September 30, 2005
Icons: An A-Z Guide to the People Who Shaped Our Time
One of my favorite browsing books, Icons: An A-Z Guide to the People Who Shaped Our Time, has a thousand short (200-300 word) biographies about influential people from post WWII to the present (or up to 1991, the year of the book's publication).
It's fascinating to flip through, especially when I come across a name I'm famliar with but know nothing about, such as Edward Albee, Pol Pot, George Meany, Germaine Greer, Bruce Chatwin, or Luis Bunuel. Every entry has some kind o surprising information (I never knew that Che Guevara was director of the Cuban National Bank, "where he ruthlessly imposed a Soviet-style economy -- treating it as a single unit rather than the
It's even interesting to read about people I've never even heard of. The book is out of print, but copies are going for as little as 75 cents on Amazon.
Link
September 29, 2005
Walt Disney Treasures - Mickey Mouse in Black and White
This two volume set of of old black and white Mickey Mouse cartoons (34 cartoons in all) is my two-year-old daughter's favorite thing to watch. The cartoons really hold my interest, too.
The primitive characters continuously bob in rhythm to the happy old-time music, making them hypnotic. I never get tired of watching these cartoons.
It's also fun to watch Mickey smoke, drink, chew tobacco, swing cats around by their tail just to hear them yowl, and play a sow's teats like a musical instrument. What more could you ask for in wholesome family fare? Link
September 28, 2005
Night Fisher
(Click on thumbnail for enlargement)
I read an advance copy of R. Kukuo Johnson's graphic novel, Night Fisher, to be released in November by Fantagraphics. It's about a smart high school boy, Loren, who lives with his unmarried dentist dad in Maui. The slow paced, but always interesting, story focuses on Loren's involvement with a schoolmate and their increasing use of methamphetamines. They end up getting into some trouble because of the unsavory characters they hang around, but that's not the important part. The important part is the way Johnson uses dialogue and symbols to create a slice of modern island life. I got a good feeling for what it must be like to be a high schooler in Hawaii. Johnson's thick, evocative brushwork and use of silhouettes helps set the mood. Link
September 26, 2005
Stikky Night Skies
Stikky Night Skies is the only astronomy book I've read that has helped my find and make use of constellations. It starts off with a black page covered with white dots representing stars. Every page thereafter is a black page dotted with stars.
With very few words of text on each page, the book teaches you how to find Orion's belt, one of the most easily recognized constellations in the sky. It goes on to teach you how to find the Big Dipper, Venus, and the North star. It shows you an easy way to find north after locating the North star (draw an imaginary line from the point directly overhead to the North Star. That's North).
The book teaches you how to find constellations by repeating the exercizes over and over, changing the orientation of the stars each time. In twenty minutes, I learned enough astronomy to make me feel a little less like an idiot when I look up at the night sky. Link
September 23, 2005
Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things
The subtitle for Cy Tymony's delightful little book, Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things, is "How to turn a penny into a radio, make a flood alarm with an aspirin, change milk into plastic, extract water and electricity from air, turn on a TV with your ring, and other amazing feats."
The projects are easy to make, in fact, you probably have 95% of the materials needed for all the projects at home already. The explanations are well-thought out and the back-of-a-napkin sketches are a joy to look at. If you have kids, they love this book, which has a lot of ideas I've never seen in any other science project book. Link
Thinking Physics: Understandable Practical Reality
I took a physics class in college. About 300 other students were in the class with me. The professor was a skinny old guy with a severe stoop. From the side, his body made a question mark shape.
After the first week, I figured out that he was just going through each example in the book, and offered nothing in the way of additional enlightenment beyond the text. I stopped going to class and read the book on my own. I don't remember the book very well. I do remember that it was boring, and that I didn't feel as if I understood physics very well after reading it. Fortunately, the professor's test questions were nearly identical to the examples in the book (he usually just changed the values), so I got an A in the class.
