August 30, 2002
Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad
You wouldn't know it to look at the Western art he's been painting since his retirement, but Al Feldstein played at least two small but crucial roles in American popular culture. Both stemmed from his position at Entertaining Comics. EC had been founded by Max Gaines, whose earlier company, Dell, may have been the first real comic book company. Gaines went on to found All-American Comics (later merged into DC; a number of All-American's titles, penned by comic book pioneer Gardner Fox, are still available today in slightly different forms). The name originally stood for "Educational Comics", then stood for "Entertaining Comics", but seems to have simply been a nod to Gaines' history with DC. When Max Gaines died young, his son William inherited EC, then having largely abandoned the educational comics game to become a publisher of funny animal books. Gaines doesn't seem to have been terribly interested in the company until Feldstein came along, but the two seem to have gotten along like a house on fire. They quickly launched into crime comics, following in the footsteps of the lurid bestseller Crime Does Not Pay, and then (writing the stories themselves) began publishing Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and the rest of the EC horror comics. The two men had created a genre.
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August 25, 2002
Trance Witness Revels
From summer 2001 to spring 2002, phootgrapher Simon Høgsberg (link possibly via the excellent photography weblog Consumptive) camped out at Marble Arch in London and took pictures of pedestrians as they walked by. The photos themselves vary in quality, but there's something wonderful about the project of making art based on everyday people. It's vaguely reminiscient of Daniel Meadows' "Photobus" work, a series of free portraits he took in England in 1973 and again (with many of the same participants) in 1998. It's even more reminiscent of some of the work at the Hirschhorn's current "Open Cities" street photography exhibit, particularly the work of Beat Streuli and (especially) Philip-Lorca diCorcia's wonderfully cinematic street photography.
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August 21, 2002
Zawahiri's fetish
Patrick Farley, the man behind "The Guy I Almost Was" and "Apocamon", has been working on a comic about Afghanistan. It's called Spiders, and part three is now available. Scott McCloud is a big fan; Spiders gets up to some of the nifty tricks McCloud talked about in Reinventing Comics. Like When I Am King, my personal standard for showing how comics can take advantage of not being on paper, Spiders (and much of Farley's other work) eschews rectangular layouts in favor of long horizontal and vertical strips; in part three, he uses vertically offset strips of panels to indicate simultaneous actions. And he foregrounds the medium of the Web, something I don't think I've seen before in online comics. The "Voxpop" splash screen serves as a sendup of Salon (of course the alternate universe's Salon would focus on Zawahiri's danger fetish) and as a way of introducing the story; since we know that Farley's war is largely being fought remotely, over the net, it also serves as a rather elegant infodump. Farley isn't just writing an excellent online comic; he's writing very good science fiction. Spiders reminds me of Bruce Sterling for more than just the (quite plausible, what with the heat rays, stink bombs, and other non-lethal weapons the Army is working on) future of war speculation. The conceit of the spiders reminds me of the "Chinese lottery" (or "Chinese radio") codebreaking thought experiment, in which mass production of consumer goods is harnessed for distributed computing. Farley imagines something a bit like distributed DES attacks or SETI@home crossed with reality TV, which is a brilliant conceit. And like all good science fiction, Spiders isn't just taking a stab at the future; it's saying something about today. In the real world Karzai's government is shaky, bombs sometimes hit the wrong people, and we haven't found Bin Laden. Farley is imagining instead a world of liberated, gun-toting Afghan women, MDMA bombs, and terrorist hunting as a non-lethal, interactive online game. It's a classic piece of liberal wish fulfillment (down to the reference to President Gore, which reads as irony, wish fulfillment, and a marker of just how difference this universe is, all at once). There's nothing wrong with wish fulfillment in science fiction or in comics; in the real world, heavy pre-natal doses of radiation rarely make one into, say, a roller-skating disco superheroine. But Farley presents a worm in the apple; the righteous, bloodless war of vengence isn't bloodless, and it barely even comes off as righteous. I can't wait for part four.
August 18, 2002
His indie world
Poor yay-saying wannabe pop star Amanda Latona recently was given a less-than-glowing profile in the New York Times Magazine. I have zero interest in ever seeing Latona perform or hearing her music, but I don't think that she'll cheat her audience, and I don't think that audience includes a lot of Times readers. When was it decided that singers had to be smart? Is Ben E. King an Einstein? Was Tammy Wynette the second coming of Madame Curie? I have no idea, but it seems largely irrelevant. What's important to the music is the music; the idea the musicians should also be songwriters is a recent anomaly, spurred by Bob Dylan and the British Invasion. It would have confused people in Elvis' day, much less the Carter Family's or Jenny Lind's. But Amanda Latona isn't rock and roll; you don't have to have given any thought to the question of whether punk rock equates to capitalism to be a little perturbed at watching the hit machine operate.
