Miss Cobbett

When Designers Draw

I don't know if you've ever known any graphic designers (what we now call 'print designers'), but if you have...you may have noticed how limited they were in the concept department.

What they are very good at is ingesting a current 'look' or trend, and regurgitating it in a way that is pleasing to the eye. For a graphic designer, originality and unusualness are liabilities to be excised, like superfluous fingers. Or at least kept well-concealed.

I can't imagine that designers really set out to destroy their originality. What is more likely is that they don't have much to begin with. If they did, they'd be shunted off to fine arts, or poetry, or even computer programming. The graphic designer's drive is not toward creativity per se, but rather toward mechanical repetition. This is a person who likes to cut-and-paste, draw straight lines with a ruler or graphic-layout program, or show five different ways of putting a pink square and a blue square next to a block of grey text. It is not someone who enjoys challenges and risks: no wild-boar hunting, please, or standup comedy, or Ironman triathlons.

Another characteristic of these folks, doubtless related, is their lack of structural visualization. They can't draw in three dimensions. Ask them to draw faces, and they'll give you childish mugshots. Usually the head-on, sometimes a side view, but never the three-quarters shot that people routinely see in life and movies. I suggest that this two-dimensionality of vision helps make them successful as layout artists.

What they are not any good at is illustration. The annoying Maira Kalman has carved out an huge career for herself as a colorful primitivist, mainly because there aren't too many people using gouache anymore. Back in the 40s and 50s there were (Lucille Corcos, M. Slasek), but those old-time gouache illustrators were precise in their line. They didn't produce stuff that made one think of finger painting. This Kalman illustration below, from the New York Times, is one of the best things she's ever done, but it also shows up all her faults. Usually her excuse is that she isn't trying to draw well, but that doesn't hold up here. It's a nice little drawing of Kitty Carlisle, and Kalman put some work into it. But what happened to the background? Is the floor curved, or what? What's happening with the drinks table? Kalman isn't denying perspective. She just can't do it. 

 

Elena Kagan Wears a Wig

From her appearance, it must be due to an endocrinological disorder. You often see women with this problem: very thin hair up on top, so that you can see their scalp clearly. Sometimes so much is gone that from a distance they appear partially bald. Usually these women are middle-aged and overweight, but that may have no connection to the alopecia. It could be just be that fat, unkempt women with the condition are less likely to try to hide it. Kagan of course has to do something about it. She can't go around looking as though she's a crazy baglady or having chemo. And so the hairpiece. But what kind of hairpiece should she get?  She could get a big wig in a shoulder-length 'do, but that would require a lot of upkeep. And people would inevitably ask why she always had the same hair style. But if you're not a fashion plate to begin with, people won't be after you to try a stunning new coif, so you might as well go minimal. And think of the time you'll save!

What is the name for this mental condition?

I am not a big fan of the Chuck Jones cartoons featuring Roadrunner (née Beep-Beep the Roadrunner). Too pure and abstract for me. But they are so useful when I need to illustrate a point. 

Let's say you showed a friend a Roadrunner cartoon for the first time, and this person was not only unfamiliar with Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, he didn't know about the formal properties of cartoon violence. So when the crate of Acme dynamite goes off in Coyote's face, your friend is seriously upset. Upset at the violence, concerned for the Coyote, and then really annoyed and confused when the Coyote reappears, good as new, in the next scene.

Your friend isn't stupid, he just can't get his mind around an unfamiliar idiom. 

I just had this happen with two acquaintances of mine. Both are "older men," though I'm not sure that has anything to do with it. 

One of them tried to watch the film Withnail and I, highly recommended by me. He couldn't get through it. The squalor and desperation were too much like real life. The cartoon aspect of it all was beyond him. 

The other guy recently read a short one-act I wrote a while back, and took great exception to its style and subject matter. The little play is a madcap farce, pure and utter silliness. One of the characters pretends he has no feet, and spends all his time zipping about in a wheelchair while wearing a fireman's helmet. It was all too much for my acquaintance, who was appalled at the mutilation element. Weirdly, he interpreted my absurd dialogue as an attempt to imitate Harold Pinter.

