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Friday, June 27
LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE
by
Lloydville
on Fri 27 Jun 2008 03:00 AM PDT
Things just keep getting better and better for fans of classic American comic strips. Little Orphan Annie has just been added to the list of strips that are being reprinted in volumes that will eventually cover the entire runs of these comics.
The first volume is available now. It includes the first few years of the strip, beautifully reproduced, mostly from Harold Gray's original drawings or from the syndication proofs. In them, the plucky Annie knocks about America spreading kindness or kicking ass, as the situation requires.
Here's a philosophical question for you. Why was it that American popular culture, back in the darkest days of patriarchy, kept coming up with images of powerful little girls, like Annie and Dorothy of Kansas, who set off on their own on dangerous journeys and triumphed over all adversities by force of character . . . while in our own nominally feminist age the most prominent role models for young girls are sexually objectified teen tartlets?
There are now four volumes out of the early Dick Tracy strips, seven or eight of Krazy Kat, three of Gasoline Alley and Terry and the Pirates, two books which contain complete runs of Winsor McCay's Little Sammy Sneeze and Dreams Of the Rarebit Fiend -- plus two huge volumes which reprint color Sunday pages from Gasoline Alley and Little Nemo In Slumberland. If you pile them all up beside your bed or easy chair and read a few strips or pages a day, you've got your own personal funny pages to hand, some compensation for the fact that modern newspapers have no space for popular art this brilliant and this entertaining.
Tuesday, June 17
JOKERS WILD
by
Lloydville
on Tue 17 Jun 2008 01:12 AM PDT
I've had many strange experiences in Las Vegas, but none stranger that seeing David Irving speak in a small banquet room at the Jokers Wild Casino, a little locals' joint on Boulder Highway, at the edge of town.
Irving is a very controversial historian of the Third Reich whom I've written about before, here and here. The most prodigious researcher in the German archives pertaining to National Socialism, and in the archives of the Allies that house captured German documents on the subject, Irving has written a series of books which are essential compendia of facts about Hitler and his state. But he has a bias -- a desire to show that Hitler and the Nazis weren't as bad as everybody thinks, and that the Allied leaders were far worse than anybody thinks.
His motives in this are suspect, since he occasionally reveals anti-Semitic attitudes that offend the conscience, but his facts are always right, even if he marshals them to serve a twisted argument. His books are respected, with reservations, by respectable historians, but he has been vilified mercilessly by just about everybody else.
He was imprisoned for over a year, in solitary confinement, in Austria for giving a speech in which he noted that the gas chambers at the Auschwitz historical site are reconstructions, which is true, and arguing that gassing was not in fact used systematically to kill prisoners there, which is hotly contested by other historians and by eyewitnesses. His words were thought to violate Austrian laws against Holocaust denial.
Irving is not exactly a Holocaust denier -- more of a Holocaust minimizer. He admits that many bad things were done to Jews by the Nazis, just not as many bad things as historians have claimed. And he insists that Hitler was out of the loop as far as the Final Solution was concerned -- that Himmler instituted mass killings on his own hook, so that the "Messiah" of the German Reich would not be tainted by the policy.
This strains credulity, of course -- imagining that a faithful lieutenant would do something so momentous on his own, something which Hitler would be held accountable for even if he knew nothing about it. Still, Irving can point to the fact that no document recording Hitler's acquiescence in the mass extermination of Jews survives, and that Himmler regularly removed allusions to the policy from reports he passed on to the Führer.
It strikes me as more likely that Himmler simply had an understanding with Hitler that the policy of extermination would not be referenced in high-level documents of any kind, so that Hitler would never have to contend with opposition to it from his high-placed generals and ministers, and that Himmler would take the fall for it politically if it ever became generally known. It wouldn't be the first time a politician used plausible deniability to try and cover his ass.
It's equally possible that documents recording Hitler's involvement in the Final Solution were destroyed before or during the apocalypse of Germany's collapse.
When I showed up at the Jokers Wild Casino I almost bumped into Irving as he wheeled a cart with boxes of his books into the place. I greeted him but he hurried on gruffly, perhaps embarrassed by being seen in shorts and a sports-shirt hauling his own merchandise.
His talk was held after a buffet dinner, included in the price of the lecture, in a small private room off the casino's coffee shop. The food was school cafeteria quality and barely warm. There were about eleven other people in attendance. I kept to myself, fearing what sort of conversations my fellow attendees might initiate. I overheard one older guy railing against democracy -- "It allows people to let off steam, to think they have some say over their government. America isn't a government, anyway . . . it's a corporation."
Irving's talk was generally reasonable. He spoke at length about his imprisonment, and the tale was genuinely harrowing. Irving reported to the outside world that the library of his prison contained several books he had written. At this point, a high Austrian official ordered all books by Irving in all Austrian prisons to be removed and burned -- "To show the world that we have moved beyond the Nazi era." The minister seemed to see no irony in using a book burning to demonstrate this point.
