The Fate of the Artist

How to get into the movie business

2009-07-13T01:18:00.009-05:00

don Murphy, movie producer, told me about this a year and a half ago and I've been waiting for something to come of it. There used to be a character who posted regularly in my comments here, who uses the monicker 'Hemlockman'. You could describe him as brash. In one of his posts here took a pop at the From Hell movie. I can't remember his words exactly , but they were probably something witty along the lines of "it was a pile of shit." Right away he set off one of Don Murphy's Google alerts, and the movie producer turned up forthwith in my comments section. What ensued is by now a well rehearsed press release:

REUTERS: Web wrangle leads to movie deal for novelist Sun Jul 12, 2009
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Producers Don Murphy and John Wells have teamed up to option "The Flock," a novel by James Robert Smith. The book tells the story of a group of highly intelligent giant prehistoric birds discovered in the Florida Everglades who are intent on protecting their ancient home when faced with encroachment by theme park developers.
Murphy ("Transformers") discovered Smith and his book by chance. Murphy was on the blog of Eddie Campbell, the artist of "From Hell," an Alan Moore graphic novel whose big-screen translation was produced by Murphy.
Smith was posting comments critical of the film, putting Murphy on the defensive. Eager to find out more about the poster, Murphy discovered Smith had written a book. He quickly ordered it, expecting to hate it and ready to trash it. To his surprise, he fell for it...

So there you go. That's one way to sell your book to Hollywood. Hemlockman doesn't comment here any more, not since he repeated some mean hearsay about Will Eisner. I asked him to delete it and he didn't, so I deleted it myself. Shortly after, I noticed he was trying to get rid of all his Eddie Campbell books under the header "I'm stuck with them." He closed with a cover of Bacchus #1 and the words "Oh well, wine makes me puke anyway." May your movie do well, James.

Speaking of the comments and blog readers, I always preferred Blogger to Livejournal and the rest because I don't have time for this 'friends' business. If you bump into me in a bar, we'll buy each other a drink and solve all the world's problems and we can declare ourselves to be 'friends.' I have a similar dislike of the word 'fans.' A con organizer referred to my 'fans' and I said, "Eddie Campbell doesn't have 'fans,' he has 'readers.' " Well recently they introduced to blogger this business about 'followers'. I haven't looked into it and I don't wish to, and I resent now having to concern myself with how many 'followers' a guy in my position ought to have and whether I'm running behind in that department. However, when I logged in this morning I noticed that while I had 64 followers yesterday, today I'm down to 63. One of them has decided to cancel his or her followship and now I'm forced to spend time fretting about whether it was something i said.

If I were a much bigger man, I'd have 'disciples.' Oscar Wilde I think it was who wrote: "Every great man has his disciples. But why is it always Judas who writes the biography?"

2009-07-12T18:01:00.005-05:00

artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. - William S. Burroughs

Another of the first set of the Bent Books bookmarks, 2004.

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Drunk badger disrupts traffic
BERLIN (Reuters) – A badger in Germany got so drunk on over-ripe cherries it staggered into the middle of a road and refused to budge, police said on Wednesday. A motorist called police near the central town of Goslar to report a dead badger on a road -- only for officers to turn up and discover the animal alive and well, but drunk.

2009-07-11T21:32:00.006-05:00

any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae." - Kurt Vonnegut

One of the first set of the Bent Books bookmarks, 2004.

2009-07-10T00:34:00.001-05:00

im reading a book about David Malangi, the late Australian Aboriginal painter. He achieved a degree of fame when the design of one of his paintings was used on the Australian one-dollar note. This was when the currency switched from the pound to the dollar in 1966 (reverse of the note, lower left); the note has been defunct since 1984, when it was replaced by a coin.

