A hunt. The last great hunt.
For what ?
For Moby Dick, the huge white sperm whale: who is old, hoary,
monstrous, and swims alone; who is unspeakably terrible in his wrath,
having so often been attacked; and snow-white.
Of course he is a symbol.
Of what ?
I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That’s the best of it.
— from Studies In Classic American Literature
Image by Rockwell Kent.
The fourth page of “Serum To Codfish
Cove” by the legendary Carl Barks, found on Rodney Bowcock's Comics and Stories blog, which
Mr. Bowcock has sadly just abandoned.
I'll be
posting the whole thing (ten pages in all) as a tribute to Barks and to
Mr. Bowcock, whose blog will be missed.
General Grant's horse Cincinnati, photographed at City Point, Virginia in 1865. A fine looking animal — one of the unsung heroes of America's wars, from the Revolution to Afghanistan, who worked and suffered and died in service to the nation.
Remember them, too.
The image comes from Shorpy, an extraordinary site that presents vintage photographs in high resolution.
Check out Tom Sutpen's Illusion Travels By Streetcar for a brilliant, though ultimately depressing, parody of academic film writing. Sutpen channels the voice of Prof. Thomas Marlowe, “chair of Film and Media Studies at Tait College
in Culver City, CA, and author of the groundbreaking 2003 study If I
Were King: Identity Politics, American Cinema and the Emerging
Framework of Global Patriarchy, Ur-Fascism and the Foundations of
Radical Monetarism and Ideological Order in the Era of the Hollywood
Studio System: 1935-1937 (published by Produit d'appel Press).”
The professor offers some comments on Howard Hawks's Ceiling Zero.
Sutpen's parody is depressing because it's harrowingly close to actual academic film writing. Prof. Marlowe's work could get published by any number of academic presses today, who would not read it, of course, because like much academic prose it is unreadable — some editor would simply note the phrase “Global Patriarchy” and think, “This Prof. Marlowe is one of us”.
The blogosphere is creating its own style of bloviation about film — a combination of Augustine's Confessions and the Cahiers du Cinéma style at its most antic — but one can still detect a human presence behind most of it. The academic style could be created with a not-very-sophisticated computer program, one that generated ideological catchphrases and embedded them in barely grammatical English sentences unconnected to each other by either logic or common sense. Prof. Marlowe has got the method down pat:
For any transformative reading of Hawks that is sufficiently
diversified in application to be of critical interest in the context of
Ceiling Zero, his systemic use of patriarchal symbology can be defined
by film theorists in such a way as to oppose the capacity of any
underlying conclusion. I suggested in my book that these results would
naturally follow from an assumption that the descriptive power of
images is, apparently, determined by a system of neural sensation
exclusive to genres. One consequence of this approach, which I
outlined, is that a critical intuition is necessary to impose an
interpretation on seemingly irrelevant contexts. Comparing the
theoretical usefulness of Ceiling Zero in comparison to Red Line 7000
and The Crowd Roars, we see that the critical foundations developed
earlier suffice to account for that conclusion as it applies to any
rational understanding of cinema.
The plot thickens in this third page of “Serum To Codfish
Cove” by the legendary Carl Barks, found on Rodney Bowcock's Comics and Stories blog, which
Mr. Bowcock has sadly just abandoned.
I'll be
posting the whole thing (ten pages in all) as a tribute to Barks and to
Mr. Bowcock, whose blog will be missed.
The one New York landmark that never failed to astonish and delight me, however many times it presented itself to my view in all the years I lived on the island of Manhattan, was the Brooklyn Bridge.
It's one of the most beautiful and dramatic structures ever created. Writing in Harper's Weekly on the occasion of its opening, in 1893, architecture critic Montgomery Schuyler said:
It so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable
monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote
posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not
a palace, but a bridge.
The image above is by Currier and Ives.
The second page of a story published in 1950 called “Serum To Codfish
Cove”, by the legendary Carl Barks, found on Rodney Bowcock’s Comics and Stories blog, which Mr. Bowcock has sadly just abandoned.