Irving then talked about his forthcoming biography of Himmler, which he promised would put to rest once and for all the idea that Hitler knew about the Holocaust. He said he expected to endure further persecution upon its publication.
Irving said a few troubling things. He said he told the Austrian press when he was finally released from prison that "Mel Gibson was right." He didn't elaborate on this in Austria, but to us he explained, "You know, about who started all the world's wars." In other words, the Jews. He said that Churchill did not become anti-Nazi until after he was paid 48 thousand pounds by a Jewish organization in 1936 -- an amount, Irving said, worth about 3 million dollars in today's currency. The implication was that all of Churchill's fine rhetoric was bought and paid for by Jews.
An odd evening with an odd man in an odd place in an odd town. That's Vegas, baby.
Thursday, May 15
A VICTORIAN POEM FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 15 May 2008 01:14 AM PDT
- Jenny kissed me when we met,
- Jumping from the chair she sat in.
- Time, you thief! who love to get
- Sweets into your list, put that in.
- Say I'm weary, say I'm sad;
- Say that health and wealth have missed me;
- Say I'm growing old, but add --
- Jenny kissed me!
The poem, called Rondeau, was written by Leigh Hunt (pictured above) and first published in 1838. Hunt was a minor literary figure of the Victorian era, a friend of Shelley and Keats and Dickens. His poetry has a simplicity that can make it seem trivial, but I think Rondeau is perfect. It's music allows its simplicity to breathe, and reminds us of that sincerity of unselfconscious sentiment which the Victorians at their best could summon -- a sincerity which 20th century literature, charting the age of irony, completely lost touch with. Virginia Woolf, early in the century, lamented the loss, distressed that poets could no longer write lines like these, by Christina Rossetti:
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a purple sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me. Such directness of feeling did survive in the popular arts, in pop songs and in the movies -- any place where the arbiters of high culture had no influence.
Most improbably, Orson Welles recited Rondeau at the close of a pilot for a TV talk show he made towards the end of his life (which wasn't picked up.) Welles was an unregenerate Victorian, which was a source of much of his secret power, and almost all of his films deal with loss, with the memory of some sweet, unrecoverable moment in time that haunts the present . . . a characteristic Victorian theme.
Rosebud, Mr. Bernstein's girl on the ferry, the Amberson's ball, a long-past love affair with the Baroness Nagel in Warsaw, the chimes at midnight . . . all these are one with Jenny's kiss.
Leigh Hunt wrote, "Every one should plant a tree who can. It is one of the cheapest . . . as well as easiest, of all tasks." Trees, said Hunt, "are green footsteps of our existence, which show that we have not lived in vain."
Rondeau is such a tree.
Sunday, May 11
¡VIVA EL PELO!
by
Lloydville
on Sun 11 May 2008 02:53 AM PDT
I don't know how to translate the title of the above painting by Julio Romero de Torres -- every possible rendition of ¡Viva el Pelo! into English sounds silly -- but el pelo
means the hair, so you get the idea. The image reminds me of a line by the poet Robert
Duncan, "in the dark of the moon the hair rules". This in turn
reminds me of something the poet Robert Browning said about his wife
Elizabeth Barrett Browning after her death, when he was asked what it
was like being married to such a famous person (she was far more famous
than he was during her lifetime.) Yes, she was known to the
world, Browning admitted, "but I knew her on the dark side of the moon" --
the side of the moon the world never sees . . . where the hair rules.
Wednesday, April 23
SOME LINES BY TENNYSON FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 23 Apr 2008 12:43 AM PDT
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
-- from Ulysses
Engraving of Tennyson by G. J. Stodart
Thursday, April 10
A WILLIAM BLAKE QUOTE FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 10 Apr 2008 05:29 AM PDT
There is a smile of love,
And there is a smile of deceit,
And there is a smile of smiles
In which these two smiles meet.
Tuesday, March 18
THE TIME GARDEN
by
Lloydville
on Tue 18 Mar 2008 12:58 PM PDT
The Los Angeles Times published a book review by my niece Nora, age 10, in their Kids' Reading Room section on 2 March. (That's Nora in the green shirt, above, screaming on a roller coaster.)
Here's her review . . . of Edward Eager's The Time Garden, with the illustration she did to accompany the review:
The minute I looked at the
title I thought it was just another fairy tale, but boy, was I wrong!
This is a marvelous story. One sniff of the thyme and the magic begins.
Eliza, Ann, Roger and Jack find the Natterjack (a creature in a
frog's form) and run off on an amazing adventure through time and
space. They find out what really happened long ago and save people just
like them. Any boring day can be turned into an astounding journey if
they go into the garden. People of all ages, kid or adult, will want to
be in the magical adventures.
I love Edward Eager's books and have since I was a kid. His Knight's Castle is one of my favorite books of all time. I gave Nora her first Edward Eager book last summer, Half Magic, and now she's read them all. You should, too.