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August 17, 2002
High society
On April 18, 1956, the world rather spectacularly changed. The change itself was a miniscule one, but the spectacle was something to behold. Grace Patricia Kelly was a sort of homegrown aristocrat. Her father was an wealthy contractor and a winner of two gold medals in rowing at the 1920 Olympics (although stories that portray him as a brash upstart are overstated; he was perhaps the best-known oarsman in the world at the time). He later became first oarsman inducted to the Rowing Hall of Fame. Her mother was a gifted swimmer and the first women's athletics coach at the University of Pennsylvania. Her uncle George was a popular playwright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Craig's Wife (though politics within the committee may have skewed the vote). But there's American aristocracy, and then there's aristocracy; Kelly's marriage to the handsome (if somewhat shifty-eyed) Prince Rainier of Monaco put her in touch with the real thing.
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August 13, 2002
The books of the dead
Everyone has a part of the newspaper that they habitually turn to first. Some read the business section; some the sports page; some the comics. Others turn to the obituaries. Reading the obituaries over one's coffee would seem a rather morbid way to start the morning, but obituaries have fans. Recently, New York Times obituaries have been collected in The Last Word: The New York Times Book of Obituaries and Farewells and 52 McGs, as well as a study of who gets commemorated. Goodbye Magazine tracks particularly noteable celebrity obits, and London's Daily Telegraph has spawned a whole series of obituary collections, each volume dedicated to, say, eccentrics or heros and adventurers. British obituaries are prized by connoisseurs for their bluntness, superior sense of gallows humor, and occasional genuine spitefulness; American obituaries tend to be respectful, even when the subject doesn't deserve it.
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August 10, 2002
Shift, Purkinje, shift!
Walking around Berkeley at dusk last week, we saw a hydrangea that almost seemed to glow. It was an example of the Purkinje shift. The effect is named after Johannes Purkinje, a nineteenth-century Bohemian physiologist who discovered the Purkinje cell and the Purkinje fiber; Purkinje also gave blood plasma its name and was the first person to classify fingerprints. Purkinje noted the shift when looking at an Oriental rug one evening; as dusk settled, some colors appeared to grow relatively brighter. In low-light conditions, the rod receptors in your eye (scotopic sensitivity) take over from the cone receptors (photopic sensitivity). Rods and cones are most sensitive to different wavelengths of light, so as it gets darker, we perceive colors as changing in brighteness as reds and oranges grow relatively dimmer and greens and blues grow relatively brighter; this Purkinje shift demonstration can be done with your computer in a dark room. Unlike many optical illusions -- the waterfall effect, for instance, or relative length and angle tricks or this horrid thing -- the Purkinje shift is not based upon fooling the brain. It's a result of the mechanics of the eye. The eye doesn't work the same way as mental models of the eye, as telescopes or cameras. It's a slightly eerie notion; upon his discovery of the blind spot in 1668, Edme Mariotte was disturbed by the conflict between what he had just observed and Kepler's model of the eye as a natural lens. It wasn't until 1819 that scientific exploration of the blind spot really took off, both because nerves were poorly understood and because no one had a model of the eye good enough to displace Kepler's that also accounted for the blind spot and the weird way it seemed to flow into the background. Nineteenth century philosophy, of all things, becan to provide this model. Schopenhauer sums it up at the beginning of On Seeing and Colors: We see nothing, save through reason.
August 07, 2002
On the road
In 1937, in the midst of the Depression, a young Nebraskan named Joycolon Knapp decided to hit the road with her family; her journal held her photos, notes, and an expense and mileage log she kept while vistiing places like San Francisco, Las Vegas, and the Grand Canyon (link via Portage). In 1927, after graduating from Cornell, Japanese native Kiyooka Eiichi decided that he would take a forty-day car trip from Ithaca to San Francisco (where he would catch a ship to Tokyo); in 1989, Jeffrey Rouff came across a reference to Kiyooka's trip (link via Dan at MeFi), tracked him down at Keiõ University, and obtained a copy of the home movie he took, and interviewed him. In an interview with Rouff, Kiyooka said, "The usual way would have been to take a train in Ithaca to San Francisco, but going across the country by train looked like a very stupid thing to do"; rail-jumpers, both modern (link via BoingBoing and classic, would disagree, but I'm not sure I would. America is perhaps best experienced by road trip.
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August 04, 2002
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Las Vegas remains a remarkable city: a monument to gaudiness and lack of restraint, a Disneyland for adults that's even more upfront about wanting your money in its pocket. I rather like the effect, as long as I'm not forced to stay there more than a few days. The Bellagio buffet was not as good as I remembered it (and the rooms suspiciously resemble those of a glorified Hilton), but Olives was excellent, and Paris Las Vegas is simply fun. Despite the availability of strategy charts for blackjack, I could not reliably remember when to surrender, and I was too embarassed to look at a pocket flash card; of such frailities are billion-dollar casino companies made. A few days of modest winning pushed me close to break-even, and I called myself lucky (the more so for getting tickets, after a last-minute screwup, to the fabulous Cirque du Soleil "O").
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