A few years later, I saw a copy of Thinking Physics, and was drawn to the playful illustrations on the cover. The book had a loving, handmade quality to it. Flipping through it, I saw that it was written in the form of physics puzzles. I bought the book, and in the course of a couple of weeks, I developed a true feel for Newtonian physics. I understood, on an intuitive level, the difference between force, energy, and work. The how and why of calculus became clear. Interestingly, most of the questions in the book don't require that you pull out a pencil I'll and paper. They just require you to visualize and think.
Check out the reviews on Amazon. Everyone gives this book a solid five stars. And they're well deserved. Link
September 22, 2005
Caffé Vincente Espresso Blend
In August I posted an entry on Boing Boing about my new espresso machine and the trouble I was having getting it to make crema, that delicious light colored foam on the top of a well-shot cup of espresso.
The fine folks at Caffé Pronto felt sorry for me, and sent me a bag of Caffé Vincente Espresso Blend, advertised to have "rich crema, and a long smooth finish."
Doubtful, I ground some up and turned on the machine. My mouth watered at the sight of the tawny crema emanating from the portafilter. And it's delicious to boot. I like the kind of espresso that numbs my tongue, and Caffé Vincente is loaded with whatever alkaloid does that. Time to buy more. Link
September 20, 2005
That's What I Call Sweet Music
Robert Crumb picks out 24 of his favorite dance orchestra songs from the 1920s for this fantastic audio CD, That's What I Call Sweet Music. The CD case is actually a small book, illustrated, written, and hand lettered by Crumb, with biographical information about the bandleaders featured on the disc. Writes Crumb: "What you hear on this CD is the good-time, social music of a vanished urban civilization, a lost world of smokestack factories, clanging trolley cars -- and everybody wore hats!"
The music itself is happy, peppy, melodic, and indeed sweet. The 20s were good times -- architecture, art, music, fashion, and industrial design were at their peak. The people of the era were blissfully unaware of the tragic events of the future: the Great Depression, WWII, and the appointment of George W. Bush as dictator of the United States. I often pine for that era. I know everything wasn't peachy keen -- racism was rampant, for example, but just imagine how wonderful New York City must have been! We'll never know for sure, but this CD will sweep you into a fantasy version of the world of the 1920s. Link
September 19, 2005
Twentieth Century Eightball
Eightball is Daniel Clowes long-running comic book, published by Fantagraphics.
Most of the pages in each issue of Eightball are taken up by a chapter from a longer running series ("Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron," "Ghost World," "David Boring") while the remainder consists of short, usually humorous stories.
Typically, these shorter pieces are caustic, hateful critiques of certain types of people Clowes abhors -- hipsters, Hollywood executives, professional sports fans, politicians, salespeople, and so on. It appears that Mr. Clowes has quite a large axe to grind, which is great news for me, because I also detest most of the odious subhumans Clowes gleefully eviscerates in his stories. I will read this book over and over until the day I die. Link
September 17, 2005
Tiki Flea Ukulele
About five years ago, Carla bought me a cheap ukulele for my birthday, and I hated it. I couldn't get it to tune properly, so it sounded awful. I was about to give up when I heard about a funny-looking plastic/wood hybrid uke called the Fluke. It just so happened that the co-inventor live near me in Studio City, CA.
I sent him an email message, and he kindly invited me to come to his house. his name is Jim Beloff and his wife is Liz Beloff. together, they run a ukulele music business called Flea Market Music. I bought a Fluke from Jim and Liz and instantly saw the light. The sound was bright, clear, and cheerful.
Now I love playing ukuleles. They are very portable and really easy to learn. A few years ago, Flea Market Music started selling an even smaller ukulele, called The Flea. Jim and Liz kindly asked me to design the logo for it, which was an honor.