Monday, March 17
SEARCHING FOR JOHN FORD
by
Lloydville
on Mon 17 Mar 2008 12:56 AM PDT
I recently finished Joseph McBride's excellent (and massive) biography Searching For John Ford. It tells you everything you want to know about the man . . .
except who the hell he was. The mysteries and contradictions of his
character simply cannot be sorted out. I'm sure the same would be true
of Shakespeare if we had massive documentation and testimony about his
life. The depth of the work in each man's case comes out of the
mysteries and contradictions and transcends them but sheds no light backwards on the
man himself. Perhaps, to be a truly great dramatist, you have to
abandon all hope of a coherent self in real life.
The biggest revelation in the book, to me, was the extent of Ford's
WWII service, which was far greater than I realized -- but even in that
arena, nothing he did seemed to satisfy him. He told outrageous
lies about his wartime service, even when the things he actually did
were far more impressive. Reading the book makes one more and
more convinced that Ethan Edwards comes as close to a portrait of Ford
the man as we will ever have -- a psychotic searcher who does heroic
things that no one else can do, and then wanders off alone, permanently
lost.
It's a sad tale but also, in some mysterious, unaccountable way, inspiring.
Saturday, March 8
JOHN ADAMS
by
Lloydville
on Sat 08 Mar 2008 12:24 AM PST
I commend to all my fellow citizens of this republic David McCullough's wonderful biography John Adams.
(That's Adams, bald and slightly pot-bellied, standing in the exact
center of John Trumbull's painting of the signing of the Declaration Of
Independence, above.) Erudite and sagacious the book is also
compulsively readable, magically evoking the physical world of the 18th
and early 19th Centuries but also bringing the men of the Revolutionary
era to vivid life.
The founders of the United States Of America were certainly the
God-damnedest collection of characters who ever collaborated on a great
enterprise. They seem mysteriously modern, perhaps because they
remain so recognizably American
-- frank, down-to-earth, open-minded, industrious, optimistic . . . also pig-headed, venal and hypocritical
There were scoundrels and rakes among them, men of faith and skeptics,
simple farmers and grand seigneurs -- but they were all so unaccountably radical in their devotion to the ideas (if not always to the practical realities) of liberty and equality, of self-government.
And they were brave. All the men above seen signing the
Declaration, many of them men of great wealth and position, would have
been hung as traitors by the English if their improbable revolution had
failed. They don't seem to have had the slightest doubt that it
was a risk worth taking, and merely joked about the jeopardy -- as
Franklin did when he said, "We must hang together or hang separately."
It can't really be explained, except as a result of something that had
evolved over many generations in the experience of living in the new
world, habits of self-reliance and independence which the Founding
Fathers explicated and guided but did not invent. Adams himself
knew this. "The Revolution," he wrote, "was in the minds and
hearts of the people."
Adams may have been the oddest of all the "indispensable men" of that
time -- neither a soldier nor a politician of any particular skill, not
a great writer or thinker but possessed of an orderly mind and endless
energy, he had a personal independence of thought and an an
incorruptible integrity which made him the go-to guy in any crisis.
It was Adams who ensured the appointment of George Washington as
commander in chief of the Continental Army, Adams who procured loans
from the Dutch to keep the government afloat in the early days of the
Confederation, Adams who, in drafting the Constitution of the
Commonwealth Of Massachusetts, created a key model for the American
Constitution.
And it was Adams who served as America's first ambassador to the Court of St. James, received with honor as the representative of a new and independent nation by the same king who had once hoped to hang him.
The whole tale is surreal, unbelievable, but one loves Adams because he
didn't see it that way. He seems always to have believed that the
seeds of liberty, once planted in good soil, would bear fruit -- just
as the seeds he sowed on his Massachusetts farm brought forth peas and
corn. At the end he was proud of what he had done for his
country, but he was just as proud of his farm.
Adams became President of course, for one term, after serving as George
Washington's Vice-President for two terms. He lost his bid for
reelection to his then arch-rival Thomas Jefferson, and became the
first President to hand over the reigns of power unwillingly, convinced
that Jefferson would ruin the new nation before it could fairly get
going. He groused about it, then jumped into a public stagecoach
and rode home, back to his farm, his peas and his corn. He bowed
to the will of the people without further complaint.
In that moment, the American experiment justified itself to itself and to the whole world.
Perhaps the strangest thing about looking at these old
revolutionaries today is that they always seem to be staring right back at us, at the American future we
now inhabit. In their regard there's hardly more than a trace of
self-satisfaction in what they accomplised, not a lot of sentiment, and
more than a little impatience. "We started this business well enough," they seem to
be saying, "now get on with it."
[I read the biography as a prelude to watching HBO's upcoming
mini-series taken from it, starring Paul Giamatti as Adams. This
strikes me as a brilliant piece of casting, Giamatti having a knack for
conveying the kind of adorable peevishness which many people observed
as a characteristic trait of Adams. The series will premiere on March 16.]
Monday, March 3
AN N. C. WYETH FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 03 Mar 2008 06:46 PM PST
The above is an illustration by N. C. Wyeth for the book Legends Of Charlemagne.