Mistaking cartoons and farces for depictions of real life, or otherwise failing to grasp a common and obvious idiom: what do you call this condition? Idiocy, you want to say. But let me be serious for once.

Alex Cockburn on the Obsessive, Deranged Mr. Rich

Why I love The Nation: they hold onto the wild and woolly Alex Cockburn, and he keeps the bar set high in the field of honest, freethinking debate. Here in the March 22 issue he tears into Frank Rich et al. for their doctrinaire trashing of the Tea Partiers: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/cockburn

(It occurs to me that you may not be able to read the whole thing, depending on how fond of you their website is. But not to worry. I'll just copy and paste the whole damn thing below. It's old news, and they won't mind. Sure.)

Move Over, Axis of Evil

Welcome, "Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged." This was the title of a hysterical column, vibrant with class hatred, by Frank Rich in the February 28 New York Times. Rich shrieked that "the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air." The militias are on the rampage. The sky is dark with the threat of Piper Cherokees being flown by populists into government buildings. To match the virulence of Rich's language you'd have to go back to the tirades flung at David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, some eighty of whom were burned alive outside Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993, on orders from Attorney General Janet Reno. It was this crime that Timothy McVeigh said he was avenging when he blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City exactly two years later.

As one might expect, Rich had a handy citation to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which plumps up its $170 million-plus asset portfolio with regular alarums about the rise of "hate groups," defined as those "with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people," which pretty much covers the whole ballpark. That's the same SPLC whose Mark Potok sensitively said after the incineration of the Branch Davidians and children, "The antigovernment movement, the militia, hate groups are absolutely going to get a boost out of this, and I think it's really a tragedy for that reason."
This brings us to the American class system, which Russell Baker once beautifully defined in terms of access to lawyers. Having a lawyer on permanent retainer "is the very essence of richness." That's the upper class. Those in the upper middle class hire a lawyer when they feel they need one to handle wills, contracts and so forth. Middle-class people know they ought to employ lawyers but can't quite afford them. Members of the lower middle class believe they can defend themselves better than any lawyer, and can't afford one anyway. To lower-class folk, public defender and prosecutor look identical.

The lower middle class is what we're focusing on here, the people who own auto repair shops, bakeries, bicycle shops, plant stores, dry cleaners, fish stores and all the other small businesses across America--in sum, the "petite bourgeoisie," stomped by regulators and bureaucrats while the big fry get zoning variances and special clause exemptions. The left always hated the petite bourgeoisie because it wasn't the urban proletariat and thus the designated agent of revolutionary change. Today's left no longer believes in revolutionary change but despises the petite bourgeoisie out of inherited political disposition and class outlook. Ninety-five percent of all the firms in America hire fewer than ten people. There's your petite bourgeoisie for you: not frightening, not terrifying and in fact quite indispensable.
And the petit bourgeois are legitimately pissed off. Whatever backwash they got from the stimulus often wasn't readily apparent. They can't afford health plans for themselves or their employees. They're three or four payrolls away from the edge of the cliff, and when they read about trillions in handouts for bankers, trillions in impending deficits, blueprints for green energy regs that will put them out of business, what they hear is the ocean surge pounding away at the bottom of that same cliff.

The conventional parties have nothing to offer them. The left disdains them. But here comes the tea party, whose spirit is very well caught by David Barstow, the Times reporter whose long piece on February 16 prompted Rich's mad column. Rich refers to Barstow's "chilling, months-long investigation of the tea party movement," as though the reporter had gone undercover, watching Klan rituals through binoculars somewhere in a cow pasture. This is a silly mischaracterization of Barstow's perceptive and rather sympathetic account of tea partydom, in which he significantly doesn't quote the SPLC but pops in, right at the end, an obligatory quote from an Idaho lawyer who sued the Hayden Lake Aryans into extinction.