I’ll be posting the whole thing (ten pages in all) as a tribute to Barks and to
Mr. Bowcock, whose blog will be missed.
Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and
eight times out of nine I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual
qualities.
The legendary Carl Barks drew Donald Duck comics for about 25 years starting in 1942. He didn’t have a spectacular graphic style — what he did have was a stunning narrative efficiency, great imagination and irresistible charm.
This is the first page of a story published in 1950 called “Serum To Codfish Cove”. I found it on Rodney Bowcock’s Comics and Stories blog, which Mr. Bowcock has sadly just abandoned. It was a great site. In his introduction to this story, Mr. Bowcock observed that it would have taken another comic-book artist at least twice as many images to tell the same tale. In Barks’ hands it just flies along, without ever seeming rushed or abbreviated. It’s also great fun.
I’ll be posting the whole thing (ten pages in all) as a tribute to Barks and to Mr. Bowcock, whose blog will be missed. I wish I’d taken the time, back when I had the chance, to tell him how much I enjoyed it.
I'd never really noticed it before but Chris Van Allsburg's illustrations seem to owe something to the black-and-white illustrations of Maxfield Parrish:
Same diffusion in the surface treatment, same bold modeling of solid forms beneath it. In terms of composition, Parrish was attracted to tableaux, which gives his images a flavor of the theater, while Van Allsburg uses more dynamic angles emphasizing spatial depth, which feels more cinematic.
It's absurd to see the current economic crisis as a failure of market capitalism, as some sort of vindication of the writings of Karl Marx — though this is a theme of much commentary on the subject from the radical (and not so radical) left. The financial shenanigans of the Wall Street hustlers in recent years resembled no “market” in the history of human civilization. Markets are cruel at times, unfair at times, manipulable to a degree, but essentially, in the long term, logical.
In the Middle Ages, if you sold cow-dung pies at the fair by telling people they were mince pies, one of several things would certainly have happened to you. Most probably you would have been taken out back of the cathedral and beaten to a pulp. You might have been fined or imprisoned by the local authorities for your temerity and mendacity. At the very least you would have forever ended your ability to sell pies at any fair within the reach of gossip emanating from the fair where you got busted — and that reach would have been very far, even in the days before the rise of sophisticated communication technologies.
In short, the market would have disciplined you for your fraud.
There has been no such market discipline at work on Wall Street in recent years. People sold cow-dung pies as mince pies with no thought that they would ever have to pay a price for getting caught. They knew that the government, through corrupted legislators and regulators, would rescue the pie company they worked for if it failed, that they would be allowed to keep any money they might make in the short term from selling shit as mince, and that they would in all likelihood be given a bonus for their efforts.
This bears no relationship whatsoever to market capitalism, even at its most ruthless and brutal. This is a form of plutocracy in which certain wealthy individuals are given a license to steal and immunity from any consequences that might arise from the theft.
The confusion about this basic truth arises from an unquestioning acceptance of the definition of “the market” propounded by the plutocrats. The plutocrats have never had the slightest faith in any true kind of market, because in such a market they might fail, they might lose money, they might be prosecuted for fraud. To the plutocrats, “market” means “shell game” conducted under the protection of a corrupt local sheriff.
Capitalism becomes plutocracy, the market becomes a shell game, only when the defrauded, the “marks”, are unwilling to remove the corrupt sheriff and discipline those he's protecting.
It's time to take the folks selling the cow-dung pies out back of the cathedral and beat them to a pulp — if only to make them think twice about ever showing their faces in our town again.
Artists working for periodicals in the last century were always attracted to the bird's-eye view — it grabbed attention and allowed for a complex image, often with lots of little stories or anecdotes unfolding within the frame. Dudley Fisher did a regular newspaper comic based on the bird's-eye view — the page above is from 1939.
Stevan Dohanos did the Saturday Evening Post cover above in 1954 with a similar subject but in a photo-realistic style.
