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 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 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 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

September 09, 2005

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

August 27, 2005

Getting Started in Electronics

I got my first copy of Forrest M. Mims, III Getting Started in Electronics in the early 80 for $2.49. It did a better job of making the fundamentals of electronic circuits to me than the courses I took in college.

The book uses intuitive examples to explain previously impenetrable concepts such as capacitance, impedance, and inductance, and does a great job of explaining how semiconductors work.

Even better, the last section of the book has over 100 easy-tomake circuits that beep, blink, and perform other fun stuff. This book manages to make electronics seem both accessible and magical at the same time. Many people I know speak fondly of this book as a big inspiration when they were younger. Link

August 25, 2005

DC's Greatest Imaginary Stories

Mainstream comics in the 1940s were often wildly inventive, and this collection of old "what if" comic book stories, titled DC's Greatest Imaginary Stories : 11 Tales You Never Expected to See!, is a good example.

I imagine the writers in those days were tired of grim bad guy vs good guy stories, so they took every opportunity to concoct outlandish stories, in which superheroes either died, had their cover blown, or entered a wacky parallel universe.

Mainstream comics were a lot more fun back then. The superhero comics of today are crippled by the humorlessness and self-importance. I'm glad to see that DC is digging into its vaults to revive these treasures. Link

August 19, 2005

Naked City by Weegee

Nobody captured the seamy side of new York City better than the photographer Weegee, who used to cruise the streets of the Big Apple in the 1940s with a police radio in his car, often beating the cops to the scene of a gangland slaying or transvestite club bust. he also used infrared film to snap picks of people making out and picking their noses in movie houses, and had a special lens that could take pictures at a 90 degree angle to keep his subjects from knowing. This book has over a hundred of Weegee's best shots.
Link

One Two Three ... infinity

One Two Three ... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science is another book I first read when I was in junior high school. Written in a humorous, easy-to-digest style by the celebrated scientist George Gamow, One Two Three nearly blew my mind when I read his descriptions of exceedingly large numbers.

For example he wrote a no-doubt apocryphal story about King Shiram of India, who was so pleased with his grand vizier, Sissa Ben Dahir, for inventing the game of chess, that the king asked the vizier what he'd like for a reward.

The vizier told the king he'd like one grain of wheat for the first square on the board, two grains for the second square, four grains for the third square, eight grains for the forth square, and so on, doubling the number of grains on each square for all 64 squares on the board. The king thought about it for a second and said, "You got a deal."

Gamow describes how the king order his servants to bring in a bag of wheat, thinking that there would be more than enough to fulfill his vizier's request. But the entire bag was emptied on the 20th square. He soon realized that he'd empty the palace's entire supply of wheat before coming even close to the end.

As it turned out, Gamow writes, "the amount requested by the grand vizier was that of the world's wheat production for the period of some two thousand years!"

The entire book is filled with awe-inspiring anecdotes like this, which had the result of stretching my mind more than anything I'd learned in school up to that point.
Link

August 18, 2005

A Princess of Mars and The Jet Propelled Couch

I read A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burrough's tale of adventure on the red planet, when I was in junior high school. Dejah Thoris, the princess in the novel, may have been my first crush.

I remember being thrilled when I read the following passage, in which John Carter describes seeing Dejah Thoris for the first after she had been taken prisoner by the green Martians.

And the sight which met my eyes was that of a slender, girlish figure, similar in every detail to the earthly women of my past life. She did not see me at first, but just as she was disappearing through the portal of the building which was to be her prison she turned, and her eyes met mine. Her face was oval and beautiful in the extreme, her every feature was finely chiseled and exquisite, her eyes large and lustrous and her head surmounted by a mass of coal black, waving hair, caught loosely into a strange yet becoming coiffure. Her skin was of a light reddish copper color, against which the crimson glow of her cheeks and the ruby of her beautifully molded lips shone with a strangely enhancing effect.

She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure.

A few years later, I read The Fifty Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales by Robert Lindner. It was a fascinating book, and the last chapter, called "The Jet Propelled Couch" was particularly interesting. It was about a Los Alamos physicist who had been sent to Lindner because he was acting strangely at work, often going into a trance-lie state. Because the physicist had a high level security clearance, his superiors were quite worried about his odd behavior.

It turns out that the physicist believed himself to be John Carter, the protagonist in Burrough's Mars books. Indeed, the physicist was also named John Carter by coincidence. The physicist told Lindner that he was able to teleport himself to Mars and have the same kind of adventures that the fictional John Carter had. The physicist kept detailed maps and records of his adventures, accumulating 10,000 pages of notes! I won't spoil the rest for you. It's an incredible story.

I just re-read A Princess of Mars, prepared to be utterly disappointed. But I loved it just as much as I did when I was 12 years old. Burrough's description of the Martian animals and societies, particularly the hideous six-limbed green Martians', is a hoot, and the plot moves along at a fast clip. It unfolds much like a contemporary science fiction movie. It's fallen out of copyright, and you can download it for free from Project Gutenburg's site.

The Fifty Minute Hour A Princess of Mars

August 17, 2005

Handmade Modern

Designer Todd Oldham shows you how to make 50 easy but wonderful furniture and decorating projects in his book, Handmade Modern: Mid-Century Inspired Projects for Your Home.

Because I edit a how-to magazine (Make), I have learned to appreciate well-designed step-by-step instructions, and I give this book an A+. The photography is excellent, as are the instructions themselves.

I haven't made any of the projects, but I plan to try the Eames-like room divider, the storage bench, and the planter bench. Prepare to be amazed by this book.
Link

August 16, 2005

The R. Crumb Handbook

I'll buy any book that has anything to do with Robert Crumb, because he's in my triumvirate of cartoon gods (the other two are Carl Barks and Jack Kirby). I can't get enough of his comics or his music. I also love reading interviews with him.