Of course, there are many flavors in the tea party blend. There are nuts and opportunists, as in any political formation. You can trace some of its ideology back to the nineteenth-century Know-Nothings, a typical platform of which, in 1841, called for extending the term of naturalization to twenty-one years, restricting public office to the native-born (there's your birther movement), keeping the Bible in schools and resisting "the encroachment of a foreign civil and spiritual power upon the institutions of our country." Back then this meant the Vatican; today it's Davos, Bilderberg, the UN, the IPCC.
At this point leftists invariably start quoting Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." They should put aside that snotty essay and reflect on their own dismal failures. Under the leadership of Obama--cheered into office by 99.9 percent of the left--and a Democratic Congress, we have a whole new war and no antiwar movement of any heft; a bailout for Wall Street; an awful health bill connived at by both parties; the prospect of loan guarantees for new nuclear energy plants; a huge hike in defense spending, particularly nuclear weapons; and, at least at the rhetorical level, an impending onslaught on Social Security. Constitutional abuses endorsed or instigated by the White House continue in a straight sequence from the Bush years.

Response from the left? No twitch in the morgue. The AFL-CIO was bought off from resistance to the health bill by getting relief on its Cadillac health plans. Because of alleged anthropologically prompted global warming, the green movement has sat on its hands, hopelessly split on nuclear power, whose real, baneful effects have been irrefutably demonstrated, starting with nuclear waste. There's been near total silence on the huge nuclear weapons budget boost (the largest for Los Alamos since 1944). Total silence on the Patriot Act, reauthorized February 27. What to do? Rally round the flag and scaremonger about the right, where's there's actual political ferment.

NOTES

The Frank Rich column referenced above.

The David Barstow article.

Diaries, flimsy notebooks, captions, nanzis

Last weekend I moved on from my flimsy spiral-bound Muji diary (no. 61, Oct 04 - Feb 05) to a hefty book bought at Green and Stone (no. 62, Feb 05 -) in December.

And you know what? I've scarcely written a damn thing in it. You have to be sitting down in The Troubadour Café for an hour, woolgathering and sorting out your life, to write in a book like this. (The Troubador, in Old Brompton Road, springs to mind because I visited there about a half-hour before I bought the diary in question.) This difficulty is not bad or unexpected. Diaries that are convenient for occasional jottings tend to fill up quickly with a lot of premier-cru crap that needs to be sifted and sorted. I usually carry a tiny notebook with me just for this purpose.

Big diaries are intended for more considered, refined work: long-form composition and blocking out comic strips. To use them properly you have to develop the habit of taking them to a bar or coffeehouse for a few hours a week, and focusing more on organizing your random thoughts than in simply generating them in the first place. (You can also do it at home or in a library or in an idle hour at work, but I find too many distractions in those places.) In this way the physical form of my diary actually shapes my thoughts and the outward form of my life. They emphasize finished, rounded thoughts—things that can be transmitted to other people—and commercial-style illustration rather than fleeting thoughts meaningful only to myself.

[Rosie Evitt phones. Perhaps we shall do something tomorrow, Monday, but looks as though the Met is out because aren't they closed Monday?]

But some of those fleeting thoughts—stuff in the flimsies—is precious and useful. It's tragic that a lot of it gets buried under the high noise ratio. Just looking through Book 61, I see I never culled out or developed most of my pensées and notes. A few of the comments on the TeenTime novel got typed out and now reside electronically in a big bin with hundreds of others, but most of the stuff in Book 61 hasn't been looked at since I wrote it. On page 20 (Nov. 10) I find a pensée that had no immediate practical application but needed to be written down so it wouldn't be lost forever. It's a good theme for a short-story or novel, but probably never will be because it is so forbiddingly subtle. Typing it out, I see the entry is also forbiddingly convoluted, almost to the point of inaccessibility...