N. C. Wyeth, the father of Andrew, was the greatest of American book
illustrators and one of the greatest of American painters. His
influence on cinema, especially the work of John Ford, cannot be
overestimated.
[The image is courtesy of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, one of the most delightful sites on the Internet.]
Wednesday, February 27
UNSPEAKABLY COOL: DREAM OF THE RAREBIT FIEND
by
Lloydville
on Wed 27 Feb 2008 11:39 PM PST
The
fourth of the four coolest books published in the last few years, like
two of the others, collects the work of Winsor McCay -- in this case
the extraordinary strip Dream Of the Rarebit Fiend -- but unlike the other three wasn't put out by Sunday Press Books. Privately published by Ulrich Merkl, it
includes all of the strips from the series -- those not reproduced in
the book itself are supplied on a DVD that comes packaged with the book.
The book is gigantic and presents the strips, published between 1904
and 1913, in their original size. It also has a wealth of other
illustrative material showing McCay's sources and documenting the
enormous influence his images have had on America's visual culture,
especially that of the movies.
The draftsmanship of the strips is stunning, the visual imagination
exhilarating. Its central gag involves the dreams of people given
indigestion by eating Welsh Rarebit, making it a kind of run-up to
McCay's masterpiece strip Little Nemo In Slumberland, which illustrates the dreams of a restless little boy.
Merkl's book, published in a limited edition, is available at his web
site -- it's expensive but worth every penny. It lovingly documents a
brilliant and endlessly enchanting work of popular art.
Check out my reports on the other three coolest books of recent years:
Little Nemo
Little Sammy Sneeze
Walt and Skeezix
Thursday, December 6
NO LIMIT
by
Lloydville
on Thu 06 Dec 2007 12:43 AM PST
My friend John Sosnovsky was just in town and brought as a gift a copy of Just Enough Liebling,
a collection of A. J. Liebling's writing about food, boxing and
war. In one of the articles about food Liebling offers an
extended paean to Tavel, the rosé wine from the Rhône region of France. It brought back many
memories. Tavel is a wine often served in the South Of France
with seafood (although Liebling insists it's so good it can go with
anything) and I've drunk it with many fine meals in that part of the world,
usually in restaurants or on the terraces of restaurants with a view of
the sea.
On John's last night in Vegas I tracked him down in the card room at
Caesars around 9pm. He'd been playing poker all day, with mixed
results, and said he was pokered out, so we decided to meet at Mon Ami
Gabi, a terrific French bistro in the Paris, Las Vegas casino.
Once installed on its very pleasant terrace I discovered that they had
a Tavel on their wine list, and John and I decided to drink a bottle in
honor of Mr. Liebling. And we decided to drink it with steak, to
test Mr. Liebling's assertion that it can go with anything.
It went exceptionally well with the steak, with the brisk night air and
with our conversation, which kept circling back to the upcoming fight
between Ricky Hatton and Floyd Mayweather, Jr. next Saturday in Las Vegas. John
is a member of the Fancy and very knowledgeable about boxing, but even
he seemed baffled by the question of who was likely to prevail in this
contest -- Hatton, the brawler with heart, or Mayweather, the scientist
with lightning-fast but hardly lethal hands and canny instincts for
defense (or unseemly evasion, as some consider it.)
The best we could surmise was that Hatton had a chance only if he got
inside and ripped Mayweather apart with body shots, shocking him and
breaking his will. That didn't seem likely, but it seemed
possible. Such imponderables are what have made this fight one of
the most anticipated in ages. Mr. Liebling, long since deceased,
would have had much to say on the subject and we missed his wisdom
keenly.
After the Tavel and the beef, John decided that perhaps he wasn't
pokered out after all. We set off to see what tables might be
going in the Paris' card room.
The night before, at the Palms, John had cajoled me into
sitting down at my first no-limit Hold-'em game in a casino. (I'd
played a few hands at a no-limit game in the old card room at the
Rancho Fiesta, but it had broken up almost as soon as I arrived at the table.) I
was terrified of playing at the Palms -- not least because Phil Helmuth
(below, playing in a tournament) and Layne Flack, two high-profile
high-limit poker pros, were hanging
around my table to watch a couple of their friends play. It's
tough to make your debut at a no-limit table under the eyes of a winner
of the Main Event at the World Series Of Poker. (Helmuth won it in 1989 at the age
of 24, the youngest player who's ever done so.)
No limit Hold-'em is intrinsically terrifying. Any amount of
money can be bet on a hand at any time, which means you can lose every
chip in front of you if you call an "all-in" bet with the
wrong cards in the wrong situation. On the other hand, you can
use big bets to push your fellow players around -- to make them fold
better cards than you have, for example. It's a wild and
exceedingly complex endeavor.
Miraculously, as soon as I sat down at the table I felt cool and
perfectly in command of things. I've played endless hands of
no-limit poker for fake money online and I understand the dynamics of
the game -- far better than I've ever understood the dynamics of limit
Hold-'em, where you can bet only certain fixed amounts. I've
always played limit Hold-em because it seemed on the face of it less
risky.