I had lunch with Jim and Liz today and they awarded me with a special edition of the Flea, with a faceplate design by Tiki King. The tiki looks like he is chanting a sacred song about ancient island life. Like the Fluke, the Flea stays in tune and has a cheerfully plangent tone.
If you buy a Flea, I recommend that you buy some of Flea Market Music's excellent ukulele songbooks. Then you can throw your iPod away and start making your own music. Link
September 15, 2005
It's Only Temporary
A while back on Boing Boing I posted something about how much I enjoyed books and movies about the end of the world and the last person on earth. Eric Shapiro read that post and emailed me, asking if I'd like a review copy of his end-of-the-world novella, It's Only Temporray. I said sure and a couple of days later he dropped it in my mailbox. It turns out he is my neighbor!
The 100 page book is the first hand account of a young man named Sean's roadtrip during the final 10 hours of all life on earth. A giant meteor is due to decimate the planet, and Sean wants to spend his remaining time with his ex-girlfriend, Selma. Along the way, Sean -- who is half-zonked on pot and opium -- gets tangled up in a number of bizarre pre-apocalyptic sidetrip adventures. I don't want to give them away here, because it's much more fun to be surprised.
Shapiro is a fine writer. Writing a book about the end of the world is risky, because its easy to slip into sentimentality. Shapiro smartly avoids it. Instead, he presents a darkly humorous, insighftul, and curiously believable account of the last hours of human life on a doomed planet. Link
The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses
Seven companies in the world are responsible for making almost every product you smell, from dishwashing soap to expensive perfume. The Emperor of Scent, by Chandler Burr, is an expose of the $20 billion fragrance industry, but it's also a fascinating character study of a fragrance rebel, an olfactory-gifted man named Luca Turin who has a far-put theory on how our noses detect odors (he says it's the vibrations of the molecules and not their shape that our sense of smell interprets).
Naturally, Turin meets massive resistance from the scientific community about his ideas, and Burr reveals the sometimes-sleazy world of peer-reviewed journalism.
The book is a fun to read. Burr is a great storyteller, and I was impressed with his ability to explain unfamiliar science in a way that makes sense. Link
September 13, 2005
The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo
Years before developing a crush on Dejah Thoris, I was smitten by Betty and Veronica, the two gorgeous femme fatales of Riverdale High. Even though the girls were anatomically identical (and differed physically only in hair color), like Archie, I preferred the snotty and wealthy Veronica over Betty, who didn't know that playing hard-to-get was an excellent and ancient reproductive strategy. 
Dan DeCarlo (1919-2001) didn't create Betty and Veronica, or anyone else in Archie's world. That honor goes to Bob Montana. But DeCarlo was the guy who made the girls in Archie comics icons of teenage lust. (He's also the co-creator of the undeniably desirable Josie and the Pussycats and Sabrina the Teenage Witch).
It turns out that DeCarlo was also a prolific cheesecake gag cartoonist, churning out dozens of drawings of topless women that look like Betty and Veronica's slightly older and much wilder aunt. This Fantagraphics anthology is masterfully designed in two-colors by Jacob Covey, and features over 200 single panel gag cartoons from mens' magazines of the 1950s. Link
Spanish With Michel Thomas (Eight audio CDs)
I like this eight-CD Spanish language instruction program because I'm not required to consciously memorize words or do drills or exercises.
The instructor, a German guy named Michel Thomas has developed a teaching method that gets you started speaking Spanish from the very first lesson. On the CDs, he sits with two students, a male and a female, neither of which has ever learned a lick of Spanish before.
The Amazon reviews for Thomas's teaching method read like testimonials from religious converts. Count me in his Cult.
Each lesson is just five or six minutes long, making one easy to fit into your day. I have all eight CDs on my iPod, so whenever I have a few spare minutes, I take a lesson. Link
September 09, 2005
Fob - Countdown timer for OS X
I put a lot of items on my to do list every day. I only get about 25% of them crossed off. This was getting to be demoralizing, so I recently started using a timer to force me to do at least a little bit of every thing on my list.