Not thinking that it was the work of a living artist, the Reserve Bank had neglected to ask permission and was caught in a state of embarrassment. It retroactively sent him a thousand dollar cheque, with which the artist bought a fishing boat, and had a special medallion minted, which the artist showed proudly to visitors. He was thereafter often requested to paint the image anew. I have at least dozen versions in various books on my shelf, each of which is different from the others. A quick google immediately throws up two more examples which are both new to me:

I remember being quite fascinated with the design of the dollar bill when I first visited Australia, and roughly copied the turtle from it into one of my pages in Little Italy. This and the other parts of the design were presumably lifted from cave paintings, since no artist claimed them, though, in my experience, artists are too busy spending money, when they are lucky enough to get hold of the stuff, to notice what's printed on it.

Another reason the note fascinated me endlessly was that there was a vertical strip of metal embedded in the paper, in the middle just around the point of the kangaroo's nose (not visible in any scan that I have looked at). But it was never in exactly the same place twice. You could play races with it. The game went like this . You would challenge another person to a kangaroo race, usually with money you had both just received by way of change in a bar or whatever, since it would be unfair to store a sure winner in your wallet. The kangaroo on your note may be anywhere from just about to cross the finish line to having the tip of his nose well over it. For a 'photo finish', a close thing, you would have to hold the notes over each other up against the light. Naturally the winner kept both notes. I do not store such useless information in my noodle, but you could probably get a whole beer for a buck back then.

2009-07-09T04:28:00.002-05:00

this beastie is the Snooter, as seen on the first page of my 2002 book, After the Snooter.

Someone in comments recently drew my attention to a 'snouter' that existed long before mine, and I apologise that i can't find the comment at present. I must say I had never seen or heard of this peculiar creature before and I like to think that its resemblance to my own is one of those wonderful coincidences that happen from time to time in the creative business. It's perhaps fortunate that the real point of my story was the human version in the suit, which comes about after the insect flies in the window of the famous wealthy playboy, Bruce Wa*ne (this story was full of dodgy coincidences). I said 'existed' above, but in fact this earlier 'snouter' was a fake:

The Rhinogradentia (also called snouters, Rhinogrades, or Nasobames) are a fictitious mammal order documented by the equally fictitious German naturalist Harald Stümpke. The order's most remarkable characteristic was the Nasorium, an organ derived from the ancestral species' nose, which had variously evolved to fulfill every conceivable function.
The snouters were discovered on the main island of Hiddudify in 1941 by the Swedish explorer Einar Pettersson-Skämtkvist. Unfortunately, as a consequence of atomic bomb testing, the islands sank suddenly into the ocean in the late 1950s. Thus perished all traces of the snouters, their unique ecosystem, and all the world's specialists on that intriguing subject — who happened to be holding their congress there at the time.

You can find online pictures of these little chaps, such as stevelewalready's Flickr set, sourced from Stümpke's book, from which this comes:

I think the following photo was taken in the Folklore Section of the Haus der Natur in Salzburg, Austria, by 'curious expeditions' who have a whole Fickr set of such taxidermied curiosities.

My own Snooter recently contrived to appear on film, as hinted at in my previous post on this subject. Following are a couple of stills from it, which will have to keep us for the time being. Campbell has just been woken up in the middle of the night by an odd buzzing sound...

After the Snooter will of course be contained in Alec: "The Years Have Pants," where it will have two pages that weren't included in the original printing. One of these, titled Bastards Under the sea has never been in print before. It was half-finished at the time of going to press in 2002 and I've finished it for this edition. That'll be coming in September and is in Diamond's ordering catalogue right now. And you can click the 'alec2' label below for more excerpts and previews, and when you get to the end of that selection, look for the 'alec1' label.

2009-07-08T00:08:00.001-05:00

long interview with me has just been posted at Forbidden Planet International. Pádraig Ó Méalóid was the interviewer. I love the way my mailing account at the Bigpond site renders his name:

=?iso-8859-1?Q?P=E1draig_=D3

However, it arrives correctly in my inbox. And given my rant about internet browsers the other day, you may have just read two lots of gibberish instead of one. Here's a cartoon I sent to him, recalling a snippet of conversation with Hayley Campbell:

In my neighbourhood

2009-07-07T00:27:00.001-05:00

the family upstairs were moving their furniture around all through the night. I had words with them on this matter several months ago. In fact they have already been evicted once. But they are a disreputable bunch of scoundrels. Look at the malevolent look in this one's eye.

