Clever

This past weekend I visited Dylan at the Explora Museum in Albuquerque. They had signs like this to tell you where the bathrooms were.

For Nolan

Fall of a Sudden

The first day of Fall wasn't fooling around in Santa Fe. It's cold here now!

Snow tonight means time to break out a nice warm wolf sweatshirt.

Western Movie Night

It was a beautiful day in Santa Fe... FOR A WESTERN MOVIE NIGHT WHERE WE SERVED BARBECUE!!!

We had run into royalty troubles with one of the movies we were going to show so I had to make a last minute stop for something different at the best video rental in town.

Casablanca has a huge selection and is itself huge. Its massive floor space is its biggest advantage compared to the overrated Video Library. Video library has a pretty good selection too, but it's so tiny that if any other person is in there you have to spoon them and breathe on their neck to look at the shelves. Also, there is so little shelf space that only the spines of videos and (worse) DVDs face out. This is exhausting to browse compared to the more common (and better) practice of displaying the front of the boxes as Casablanca does. Additionally, Casablanca's layout is much more sane and has sections like comedy, classics, westerns, etc. instead of obnoxious and unhelpful sections like "British Cult". I often wonder if the ideal video store wouldn't just be alphabetized from one end to other with no divisions besides the new releases. Literature sections of bookstores do this. It prevents bookstores from having to decide what genre Pale Fire belongs to and would prevent video store managers from telling me that all black and white movies are classic and that any slightly clever movie is a comedy.

The better and smarter genre divisions reminds me that Casablanca is also unpretentious. Although their catalogue is deep they also have the room and inclination to stock more major titles and new releases. This means you can go to one place to rent those movies and to get artier stuff - instead of having to make a decision from the start about whether you'll be going to Video Library or Hollywood. Also, since you aren't competing as intensely against other "serious" movie fans you're less likely to discover that Out of the Past has already been rented.

Add to this longer rental times and the option of renting 7 videos for 7 days for 7 dollars (or 4 DVDS), and Casablanca becomes an obvious winner. It has lousy hours, but they mirror the lousy hours of Video Library so no demerit.


Back in the Great Hall, Oliver, Joe, and Emily help set up the table of food in the back. Scott and Levi helped as well and Daphne was typically expert at producing a snowdrift's worth of popcorn. We had brownies, rolls, tortilla chips and salsa, potato salad, popcorn, sarsaparilla, and five different kinds of sauce to accompany many pounds of barbecued chicken, pork, and beef brought in from the new Whole Hog Cafe here in Santa Fe. It was delicious.

Because of the newly arisen and ambiguous legal issues I won't say what movies we showed, but they were excellent. Two classic westerns, one from the forties one from the fifties, both featuring Mr. Marion Morrison. Hooray for watching good movies on a big screen, surrounded by other people also enjoying themselves, and eating as much really good food as you can. And all for free.

Don't Crack Up

Today at work I was loaned to another office where they just had me stuffing hundreds of envelopes. I hadn't gotten enough sleep and I was feeling self-conscious in front of a different supervisor, so I was feeling pretty punchy. Here are three things that I thought of that made my mouth start twisting around because I didn't want to laugh out loud. In order of occurrence:


1) There's a "Simpsons" episode where Homer realizes that his life is already half wasted and he worries what people will remember him for after his death. He imagines a steamshovel dropping a bunch of dirt and his corpse into his grave. We pan over his sparsely attended funeral which includes Lenny and Ned (his family is not present) to where his legs are protuding from the ground. Heckle and Jeckle are contemplating them.

Heckle: There goes a real sack of crap.
Jeckle: Indubitably old chum!


2) The part in "Draftee Daffy" when Daffy is crawling along the floor in terror and muttering, "Man... Draft Board... Letter... President... Man... Draft Board..." You can see it here .


3) In "True Stories" when John Goodman is on his blind date and tells a woman that he is writing a song, the lyrics of which he has not completed. He attempts to sing her what he has so far and he ad-libs some syllables with meowing.

The last one got me the closest to actually cracking up. The feeling of holding in laughter because you will get in trouble may be the best feeling in the world. It is the best reason to see an amateur theater production.

Summer Projects

Summer break is a week away for me, which means it's time for summer projects.

The number one summer project will be joining up with the John K./Preston Blair $8 animation course. I just picked up a copy of Preston Blair's Animation again and it was a nostalgia rush. I had this book when I was a kid 'cause I had seen it at Ben Franklin's (maybe that store was still even called Darr's then) and made my mom buy it for me. Anyway, the Hobby Lobby here in town amazingly has three copies of this big floppy book (Eight bucks for one of the formative texts of my youth!) and as I turn the pages I'm shocked at how many of these drawings I viscerally remember. This was a major influence on my taste even though I had pretty much forgotten about it for 14 years or more. 40's animation design will probably always mean more to me than anything else that pencils can make. I need to find a scanner for my drawings.

The other summer project will be to make a ukulele out of a tin lunchbox. It should cost me only 23 bucks instead of the $129 this place wants you to fork over for their ugly things. I guess I have to find the right lunchbox, too. What would be appropriate and attractive on a lunchbox ukulele? What if there were W.C. Fields lunchboxes?