I don't think this book is a good introduction to Crumb. If you're not familiar with his work, I suggest you start out with Vol 4 of The Complete Crumb Comics. But if you are a Crumb fan, you'll love this fat (440 pages!) book filled with Crumb art and text. As a bonus, the book comes with a 20-song CD of Crumb's music, which ranges from old timey novelty jazz to turn of the last century European folk music. Considering that a music CD typically costs more than this book-and-CD combo, The R. Crumb Handbook is a great deal. Link

August 11, 2005

Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs

Hell's Angels is Hunter S. Thompson's best book. I think it's his only great book. Unlike his other work, Thompson stays focused on the job of uncovering a world hidden to most of us, and he does it with such powerful images and colorful language that it's impossible not to be utterly absorbed by the story he tells. I've read this twice, and I'm ready to red it again. Link

August 10, 2005

Revolution in The Valley

Andy Hertzfeld is the co-creator of the Mac, and a natural storyteller. His book Revolution in the Valley is Hertzfeld's chronological collection of amusing anecdotes having to do with the the development of the first Macintosh computers. He wisely focused on the people who were involved in the project and not the technology. If you are looking for good gossip, and you've come to the right place. Here's an excerpt from the time Steve Jobs presented a Mac to an uninterested Mick Jagger in 1984:

Mick was polite, but he didn't seem to have heard of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs or the Macintosh. Steve tried to strike up a conversation, but he wasn't very successful. Steve told me that Mick couldn't seem to put together a coherent sentence. "His speech was slurred and very slow", Steve described it later, "in fact I think he was on drugs. Either that or he's brain-damaged." After a few minutes, it was clear that Mick had absolutely no interest whatsoever in Apple or the Macintosh, and an awkward silence ensued.

Fortunately, Mick's twelve year old daughter Jade had followed Mick into the room, and her eyes lit up when she saw MacPaint. Bill began to teach her how to use it, and pretty soon she was happily mousing away, fascinated by what she could do with MacPaint. Even though Mick drifted off to another room, the Apple contingent stayed with Jade for another half hour or so, showing off the Macintosh and answering her questions, and ended up leaving the machine with her, since she couldn't seem to part with it.

August 08, 2005

The Cute Manifesto

The Cute Manifesto is a small-but-thick anthology (168 pages, 6" x 6") of cartoonist James Kochalka's cartoon-embellished musings on the meaning of life. My favorite is the titular story, "The Cute Manifesto," in which Kochalka defends cuteness as not being trite, but as one of the most important qualities of life to seek out.

Kochalka developed his talents in the world of self-published mini-comics, and even though he now has a publisher, he still thinks like a self-publisher. In a recent interview in The Comics Reporter, Kochalka said, "I feel like I can do anything I want. Which is the best thing about being an artist, that you can do anything you want. As soon as you start feeling you can't do whatever you want because you're afraid how the readers are going to react, then it's just a job. I don't want to have a job." Fortunately, when Kochalka does whatever he wants, it results in good stuff. Link

August 05, 2005

L. A. Bizzaro The Insider's Guide to the Obscure, the Absurd and the Perverse in Los Angeles

Los Angeles is an endless source of wonder and novelty for me. People who decry the city as a vapid cultural wasteland are really missing out. Hidden pockets of amazement abound here. I could spend the rest of my life in this city and never run out of things to see.

My friend Matt Maranian knows this. In 1997 he and Tony Lovett wrote a guide to Los Angeles called L. A. Bizzaro! The Insider's Guide to the Obscure, the Absurd and the Perverse in Los Angeles. I defy you to read this and not be surprised, entertained, and eager to head out the door to explore the places covered in this book.

For example, there's Clifton's cafeteria, a "delighfully dingy wonderland," opened in the 1931 with a cedar forest complete with cascading waterfalls and stuffed forest creatures. It's still in operation today. Then there's Tri-Ess Sciences near the Burbank Airport -- a chemical supply house that caters to the special effects industry. There's also the mind-blowing Bob Baker Marionette Theater ("the oldest operating puppet theater in the country"), located under a freeway ramp in a decrepit industrial area of LA. I've enjoyed Baker's skillful and almost-psychedelic shows with my kids three times so far, and I'm looking forward to returning soon.

If you're in LA and have access to a car and this book, you'll never be bored. Link

August 04, 2005

Moleskine notebooks

A couple of years ago my friend David gave me a Moleskine notebook as a gift. It was from Italy and had a black cloth binding and thick paper. It was so beautiful I was afraid to write in it. I didn't think my notes and sketches were worthy to go into it.

After a couple of weeks, I decided to go ahead and just start using it. And I became hooked. The pocket sized version cost around $12 and lasted several months. It was silly not to use it as my regular note taking book.

The books are also very rugged. Last week, I left one of my Moleskines outside for a week. The sprinkers hit it every day. It was waterlogged when I found it. The pages with ink pen note were kind of smeared, but still legible. The penciled notes were fine. I fanned the book open and left it to dry in the 100-degree heat of our porch for a few days. The pages are kind of warped, making it look swollen, but the cover and binding are in excellent shape. I like it even better this way -- less precious looking.

I've incorporated Moleskines into my daily life. I keep a blank art paper sketchbook (80 pages, 5.25" x 8.25") for sketching, a ruled notebook (240 pages, 5.25" x 8.25") for taking notes, and a pocket ruled notebook (192 pages, 3½" x 5½") for my to-do list.

The company has started making a less-expensive line of notebooks, called the Cahier line, but I'm sticking with the sturdy orginals.

Pranks

Reading Pranks in 1989 changed the way I thought about life. This fat collection of interviews with lots of different pranksters made me realize that the world and the people in it could be considered an artist's medium. My favorite pranksters in the book are those who pull pranks that delight rather than annoy or torment.