The above photo and the following both happened during the period I had stopped blogging:

Dame Edna launches cosmetic line-16th January 2009,
The colours of the 17 products in the range are inspired by Dame Edna, with titles like Kanga Rouge and Possum Nose Pink.
“The colour on my eyes is Varicose Violet and it’s inspired by my mother’s legs,” Dame Edna said.

No animals were harmed in the making of this blog. All creatures of the woods were released back where they belong.

2009-07-06T00:24:00.001-05:00

it's turned cold down here in the southern hemisphere. Here's a photo of a pair of jeans drying under the fan heater on the wall. You will notice that two cats have found a warm place to sit, one on each jean. I like the way cats' brains work.

Here's a cat in After the Snooter. It has been caught short, on the wrong side of the door.

Knowing the wrongness of fouling the carpet, it manages to stack its poo vertically against the door.

I like the way a cat presents its work for view:

The electric light in the bathroom failed over the weekend. The wife of my bosom gets up so early that she's been showering in the dark at both ends of the day, and it's not something easily done by candlelight. She says she hasn't seen herself for three days.

2009-07-05T00:32:00.010-05:00

wee Hayley Campbell has just had a sojourn on the isle of Skye. Here's my little piece of it:

That's a cask strength special (with the top already knocked off it, as you can see.) Here's Hayley herself:

Isn't that the most beautiful sight ever? And the girl's not a bad looker either.
This is how she looks in one of the previously unpublished pages in "The Years have Pants"

2009-07-04T01:29:00.015-05:00

since I've been missing from my blog here for a number of weeks, I thought i should clear out the drafts folder, where I find this scan of a drawing by the young Hans Holbein, left over form a series of four posts I wrote on the subject of Holbein's marginal additions to The Praise of Folly by Erasmus of Rotterdam (1515)

There's a superb overview of Holbein's most important graphic works, his three treatments of the Dance of Death. But it's much more than that. It traces all the editions and copies, showing complete versions of each. This is a truly remarkable resource which can absorb the historian of graphic art for hours. For example here's an sample woodcut from each of four series out of the seventeen collected in their entirety. I've picked the fighting soldier panel in case some of my younger readers might get bored. Pretend it's a zombie wars flip-book or something:

1.Holbein, 1525:
2. Hollar, 1651:
3. Deuchar, 1788:
4: Bechstein, 1831:
A note to any of those younger readers still hanging about after the pictures finished. We're not looking at cases of artists 'ripping off' another artist. there was a time, long ago, before you were born, when if you wanted a copy of something, you couldn't just scan it. Pictures in books were printed from engraved woodblocks, which would wear out after much use. Thus fifty years later, if a reprint of the book was required, it would be necessary to hire another artist to hand-copy the whole job. And each successive artist copying the same images would be likely to add his own touches. He may also not have had access to the earliest version and have worked from an intermediary copy. It was akin to a shakespearean play, which would have to be restaged and performed anew for each generation. The linked site gives a scholarly assessment of the likely sources of each version. Regarding the panel of the soldier: "Variations: Birckmann has equipped Death with a gigantic arrow instead of a bone; Death doesn't have a shield, but grabs the soldier; Death has placed the hourglass on one of the fallen soldiers. These changes are copied by Valvasor, Hollar and Deuchar. Rubens finishes the drawing of the bone; Death raises his arm, so one can see the face; Death has a nose. These changes are copied by Mechel." The set by Rubens, one of his earliest works, I have never seen before, and in fact it was only discovered in a sketchbook in Amsterdam in the 1970s. These were discovered to be the main source-artwork for the version of the book already known to have been engraved by Mechel.
another note: the process of copying involved pencilling the image onto a woodblock which would then be engraved. In its simplest form, ie not getting into complications by using a mirror, this would leave the image reversed after printing from the block. Thus, one of the images above had to be flipped in photoshop to make it face the same way as the others.

The Holbein section is part of a bigger project of which this is the site map, Lubeck's Dance of Death, dealing with just about all the known information on the subject, of which the Holbein book is but one example. Martin Hagstrøm appears to be the author of the project, which really is colossal, and of inestimable value to anyone curious about the tradition of the Danse macabre.