Tony Sarg did a wonderful series of bird's-eye views of New York in the 1920s, which have recently been collected in a book, Up & Down New York. (You can get it here.) Sarg was a fascinating figure from the first half of the 20th Century — primarily a theatrical puppeteer, he branched out into children's books, films and advertising displays. His most lasting contribution to American visual culture was probably his invention, in 1928, of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons — versions of his popular marionettes but manipulated by lines from below.
American illustrator Mead Schaeffer, a contemporary of Norman Rockwell, was strongly influenced by N. C. Wyeth, from the generation before theirs. In some of Schaeffer's illustrations for classic books he almost seems to be trying to impersonate Wyeth:
Most of the time, though, he used a lighter palette and line (or a more impressionistic treatment of the surface of the image) to soften the bold, solid modeling of figures and forms that characterized Wyeth's illustrations, while still evoking the Wyeth “look”:
During WWII, for The Saturday Evening Post, Schaeffer did a series of portraits of soldiers with picturesque jobs which relied on a photo-realistic technique, dramatized by extreme angles — like the image of the aircraft-carrier signalman at the head of this post, and of the naval-convoy lookout below:
These portraits seem to owe more to the graphic style of propaganda posters than to the more complex narrative strategies of many of the artists who did Post covers in this era.
I've always loved Norman Rockwell — passionately — especially his Saturday Evening Post covers. His little narratives and character studies were accomplished with techniques I associate with cinema practice from the golden age of the Hollywood studios — a photo-realistic look subtly theatricalized by carefully controlled lighting, expressive “set design” and compositions that emphasized the depth, or stereometric quality of the image. He made pictures you could get lost in, on a formal level, just long enough to imaginatively inhabit the environment in which his stories unfolded.
What I'm only coming to realize is how many other artists there were who pulled off the same kind of miracles on Saturday Evening Post covers. None of them quite duplicated Rockwell's technical bravura, but they came close enough to be enormously effective storytellers in their own right.
I've written before about Stevan Dohanos, but John Falter was in the same league. He could tell Rockwell-like stories about the ordinary rituals of American life that still resonate today with something more than nostalgia:
He also did a series of double-page views of American cities — covers that folded out to twice the size of the magazine — like the one at the head of this post. These told a different kind of story — summoning up the life of a city in the bustle of one of its signature spaces, seen in long-view. The one above, of the square in front of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, at 59th & 5th, makes New York look toy-like and manageable — and that's the way it sometimes feels in that elegant square, which mediates between the monumental and the human scale of things.
[Clicking on the double-page image of New York (or here) will take you to a high-res image at The Visual Telling Of Stories web site, where I found the cover — worth examining in detail for all the little stories unfolding within the wider view.]
Jules Guérin was one of the most famous American artists at the beginning of the last century. He illustrated books but also executed important public commissions, like the murals for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.
He had a curious style — a delicate sense of color and design, influenced by the Art Nouveau movement, married to a very rigorous draftsmanship. As a design, the image above has something of the abstract quality of a Japanese woodblock print, yet it still seems to be an authoritative record of the look of the Manhattan skyline in a mist.
Guérin's color sense led to his being hired to design the color scheme of the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, controlling every color choice throughout the fair, including the roofs of buildings and the uniforms of the guards. This was a break from the “White City” aesthetic of American world's fairs, established at the Chicago exhibition in 1893.
His superb draftsmanship, on the other hand, kept him busy doing renderings for architects and town planners to showcase their proposed building projects:
You won't see his paintings on the walls of your local art museum, which is and apparently always will be committed to showing you cutting edge art (more specifically, art that was considered cutting-edge around 1965), and there are no books dedicated to his work.
But he's no longer lost — thanks to the Internet. The images on this page come from various places, including a wonderful site that hosts vintage American illustrative art, Golden Age Comic Book Stories, centering on comic books but with a good sampling of classic American illustrators as well. Its latest post reproduces all of N. C. Wyeth's illustrations for Jules Verne's Mysterious Island — a really stunning collection of images.