voila!

Good boy?

Have -not- been a good boy, have not been updating this blog. Postings resume this week. Be a good scout: prepared.

Thinking of Anything Else

ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930)
Starring Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo Marx, with Margaret Dumont
Directed by Victor Heerman
(97 minutes) B&W

Searching the middle for a beginning or an end…

Chico Marx noodles around on the piano during the party celebrating not only the return of Captain Geoffrey T. Spaulding (three chairs for him) but also the unveiling of Bogarde's famous painting, "After the Hunt." Chico, going here as musician Senor Ravelli (if we don't show up you can't afford us), and his fingers continue drinking in the sounds of the same bars over and over and over.

"I can't think of a finish," he finally says, though that does not stop his fingering the keys. "Funny, I can't think of anything else," says Groucho.

Butlers, ingénues, and other characters tell jokes, but the Marx Brothers live the jokes. Punch lines are not the point for them, in their repertoire they use fishing lines, instead -- casting out for bigger and better fish.

When Groucho cannot think of anything else, it is not a punch line it’s a clue to their humor: (supposedly not comedy attractive to women -- like the Three Stooges, or Abbot & Costello, it's a guy thing). And yes, there we find ourselves off on a different tangent but that is what makes the Marx Brothers to me.

Tangents, atypical roads take us unexpectedly to places for which we usually are not quite prepared; unexpected, yet also usually ingenious as is revealed upon multiple viewings of their work. You do not always know how they will finish, and often there is no satisfactory end, either because “The End” winds up a bust or because you do not want them to leave quite yet.

All of this high-faluting nonsense is to say, I find them very funny people. I hope you do, too.

Special note: Some of the Brothers' best words came from the mind of George S. Kaufman, whose website supplied the picture up top, and of whom you should read more about here.

Put Your Lips Together

Take a deep breath. Some thoughts following not yet fully formed...

Looking into the concept of breathing, I found a link to meanings of the word psyche.

psyche

1. Breath, to breathe, to blow, (later) to cool; hence, life (identified with or indicated by the breath); the animating principle in man and other living beings, the source of all vital activities, rational or irrational, the soul or spirit, in distinction from its material vehicle, the body; sometimes considered as capable of persisting in a disembodied state after separation from the body at death.

2. In Mythology, personified by Plato and other philosophers, it was extended to the anima mundi, conceived to animate the general system of the universe, as the soul animates the individual organism. St. Paul (developing a current Jewish distinction between spirit or breath, and nephesh, soul) used the lower or merely natural life of man, shared with other animals, in contrast with the spirit.

3. The soul, or spirit, as distinguished from the body; the mind.

4. The conscious and unconscious mind and emotions; especially, as influencing and affecting the whole person.

5. All that constitutes the mind and what it processes.

6. Term for the subjective aspects of the mind, self, soul; the psychological or spiritual as distinct from the bodily nature of humans.

This takes my thoughts to where they still too-often go these days, even after almost four months of not smoking. Apart from the occasional lava-lamp bubbling beneath my brain, without thought or warning will come a sudden in and out of a sharp breath from my mouth. Someone else noticed this, thinking I was practicing some kind of meditative zen technique. What actually went on: my body tries to smoke, even without a cigarette in hand. Breathe in and puff out. Therefore, by the definitions above, the mere act of breathing constitutes expelling our life force, our animating spirit.

When I get the chance, I put these exhalations to work as I finally found something, like smoking, involving breathing in and out and annoying people at the same time: playing the harmonica.

To play all the notes in the scale you alternate breathing in and out like in the image below.

And once again mixing some of the definitions above together the spirit, the unconscious mind get translated into the vibrations created by the ‘blows’ and ‘draws’ – in this act they become something else.

Meet the New Boss...

I love Metroid games -- more so for the puzzles than battling the bosses (bigger badder characters you need to beat if you plan moving further through a game) because I'm not much good at beating the boss creatures for some reason. I've tried Metroid Prime 2 on the Gamecube, and Metroid Hunters on the DS, but I just can't beat a boss. OK, I beat the first boss on the DS, but couldn't get past the second one. My hope for the Wii was that the controls would give me an easier time with these foes along the way. So far so good, as I finally survived my first Metroid boss battle, but I also survived long enough to succeed against Boss Rundas in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption!

Here's a Gamespot video of how I should have handled it. The video only lasts about 4 minutes -- it took me about 10 times that long to succeed. Oh well, success is success...