I also want to read a stack of books. Since I'll be doing the same job I did last summer, which is pretty much just sitting near a phone, I should have a lot of time to draw cartoon dog faces and read. Evenings will be for sitting outside and for watching black and white movies on VHS.

I put a lot of links in this post.

Bob Clampett's Truncated Oeuvre

Thad Komorowski on his site "Identifying Animators and Their Scenes" has posted his thoughts on Bob Clampett's merits versus those of Chuck Jones. He says he ranks only Jones above Clampett as a cartoon director, but that Jones is superior because he continued doing great work after 1946, while Clampett did not. (Clampett left Warner Brothers and pretty much abandoned theatrical animation).

Chuck is unique among Warner directors in that he continued to create watchable and sometimes even excellent cartoons well into the fifties. He was able to do both crazy forties stuff and also the more limited animation talky stuff later.

Like a lot of people who love Warner cartoons and grew up watching them on TV, Chuck was my first love. Bob left in the mid-forties, and none of the pre-48 stuff was aired on network TV. Chuck is easily the strongest of the three 50's directors.

But when I got a tape of "Bugs Bunny Superstar" in middle school and saw "A Corny Concerto" it immediately became my favorite cartoon. It was completely different than anything I had seen before. It was what Looney Tunes were always purported to be; completely insane. Chuck's cartoons aren't at all crazy and wild like Clampett's, and Friz and McKimson's had plenty of explosions and beatings and stuff, but they were often kind of ugly and boring. Clampett makes your skeleton want to leap out of your body.

I deeply love Chuck Jones cartoons, I love the witty scripts and the precise draftsmanship. Some of those Wile E. Coyote poses make me ache with my whole body because they look so good and so right, you can feel what they look like. Because Jones loved to do strong poses and his drawings looked so amazing it didn't hurt him as animation became increasingly limited. (Obviously UPA's style had influence everywhere, but WB budgets were continually shrinking for shorts after the war.) As Thad says, it's often claimed that Clampett's influence was what made everyone's cartoons so much wilder and fun and good-looking in the 40s. But like him, I have trouble accepting that it was just Clampett. Surely, much of the credit just goes to budgets being bigger and animation being fuller. I love "Little Red Riding Rabbit" by Freleng, I don't think it's significantly better writing than a lot of later Freleng scripts, but the drawings are a pleasure to look at, which is not always (or even often) the case with a lot of later Freleng pictures. Chuck's cartoons kept looking good because he had such a strong sense of pose and design.

So back to Clampett. As Milt Gray points out on his commentary track for "The Gruesome Twosome" animation in Clampett cartoons is fuller than anybody else at Warner's. I would love to know what he would have done if he stayed on, but it isn't obvious to me he would have continued to be brilliant, I think that if he left because of more limited budgets it might be legitimate artistic choice. I know that people rave about Scribner's work in "Hillbilly Hare" and I know that under McKimson he was probably reigned in, but it still has nowhere near the punch for me that Scribner does in a great Clampett cartoon. Would he have kept it up under Clampett? Maybe, but maybe the vibe and budgets at WB in the 50's were just never going to be conducive to that kind of full animation.

The shorter point I wanted to make was this: why should making "only" a dozen absolutely amazing cartoons in the forties make him less of a director than Jones who made some brilliant ones in two different decades? Orson Welles directed very few great movies, would a director who made more over a greater span of time clearly be a better director?

The other thing I wanted to say was that Thad implies that Jones was good at two things, full and limited animation, while Clampett was only good at the former. But Jones's animation was never as full as Clampett's, so I'm less convinced.

With all that said, I'm not even going to claim that Clampett is the superior director, only that I wouldn't demote him for the reasons cited.

What Can Happen In Dreams

It is commonly known that if you die during a dream, you will also simultaneously die in your sleep in real life.

It is lesser known that if you die in a dream that somebody else is having you will become invisible to them. Be careful: This new condition may not be immediately apparent to either of you.

Any animals that talk to you in a dream can now understand your spoken language perfectly.

Sometimes in our dreams we meet and even interact with celebrities. This is usually nothing more than wish fulfillment - or perhaps even a manifestation of fears. However, if you speak with a celebrity who shares your birthdate it really is their ghost!

Once in your life you will have a dream that is a scene by scene replay of the first dream you ever had. It may be when you are 80 or it may be the second night you ever dream. The lucky few who are able indentify this occurance and state it aloud while still in the dream will, before going to bed each night, be able to choose the content of their dreams for life.

Try placing a radio attached to a tape recorder 3-5 feet from your bed while you dream. If your dream takes place in a school of any kind the entire AM dial can pick up all of the dialogue.

If you dream that you died of drowning you will not necessarily die; upon waking you may choose to die or choose that a random person swimming somewhere in the world at that moment drown.

Print and keep this list on a bedside table and keep track for yourself!

Every 17 Years, the Cicadas Hatch

This blog has been dormant for too long. Will it re-awaken? Will it be about the same thing? (If you mean work disguises, no - if you mean me, probably in some context).