Goddess of War

The lovely and talented Lauren R. Weinstein had a signing and opening party for the big installation and display she made for Desert Island.



(above) Window installation as seen from Metropolitan Avenue by a crappy photographer.

The book is one of those big comic books that artsy people buy. Those types usually don't read them, but go off the Times Book Review for their information. If they were to crack this open, they'd be shocked by the sex and violence and indians and cowboys.

It's a crazy amalgam of world mythology and 1970s Marvel storylines written with such a detachment you can buy into the mad logic of the narrative. The duotone colored pen and ink artwork is punctuated by several etchings.

I wish she did the whole thing with etchings. Each one tells more story than a twenty page comic book (pictures being worth so many words). They're like Bosch paintings, layer upon layer of chaos shown in an orderly fashion.

The opening was a great time. Desert Island is a terrific store. Lauren is super person.


(above) Lauren invited friends and strangers to make little people running from the Goddess of War's hand. The window has a few dozen great guys. The store is decorated with more. Hopefully, they'll continue to be added as the display stays up.



(above) Lauren signing books. Murray the Cat over her shoulder, nonplussed.


(above) Patrick and Kate Hambrecht in the foreground. It was a pretty big turnout. Maybe 60 people or so.


(above) Tim Hodler in a nice new T-Shirt and Tom Hart in the only one of his father's baseball shirts that didn't have the number "69" on the back. Tom seemed really embarrassed about that.


(above) Jared Whitham made the giant hand for the display.

Imperial Umbrellas

Soon to be gone on 28th Street due to rampant construction.



This is between 6th & Broadway, the very block once known as "Tin Pan Alley".

Two doors over is where George Gershwin had his first teenage job as a "plugger" playing piano for sheet music publishers. Its where he wrote his first hit "Swanee".

Next to that was where William Morris had his first offices booking vaudeville acts nationally.

A few doors down from that is where Emma Goldman published her anarchist magazine Mother Earth.

A couple decades earlier the Imperial Umbrellas address was a dance hall.

If you come visit us by taking the N/R train to Broadway and 28th, you'll be walking the same path that was routinely tread by some of the most important figures in American history.

As for Imperial Umbrellas, they haven't done umbrella repair in a long time. The only person left for that his the great craftsman Gilbert Center who did a repair job on one of our umbrellas few months back.

Naked Campaign - McGaffin

I'll admit, I'm not crazy about the content of this edition of The Naked Campaign for The New Yorker.

The art, as always, is great. The conceit, as usual, is great.

The imagery in the edition is some of our strongest and most cinematic.

The commentary, though, is a little weak and the excellence of the form masks that.

If you watch our earlier piece, Reality Bites, Brodner rightfully attacks the campaign coverage for focusing on stupid things -lapel pins, saluting the flag, late night misstatements, etc.



This was a sharp, smart film.

In our latest piece, we engage in the same "gotcha" reporting that we earlier condemned.

So McCain still says "Czechoslovakia", big deal. Most people over 30 do, even those of us who know the difference between Serbia and Montenegro. Does that really change anything about the way the guy would govern?

The greatest shame of this is that the graphic idea is great, I just think it was wasted on weaker content.

Moment of Death - Post One

Next time you find yourself looking forward to dying (like I do almost every second), consider that medical science doesn't really have a clear definition of death ---the one thing that is certain; its a process that may take as long as hours.

I imagine those long minutes stretch into years, much as the most complicated dreams happen in a few seconds.

Perhaps those minutes seem longer than our natural lives. Perhaps you're going through them right now.

Some of these questions are addressed in the upcoming National Geographic special "Moment of Death" (premieres September, 3).

We did a few dozen animation and effects shots, similar to our work for WNET/Thirteen's "Curious" but cooler.

One of the sequences is an illustration of a woman's "near death experience". We wanted to avoid the white limbo look often used to show these things, so we experimented with several looks.




above: Going for a Stan Brakhage inspired look, we painted on two inch artist tape.
This original piece of art is about 25 feet long.




above: This is another using footage of the actual Near Death Experiencer and give her a wispy, flowing brush line body.

Tune in September to see how the sequence finally turned out! (It doesn't use either of these treatments.)

BAT-POW!

Summer of 1989. I was taking Chemistry in summer school so I could take a History elective during the school year. Mr. Feighan's teaching method was to use his young son Keith as an example to every problem. That summer, Keith was obsessed with Batman.

He wasn't the only one. Every day Bill Leetch wore a different Batman T-Shirt to class (in summer school, there was no dress code, anything but a jacket and tie would get you immediately sent home in the regular year). So Mr. Feighan would rip on him for it, and so would all the other boys. We would all mock him, but really, the excitement we all a had for Batman was so thick that in the days leading up to the films release chemistry took a back seat to stories of Keith as Batman and speculation on how exciting the movie was going to be.

Even though I coolly feigned disinterest this whole time, I was there at midnight sitting between Dan Barry and Tom Palermo in a buzzing packed movie house. The anticipation was so great that even if Carly Simon popped out of the screen, pulled off her face to reveal Cthulu himself who in turn was destroyed by a flesh and blood Caped Crusader before our eyes we would have been disappointed.