Inevitable Alterations

The mind searches furiously for a key to it all. What is it? What went wrong? Why? How? The body meanwhile does what it must to survive! Escape is not sought nor desired nor even possible. The alteration, subtle at first, then mounting in intensity, growing bolder, more visible, more disruptive as time went on -- the alteration was inevitable.

For the chaos, the tumult raging all about this last of his superior breed could only be the product of the pain and the passion and the fire to which he alone remains heir. The energy -- the creative force -- could be disciplined only so strictly, held seething in check only so long, before it burst forth ravaging, mindless uncontrollable. That's the answer! So obvious in retrospect! An organism ceases to live when it ceases to grow. The element of change, which loomed so terrifying -- was in fact the only hope of salvation.

To resist, to dam the flow, to go rigid...was to abandon all hope.

Steve Gerber wrote that (or at least co-wrote that) in the first issue of the comic book Omega the Unknown. Gerber and co-creator Mary Skrenes have always closely held the book and its mysteries to the vest, so we probably will never really know who did what. Just another mystery of life without an answer. What is it?

We feel most comforted by stories with answers, with endings, where there is a chance to frame everything into one picture. All the answers we need in a glance. Steve Gerber will not be ending any more stories. Dead at 60. Why? How?

It is common in the world of comic books for the artist to have a unique style. Uncommon is the comic book writer with an irreproducible personal voice and viewpoint in his work. Steve’s work is uncommon in this vein. …Could only be the product of the pain and the passion and the fire…

One of my favorite Gerber stories, the revival of the Metal Men. The overall theme of the story tells us of the sometimes-hard-to-find good in everyone, but now I am seeing something else in the background. Doc Magnus overcomes his madness in the story because of his work – not only in that he creates, but also that his Metal Men creations save his day by the end, by bringing him clarity and peace at last. I hope Steve too had peace at the end and that he recognized the outstanding quality of his work.

I hope other generations of writers and artists can continue to wrestle with the lessons of his works and their quality. For those of us who bought his stuff off the stands, his stories will continue in re-readings. The sadness, as always, is in the stories he never got the chance to tell us or to finish.

It is another element of change, and to do right by ourselves we must make the best of it we can. As we could often find something good in the baddest of Steve's villains, we could also heed the card left by his anti-hero, the Foolkiller, which said: Today is the last day of the rest of your life. Use it wisely, or die a fool.

Good night, Steve…we're a much wiser bunch because of you.

The basic nuts and bolts of Steve's life can be found here.

More information from a personal perspective may be found at the site of his friend Mark Evanier. Donations may be made in his name at Hero Initiative.

I've Still Got A Secret

More reasons to smile...

It’s pretty much still a secret, but the program “I’ve Got A Secret” – which ran on the CBS television network from 1952 to 1967 – began again in re-runs on Game Show Network (GSN) at the beginning of the year, at the primo time of 2:30 a.m. CST. If your Tivo is tired of the more modern re-runs and if you are looking for old-school entertainment packed with unexpected and occasionally poignant moments from history, you could do worse than getting some of these into your digital memory for future viewing.

No one thought of future viewers when these first aired. They probably did not think much beyond the show for the following week. “I’ve Got A Secret” after all, was not a game show in the standard sense. Generally played for laughs, the draw was more for those seeking a variety show. The contestants brought a unique secret for the panel to guess, and if the panel was unsuccessful, then the contestant won eighty dollars. In the first few years of the show, they also won a carton of Winston cigarettes courtesy of the program’s then-sponsor.

The variety of the show came from the different types of secrets and guest stars: on one night, a couple revealed they themselves had just found out NASA picked their son for the new astronaut program. An Indian in full authentic regalia, who, it turned out, was the man who posed for the so-called Indian head nickel followed them the same evening. On another night, a lady came from Michigan with the secret her house and all its furnishings were made entirely of paper. Or on another, a group of people in various forms of injury – one with a black eye, another with a cast on their leg, someone else with their fingers wrapped and another with a broken nose showed up with the secret that they had all injured themselves doing The Twist.

If you'd like to check them out before setting your Tivo timer, here's a You Tube clip of a typical 1962 episode (it's only Part One, but it should also offer you the chance at Part Two and Three at the end):

The panel here is my favorite of their various regular groupings: Bill Cullen, Betsy Palmer, Henry Morgan, and Bess Myerson...

Bill Cullen should be familiar to fans of game shows in general given his long-running hosting job for thirty-some years. He was the original host of the Price Is Right, back when it was successful enough to have not only a daytime, but also a regular nighttime version. Its popularity even gave it a spot as a plot on the Flintstones.

