Up All Night with Alfred Hitchcock

Yes, children, it’s that time again! The Art Institute of Phoenix is staging another Up All Night party this Friday, 20 March 2009. Wayne and Laura in the AIPX Library Film Committee encouraged me to design a poster to advertise the big Hitchcock double-feature, AIPX Reel Inspiration presents North by Northwest at 10:15 PM & PSYCHO at 12:45 AM.
Isak Artzi asked if I’d give a description of how I made the image, so here’s the story:
Initially we wanted to have a triple-feature: North by Northwest+Vertigo+PSYCHO.
The first image that entered my head was a rusty-metal/ industrial render of the famous Hitchcock profile as used on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series of the late ‘50’s/ early ‘60’s, inside which sat a colour photograph of a human brain atop the spinal cord. The brain would be cut into three pie-slices, each slice bearing one of the films titles scrawled in lipstick or nail polish.
I then thought of a simpler approach, with three identically-sized Hitchcock silhouettes projected through three lenses in yellow, cyan and magenta overlapping each other, with the titles coloured likewise.
I decided against these ideas because, gee-whiz, that profile / silhouette imagery has been used a bit much over the years and I didn’t want to be quite so obvious.
I don’t know where the idea came from to depict Hitchcock shooting pool, but next thing I knew I was drawing the director lining up a combination shot with a 3-ball aimed at three balls painted with the titles of the three films. Then came the word that we would only have enough time to show two, so I changed the 3-ball to a 2-ball and deleted VERTIGO from the trio.
I drew the whole illustration on a standard-issue WACOM tablet checked out from the video cage, with the Standard brush tool set between 9px & 20px (depending on the desired line thicknesses). Shape Dynamics and Smoothing were in the ON position. I worked in Photoshop CS4, mostly on the 308-06 & 307-01 workstations. I also used CS3 on pc Laptop #03 between 6 and 10 pm on the evening of March 10th. Any number of witnesses can verify my whereabouts on that evening.
When it comes to drawing with the pen tool, Photoshop is Photoshop. Adobe adds some new features to the Photoshop package every year, but drawing has remained pretty much the same for the ten years I’ve been using the program.
For the colours I did not want to use anything obviously associated with Hitchcock. However, I wanted a touch of “PSYCHO”, so I picked my palette from Van Gough’s psilocybin pool parlour. Many people say they remember PSYCHO in colour, although the film is black-and-white!
The Print Bureau did a marvellous job printing the poster six feet tall. Now if we can only find a frame to fit!
Probably not many people know that Alfred Hitchcock began his film career designing titles, and his continuing choice of outstanding, award-winning title sequences for his films bears this out. Saul Bass’s animated title for North by Northwest is thought to be the very first use of kinetic, moving type in the movies. PSYCHO is great titling too. Not to mention all the vintage footage of downtown Phoenix, Arizona in 1960!
Happy St Patrick’s Day, Mr Hitchcock, wherever you are.

What sin, a word?

Two weeks on, we’ve all probably had a chance to take a few deep breaths, and assess our situation. It seems…hard to believe. We face a real possibility of living in a world in which the President of the United States is not a creep.
What I really found difficult to credit was the hostility expressed against Barack H. Obama from some quarters. As the number of people who expressed absolute conviction to vote for more of the same hell we’ve been through the last three decades dwindled week after week, the often hysterical use of the word “socialist” to describe Obama spoke volumes. “Socialist”, the s-word, is the new code-word for an old n-word.
When did socialist become a dirty word? The rightwing radiodivs spent three decades to pejorative the word “liberal”, an adjective synonymous with “generous”. As far as the US corporate media was concerned, “liberal” = “witch”. But “socialist” = “devil”?
All the world is a stage. We are never really who we pretend to be, and we believe so only at our peril. Even Shakespeare wasn’t really Shakespeare, so it’s said.
So let’s not get too giddy for our own good. We are in what appears to be a Humpty-Dumpty situation. We should still be careful what we wish for, bearing in mind the laws of irony and unforeseen consequences. Today’s military-industrial monsters are descended from a baby conceived on FDR’s watch, before even the attack on Pearl Harbor.
That said, there is more than ever, nothing to fear, but fear itself. Great Things are in store, greater than we know.