Years later, I know its unfair to put those expectations on any work, least of all a men-in-tights chronicle. Tim Burton's film holds up as what it was meant to be -a good looking piece of fun, a piece for Jack Nicholson to chew the scenery, a vehicle for a soundtrack by Prince, and the kind of wholesome "Biff! Bang! Pow!" entertainment teenaged boys need on a hot summer night.

Now we've got Batman VI: The Dark Knight breaking box office records and turning critics to their thesauruses for superlatives. What is it about this picture that resonates with us at this moment?

The superhero movie should be a pretty easy thing to make. No explanation is necessary, not because of some Jungian collective or "hero with a thousand faces" that is wired into our thought systems -but because we've all seen it a thousand times. When we see Eastwood working his farm at the opening of "Unforgiven" we know his story, we know that he was a gunslinger and we know he's now an old man. We view this in the continuum of films and television we've seen thousand times. What makes "Unforgiven" extraordinary is how Eastwood uses that as a springboard to create not just one moving character in William Munney, but a whole cast of players who's parts elucidate dark corners of the human condition.

Beauty is a matter of size and order, and therefore impossible either (I) in a very minute creature, since our perception becomes indistinct as it approaches instantaneity; or (II) in a creature of vast size -one, say 1,000 miles long- as in that case, instead of the object being seen all at once, the unity and wholeness of it is lost to the the beholder.
Poetics, Chapter VII

Maybe it's unfair to critique a film whose middle 45 minutes were project while you were thinking "can I hold it much longer?". A film that you missed part of to take a hop into the men's room to prevent permanent bladder damage or a grown up version of first-grade public humiliation. This is why kid's films are 75 minutes -children have small bladders. Guys in tights = kid's film, right?

Apparently not.

In our cultural obsession with youth and childhood we have started to elevate the fantasies of childhood to the lingua franca of adult philosophies. Of course, teenage fantasies don't have the vocabulary to discuss the complex shadows of adult morality -everything is heroes and villains. It's a safe place for thinking, where it's easy to make a moral choice. The Dark Knight gestures towards these moral shadows but still portrays them with shining absolutes.

Its big screen adaptation of the Milgram Experiment shows that whatever choice you make, ultimately a masked man will save the day. That the choice between saving two people in jeopardy comes down to saving both as long as your team can get there fast enough. And ultimately, that the most righteous man alive will always be the most righteous man alive -until he isn't, then he's bad to the flesh burnt bone.

Maybe this is why the film is so critically and financially successful. We like these overt gestures towards moral ambiguity -that makes it seem adult, but love the essential dichotomy of right and wrong -that comforts us in our age of uncertainty and tumult. Maybe this is why Heath Ledger's Joker has been getting such well-deserved praised -he's a character that, for a time, stands outside the film's system of black and white. But even he, ultimately, is turned pure "bad". Chaos, it turns out, is public enemy number one in Gotham and that's what the Joker loves.

Chaos, it turns out, is what the audiences love too. It what we love as teenagers, turning up the stereo too loud, staying out past curfew, and sneaking wine coolers down to the railroad tracks.

Zip! Bow! Wow!

I've been meaning to post a review of Batman even though I haven't seen it yet, but I haven't gotten around to making up anything good.

Hopefully next week, I might even see it by that time. I'm really looking forward to some nice "POW!" "BANG!" "POP!" graphics for the fight scenes.

So I haven't seen Batman, unlike the rest of America. Partially, because I don't really care about men in tights all that much. When I see a superhero picture I like to moazy on in after a grueling day of making schedules and budgets for jobs that never happen. If a movie is sold out days in advance, it's unlikely that I'll be a ticket holder.

The other reason is that we're pretty busy.

Above is a logo animation we made for On The Leesh, an independent production company run by awesome people. A couple years back we did the titles to their short "What Are The Odds?" (below)



If you get past the crappy, crappy YouTube compression, you'll see some pretty nice animation by Ed Smith. Ed has an encyclopedia of great talents as an animator. Under the letter "D" is "dog". I've never seen anybody animate dogs -all shapes, sizes and varieties -with such personality and skill.

The "On The Leesh" logo was animated by Christina Riley. She does a good with dogs too (even though its hard to compete with Ed Smith). The dog's playfulness with the film is "realistic" and he's got a fluid energy.

One thing that's tough about this type of design -and Flash animation in general -is the difficulty of tracebacks. In frames 40 through 50 of this animation, the dog's body is on hold while his tail wags. Given the energy of the character (and the furriness of the pup) you'd like a little bit of something going on with character. In a silhouette character, that redefines the shape and alters not only the mood of the character but can cause a jitter on feet and hands that makes the character slide.

Art Show

(above) On the Edge of the Woods, Saul Chernick

A few months back R. Sikoryak recommended art journalist/curator Jill Conner get in touch with us for a show she was curating.

She was putting together a show called Loaded at The Phatory on E. 9th Street featuring work by Saul Chernick and Ernest Concepcion. Both artists have strong figurative images and an almost aggressive form that is particularly fresh in today's gallery scene.

Anyhow, she wanted to put together a few nights of animation to bring folks into the show and put the paintings in a new context.

I don't claim that our work is "art" by any stretch of the imagination. We do commercial work and work for hire, I'm proud of the stuff we make but it is expressly not "art".

I was a great honor to be featured in the same show as guys like Saul Chernick and Ernest Concepcion as well as video pieces by Jim Torok, Brian Dewan and Brent Green.

Here's a shot of the show.

That's Jill's reflection in the window.