Betsy Palmer, delightfully daffy, an aspiring actress who got her best-remembered role years after IGAS was over -- as the mother of psycho serial slaughterer Jason, in the original Friday the 13th movie.

Henry Morgan was one of those wits you used to see a lot of, not really an author, a comedian, star, he just ... was. His curmudgeonly-wit did not endear him long with sponsors, so his solo-efforts on radio and television never lasted long.

Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America, but she was also quite intelligent and stylish and later went on to the anti-war movement and regular work with various New York City government administrations.

Panel moderator Garry Moore, like Henry Morgan, is something you do not really see much of these days -- not really a star of any sort, but whose easygoing charm made him welcome in American homes via the airwaves for years. Moore is famous today for discovering and nurturing the talents of Carol Burnett, though to Bullwinkle fans his fame is for his having a partner/sidekick named Durwood Kirby.

I am not sure why, but until viewing these re-runs I had forgotten how much of a crush I must have had on Betsy Palmer. There is something about her still uniquely appealing to me. You can read more about her, and “I’ve Got A Secret” in this article from T.V. Guide, from 1962. (The picture up top was taken from this same article.) Look out there for the fellow with the carrots in his ears…

Of the couple mentioned above, whose son NASA chose for the astronaut program, they were Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong, and you can read about their experience on IGAS here in an excerpt from "First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong."

Game Show Network will hopefully go back further to earlier re-runs than 1962 of the show, but at times they've been squeemish about playing episodes with such a prominent sponsor as Winston was in those days. Some time you may get to see David Niven (who's secret was that he was sitting on a block of ice while answering questions), the entire United States Air Force of the early 1900s (back when it was only one guy), and a man who witnessed Abraham Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theatre.

Don't keep this a secret...

What can a Cat Man do?

“My name is Joe. I pick locks. I pick my nose.”

So goes the Cat Master, the leading character in King City, by Brandon Graham. Well-regarded on the Internet comics blog scene, Graham’s first volume is as entertaining, crazy and well drawn as advertised.

Joe’s lock picking practice makes for a natural beginning to the action but we follow this arc into spies, drugs and his bucket, with which he carts around his special cat.

The cat, when injected with cat juice, becomes anything. I mean, ANYthing, from a periscope to a key-copying machine to a parachute.

Though Graham’s end notes shows he thinks a bit too much about his work, the effortlessness of what he’s put down on the page here shows he’s able to use this thinking subconsciously and unobtrusively to the reader’s advantage. And not just with the personality-filled pretty pictures and ideas.

He does well with not only the dialogue between characters but also Joe’s frequent monologues. My favorite is when he considers his long-lost love, who Joe remembers while looking into the mirror:

“That girl used to put glue in her hair and jump on the bed and taste like grape candy. And how do you get over that?”

A gallery of Brandon’s work, including his depiction of Joe's cat seen above, is at http://royalboiler.deviantart.com/gallery/

King City is available at better comic books shops and bookstores carrying manga from Tokyopop. He’s also got another series, Multiple Warheads, coming soon from Oni Press.

When a Huddled Mass, no longer tired, nor poor, gets ugly, angry and possibly even

We never get a good long glimpse of the giant something tearing up New York City in Cloverfield but for most of the movie, we clearly feel the terror and madness such a visitation would invoke amongst those experiencing this kind of a first contact.

Producer J.J. Abrams (Lost, Alias) and director Matt Reeves appear to understand we do not need exploding eyeballs and full-frontal decapitations to feel fear. We can be afraid and go ‘ooh!’ in our theater seats, held rigid in suspense, through a movie that is only rated PG-13.

For those who do not know what the movie is about… A gigantic vaguely glimpsed monster tears up New York City. Several friends try to escape together and we experience their trek through the videotape they made on their journey.

Our only knowledge going into this is the beginning of the tape, which tells us someone discovered the videotape in what was “formerly known as Central Park.” We do not know who shot it, who survived, or who found it, or even how long ago the taped events took place. Some of our questions receive answers. I will have to see this again to find out if there were more answers than I originally gathered.

And that’s just one way to see the film… Abrams and company infected the Internets with various viral clues, like websites promoting products which may or may not have anything to do with the creature. Slusho.jp is worth visiting as is the manga prequel to the film. Or you could visit the Cloverfield Clues blog.

If this is correct, then while the United States was responsible in large part for the original appearance of Godzilla, Japan may have finally returned the favor.