No-limit Hold-'em for money, however, is a far more logical game,
far less dependent on the random fall of the cards, though the logic is
sometimes the logic of ruthlessness and terror.
I played for three or four hours in this heady atmosphere and walked
away about a hundred dollars down. Not good -- but not
devastating, either. You can pay more for a good meal or a rock
concert and not enjoy either half as much or for half as long.
There were no poker pros hanging around the Paris' card room (above) -- just a
lot of genial players who seemed like people on vacation
looking for a good time . . . and to say they'd played poker in Las
Vegas. They weren't bad players but they played too many hands,
eager for action. I waited for my chances, bet hard when they
came and walked away three hundred and thirty dollars ahead -- by far the most money I've ever won at any poker table. More importantly, it left me over two hundred dollars ahead for my first two nights of no-limit poker.
John did even better, walking away over seven hundred dollars ahead -- covering the cost of all his poker playing in Las Vegas and his hotel room and
his flight here, with a little left over for celebratory drinks
afterwards. To say that we raised our glasses joyfully would be
putting it
mildly.
[The snapshot of the Paris poker room above is from a useful web site, vegasrex,
which describes and reviews the various card rooms in Las Vegas and has a lot of other stuff about what's going on in town.]
Sunday, December 2
AN H. L. MENCKEN QUOTE FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Sun 02 Dec 2007 06:06 AM PST
Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Friday, November 30
UNSPEAKABLY COOL: LITTLE SAMMY SNEEZE
by
Lloydville
on Fri 30 Nov 2007 01:26 AM PST
The third of the four coolest books published in the past few years is (I am compelled to report) also from Sunday Press Books -- a collection of Winsor McCay's pre-Nemo comic strip Little Sammy Sneeze.
This book is not a gigantic volume reproducing newspaper pages in full size,
simply because Little Sammy did not command a full page on
Sundays. It is, instead, a good-sized coffee-table book -- all
that's needed to reproduce McCay's color Sammy Sneeze strips almost exactly as they were originally published.
Sunday Press's philosophy in regard to reproducing old color strips is
very sensible. They use modern digital techniques to correct the
fading of colors and the yellowing of paper, but don't try to improve
on the colors as they would actually have appeared to a reader of the
time and don't try to eliminate minor characteristic printing
errors. What one sees in their books is thus a very close
approximation of the medium the comic strip artists composed for.
In Little Sammy Sneeze, McCay
took a very small idea and made something wonderful out of it.
The strips normally employ either six or eight panels, all showing the same location
and generally from the same point of view. Activity proceeds within the space
of the location as Little Sammy works himself up to a sneeze, which
usually produces catastrophic effects within the location and causes
Sammy to be ejected from it angrily. For some reason, this
mechanical formula produces endless delight -- much the way simple
variations on a musical theme can produce endless delight.
The drawing, of course, is brilliant, as you'd expect from McCay, and
the period detail within the mostly realistic settings has only grown
more magical with time. The strips are in part about time, of
course -- small segments of time in which many things happen.
Seeing the way static pictures on a page can evoke a sense of the
passage of time is intrinsically fascinating. It's like
deconstructing the process of cinema, with the illusion laid out
anatomically before you.
In one instance, McCay deconstructs his own medium, as Sammy's sneeze fractures the frame of the comic strip panel itself:
If the gag in the strip is always the same, or more or less the same,
it is nevertheless always surprising -- or perhaps one should say
always suspenseful. There's a psychological phenomenon involved
here that's at the core of any good joke, which can make you laugh even
if
you've heard it before. In part, it's the shape of the joke that
makes it work -- a tension is created that can only be resolved with
the release of a laugh. The same phenomenon is at work in all
stories, which is why it's possible to cry every time you read A Christmas Carol -- even if you know it almost by heart.
You can obtain Sammy's sneezes here.
Thursday, November 29
UNSPEAKABLY COOL: WALT AND SKEEZIX
by
Lloydville
on Thu 29 Nov 2007 12:39 AM PST
The second of the four coolest books published in the past few years is another oversized volume from Sunday Press Book -- Sundays With Walt and Skeezix. It collects a number of Sunday pages from Frank King's brilliant long-running strip Gasoline Alley,
one of the glories of American popular art. I've written before about the
series from Drawn and Quarterly Press which is reprinting the entire
run of the daily strip in a succession of handsome volumes -- but the Sunday
pages are something else again.
In the daily strip, King created a narrative masterpiece graced with
many flights of visual invention, but in the color Sunday pages his
visual imagination grew much bolder -- lyrical, almost abstract at
times. He looked at the Sunday page sometimes as an arena for the
wildest experimentation -- to see just how far the expressive potential
of a comic strip might reach.
In the Sunday Press collection we can see these Sunday strips almost as
their
first viewers did -- in the same colors and in the same size.