Look at that caveman go!

“Palin Claimed Dinosaurs and People Coexisted”. I first saw this story in the Huffington Post, quoting the LA Times. Amidst the chorus of guffaws and Lurch- impressions emitted by my friends and associates, Parke Wabash offered: “Of course, people lived with dinosaurs! Read Alley Oop.”
I quickly located am online mp3 of Alley Oop by the Hollywood Argyles and gave it a spin. I can still remember listening to the song with my dad on the little jukebox in the booth at Aunt Martha‘s Pancake House in 1960. In those days, the truck stops and family-type restaurants of America often had individual little jukeboxes in the booths, into which you could deposit nickels or dimes to hear the latest hits while you waited for your meal, ate, drank coffee or just killed time hanging out. It is part of the “Old, Weird America”, beloved by the likes of Harry Smith and others, myself included. Such homey accoutrements did not seem “weird” back then, but rather, as normal as maple syrup, and they are gone forever, if you happen to believe in linear time.
In a funny kind of way, Alley Oop started the Sixties. The song was recorded and released early in 1960. It’s the first song to lyrically treat Einstein’s theory of General Relativity as a given:

“There’s a man in the funny papers we all know
He lives way back a long time ago”

“Lives”, not “lived”. Multiple temporal realities are here taken for granted. A further synchronicity is evidenced in the surname of Oop’s erstwhile 20th Century mentor in V.T.Hamlin ’s original comic strip, Doc Wonmug, a play on the name “Ein stein”- meaning literally, a single instantiation of the traditional implement the Krauts suck their suds from.
The song also has its own brand of quantum mechanics at play: two different groups released the song on the same day, May 30th, 1960, and the two versions charted at Number One- simultaneously!
That’s two objects occupying the same space in time. And, the original group, the Hollywood Argyles, never existed in the first place!
The guy who booked the session named the combo after the intersection where the studio stood: Hollywood Boulevard at Argyle. Go there and look if you don’t believe me. Last time I checked it was some kind of bank, but of course that’s not saying much nowadays.
The guys who played the original session each got paid the same amount; $25 flat, one time. The singer, Norm Davis, is a poet now living in Rochester NY (Wikipedia).
The other group that shared the song’s Number One status was called Dante and the Evergreens. If I ever heard it, I don’t recall.
There was a third group who also released a version of the song. The Dyna Sores’ version of Alley Oop made the top 60.

Time to Brush Up

A couple of days ago Mike Rider showed me this SPIDER. It’s tons of fun, with sliders to let you adjust the size speed, colour, and other features. It looks like 3d but it’s not, apparently, but rather, it seems to have been achieved with some 23 packages of AS 3.0 files.
AS 4.0 is supposed to debut next week. I don’t know who has time to learn all this stuff, and then have enough hours to work (draw) for a living. Time is getting crookeder all the time.
This one little discovery prompted me to look around at what some different Flash Animators are doing, specifically the Cold Hard Flash web site. I have lately been spending so much time with my nose buried in technical literature that I have neglected to check out what new work creative individuals have been doing. Lordy, but there is a lot of good work out there and a large proportion is being done by Spanish or Francophone artists.

If you’re not willing to make a fool of yourself, you may well be fooling a self of your make.

Time Longer than Rope

Parke Wabash sent me a terrific book of WAR COMICS, and it seems quite a propos to our moment in time. There are some colour pages from a long out-of-print DELL title called COMBAT in which the featured artist is Sam Glansman. As a kid I recognised his distinctive style and knew him by his initials SJG, which he sometimes enclosed within a small cartouche. Great Stuff.

