« November 2009 | Main | January 2010 »
Yes, the bird is the word, and this bird has the last word.
It has been a gas blogging all year, but this blogger is out of gas and taking a nice break for the winter break.
Thank you for following, for reading, for commenting, for linking, for sharing, and for putting up with the eclectic stew served here thrice-weekly.
I hope to see you back here on January 4th for more inside stories from the hollywood outlier!
Enjoy the holidays wherever you are!
william
Before his seminal work on Spiderman and Dr. Strange, the comic book artist Steve Ditko started out in the 1950's drawing stories for lesser known publishers such as Ajax/Ferrell, Gilmore, Prize, Timor and mostly Charlton Comics.
A new book called Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 1 collects much of this early work and reprints it nicely.
He certainly had a knack for faces, and for extreme close-ups and under-lighting.
The EC influence is evident, but it was an influence that most of his generation was under at the time, and it seems like he had has own unique and distinct style from the time he picked up his pen.
william
Here are a few drawings from my Australia sketch book that I meant to write about but never got around to this year. So now that the year is ending, I'll throw them in here for the scrap book.
A vintage Australian tourist poster.
Natalie hanging out with Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark star Bailee Madison.
william
"First Autistic Boy In Outer Space"
Now that's a headline I'd like to see someday.
Why not? They say the stars are our destination, and the sky's the limit. Maybe I'll be that very first boy on the autistic spectrum to go for a ride in a rocket ship?
My Dad took me to the California ScienCenter Museum the other day.
There was a lot of cool stuff there, but I was mostly interested in the jets and rocket ships!
I really really wanted to get in one and blast off. They didn't have that option for kids. Maybe someday? I want to go to outer space and see the little creatures there.
I kept telling my Dad that I wanted to go to the Purple Planet, but he didn't seem to know where it is. Hmmm.
I had to settle for climbing into the pilot's seat of this helicopter.
That was pretty fun, but I still wished that I could have climbed into the cockpit of one of the space capsules I saw there.
Mercury. Gemini. Apollo. Diego.
Time to get out of this contraption!
I know it looks like I am being teleported into outer space, but really I am just standing in a big wind tunnel. I was moving around a lot, so my Dad couldn't take a picture in focus, but this one kind of looks the way that I felt standing inside that strong wind!
I had a great time at the science museum. They even had a yellow parachute that floated down on a wire when you pressed a button. Doesn't get much better than that!
Things are definitely Looking Up for me!
Diego
(my Dad says that he will be back with the next post)
Slim Brundage, the Janitor and proprietor of The College of Complexes in Chicago in the 1950's, known as The Playground For People Who Think, was famous for his raves, no, not the rave parties that we are familiar with today, but his screeds or rants or diatribes about the social and racial and political injustices he saw in the world all around him.
Here is one of Slim Brundage's famous "ravings", and although written almost fifty years ago, it felt so prescient that it bore partial reprinting here.
Politicians running on "gas" and sending the marines to Iraq? Putting the peasants in peonage every time they threaten a "Wall Street dollar"? Spending "40 Billion A Year" on "new ways to kill people"?
Eerie!
Man, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
What would Mr. Brundage have to say if he could see us now? Could The Janitor come back and clean up the fine mess we're in today?
william
The most famous "X" in American history is surely Malcolm X, who dropped the last name ("Little") that was given to him, presumably by a white slavemaster, in favor of the letter X, symbolizing the true African family name that he would never know.
Born in 1903 in a lunatic asylum in Blackfoot, Idaho, the future proprietor of Chicago's famous College of Complexes, Malcolm Reed Brundage also chose to shed his given name as he grew up, adopting the "Hobo sobriquet" of "Slim".
As someone once wrote of him "his childhood was difficult, but he was difficult back." Stuck in an orphanage at 10, he wound up organizing a strike against the strict rules and lousy food. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World, or "Wobblies" and spent the rest of his life organizing or agitating, mostly on behalf of free speech and using your brain.
Like Malcolm, Slim Brundage also seems to have humorously adopted the letter "X" into his name at some point, although as his business card points out, in his case his "X" was a form of "ex", as he was an x-convict, and x-husband, an x-bootlegger, etc.
How cool was "Slim" Brundage? He certainly had an eye for interesting, strong women!
His first ex-wife was Margaret Johnson, who was one of the greatest cover artists of lurid pulp magazines like Weird Tales. Her art was so disturbing that H.P. Lovecraft used to tear the covers off of the magazines containing his stories and dispose of them!