What rushes through our veins

I read this a little too quickly last year, but some of its scenes keep cropping up in my head...

In Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein, the search is on for the Secret Constitution of the United States, dragging private detective Michael McGill through all the dark secret places crawling beneath America's red white and blue crust. But despite the prevalence of perversions and addictions there's a bump in the road that sticks with me in this election season:

McGill and his guide Trix travel through the sexual and pharmaceutical byways of the nation and eventually the clues take them to Las Vegas, to the newly-opened Freedom Hotel. The Freedom is shaped like Rio De Janeiro's giant Jesus, but in the Vegas version Jesus is dressed in an Uncle Sam suit. And all the flag-waving grows tackier from there. It's the kind of a place where they'd have red, white, and blue toilet paper.

Trix gets upset with the receptionist and McGill drags her to the elevator:

"These people just work here. They didn't build it." explains McGill... "you want to kill people for being dumb?"

Trix answers in the affirmative, so McGill continues:

"Look," I said. "You don't get to keep the parts of the country you like, ignore the rest, and call what you've got America. You didn't vote for the president, right?"

"Fuck no."

"No, I bet she did. Half the people in America did. More than half the people in America believe in God. You don't get to just ignore that. I know you like telling me about new stuff and showing me that there's a whole other society in America and all that shit. So now I'm showing you: this is what the rest of the people have, okay?"

And this is not the point of the book, it's just one of the points along the way. Read it for yourself.

We're one side of things from others, but if all we see is our own truth, then how are we better than those "narrow-minded idiots" we see skulking around on the "Other Side"?

Flipping through channels: Bill O'Reilly had on some woman who was a born-again Conservative of some kind, shaking her head that she found she was lying to herself all the time she was "Liberal" and she couldn't live with the lies anymore, so she became saved by Conservatism. I don't know who she was and I don't really care: she could have been someone interviewed by Keith Olbermann about how they couldn't live with the lies of being a Conservative. The sincerity was the same.

This isn't mathematics where only one answer is possible, this is people-stuff where answers are neither neat nor permanent.

Advance the Mask, Again

NPR's All Things Considered broadcast a nice piece this afternoon on the history of the Lone Ranger, and you can read about it, and listen to it, here...

This connects with my previous post that began playing with music and soon went down another trail to the Ranger and the goodness of doing good.

Because I still stand by that post, I'll disagree somewhat with the article's quote from Professor Gary Hoppenstander, who says "I think what (the mask) plays into is the audience's sense of escapist fantasy. The idea is that in their imagination, in their dreams, all they need to do is don their own mask, and they, too could have these grand and exciting adventures."

Yes, that's true, but there's probably a lot more going on. Michael Chabon notes some of it in the NPR article.

Regarding the mask again -- there's a lot of thought put into what the mask looks like to others: in the Ranger's case, for instance, he's seen as just another outlaw. In Batman's case he's seen as the nightmare of criminals. I'm wondering now, not what is seen on the outside, but how is the outside seen from the inside of a mask. Does the world look different when no one knows who you are...?

Give Him His Space

Before I forget...

Happy Birthday to Space Godzilla who was borne to American audiences in January, 1999. Perhaps we'll get a decent print of your movie here some time -this- year!

Concession Stands

"It is going to take a person who is himself an innovator like myself … to be able to go head to head with Barack Obama and win." said Mitt Romney before New Hampshire's primary.

He's made past comparisons of himself and his candidacy to Obama's, and his speech last night after his second-place finish shows he's been working on the style, but has not come close to the substance, of Obama. Romney said:

"They've heard Washington say that they're going to stop illegal immigration, but they haven't.

They've heard Washington say that they're going to get us off of our dependence on foreign oil, but they haven't.

They've heard Washington say they're going to get people insured that don't have health insurance, but they haven't. They've heard Washington say they're going to improve our schools and make them the best in the world, but they haven't.

They've heard Washington say that they're going to protect our jobs and make sure that the jobs that we have are the best in the world, but they haven't done that.

They've heard Washington say they're going to balance the budget, but they haven't done that.

They've heard Washington say that they're going to make life easier on the middle class and reduce the burdens on the middle class, but they haven't. "

Whereas Obama's New Hampshire concession speech went like this:

"But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.

Yes we can.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.

Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights.

Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can.

And so tomorrow, as we take this campaign South and West; as we learn that the struggles of the textile worker in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in America's story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea -- Yes. We. Can."

Can we see the difference between the two?

Yes we can...