I especially enjoyed the interview with Jeffrey Vallance, who once took a frozen chicken that he'd bought at a supermarket to a pet cemetery and, with a straight face, told the people who worked there that he wanted to arrange a memorial service for his departed pet Chicken (he told them its name was Blinky). He ordered a small powder blue casket with pink satin lining ("Blinky was starting to thaw, so she was placed on a paper towel so that the moisture would not seep under the satin".) He also order an engraved grave marker which read "Blinkly, The Friendly Hen".

Another time, Vallance dressed up like an electrician, complete with nametag, and went into the Los Angeles Country Art Museum, where he replaced electrical outlet covers with ones that had his paintings on them. He then sent out invitations to people announcing his debut show at the museum. Link

August 02, 2005

Ed Emberley drawing books

I have at least 50 art instruction books. Among my favorites are those by children's book illustrator Ed Emberley. He's got a series of them: Ed Emberley's Big Purple Drawing Book, Big Green Drawing Book, Big Red Drawing Book, Big Orange Drawing Book, and so on.

What makes these books so wonderful is the way Emberley uses simple shapes to construct appealing and lively animals, vehicles, people, monsters, plants, and other things. His creations are witty and funny, and his unique step-by-step presentation yields a fool-proof method for copying his work.

I find myself pulling his books off my shelf at least a couple of times a week. My 7-year-old daughter goes to a lot of birthday parties and I like to draw the birthday cards for the presents she gives her friends. More often than not, I swipe Emberley characters for the card. Link

July 30, 2005

No Fear Shakespeare

In college, I had to read Shakespeare. On one of my papers, I complained that I didn't like the play because it was too hard to understand. My instructor wrote on my paper like, "So you only like ideas that are easy to come by, eh? Your loss!"

To this day, I don't like difficult writing. I do like challenging and thought-provoking ideas, but only if they're expressed in easy-to-understand terms. Maybe that's my loss, but I've learned to accept it.

A couple of months ago I found a series of inexpensive ($4.95) books called "No Fear Shakespeare." Each book has a complete Shakespeare play. The left facing page has the play written as Shakespeare wrote it, and the right-facing page is translated into easy-to-understand English. I read Hamlet and was surprised to find out how much I liked it. And I also enjoyed going back and forth to see how Shakespeare wrote his plays. I've learned to appreciate his use of language.

Here's a sample from Hamlet's famous soliloquy.

Shakespeare:
To be, or not to be? That is the question—
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished! To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.—Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia!—Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.

--Act III, Scene i, lines 57-91

Plain English
The question is: is it better to be alive or dead? Is it nobler to put up with all the nasty things that luck throws your way, or to fight against all those troubles by simply putting an end to them once and for all? Dying, sleeping—that’s all dying is—a sleep that ends all the heartache and shocks that life on earth gives us—that’s an achievement to wish for. To die, to sleep—to sleep, maybe to dream. Ah, but there’s the catch: in death’s sleep who knows what kind of dreams might come, after we’ve shaken off the flesh from our souls. That’s certainly something to worry about. That’s the consideration that makes us stretch out our sufferings so long. After all, who would put up with all life’s humiliations —the abuse from superiors, the insults of arrogant men, the pangs of unrequited love, the inefficiency of the legal system, the rudeness of people in office, and the mistreatment good people have to take from bad—when you could simply take out your knife and call it quits? Who would choose to grunt and sweat through an exhausting life, unless they were afraid of something dreadful after death, the undiscovered country from which no visitor returns, which we wonder about without getting any answers from and which makes us stick to the evils we know rather than rush off to seek the ones we don’t? Fear of death makes us all cowards, and our natural boldness becomes weak with too much thinking. Actions that should be carried out at once get misdirected, and stop being actions at all. But shh, here comes the beautiful Ophelia. Pretty lady, please remember me when you pray.

July 26, 2005

The Clouds Above

The Clouds Above is a beautiful 216-page, hardbound comic book for kids and grown-ups. It's about an elementary school kid who arrives late for school and winds up on a fantastic adventure in the sky. Each page is a single square panel. I finshed it in about 20 minutes then went back to savor the art, which reminds me a bit of Joe Matt's work. I see great things in Jordan Crane's future. (Here are some of Crane's self published books). Buy from Amazon

July 25, 2005

Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs

Pop-up book designer Robert Sabuda is at the peak of his form here. Along with Matthew Reinhart (who illustrated the book and wrote the text), Sabuda has produced a book with six amazing two-page spreads, each containing one large dinosuar pop-up scene in the center and four pop-ups along the borders. The T-Rex skeleton is my favorite. The book is geared for K-3rd grade but I think older kids (and adults) would like it, too. Buy Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs on Amazon

July 23, 2005

The Secret Societies Handbook

I've been interested in secret societies for as long as I can remember. Part of the appeal of them is the mumbo jumbo and weird symbols they use. I particularly remember those ads for The Rosicrucians in Fate a paranormal magazine I loved as a kid. The other reason secret societies interest me is because they offer pat answers to troubling world events. Economy in a tailspin? Blame it on the Bilderbergs! President making backstage deals that result in deaths of thousands? Blame it on the Order of the Skull and Bones!

To my delight, I stumbled across The Secret Societies Handbook by Michael Bradley, at the bookstore a few says ago and couldn't put it down. The author reveals the histories of 21 secret societies, including Assasins, Bilderbergs, Bohemian Club, Club of Rome, Council on Foreign Relations, Essex Junto, Freemasonry, Golden Dawn, Illuminati, Knights Templar, Ku Klux Klan, Mafia, Majestic-12, Aviary, Aquarium, Mesur, Opus Dei, Order of the Skull and Bones, Priory of Sion, Rosicrucians, Round Table, Triads, and Trilateral Commission.