It's a measure of our culture's descent into mediocrity and triviality
that no work of such ambition and grace now accompanies any daily
newspaper in the land, and certainly no cable news channel. It
used to be assumed that the visions of great popular artists ought to
be part of every American's daily dose of media. Today only cheap
digital graphics and portentous musical jingles accompany the canned "news"
doled out by the major media outlets.
Americans have never liked being spoon fed "culture" -- meaning culture
that somebody decided was good for them. That was the beauty of
the comic strip -- it was an art form so unpretentious, so vernacular
and casual, that Americans could consume it over breakfast or before
dinner without a trace of self-consciousness or social anxiety. But its
expressive range was almost limitless. We know that from the work
of artists like Frank King, who in their own quiet but audacious ways
tested its limits to the full.
You could read through these comics and weep that stuff this great used
to be thrown up on the porches of millions of Americans by
paperboys every Sunday morning -- and isn't anymore. Or you could read through them
and take heart at the fact that stuff this great could ever have been part of
American popular culture -- and so might be again. Why not?
You can buy Sundays With Walt and Skeezix here.
Thursday, November 22
A WILLIAM BLAKE QUOTE FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 22 Nov 2007 12:50 AM PST
. . . the pang of affection & gratitude is the Gift of God for good. I am
thankful that I feel it; it draws the soul towards Eternal life &
conjunction with Spirits of just men made perfect by love &
gratitude—the two angels who stand at heaven’s gate ever open, ever
inviting guests to the marriage. O foolish Philosophy! Gratitude is
Heaven itself; there could be no heaven without Gratitude. I feel it
& I know it. I thank God & Man for it . . .
Friday, November 16
A JULES RENARD QUOTE FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Fri 16 Nov 2007 10:58 AM PST
Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
Wednesday, November 14
WINSOR MCCAY AND THE CINEMA
by
Lloydville
on Wed 14 Nov 2007 11:05 AM PST
The
influence that went on, back and forth, between the cinema and other
visual arts has often been noticed but rarely studied in detail.
Writers on cinema have produced tome after tome about the influence of the
stage and literature on movies, but the visual side of things has
rarely been subjected to rigorous investigation.
Partly this is because the two principal visual influences on movies,
comic strips and Victorian academic painting, have had little prestige
in the scholarly culture, and partly it's because these two forms have
been hard to study themselves. First-rate reproductions of even
the most important comic strips have been difficult to come by, and
Victorian academic painting tends to languish in storage in museums, to
make room in the galleries for the junk creations of "modern art".
With respect to comic strips, things are changing. Splendid reproductions of seminal strips like Popeye, Gasoline Alley and Terry and the Pirates
are becoming available in ongoing series, and Winsor McCay is getting
spectacular treatment in large over-sized volumes which do full justice
to his amazing visions. (See here and here.)
New revelations about the connection between comic strips and movies should
follow. Here's a brief slideshow (via Boing Boing) created by a critic at the Boston Globe
which surveys some of the most obvious ways Winsor McCay's work has
influenced the iconography of movies. It's based on observations in a new collection of McCay's strip Dream Of the Rarebit Fiend. More complex issues of
narrative technique and composition will surely come to the fore in the
future. [McCay created some of the earliest animated cartoons, so
his influence on film animation has long been appreciated, but his
influence on movies in general was far more comprehensive, as the
slideshow suggests.]
If you want to contemplate the connection between cinema and Victorian
academic painting you will just have to settle at present for my
passing observations in the essays collected here.
Monday, November 12
MA VIE
by
Lloydville
on Mon 12 Nov 2007 12:33 AM PST
Here's a poem in French by Henri Michaux, Ma Vie:
Tu t'en vas sans moi, ma vie.
Tu roules.
Et moi j'attends encore de faire un pas.
Tu portes ailleurs la bataille.
Tu me désertes ainsi.
Je ne t'ai jamais suivie.
Je ne vois pas clair dans tes offres.
Le petit peu que je veux, jamais tu ne l'apportes.
A cause de ce manque, j'aspire à tant.
A tant de choses, à presque l'infini...
A cause de ce peu qui manque, que jamais tu n'apportes.
Here's a rough translation:
You're going away without me, my life.
You're rolling on.
And I'm still waiting to make my first move.
You've taken the battle elsewhere.
You've deserted me.
I never followed you.
I've never seen anything in what you offer.
The little I want you never bring me.
Because of this I want so much --
So many things, almost everything . . .
Just because of this pittance I lack, that you never bring me.
Saturday, November 10
THE WAR
by
Lloydville
on Sat 10 Nov 2007 06:27 AM PST
Reading Hitler's War,
David Irving's massive, exhaustive study of WWII as seen from Hitler's
perspective, is riveting but spiritually exhausting. We will
never have a more sympathetic portrayal of Hitler and his motives, at
least not one consistent with the purely factual record, but what vapid
company the Führer turns out to be. Even the glamor of evil can't
redeem him and his henchmen from their utter banality, from the sheer
colossal mind-numbing stupidity of their fear of and paranoia about "world
Jewry". As they grow in power their puny souls seem smaller and
smaller -- consistent with the bunch of clever, fanatical, provincial
hacks they were. It will be to Germany's eternal shame that it
consented to be led in momentous times by such mediocre shadows of men.