Watch out for Eddie Campbell's The Dance of Lifey Death, contained in Alec: "The Years have Pants".

And click the 'alec2' label below for many more posts on the subject and excerpts from the big book. When you get to the end of that selection you'll find an 'alec1' label. Click that for more.

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Would you pledge your soul as loan collateral?
RIGA (Reuters) – Ready to give your soul for a loan in these difficult economic times? In Latvia, where the crisis has raged more than in the rest of the European Union, you can. Such a deal is being offered by the Kontora loan company, whose public face is Viktor Mirosiichenko, 34. Clients have to sign a contract, with the words "Agreement" in bold letters at the top. The client agrees to the collateral, "that is, my immortal soul." "If they don't give it back, what can you do? They won't have a soul, that's all," he told Reuters in a basement office, with one desk, a computer and three chairs.

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2009-07-03T00:00:00.001-05:00

if you are intrigued by the zipatone style I wrote about yesterday, then I should mention that I pulled out the sheets of the stuff for the new book, "The Years Have Pants", the 35 page addition which brings Alec up to date (and gives its name to the whole collection). Here's a panel from it:

I read somewhere on the net yesterday that“Top Shelf has wisely kept From Hell in print as a nice affordable softcover. At 576 pages, it's longer than either the Bacchus book or the Alec book would be.” Note that the Alec book is in fact 64 pages longer than From Hell, with a total of 640 printed pages, and goes for the same price, 35 bucks soft and 50 bucks hard.
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Housewife first up for 100-day "live sculpture"
"One & Other" is a work devised by sculptor Antony Gormley for Trafalgar square's empty plinth, now a platform for temporary works of art. The first of 2,400 people to feature in Gormley's work is Rachel Wardell, a 35-year-old housewife and mother-of-two. "I wanted to be able to represent normal, everyday stay-at-home mums who aren't normally a feature of major artworks -- to show my kids now, and when they're older, that you can do, and be part of anything, no matter how ordinary you are or feel," Wardell said. She will appear on the plinth at 9 a.m. on Monday, July 6, and will be followed at 10 a.m. by Jason Clark, a 41-year-old nurse from Brighton.
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WELLINGTON (Reuters) – Air New Zealand has hit on a novel way to make sure even the most jaded flyers keep their eyes glued on its flight safety briefing. The national carrier's safety video for domestic services on its Boeing Co 737 planes show pilot and cabin crew dressed only in body paint.

2009-07-02T00:54:00.008-05:00

a couple of weeks back, Alex Holden, an artist worthy of our attention, wrote on his blog about the elusive Zipatone:
Zip A Tone has been on my mind because I recently received "Two Eyes Of The Beautiful" from Ryan Cecil Smith, who is currently living in Japan. Some equivalent of Zip A Tone (in virtually unlimited variety) is still widely available in Japan, despite the advent of the computer. "Two Eyes of the Beautiful" is all about Zip A Tone, from simple dot patterns, to trees and foliage......even buildings.
I recalled this because in the course of scanning my Ace Rock'n'Roll Club pages as part of the routine digitalization of my whole back catalogue, I came across a particular story where I set myself the challenge of making all the pictures as much out of tone as possible, with supporting ink-work kept to a minimum, even excluding panel borders. This is a panel from that story, drawn in Feb 1979, thirty years ago.

(click for a close-up)
I was able to get some tonal gradation using superimposition and overlap, creating a sense of light and atmosphere, but this approach proved too expensive and time-consuming. I carried a much simpler version of it over into the Alec Book. The white lines in the picture are a result of shrinkage of the material, which happens over time. I'd probably want to mend those if i ever reprint the story.
For more on the subject, click the label.

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I'm told that the event I discussed here last thursday went well, and Amos's latest posters sport nifty slogans such as:
"YOU'RE GOING TO HELL AND THE DEVIL IS MY BITCH" and "I KNEW GOD WAS A WOMAN, BUT I DIDN'T KNOW SHE WAS BLACK!"