For example, I have a bunch of Quicken housekeeping to do -- hours and hours of it. I dread it, but it has to be done, for tax purposes. I don't want to blow an entire day doing it, so I've started attacking it in 15 minute chunks each day, which is much more bearable. I use a free OS X program called Fob, from Leaky Puppy Software, as a countdown timer.
Fob lets you set up and store a list of timers that you can use whenever you want. I have a timer that I can activate that gives me 30 minutes to research a book I'm working on. I have another timer that lets me work on a painting for 20 minutes (in this case, I use this as a timer to force me to stop doing something fun, as opposed to the Quicken timer, which I use to encourage me to do something I hate).
Merlin Mann of 43 Folders has written some great stuff about using timers to beat procrastination. Just today I noticed that he reviewed another Mac-based timer called Minuteur. It looks nice, but I haven't tried it yet. Link
Action! Cartooning
I have lots of instructional drawing books. Most of them looked good in the store, but turned out to be duds when I brought them home. Action! Cartooning by Ben Caldwell is one of the winners. Caldwell is not only an excellent and expressive cartoonist, he's also a good teacher.
My biggest problem is that my drawings have a tendency to look stiff. Caldwell's work is dynamic, even explosive. He's good at showing how to exaggerate activities such as running, jumping, or even standing and sitting. I plan to keep his book close at hand while drawing figures.
Link
September 07, 2005
Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes
Dan Clowes is one the of greatest living cartoonists. (He's also an excellent screenwriter, having co-written Ghost World and the forthcoming Art School Confidential, both based on stories appearing in his comic book, Eight Ball.)
Clowes' latest full-length book, Ice Haven, tells the story of a senseless murder, told in the form of newspaper style comic strip vignettes. Several stories are interwoven throughout the main story, which takes place in a deceptively staid small town called Ice Haven. Clowe's melancholy color palette is terrific here, bringing to mind the faded dreams of a town that had hoped to become a sort of winter paradise, but instead ended up as a place where people's dreams freeze and die. This book is Clowes at his best. Link
Frank Frazetta Icon
I still have my copy of The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta, which I bought in 1975 for $5.95. The paintings of otherwordly creatures and curvaceous and exotic female humans and aliens transported me to another world.
Recently, I picked up a copy of Icon: A Retrospective by the Grand Master of Fantastic Art, (2003 revised edition) which is a much better book about the life and work of the world's most famous fantasy painter. The paintings are reproduced larger and the colors are much richer. Best of all, the authors delve into the story behind each painting.
I'm not much of a fan of Conan, but that doesn't stop me from being a fan of the artist who made the character famous. Link
September 05, 2005
Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace 1951-1952
A couple of years ago, comic book and book publisher Fantagraphics started a series to reprint every Peanuts strip ever drawn by Charles Schulz. These books are beautifully designed and are printed on high quality paper, which makes it much easier to appreciate Schulz's drawing style.
Now Fantagraphics is giving the same treatment to Hank Ketcham, creator of Dennis the Menace. As much as I like Schulz's work, I think Ketcham is better in almost every way. His deceptively loose drawing style is highly praised by all my favorite cartoonists. In fact, Ketcham is considered my many to be the cartoonist's cartoonist. As a bonus, a large percentage of the comics in this 624-page (!) book are laugh-out-loud funny.
Link
ABOUT MAD PROFESSOR
Mark Frauenfelder's Mad Professor Bizarre Science Experiments Book.
RECENT ENTRIES
Icons: An A-Z Guide to the People Who Shaped Our Time
Walt Disney Treasures - Mickey Mouse in Black and White
Night Fisher
Stikky Night Skies
Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things
Thinking Physics: Understandable Practical Reality
Caffé Vincente Espresso Blend
That's What I Call Sweet Music
Twentieth Century Eightball
Tiki Flea Ukulele