A useful specific for the soul-sickness induced by Irving's book is Ken Burn's 15-hour documentary The War.
It's not without its passages of moral self-congratulation, but its
greatest value lies in its willingness to confront the darkness that
the war summoned up in the victors, especially in the young men who had
to fight it on the front lines. In the filmed interviews, the American combat
survivors -- old men looking back on the war after more than half a
century -- still tremble when they recall what they had to do, still seem
mystified that they could do it.
Like the Germans and the Japanese, the good guys in this war learned to
kill without mercy -- even to kill defenseless civilians and unarmed
prisoners. And sometimes they experienced an exhilaration in
killing. The experience shook their souls and by the evidence
they never really got over it. The fact that they won a "good
war", or a "necessary war" as one of them prefers to call it, didn't
heal the wounds within.
Hitler, and the Japanese warlords, sought to glorify the merciless
killing of war -- sought to embrace it as a given of nature. The
soldiers of the great democracies may have recognized it as a given of
nature, but their refusal to glorify it, to accept it willingly as a part of who
they were, even in a just cause, makes for a startling contrast to
the supposed "realism" of a man like Hitler. It gives the heart a
little breathing space in a heartless world.
Sunday, November 4
A SHAKESPEARE SONG FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Sun 04 Nov 2007 01:50 AM PDT
- O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
- O stay and hear! your true-love's coming
- That can sing both high and low;
- Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
- Journeys end in lovers meeting--
- Every wise man's son doth know.
- What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
- Present mirth hath present laughter;
- What's to come is still unsure:
- In delay there lies no plenty,--
- Then come kiss me, Sweet and twenty,
- Youth's a stuff will not endure.
It's from Twelfth Night.
Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
Journeys end in lovers meeting . . .
Are there any lovelier lines in all of English poetry?
What I like about them most is that they combine the lover's faith with the storyteller's faith.
The reference to singing both high and low is apparently mildly obscene, but I'll leave the details of it to your imagination.
The carpe diem message of the
song is not unusual, but the gossamer delicacy of the tone is
rare. As I've suggested before, A. E. Housman got it down pretty
well:
Clay lies still but blood's a rover,
Breath's a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad, when the journey's over
There'll be time enough to sleep.
Saturday, October 27
AN A. E. HOUSMAN POEM FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Sat 27 Oct 2007 01:36 AM PDT
- These, in the day when heaven was falling,
- The hour when earth's foundations fled,
- Followed their mercenary calling,
- And took their wages, and are dead.
- Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
- They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
- What God abandoned, these defended,
- And saved the sum of things for pay.
The title of this poem is Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.
It's one of my favorite poems of all time because it looks at things so
coldly and reminds us that sincerity is not the highest of
virtues. Today we tend to think of virtue as a state of mind --
if you mean well, you're a good person. To Housman, as to the ancient Greeks, virtue was action, pure and simple.
Friday, October 26
THE COLDEST WINTER
by
Lloydville
on Fri 26 Oct 2007 02:00 AM PDT
When he died in a car crash this Spring, David Halberstam had just finished his 21st book, The Coldest Winter,
an epic study of the Korean War. It's partly a work of military
history, with combat narratives based on interviews with veterans of
the conflict, but its greater value lies in the way Halberstam places
the war in the context of the post-war world, of American and global politics and strategy.
It fills in yet another piece of the puzzle of America's mood after
WWII -- dark, anxious, bewildered, unsure of its new role as a world
superpower, veering between arrogance and lunatic paranoia.
There are many lessons for our own times to be learned from the book --
not least about the ways the Republican party managed to box the
Democrats into policies they mistrusted under the threat of being labeled
"soft on Communism". Substitute "terrorism" for "Communism" and
you will see the same dynamic at work today.
The war in Korea all but wrecked Truman's presidency, but he was
confident that history would judge him more kindly than his
contemporaries, as indeed it has. Among the high-ranking soldiers
and politicians, Matthew Ridgway and Truman emerge in Halberstam's book
as the true heroes
of the war. Ridgway learned how to fight the Chinese because he
was willing to take them seriously, to respect them as soldiers,
something the racist high command under MacArthur could not do.
Truman was willing to buck popular sentiment and
risk political ruin to oppose MacArthur, whose madness served the purposes
of the right-wing Republicans in Washington but whose insubordination
threatened the very core of the American system of government, the principle of
civilian control of the military.
Among the boots on the ground, there were heroes by the thousands,
though they got no glory out of it, or even much recognition from the
folks at home. Korea was a war Americans wanted to forget, even
while it was happening -- which is just the kind of war that needs to
be remembered and studied with care. We're in one like it
right now -- part of the price a nation pays for forgetting the
grievous mistakes it has made in the past.