2009-07-01T21:07:00.008-05:00

once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonably good understanding."-Jonathan Swift.

I see Mr Bent of Bent Books in Brisbane still hasn't put our 2008 set of bookmarks up with the others, so here's a first showing of this one. I expect he has had more important things to think about, what with the recession. Follow the label below for some more.

2009-06-30T01:23:00.001-05:00

i was in town today to visit the dentist, due to the mishap mentioned here on Saturday. I popped into Folio Books, where my pal mr j works. he showed me all sorts of wonderful things. I bought a book which I'll write about later, but right now I'll give a quick mention to the one I didn't buy as it is a recent release and relevant to yesterday's celebration of James Kochalka. James is one of the fifty "artists, illustrators, designers," featured in

An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration from the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators and Designers (Paperback) There are six pages devoted to Kochalka's sketchbook diaries, including some close up photos of the objects, which invite us to see them in quite a different way from his online digitally-colored scans.

It was released in December 2008 and Amazon included it in their best books of that month.

And since I haven't mentioned my pal mr j here in quite some time, you can see what he's been up to on his blog, ON THE MAT, which is all about his wrestling cartoons, of which this is a sample:

Meanwhile, there is abeautiful big white whale that we love to watch for along our coast here.

Migaloo, a 14-meter, 35-ton pure white humpback whale, has been spotted off the New South Wales mid-north coast and could soon be in Queensland waters, where hefty new fines apply to anyone who gets too close.
"Migaloo has been declared a special-interest whale, granting him more space to swim up the Queensland coast," Ms Jones said.
The first reported sighting of Migaloo was in 1991 off Byron Bay, when he was three to five years old.
His unusual colouring makes him easy to track.
In winter humpbacks migrate north to warm tropical waters, where females give birth. 2005 PHOTO AT THE LINK

How it lo0gs

2009-06-30T00:26:00.002-05:00

I expect most people who read this are just swiftly taking in the information and don't give much of a thought to how the page looks. As somebody for whom making a living depends on attracting the eye of potential readers, I naturally give a great deal of thought to how this page looks. But trying to design a blog page for the internet in the old-fashioned print sense is folly. In the past i have relied on readers to tell me when something hasn't worked well on one of the variant browsers, so today when the wife of my bosom mentioned that my blog has become unreadable (on her monitor at work), it behooved me to do something about it. "Do you mean I'm using too many big words?" "No, I mean you're putting them all on top of each other."

This is how it looks to me on safari. Maybe you're familiar with it and maybe you're seeing it like this for the very first time. I'm particulary fond of the cunning motif of having the opening 'capital' overlap the header.

Firefox isn't too bad. It loses the neat drop shadow under the title lettering, but otherwise is faithful:

Opera picks up the drop shadow but does this odd thing with the sidebar, amputating it and shoving it as far east as it can go.

Explorer centers everything, loses the title altogether and puts the sidebar at the bottom:

That sound of a pencil hitting the floor, a stamping out of the room and a slamming of the door. That's me giving up and going to the pub.

2009-06-29T15:47:00.005-05:00

that Colman G. has made me laugh again in comments by introducing me to my new favourite site, 'There, I fixed it.'
Observe the 'replacement bumper' on the Toyota:

He says it reminds him of some of the stuff in The Fate of the Artist. He will be pleased to know there is a whole lot more of it in The Years Have Pants .

____ochalka, yet again

2009-06-29T00:02:00.006-05:00

k

I've been reading the most recent of the American Elf books published by Topshelf and it occurred to me that the sketchbook diaries, as he's been calling his daily strip, recently marked its tenth year. This was the very first cartoon:
And here's the most recent as I write this:

The whole archive is available at his site, linked above, but you should do like I did and go out and buy it.