Glansman’s Pearl Harbour story is a standout, with complex composition depicting soldiers, Zero’s dive bombing ships and fireworks bursting out of the page.

One image remains especially imprinted in my memory- a drawing of General Tojo smashing an alarm clock with his Samurai’s sword beside this caption

“AMERICA NEEDED TIME…TIME TO BUILD UP ITS STRENGTH…TIME TO PREPARE…BUT GENERAL TOJO WAS DETERMINED NOT TO GIVE US ANY TIME! WHY SHOULD HE?”

The Japanese militarists squandered their time building weapons, raising armies, navies, and air forces. In these they placed their faith, and their faith betrayed them.

Weapons don’t make you strong, and armies don’t make you safe. Navies don’t make you safe, nor do surveillance satellites. Even less so, unmanned drones and space-based weaponry.

“Time longer than rope”, says Yabby You, “and Time is gonna catch up upon you.”

Time is the master of man.

Time is a Crook

“Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook.” - Peter Lorre in Beat the Devil

“I’ll bet Aline Kominsky is going to have a shit fit”, quipped my friend after I told him a single 8” x 12” Bristol pen & ink page, drawn in 1969 by her husband (presumably before they met?) sold for $77,675.00 at auction Thursday in Dallas.

Page one of All Meat Comics (from Robert Crumb’s Big Ass Comics, originally published by the Print Mint in 1969) had been in the possession of Jack “Jaxson” Jackson. Jackson, a pioneer Texas Underground Cartoonist, passed away in 2006. Along with the rest of All Meat, bidders bought all the pages from Eggs Ackley among the Vulture Demonesses (page 1-=$21,510.00; page 7 =$31,070.00). Also on the block was the entire Dale Steinberger the Jewish Cowgirl story (page 1 =$31,070.00), as well as a striking page from Lenore Goldberg and her Girl Commandos (page 10 =$13,145.00) from MOTOR CITY Comics #2.

Best guess is that all these treasures were originally a gift from Crumb to Jaxon.

MORAL: Cultivating friendship is the best investment of all.

Shucks! Now I have to run for president.

Summer's here and business is slow. I spend my precious time searching for old
contra-bass saxophone solos on YouTube. There are some good new ones, of course.

James Carter is a standout, always was. Coleman Hawkins lives, though there are no films
of him I can find. The recordings are taken from discs.

I've booked three different models for Open Session Life Drawing classes. Wishing
to drum up trade as much as possible, I produced a poster. Kevin H suggested I tone it down, so I did, but here is the director's cut.

Most people will likely only see a "censored" version. This is, by the way, the only place
on the world wide web where you can see a depiction of 3/4 female nudity (I think).
There are millions of web sites, and I still haven't seen them all...

I was intrigued when I heard an item on the NPR Science Friday programme last week, an interview with an Aussie entrepreneur who prevailed upon some fat friends to undergo liposuction, and donate their collected body fat to have him cook it down, in his own kitchen, into bio-diesel fuel, which he used to propel his boat. The implications of this act are staggering, to say the least, for the citizens of United States and the world. We have found a single solution to two of our most pressing problems : the obesity epidemic and the fuel crisis. If we had our act together half as well as the World War Two generation who collected scrap metal, string, paper and everything else, we could make patriotic fat-harvesting part of the daily routine of every school, office and police department.

We now face the possibility of becoming a true space-age race, as highly evolved as any extraterrestrial species depicted on Star Trek, or in the annals of Science Fiction- a species whose bodies produce a substance that propels their vehicles.

What about that other pressing issue, Global Warming? The solution to this most grave threat to our future, is simple, so simple I can’t believe nobody else thought of it:

1. Everybody open all their windows and all their doors, at home and at work.
2. Turn the AC up to FULL.
3. Wait for the temperature to decrease. If it doesn’t go down within 90 days, we can try another idea.