And he had a long affair with New York Times art critic and famous mystery crimewriter Helen McCloy.
The IRS found an excuse to shut Slim and the College down in 1961. Brundage died in 1990, and appropriately enough, his papers are in the collection of The Newberry Library, on the site of the park formerly known as Bughouse Square, where Slim and other "soap box" orators once made their home and filled the air with free speech.
The Janitor lives on!
william
Imagine a bar that is run by an ex-Hobo turned Janitor turned self-styled Professor in which the main objective is to provide a forum for free speech, a gathering place for speakers of every race, creed and color, and the encouragement of the exchange of ideas, however unpopular or controversial.
Imagine this proprieter, born in a madhouse, styled his academy in the language of psychopathology and welcomed "all schizophrenics, manic-depressives, paranoiacs, compulsives" and gave out "Schizo certificates" certifying that the bearer, having been found "fully and satisfactorily wanting in sanity" was now enrolled in the "Loyal Disorder of Schizos".
If you can dream it, it probably exists, and starting in 1951 and continuing in the Chicago of the fifties and early sixties, there was such a place, called The College of Complexes, under the stewardship of an inimitable character named "Slim" Brundage aka The Janitor!
Bringing the anarchist tradition of the Haymarket and the soap box orators of what was known locally as Bughouse Square under one roof, add into the mix one liquor license and one beat generation, and you've got a potent cocktail that was served nightly at this bohemian grove.
On any given night, Gwyndolyn Brooks or Nelson Algren, Carl Sandburg or Duke Ellington, Studs Terkel or Congressman Sidney Yates might be seen at the college; but more than the celebrities it was the working class radicals, black liberationists, early feminists or anyone of strongly partisan view who could affectionately be called a "crank" who gave the place its personality.
In a world where ideas mattered and were hotly debated, it was a "playground for people who think".
Imagine that!
william
P.S. The College tradition continues today, in a diminished form, with once weekly meetings at the Lincoln Restaurant at Irving Park and Damen.
As I'm sure many of you who read this blog know, my wife Elsita started a blog called The Hidden Seed this year in which she shares her own sense of personal style and self-expression and encourages her readers to join in her community of positive self-image.
But, as they say, the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, and every apple has a seed, so I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise to discover that The Hidden Seed has a Hidden Seed, as we reveal with these pictures for the very first time the self-expression through personal style of Miss Natalie!
It is fun to watch our own little Hidden Seed grow her own Secret Garden, as she surprises us every day with her creative output and style choices. I can imagine that it won't be long before she is blogging too, and sharing with the world the universe inside that she has to offer.
Enjoy!
william
A friend of mine shared this book with me and it definitely stands out as one of the oddest, most unique publications I have come across.
"Ceau" is, of course, short for Ceausescu, the surname of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, the long time dictactor and his wife who held power in Romania from 1965 until they were overthrown and executed on Christmas Day in the violent political upheavals of 1989.
My own interest in Ceausescu stems from living in Romania for most of the year in 2002, as it was in a huge field outside of Bucharest and in the mountains of Poiana Brasov three hours north of the city, that we built and filmed the world of 19th Century North Carolina for the movie "Cold Mountain". My driver on that production was a young man in his early thirties, and over the months of driving the long, winding mountain roads of Transylvania, he opened up to me and shared something of his own biography growing up under the dictator.
It turns out that he was a young man in the Army in December 1989, and was on active duty on the night that his whole world changed. In the course of 24 hours, he went from standing guard in the capital while Ceau gave a desperate speech, his last, to the huge crowd that had gathered in the Revolutionary Square. My driver was ordered to face the crowd of demonstrators and shoot if necessary, one of the most tense moments of his life, as for the first time the public courageously turned on their despot and started booing him and rioting. By the next night, after failing to quell the disturbance at the Central Committee headquarters, the first couple fled in their helicopter, and suddenly his orders were reversed as his officers and everyone else tried to save their skin and show their opposition to their former government.
"Ceau" the book, is a collection of hundreds of portraits, both naive and professional, of the dictator and his wife, alone or as a couple, and sometimes with smiling children or an adoring public, that were painted over the decades, and collected in this one volume. It is both an art book, and a subtle critique of the psychology of subjugation to power.
There are no words accompanying the portraits, but the book ends with the written transcript of the hasty kangaroo-court trial put on by the military before they were summarily executed.
It is said that the firing squad did not even wait for the customary niceties of putting on the blindfold and tying their hands before they started firing.
If there is an "art" to living, and dying, as a dictator, this odd book really captures it.
william