Actually, It was more complicated than that. I was on my way to get one last week after my pal White reminded me of it, but then he phoned me to say, 'Oi, you haven't gone and bought that yet, have you, no? because I accidentally bought two." He was going to write it off as stupidity tax, but i was there to take it off his hands, so all's well that ends. While we were having lunch, Whitey reminded me that he was one of the first, if not THE first, to publish a selection from the Kochalka dailies, way back in DeeVee around ten years ago. Who would have thought then that we were looking at the first step in such a significant piece of work? At the same time he was serializing my How to be an Artist. Who would have thought there was all that happening in a quiet little book like Deevee? It goes to show you never can tell. You need to pay attention

speaking of Michael Jackson:

Michael Jackson's death sparks bus brawl
MIAMI (Reuters) – A fight broke out on a Florida bus when news of Michael Jackson's death sparked debate over whether he should be remembered as a great musical talent. The bus was moving through the city of North Lauderdale on Thursday when passenger James Kiernan received a text message about Jackson's death on his cell phone, and he read it aloud on the bus. The unidentified bus driver opined that "Michael Jackson should have been in jail long ago," prompting Kiernan, 60, to retort that "the world just lost a great musical talent." The last remark enraged another passenger, Henry Wideman, who started a swearing match with Kiernan, then pulled out a knife... .

my previous Kochalka post

2009-06-28T17:57:00.010-05:00

in the early 1980s I was part of a lively scene in London based around a small-press outlet called Fast Fiction, which was really an agglomeration of like minds. The early chapters of my book How to be an Artist are my account of that milieu and you can find that in the big Alec book I previewed yesterday. I'm always pleased when see one of my confreres from those days doing well, as I did a couple of months back in Creative Characters (the faces behind the fonts) issue #21 April 2009. I'm speaking of the excellent interview with Rian Hughes.

Typefaces. Are you a Space Cadet or an English Grotesque?
I’m a Slack Casual. With contextual ligatures.

Most of your typefaces capture a certain style or atmosphere without copying a specific model. Do you feel you’re a “character actor”, in some way? Which of your typefaces come closest to being “you”?
Ministry is the only straight revival I’ve done, though I’m working on a new, unrelated, American revival. Rather than pastiche, I’d say “essence” is what I’m after. Paralucent and Blackcurrant are very “me”. The rough wood types are less “me”, but have been hugely popular. Give the public what it craves!

That's Blackcurrant above left. If you think you don't know Rian's work, I'm sure you've seen it without realizing:

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Distraction of the day: those amusing Japanese
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2009-06-27T23:05:00.008-05:00

At last the big ALEC OMNIBUS, now titled "The Years have Pants", has gone off to the printer, and will return in all its glory in time for its September appearance in the stores. That title is a quotation of the title and first line of a poem by William Ernest Moenkhaus, a bright light of the 1920s who died much too young. The book has a striking cover designed by Eric Skillman who has been getting a lot of attention for his work on the Criterion Collection DVDs. Here's a recent interview with him.

Here are brief glimpses of one of the new stories that I've drawn specially:

This particular story is a five- pager and is a sampling of the 45 pages of new or previously unpublished material included in the book. If all you've seen previously are the four books I published myself between 2000 and 2002, then this volume has 90 pages altogether that you won't have seen before.

It's being solicited right now in the Diamond Previews catalogue. Make sure your local outlet knows about it!

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In the meantime, I chipped my back tooth this morning on the wife's well-cooked bacon and no dentist is open till Monday. "Worries, worries, pile up in my head. Woe is me i should have stayed in bed," in the words of Problems by F and B Bryant , as sung by the Everly Brothers in 1958 (and heard here in rare demo).

2009-06-26T22:39:00.005-05:00

the problem with having a standing google alert for my name is that I've got to be constantly reminded of this bastard who is doing more with his life than I've been doing lately:

If only I could cut a swaggering figure in the world like this one here:

Instead, I am this indigestible lump:

The Inkstuds interrogation is here. If you think that's cranky, just you come round here and I'll give you cranky!

Men At Work's Down under 'ripped off' Kookaburra
ONE'S a pub classic, belted out at top volume by tipsy patrons around closing time. The other is a more dignified affair, a favourite of youth choirs and choral groups. Now, as unlikely as it seems, the classic children's ditty Kookaburra and the Men At Work hit Down Under are set to go head-to-head in court amid accusations part of the rock anthem is a rip off.