Some of the societies I'd never heard of. Bradley is not a conspiracy nut. In his introduction he writes, "I approached my research for The Secret Society Handbook with the same intellectual smugness with which I read stories about alien abductions or sightings of Elvis Presley ... How wrong I was. I know believe that Western history needs to be completely rewritten to tell the hidden story behind our true economic and political global hierarchy. The more I researched, the more alarming my discoveries have been."

I have to agree. Parts of this book were scary, like the fact that every US Presidential administration is larded with dozens of members of the Council on Foreign Relations which, Bradley asserts, controls the CIA and the State Department.

At just 144 pages, you can finish this eye opener in an evening. You might not be able to sleep very well after reading it though. My head was spinning. Buy it from Amazon

July 22, 2005

Happy Kitty Bunny Pony

Japan's Sanrio has a near monopoly on overly cute animal characters, but in earlier decades the United States ruled this lucrative industry. A new book called Happy Kitty Bunny Pony: A Saccharine Mouthful of Super Cute, by Charles S. Anderson Design Co. with text by Michael J. Nelson, provides ample evidence for my assertion.

This 176-page book, encased in a handsome clear vinyl slipcover as a sort of bib, features hundreds of retro images of fuzzy ducklings, Keane-eyed kittens, pink prancing ponies, friendly blue chipmunks, bashful panda cubs, coy baby donkeys, and the like. All the animals are gleeful -- they have the kind of look on their face you might imagine Bernie Ebbers would have if he were to wake up and realize the last four years were just a silly nightmare. Many of the animal characters have psychotic gleams in their eyes.

The stomach-churningly adorable illustrations are kept in check by perverse captions written by Michael J. Nelson (head writer and host of Mystery Science Theater 3000). For example, on a two page spread featuring drawings of bunnies dressed up in Mary Poppins style clothes, Nelson writes, "Step right up! See bunnies walking upright and wearing all manner of costumery! Yes, anthropomorphized rabbits with bulbous limbs in Victorian-era clothes! Step right -- What's that? You say you'd rather die than see that? Perhaps this isn't the place for you."

How can you go wrong with a book like this?. Buy it for $10.17 at Amazon.com.

Book review: Strange Angel, a Jack Parsons biography

A few months ago, a writer named George Pendle emailed me, asking if I'd like a review copy of his book, Strange Angel : The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons.

I knew a bit about Parsons from reading Robert Anton Wilson's books, which occasionally references him. I knew Parsons was a pioneering rocket scientist from Pasadena who co-founded Jet Propulsion Laboratories, and that he was an avid follower of occultist Aleister Crowley. I also knew that he accidentally blew himself up with explosives. He seemed like an interesting but doomed and mentally ill man.

I hoped that Pendle's account of Parson's would go beyond the brief mentions I'd read in Wilson's books and online, and I wasn't disappointed. In fact, Strange Angel is the best book I've read so far this year. Pendle's telling of the story presents the dizzying roller coaster ride of Parsons' life within the well-researched context of the era in which Parson's lived. I loved Pendle's multi-pages forays into the history of Pasadena as a paradisical Eden for old money families from the mid-west and New England, and the crooked Los Angeles political machine of the 1930s. Pendle also provides the best short biography of English occultist Aleister Crowley I've ever read. L. Ron Hubbard figures prominently in the book, too: he lived in Parson's house in the 1940s before he founded Scientology. Pendle paints an unflattering portrait of Hubbard, claiming he swindled Parsons out of around $20,000 and swiped Parsons' girlfriend, to boot.

Pendle conducted interviews with people who knew Parsons, and scoured the archives of JPL, Cal Tech, Thelema Media (which publishes Crowley's books) to collect enough bits of factual history to construct a dimensional portrait of a man who heretofore has been presented as a cardboard cut out. Parson's life was far more interesting and sadder than I could have guessed. This would make a great movie. Link (Listen to George Pendle read an excerpt from Strange Angel.) ">Link

June 08, 2004

Real Stuff by Dennis P. Eichhorn

I'm fanatical about autobiographical comics. Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Joe Matt, Chester Brown, Mary Fleener, Joe Sacco -- I can't get enough of them. There's something about comics and real life stories that go together; I can't quite figure it out, but it works. Denny Eichhorn, author of Real Stuff, is one of the best comic book autobiographers. Like Pekar, he doesn't draw his own cartoons -- he hires well-known ones to draw from his scripts. Dennis has led an interesting life. There's a little Kerouac in him, and a little Bukowski, too. It's a wonder he's still alive, after all he's been through.

One of my favorite episodes from his life is from his high school years. A kid he didn't know very well invited him over to his house. The mom asked him if he wanted a hambuger. He said, "Sure." When the burger was ready, the mom and her son sat down at the table and watch Denny eat the burger. They didn't eat; they just watched Denny. They had gleams in their eyes. When Denny was finished, they asked him if he liked it. He said it was OK, but a little spicy. Then the mom and soon broke out in laughter. "It was DOG FOOD!" they howled.

Denny had 20 issues of his comic, Real Stuff, published, mostly by Fantagraphics. This anthology, also titled Real Stuff, is published by a company in Los Angeles that I've never heard of, called Swifty Morales Press. They did a great job -- the book is a beaut. Buy from Amazon

June 02, 2004

Tim Biskup's "100 Paintings" -- my favorite book of the year

Tim Biskup works as a background animation artist. He's also a prolific painter, and this itty-bitty book (measuring a little more than five inches on a side) has reproductions of 100 full sized paintings that he whipped out in a matter of months. Biskup's style is inspired by the work of the eminent LP album cover artist Jim Flora (who died in 1998), but he's got a delightfully eclectic assortment of other influences, such as Japanese pop and early Disney layout artists, blended in. This little hardcover book is a steal at $10.47. Link

April 27, 2004

American Sucker, by David Denby

In the late 1990s. David Denby the movie reviewer for The New Yorker decided he wanted to make $1 million so he could buy out his soon-to-be-ex-wife's share of the New York apartment they owned. What better way to make that kind of money, he figured, than by investing it in high tech stocks? The market was rising daily, and seemed unstoppable. He started hanging out with the founder of imClone, Sam Waksal, and Merrill Lynch's famous high tech analyst Henry Blodgett. Denby fell hard for their hype and invested nearly everything he had in the tech sector.