Wednesday, October 24
A SCHOOLYARD RHYME FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 24 Oct 2007 11:56 AM PDT
It is in the rock, but not in the stone;
It is in the marrow but not in the bone;
It is in the bolster, but not in the bed;
It is not in the living, nor yet in the dead.
This is a riddle, of course. Can you guess the solution?
[From I Saw Esau, edited by Iona and Peter Opie.]
Monday, October 22
A SHAKESPEARE SONG FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 22 Oct 2007 10:53 AM PDT
Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o' the great;
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan;
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.
No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownéd be thy grave!
I've always loved this song, from Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare's late plays, especially this couplet:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
It's so
Shakespeare -- speaking of the gravest things in the lightest and most
lilting way. I can't help but see it as a reflection of the
country humor Shakespeare grew up with, when hard things, all too
familiar, needed to be tossed off carelessly at times -- sort of like
the phrase "he bought the farm."
At any rate, the tone echoed through English literature -- A. E. Housman derived a whole oeuvre from it, as in the following:
With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipped maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid,
The rose-lipped girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
I also love the image in this couplet from Shakespeare's song:
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages . . .
Though
Shakespeare became a wealthy man and a speculator later in his life, he
never got too far, imaginatively, from his working-class roots.
Life to him was always a job of work, literally and
metaphorically. He died soon after giving up his trade as a
playwright -- in his heart, I suspect, the end of work and the end of
life were more or less the same thing, as they were for most English country folk of the time.
It took me a while to realize where the image in the couplet above
comes from, specifically -- Saint Paul's letter to the Romans, where
the apostle writes, "The wages of sin is death."
Saint Paul didn't exactly mean that death was a punishment for sin,
or that if you lived a sinless life you could escape death, because no one can live a sinless life. He
was just making a general observation, as Shakespeare was, about the
condition of man, imperfect by nature, doomed to die. When you
take your last wages in this world, all you can buy with them is the
farm.
Friday, October 5
THE MONEY AND THE POWER
by
Lloydville
on Fri 05 Oct 2007 11:46 PM PDT
The
Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America,
by Roger Morris and Sally Denton, Vintage, 2002, is the most important
book ever written about Las Vegas and one of the most important books
ever written about corporate-controlled America in the 20th Century.
The prose can be clunky at times but there are stunning revelations on
almost every page. The result is a clear and impeccably researched
portrait of the criminal/corporate syndicates which run America and the
role Las Vegas has played and plays in their exercise of power.
You can buy it here:
The Money and the Power
Wednesday, October 3
TERRY AND THE PIRATES
by
Lloydville
on Wed 03 Oct 2007 12:12 PM PDT
As
I've written before, these are great times for fans of vintage comic
strips. Publishers are bringing back into print many classics of
the genre -- among them Popeye, Dick Tracy and Gasoline Alley -- in handsome multi-volume editions that will eventually make available complete runs of the strips.
Not least welcome in this avalanche of treasures is the first volume in a series published by IDC that will cover all of Milt Caniff's wonderful Terry and the Pirates adventure
strip. It's a big, well-printed volume with the daily strips in
black-and-white and the Sunday strips in full color. This first
installment covers 1934 to 1936.
Caniff's is known as the "Rembrandt of the comic strip" for his
exquisite draftsmanship, but he has also been studied by filmmakers for
the dynamic cinematic compositions of his panels, the economy and punch
of his visual narrative style.
It's impossible to convey just how much fun Terry and the Pirates
is -- a series of rattling good yarns set in the Far East that move
fast and are full of surprises, drawn with wit and elegance and bold
graphic invention.
Caniff didn't come up with idea for Terry and the Pirates and he didn't own it -- so he eventually moved on to an original series called Steve Canyon, which is even more ambitious visually but, to my mind, a bit stodgier in terms of story and character. The Canyon
strips have been available in a series which prints the panels so small
that it's hard to read the text sometimes without a magnifying glass
and almost impossible to appreciate the graphic work. It's not worth owning.
The IDC edition of Terry and the Pirates, though, does full justice to Caniff's art. I think it's one of the most important publishing events of 2007.
Saturday, September 29
SIMONE WEIL ON BRUTALITY
by
Lloydville
on Sat 29 Sep 2007 10:03 AM PDT
Let us not think that because we are less brutal, less violent, less
inhuman than our opponents we will carry the day. Brutality,
violence, and inhumanity have an immense prestige that schoolbooks hide
from children, that grown men do not admit, but that everyone bows
before. For the opposite virtues to have as much prestige, they
must be actively and constantly put into practice. Anyone who is
merely incapable of being as brutal, as violent, and as inhuman as
someone else, but who does not practice the opposite virtues, is
inferior to that person in both inner strength and prestige, and he
will not hold out in . . . a confrontation.
-- Simone Weil
Friday, September 28
A SONNET FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Fri 28 Sep 2007 09:51 AM PDT
On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer by John Keats:
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
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