These idiots can bugger off. I'm sure the lady who wrote the old song, who i think died in 1988 was probably quite happy to see it quoted like that, an indication that it's part of the musical currency of her country. It's when Art becomes the property of accountants that this happens. But having said that, I cannot say that some of my fellow artists are not idiots too.

2009-06-25T18:44:00.010-05:00

i meant to write about the full length documentary film PROCEED AND BE BOLD much earlier than this, but I’ve been in a funk for a couple of months. I’m jolted out of it suddenly by noticing that there’s a connected exhibition in Chicago that only has a couple more days to run:

QUIT YOUR JOB AND BECOME AN ARTIST- Closing Party Saturday, June 27 from 12pm-6pm. Free and Open to the Public. Please join us at the Cash-and-Carry Poster Sale, where you will be able to meet Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. and purchase posters at $15 each. Posters can be signed by the artist. Enjoy beverages by Peroni and music from the Manley Diehl at this free event.

Amos Paul Kennedy is a very personable fellow who creates letterpress posters of immediate appeal, using type and colour in support of mottoes that are variously serious, utilitarian and mischievous.

The rise of letterpress as a small scale artform is a current that up till now has not caught my eye and I'm finding it full of charm and interest. The documentary, made by Brown Finch Films captures the spirit of this movement in flight, with several international practitioners commenting on Kennedy's work. You can view excerpts at the link.

Amos is particularly good at the Art of gentle disruption- see the sequence where he is called in by the university police to explain his provocative postcards and he takes his mascot lawn jockey along with him. “He enjoys being a social irritant,” says one commentator. As the film proceeds we see him obtaining an old machine and collecting printers’ unwanted type here and there. Intercut through the film, director Laura Zinger shows clips from an old black and white 1950s documentary on the history of printing. At one stage I suddenly realized she had just cut in a couple of shots of Amos in mock old-style monochrome.

Kennedy's work ranges from richly vibrant like the detail above, to simply practical like his job for a local night club (Proprietor, Tee, shown below with the poster):
“LADIES, NO FIGHTING IN THE BATHROOM. (This is a grown folks establishment)" – "I had a few left over," says Amos, "and mothers started buying them, mothers with two daughters- I need ThAT in MY bathroom!"

I love the Dvd and recommend it. It mulls over many questions about art in our times, such as who owns it and who has access to it, and why and why not. They're on sale for twenty at the producer's site and also at the event linked above. Also keep an eye on the Brown Finch news page for screenings and hopefully more to come.

2009-05-13T15:11:00.007-05:00

leif Peng is showing all 21 of Cliff Roberts' illustrations from the Book of Jazz.
The style here seems to have been de riguer in the 1950s for Jazz music subjects. Leif attributes its origin to Jim Flora. there's a whole blog devoted to Flora

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At The Hollywod Reporter:

The Palme d'Or may seem like a twee, only slightly relevant prize to the American film industry.
But it's been an oddly accurate barometer of the state of U.S. filmmaking - or at least the high-end film world's view of it -- since its modern incarnation began several decades ago.
When American directors were driving the car at the studios in the 1970's, they were winning it more frequently than the word 'cinema' is cited at the Palais -- Scorsese, Altman, Coppola. They took a break in the 80's, but when the indie movement hit, they were back with a vengeance -- Soderbergh, the Coen Bros and David Lynch took it three years in a row from '89-'91.
But it's been mostly fallow since then --

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my pal Bryan Talbot is showing his Grandville video:

2009-05-12T19:03:00.005-05:00

&
From time to time I find myself mucking around with the html template on Blogger. Just changing the codes around and trying to personalize ever so slightly the design of the basic 'classic' page. The problem is always that what is visible in one browser may not be visible in others. For example, I've been playing with a drop shadow on the header above for the last week, but it's only visible in Safari. A few days ago I discovered that if my initial letter is big enough it can sprawl all over the header (1000px ampersand in Book Antiqua, color #FF7F00). I was up most of the night with a sick cat. Profound thoughts are far away. I'll see if my pal White is up for lunch. (the next day it was all over Bryan's vid so I crushed it)

2009-05-11T00:22:00.005-05:00

_______________here's a stirring piece from the Guardian on the writing of one of the great books of the twentieth century.