As you might guess from the title of this memoir, Denby didn't make a million. In fact, he lost almost that much money. Because he's such an insightful writer, it's thrilling to read how he deals with his long hard tumble towards financial disaster. Buy from Amazon

April 23, 2004

Al Capp's Lil Abner: The Frazetta Years, 1960-1961

Lil Abner has always been one of my favorite newspaper comic strips. The wacky storylines, lovable hill people, and cute mountain girls appealed to me even when I was a little kid. This Lil Abner anthology has some of the best stories and art of the strip's entire run. The stories are funny -- the $19.95 Japanese import car, called the Nomoto (get it?) is a classic. Best of all, the girls are drawn by Frank Frazetta! Buy from Amazon

April 12, 2004

House Industries Book

House Industries, the world's greatest typeface designers, have published a 240-page book chronicling their work. I haven't seen the book itself, but the sample spreads shown here are stunning. The $69 book has a 32-page section on House's design process and it comes with four fonts. Link

April 07, 2004

Acme Novelty Library Datebook

Chris Ware's cartoons have fascinated me for a decade. He has an extremely clean line, and his compositions are so painstakingly rendered it must take him weeks and weeks to do a single page. It's not surprising that he makes old fashioned penny arcade style contraptions -- he has the talent and the patience to create such mechanical marvels. This sketchbook of his work from the 80s and 90s is a treat, because it shows his looser, quicker studies and ideas. I am surprised he has so many different styles. The book itself is a work of Ware art.
Buy from Amazon

April 02, 2004

Naked Came the Stranger, by Penelope Ashe

Back in 1966, a New York Newsday reporter named Mike McGrady decided to play a joke on the world. He wanted to write a dirty book along the lines of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, but he wanted to make it intentionally bad. He wanted it to be awful, and loaded with sex. He enlisted 24 of his Newsday colleagues to each crank out a chapter of the book, then hired a young woman to pretend to be the author. Imagine his surprise when Naked Came the Stranger shot to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list and stayed there for 25 weeks, selling millions of copies (each of the writers got their share of the $1.2 million it took in). When the world discovered the hoax, the book sold even more copies, thanks to the masterful way McGrady worked the press into a frenzy, offering an "exclusive" to everyone who called him, and even getting Walter Cronkite to fly out in a helicopter to interview him. Bill Moyers, publisher at Newsday during the time, was fired in part for his participation in the hoax.

In 1970, McGrady wrote a book called Stranger Than Naked, or How to Write Dirty Books for Fun & Profit, which reveals the story behind the story. It's been optioned for a by a movie production company. Buy from Amazon

April 01, 2004

This biography of Frank Sinatra,

This biography of Frank Sinatra, now out in paperback, sounds plenty juicy. It was written by George Jacobs, Sinatra's personal valet, who worked for Ol' Blue Eyes for 13 years, addressing him as "Mr. S."

JFK snorting lines of coke at Mr. S's house with Peter Lawford? Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich making out in Mr. S's swimming pool? Jacobs says it's all true.

From the book: "He couldn't sit still, and he couldn't be alone. Thus he always needed a girl, and she didn't have to be famous. First he'd go for his leading lady. If she wasn't free, he'd try some famous ex, like Lana Turner, whom he'd dated in the forties, for old times. Then he'd work his way down the food chain, starting with the starlets, then the hookers, and, if all else failed, he'd call Peggy Lee, who lived down the block."

Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers: Best of Blogs

This book reminds me a lot of Chip Rowe's The Book of Zines, a one-shot digest of the best of paper zines from the 1990s. Blogs have pretty much replaced zines as the medium of choice for amateur publishers. The main difference is that there are far more blogs than there ever were zines. This is is probably because it's much easier to do a blog than a zine. Anyway, Alan Graham and Bonnie Burton did a wonderful job finding some very funny, thought-provoking material from the enormous slush pile of blogs. I don't know how they did it, but here it is, in one easy-to-read book. (Full disclosure -- my work appears in both The Book of Zines and Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers). Buy from Amazon

March 26, 2004

Full Moon, by Michael Light

To create this book of 130 photographs chronicling a manned mission to the Moon, Michael Light went through over 30,000 NASA photos. He scanned the actual film used by the astronauts, and the resulting photographs are stunning. I remember the first manned moon landing, and nearly 40 years later it remains one of the most exciting things I've ever experienced. I think this book conveys some of that excitement to my six-year-old daughter, who will probably never get to witness a live Moon landing.

Buy from Amazon

March 25, 2004

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson manages to make any subject he cares to write about interesting, and I'll happily follow him wherever his mind leads us. This time Bryson decided to write about "nearly everything." His definition of "nearly everything" is the scientific history of the universe (especially our planet) and the history of scientific discovery.

If that sounds like an awful lot for one book to hold, you're right, but Bryson is very good at picking out the most interesting bits. His minibiographies on the lives of scientists are great ways to feel the pulse of different eras, and his adjective-laden descriptions of potential cataclysmic fates for our planet gave me the spooks like no horror movie I've seen.