Crazy/addlebrained/mentally deficient people who are otherwise of functional intelligence find ways of coping with the world...much as I go 'yes yes" and nod as my eyes glaze over and drift off. They talk about art & literature and people you've never heard of—maybe people who never existed. There was Therese Schroeder at Mesa Vista (talked abt great German lyric poet of whom I kd find no record later, there was Bill Lable (with his pseudo-scholarly digressions abt Tristan Tzara, and his Paris expatriate gallery of photos)—both deranged, Lable virtually illiterate. This method of coping is, I suspect just a more extreme and unsuccessful version of something we all do at times.

....and much of my diaries go like that. Boiled down to essence, it describes how crazy and feebleminded people pretend to have great intellectual interests, and this is a method of coping; and perhaps it's not a crazy-person thing at all, it's just common syndrome, and I've noticed it in crazy people because their affectations are incompetently assumed.

Will I ever use this pensée in a story or novel or piece of journalism? I don't know. There are too many other notions competing for attention.

Likewise with ideas for gag cartoons and comic strips. I've done lots of both, but never pursued either one seriously—I mean to the point of devoting myself to THIS THING and nothing but—because neither one seemed to have real depth of possibilities. They're just narrow forms of commercial art, often clever and memorable, like an ad slogan or visual, but by nature derivative and parodistic. Any new strip, any idea for a single-panel gag drawing, is a parody of and commentary upon the ones that have gone before. (An apparent exception, the graphic novel, is really just illustrated literature and thus not an exception at all.) Nevertheless, I intend to get a strip or series of cartoons launched, at least in a small way, in the near future, just to keep my drawing hand in shape. And since I'm always thinking along those lines, I've built up a ton of scribbles and captions in my notebooks. New Yorkerish captions, and notions for strips that are inevitably influenced by the kind of thing that have populated the alternative weeklies for the last fifteen years. Stuff like:

SURF GIRL. Like Harry Haengisen's PENNY in style and line, only it's only three panels. A teenage girl strip, with no attempt whatsoever to reflect the contemporary pop culture. The girl never goes surfing but she is always dressed in a neoprene wet suit. A very nice neoprene wet suit. Nobody comments on it.

NANZI. A one-off or short-run, where Nancy and Aunt Fritzi and Sluggo are all in a cartoony Nazi Germany circa 1936. You see the possibilities immediately—Sluggo as a disused stormtrooper, Nanzi and Fritzi always trying to do the right thing (for the Fatherland).

The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost

Link to Ward Churchill fansite

Like Ward Churchill, John Walker Lindh, Courtney Love and many other middle-class American kids, I acquired a great admiration for Mr. Malcolm X when I was growing up. So when I see that a controversial new work by Prof. Churchill is called On the Logic of Roosting Chickens, I jump to congenial conclusions. The main essay, linked above, is not rhetorical perfection. Like most academics, Churchill has a clanking, infelicitous prose style. His writing has a touch of paranoid rant. It is fueled by animosity toward the sort of caricatured Americans you see in sitcoms and commercials. Its imagery is hackneyed. It pays the usual obeisance to the Holocaust popcult, drawing tortured comparisons between dead Iraqis and all those trillions of Jews and Gypsies killed by Capt. Eichmann's magical ray gun.

But it has its points and tells me lots that (even) I did not know.

No Politics or World Events, Please!

At some point many years ago there was a sort of Bretton Woods for journalists, whereat they resolved that the only permissible matters for discussion would be Politics (by which they mean the Tweedledum-Tweedledee kind practiced in America and most other 'Western Democracies') and Diplomacy (a kind of international Politics and identical to it inasmuch as the point of the exercise is not really to solve anything or bring an end to a discussion, but is rather to keep the whole silly game going).

This, then, is what passes for serious news in the Serious News portion of your newspaper. The rest of the paper is filled out with Human Interest Stories (cripples, beggars, and others the reader is expected to feel superior to), Sports (don't ask me), and Entertainment (press relations and puffery for the movie and broadcast business).

And of course most people don't read real newspapers anymore anyway. They get their news from blogs and online papers, Fox News, CNN, and chat shows. What do you suppose are the items of vital interest on these newer media outlets? See paragraph one.