The masterpiece that killed George Orwell
(It's quite long. A couple of snippets:)

The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell's dystopia. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war...

On Jura he would be liberated from these distractions but the promise of creative freedom on an island in the Hebrides came with its own price. Years before, in the essay "Why I Write", he had described the struggle to complete a book: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or [sic] understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's personality." Then that famous Orwellian coda. "Good prose is like a window pane...

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece... It was a fleeting moment of happiness; he lingered into the new year of 1950. In the small hours of 21 January he suffered a massive haemorrhage in hospital and died alone... aged 46.

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I read on wine label last week that the wine i was drinking is 'iconic'. While i was trying to figure out how a liquid can be 'iconic', I subsequently read that the new release of the great Grange Hermitage is 'iconic'. How can a 'release' be 'iconic'. Somebody make these people stop.

2009-05-10T05:52:00.007-05:00

following upon my subject of yesterday, i was curious as to the originators of the fascinating woodcuts of the Davy Crockett Almanacks ( 1835-1856). I have an insatiable longing for information about obscure artists from long ago. Mostly the woodcuts are unsigned, but a handful of names is recoverable from the material upon scrutiny, and various scholars have tabulated the information (condensed here):
" In the 1839 Crockett Almanac Alonzo Hartwell engraved at least three images after designs by Croome. Hartwell also engraved the title page and six other full-page cuts for the Crockett Almanac for 1842. The title cut was after a design by William Croome." Hartwell had a reputation as a portrait painter in Boston in the 1850s. Croome is the artist on a book titled The Golden Sand of Mexico, completely viewable online, and sampled at left above.

The one that has particularly caught my attention though is: "John H. Manning (born c.1820), an engraver and designer in Boston, was one of the artists for Gleason’s (later published as Ballou’s) Pictorial Drawing Room Companion. Among his other illustration credits are Turner’s Comic Almanac (1845), Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1845), and Boy’s Own Book of Fun (1847). Manning’s work for the Crockett Almanacs included three illustrations in the 1840 edition, and in the 1841 edition Manning designed four cuts that were then engraved by Hartwell.."

Manning was far above all of the other artists whose unsigned work filled up the pages of the Crockett almanacks. This one is unsigned but i feel confident, based on three other signatures by him that I have identified his hand in it and besides, I find it to be the single most striking image of all that I have seen from these booklets. The unusual word-balloon is particularly exciting.

There is another book I'm reading at present, titled The Flash Press: Sporting male weeklies of 1840s New York (published 2008). Nicholson Baker wrote a great review of it for the NY Times. The Flash Press, a clutch of naughty papers published for a short spell between 1841 and 1843, did not tend to attract signed illustrations, but it occurred to me to dash ahead to the index and see if any of my artists were about to turn up in its pages. To my delight, Manning is present, and in fact was the only artist to sign his work in those papers. Here is one of five examples reproduced:

The large heads are atypical of the artist's work, but all of it is recognizable by a vitality, the spark of the true cartoonist. It's worth noting that the monumental British Punch magazine only started in 1841, and that Manning's work as we see it in these samples is as good as anything in the earliest Punches.

Other items of interest in the Flash Press include a completely reproduced account of Charles Dickens' visit to 'the Five Points.' Dickens of course wrote his own, but it's interesting to see the same event written up by another, a Flash Press journalist who was in the entourage. Another character who turns up as a publisher of the naughty stuff is George Washington Dixon, whom I know from accounts of blackface minstrelsy, where we find him the composer of Old Zip Coon, an early landmark of American popular music, later stripped of its racist text and rerwritten as Turkey in the straw. William J Snelling, a writer well regarded by posterity, also plays a part in the story, though his doings in these years have fallen outside the scrutiny of his online biographical summaries. The authors of the Flash Press have done a service to nuts like me who like to fill in all the details (or as my wife would say, 'who need to know the ins and outs of a chook's bum.')