Buy from Amazon

March 24, 2004

Amazon's New Comics and Graphic Novels store

Amazon has announced a new section that deals with comics and graphic novels. This is great news. I don't see much in the way of real comics, though. They are dealing mostly in anthologies. Link

March 22, 2004

The Eudaemonic Pie, by Thomas A. Bass

After reading my review of Bringing Down the House, Madpro pal Stefan Jones reminded me about a similar book called The Eudaemonic Pie, by Thomas A. Bass, describing it as "Chaos theory wonks build shoes with computers hidden in them to predict roulette wheel results. Highly recommended." I agree. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember it being deeper and more thought-provoking than Bringing Down the House. Buy from Amazon

Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems, by Richard Ferber

I was trying to think about what book has had the greatest effect on my life. I thought about books I'd read in college that seemed to carry a lot of philosophical weight at the time I'd read them, and then seemed like junk upon re-reading them later, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or The Fountainhead. So, I asked myself again, what book has really changed my life? Then it hit me: it was, without a doubt, Richard Ferber's Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems.

We have two kids, one age six, the other 11 months. When our six year old was a baby, we put her to sleep by holding her and rocking her. She would wake up every couple of hours, crying for us to come back and rescue her. We finally gave up and let her sleep with us. It was the only way we could get any sleep. To this day, she demands that one of us crawls into bed with her until she falls asleep. (Fortunately, she no longer wakes up in the middle of the night crying for us.)

When we had our other daughter, she would cry for us every hour at night. The whole family was exhausted from the ordeal. Would we have to suffer this ordeal for three more years?

Some friends told us to "Ferberize" her and we'd all be able to sleep soundly. We were skeptical, but we bought the book and followed the instructions faithfully. In a nutshell, Ferberization entails putting your baby in her crib, kissing her goodnight and walking out of the room. She'll cry, of course. After five minutes, you walk in and reassure her, then walk out again. This time you wait ten minutes. You repeat this, adding five minutes between return visits. It sounds cruel. As a parent, your instinct is to run to your baby as soon as she starts crying. But in this case, not following you instincts is the best course of action. It took exactly two nights to Ferberize our baby. She has learned to fall asleep on her own, and when she wakes up at night, she knows how to fall back asleep on her own. Best of all, she is happy, confident, and well-rested. And so are we. We have our nights, and as a result, our days back. Truly a life-changing book.

Buy from Amazon

March 19, 2004

Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions

This is a story about a group of MIT students who came up with a system to win lots of money at the blackjack tables. These well-educated Asian American kids used a standard card counting system to do it, but the real genius in their system was employing confederates to throw off the ever-vigilant security teams that casinos hire to catch card counters. Ben Mezrich's story has all the makings of a Hollywood thriller, complete with sleazy casino bosses, wild parties, and the consequences of living a double life. Buy from Amazon

March 18, 2004

Laid Bare, by John Gilmore

If you're interested in the fast crowd Hollywood scene and music from the 1960s, you'll love Laid Bare. This true (almost too good to be true) memoir, written in a highly engaging style by a former bit actor who hung out with likes of Janis Joplin, James Dean, Hank Williams, Errol Flynn, Lenny Bruce, Ed Wood, Jr., and Vampira, is loaded with juicy sleazy anecdotes about youth-culture heroes gone wild. At the same time, Laid Bare really gave me a feeling for what things were like for the drug-eating, fast-driving, young and beautiful scenesters of the 60s. Buy from Amazon

March 11, 2004

Blue Latitudes by Tony Horiwitz

Blue Latitudes is author Tony Horiwitz's modern-day re-exploration of the voyages Captain Cook took in the 18th century. He starts by going out to sea as a crewmember aboard a replica of Cook's ship, where he has to deal with extreme seasickness, fear of heights (any secret desire I may have had to climb a 100-foot mast that's rocking back and forth was killed by reading this chapter) and sleepless nights. He travels on to Tahiti, New Zealand, Hawaii, Alaska, Tonga, and even England, mingling with the locals and trying to figure out what kind of influence Cook had on them. Horowitz is a natural when it comes to sniffing out the local color and getting to the heart of each country's culture. What a great gig! Buy Blue Latitudes from Amazon.

March 10, 2004

The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man, by David Maurer

The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man is the book that inspired the the movie, The Sting. The book's author, David Maurer, was a linguist who studied the jargon of different professions. He was so captivated by the charm of con men (who befriended him and opened up to him completely), he decided to write a whole book about their lives and their ruses. If you've seen The Sting, then you have the basic idea of how a big con works. It's basically a theatrical production with elaborate sets and costumed actors for an audience of one. But the audience member thinks the production is real, and ends up losing his life savings by the time the curtain closes. The two most surprising things I learned from reading this book: one, the con men, who work so hard to set up a con and take the mark's money, usually blow their cut immediately by gambling it away, and two, the victims of cons often return to the con men to get fleeced again, even when they know they were conned the first time. Buy The Big Con from Amazon

March 06, 2004

Peepshow: The Cartoon Diary of Joe Matt

Joe Matt has been writing and illustrating his cartoon biography for over a decade. I was hooked the instant I started reading his work, which was orginally published as a comic series by Drawn & Quarterly. Matt is very open about his idiosyncracies -- his love of porn videos, his habit of urinating into jars so he does't have to talk to his housemates, his love-hate relationship with fellow Canadian comic book artists Chester Brown (Yummy Fur) and Seth (Palookaville), his nearly self-destructive parsimony. He lives a pretty miserable life, it seems, but it makes for fascinating reading. I also like Matt's clean drawing line; he's quite an accomplished artist. This anthology, titled Peepshow: The Cartoon Diary of Joe Matt, is a fine introduction to his work.

Buy from Amazon

March 04, 2004

Ed Emberly's Drawing Book of Animals

Artist Ed Emberly has written a bunch of instructional drawing books for kids. His Drawing Book of Animals is one of my favorites. He provides step by step instructions on how to use simple shapes to draw very cute animals. My six-year-old daughter and I have a great time at the kitchen table using this book, some color pens, and a stack of cheap paper.

Buy from Amazon

March 03, 2004

You Can't Win

You Can't Win is the utterly compelling autobiography of Jack Black, a thief and a hobo who grew up in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I've never read a better book about the criminal underclass. Black's unsentimental writing style is superb. His descriptions of how he cracked safes, sneaked into houses to steal money from under the pillows of snoring victims, and survived miserable prison experiences had me turning the pages wide-eyed in bed at 2 a.m.Black never tries to make you feel sorry for him, and he greatly regrets his crimes (in his later years he became the librarian for a San Francisco newspaper), but you get the sense he enjoyed the thrills and risks of being a crook during the turn of the century. I felt kind of guilty for rooting him on as he broke all kinds of laws, but he's such a wonderful storyteller and a well-mannered crook I couldn't hellp myself.William Burroughs, who wrote the introduction to the latest edition, says You Can't Win is his favorite book. If you've read Junky, it's easy to see that Burrough's writing style was greatly influenced by Black's.

Buy from Amazon

March 02, 2004

When the Tripods Came/ The White Mountains/ The City of Gold and Lead/ The Pool of Fire

My sixth grade teacher read this science fiction trilogy (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire) to our class and it had a profound influence on me. I was thrilled and mesmerized, and when I reread it recently, I was even more impressed.

The story, written by John Christopher in the late '60s, takes place in the future, after giant creatures (called Tripods) have colonized Earth and are using people as work animals. When children reach a certain age (I think it's 10), the creatures surgically attach a cap to their heads, rendering them docile, uncreative, and unquestioningly obedient to the tripods. People live like they did in the 18th century before the industrial revolution. The populace has even come to believe that capping is a good idea (because their thinking is too muddled to really question anything) and have developed a celebratory ritual around capping.

But when the hero of the trilogy gets "capped," the mechanism that's supposed to make him obedient doesn't work, so he is able to clearly see that people are slaves to the cruel aliens. He also learns that there are others like him, and they set out on a journey that they hope will take them to a place where the Tripods don't exist.

You can read these books as metaphor for cultural brainwashing that comes with adulthood, or as straight adventure, or a combination of both. Either way, the series makes for great reading. I just learned that there's a relatively new fourth book in the series, which is a prequel to the trilogy.

Buy from Amazon (ignore the hideous cover art)

March 01, 2004

Understanding Physics by Isaac Asimov

I took a lot of physics classes in college, but I never had a good understanding of the subject until I read Asimov's "Understanding Physics." This edition (which is out of print, but can be purchased for as little as $1.95 from Amazon's marketplace) is an anthology of three volumes that were previously published seperately: "Motion, Sound & Heat," "Light, Magnetism & Electricity," and "The Electron, Proton & Neutron." Yes, there are formulas in here, but they aren't difficult, and on the whole, this 800-page book is very readable. I've never been a big fan of Asimov's fiction, but he is a terrific science teacher. He turned on a lot of stubborn light switches in my head (like the one that explains "escape velocity').
Buy from Amazon

February 28, 2004

Join Me!

I haven't read this Join Me!, but I've ordered it. It's a true story about a 27-year British TV producer who placed an ad in a newspaper (just for fun, I guess) that said "Join Me" along with a mailing address. Amazingly, 6,000 people wrote him, and he became a cult leader of sorts. Here's an interview with Danny Wallace, the accidental cult leader.

Buy from Amazon

The Da Vinci Code and Dan Brown's other novels

Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is a novel about a secret society that harbors dangerous evidence that could shatter the Catholic Church if revealed. It's probably the best conspiracy story I've read. I never did make it through Focault's Pendulum or any of Pynchon's books. They bored the pants off me. And The Illuminatus Trilogy seemed a lot more profound (and coherent) when I was in college than it did during a recent re-reading. Brown got the right mix of suspense, history, and conspiracy with The Da Vinci Code.

After reading The Da Vinci Code, I bought all of Brown's other novels: Angels & Demons, Deception Point, and Digital Fortress. I enjoyed them all, but none are as good as The Da Vinci Code. Angels & Demons come very close. The story's set-up is similar to The Da Vinci Code's. In fact, they share the same protagonist, an American professor of religious studies. Both stories involve the professor getting involved in a whirlwind adventure in a large European city (Paris in Da Vinci, and Rome in Angles & Demons) and both feature daughters of important secret society leaders who are murdered by a gruesome misfit henchmen of a competing secret society. The similarities didn't bother me though, because Angels & Demons is such a fun ride.

Brown's other two novels, Deception Point, and Digital Fortress, were written before Da Vinci and Angels & Demons, and while they're both perfectly readable adventures, they lack the historical and conspiracy angles that fuel his later work. Digital Fortress, the weakest of all, takes place in the bowels of the National Security Agency. The female hero of the story must crack a supposedly uncrackable code, and she doesn't know which of her coworkers she can trust. Almost every scene takes place in the basement of the NSA, and I felt claustrophobic while reading it. Brown wisely began moving his chartacters all around the world in Deception Point, which a fun science and political thriller about the discovery of an unusual meteorite in the arctic circle. Here's how I'd grade these books on a scale of 1 to 10:

The Da Vinci Code - 10

Angels & Demons - 9

Deception Point - 6

Digital Fortress - 5

February 27, 2004

Bonnie's Household Organizer

Now that we have two kids, our house gets messy very quickly. Extra dishes, school papers, projects, and toys have a way of piling up. It doesn't help that our house is pretty small. I've learned a lot about cleaning and organizing from Bonnie's Household Organizer, the best clutter-cutting book I've found to date. Every page is full of useful information on how to make the most of my limited time and space. The most valuable part is her "minimum maintenance" cleaning routine that keeps our place presentable for unexpected guests.

Buy from Amazon

February 25, 2004

The Complete Crumb Comics, Vol 1-16

There are three truly great comic book artists in the world. Two are dead: Carl Barks (who invented Uncle Scrooge, and did a bunch of duck comics for Disney), Jack Kirby (Captain America, Fantastic Four, Thor, Hulk, etc). The third, Robert Crumb, has been drawing comics since he was a little kid, and is still going strong. A lot of creative people get worse as they age (e.g., Charles Schulz, Elvis, Lucille Ball), but Crumb's current work is relevant, insightful, funny, and provocative. (I'm not going to defend or lambaste Robert Crumb for his depictions of women in his comics. Lots of other people already have.)

One of Crumb's strong points is his refusal to compromise. He doesn't do commercial art for anyone. (Toyota once offered him $100,000 to draw an advertisement. He said no. Toyota told him he could draw anything he wanted, anything. Crumb said, OK, I'll draw a picture of a murderer stuffing the headless corpse of a woman into the trunk of a Toyota.) His other strengths are an eye for detail, insight into human behavior, and a love of early 20th century American history, particularly musicians and craftsmen of all kinds. Crumb loves old music, old architecture, and old kitchen appliances almost as much as he hates modern American culture. (In 1995, Crumb moved with his family to a village in France.)

The Complete Crumb Comics, which is now in its 16th volume, is a chronological anthology of everything ever published by Crumb, including comics that he drew as a kid with his brother, and cards he drew for American Greetings before he created Zap (arguably the world's first underground comic). Each volume has new cover art as well as lots of interesting biographical material, occasionally pennned by Crumb himself. Even if you've seen Terry Zwigoff's Oscar winning documentary, Crumb, there's a lot more to learn about the artist in this anthology. But the best thing about The Complete Crumb Comics, of course, is the comics themselves. Crumb is a master storyteller. There are times when I've been disturbed by his work, I've never been bored, and I always come away from his work feeling like I understand a something new about human nature.

Buy from Amazon

February 23, 2004

The Complete Peanuts 1950-1952, by Charles Schulz

A couple of years ago I went to an Art Spiegelman (creator of Maus) talk at UCLA. He made a comment about Peanuts that struck me. He said all the kids in Peanuts are actually adults, and that Snoopy is the only real kid in the strip. It really is true.

But it wasn't quite as true in 1950, when Schulz started Peanuts. I'd never seen his early Peanuts comics, because most of them hadn't been reprinted until this month, when Fantagraphics published The Complete Peanuts: 1950-1952.

The reason these early comics hadn't been reprinted is because the characters hardly look like the Peanuts everyone knows. Schroeder and Linus are infants who can't talk, and Snoopy is a puppy who acts like a puppy. All the characters are much more childlike. It would have been too confusing for readers used to the fully-developed characters.

But in this book we get to see that the Peanuts looked like when they were still evolving, and what a treat it is! The artwork is delicate and cheery, and the kids run around doing kidlike things – pretending to be spacemen, or cowboys and Indians. The stories are funny without resorting to gags (which has always been a strength of Schulz's).

I really think this book shows Schulz at his best. The book itself is lovingly designed by Seth (creator of the comic Palookaville), and Fantagraphics promises that it is the first of a seried of 25 Peanuts books, reprinting every strip from 1950 to 2000. I'm not sure what year Snoopy changed from a quadruped to a biped but that's when I'll stop buying the books.

Buy from Amazon

February 22, 2004

Cool Tools

My friend Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired and the former editor of Whole Earth Review, has self-published my favorite book for 2003: a 140-page color book with reviews of his favorite "gadgets, how-to books, amazing documentaries, great pieces of software, uncommon mail order catalogs, websites, pieces of machinery, and things you can grab with your hand." If you've seen the old Whole Earth Catalogs, then you already have a good idea of what Cool Tools is like. No matter how much you already know, you'll find dozens of things in here to blow your mind. Buy from Amazon

February 21, 2004

Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion

This user's manual for survival in a hard-sell, high-pressure society is on my top-ten list of non-fiction books. How do door-to-door salespeople, marketers, car dealers, strangers, con artists, and cult leaders convince people to hand over their money or time seemingly against their will? The author studied this phenomenon and came up with six methods that other people use to influence you to do things that aren't necessarily in your best interest: reciprocity, scarcity, liking, authority, social proof, and commitment/consistency. Filled with wonderfully lucid examples and anecdotes, Influence is not only profoundly insightful, it's a lot of fun to read.

Buy from Amazon

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

Jimmy Corrigan was the lead story in Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library comic book series, published by Fantagraphics. Rendered in Ware's painstakingly detailed and clean-lined hand, Jimmy Corrigan is a non-linear fictional biography about a guy who lives a miserable life because his parents treated him horribly. We learn that his parents, too, were treated horribly. It's pretty depressing, but the art is truly mind-blowing, and the creative ways in which Ware unfolds the story are pure genius. I highly recommend this book, especially since you can buy a used hardcover copy on Amazon for just $10. A great deal for a 380-page, all color book. Buy from Amazon.

February 19, 2004

The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby: The First Graphic Novel

Super Diaper Baby is a spin-off of the enormously popular Captain Underpants kids' book series. While the Captain Underpants books are heavily illustrated chapter books, Super Diaper Baby is a comic book disguised as a paperback. The art is appealingly crude, and reminds me of the comics I drew in school. In fact, the premise is that The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby was written and drawn by the two kids who star in the Captain Underpants books.

Weirdly enough, The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby stars a giant piece of human excrement as the villain. In the 1960s, headshop owners were getting busted for selling underground comic books, because they had sex, violence, drugs, and scatology in them. Now, kids books (published by Scholastic, no less) have turd drawings in them and the books are sold in regular bookstores without any parental warning on them.

My six year-old-daughter enjoyed this book as much as I did.

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February 17, 2004

Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art

Harvey Kurtzman may have invented Mad, but for 99% of Mad's readers, it's the work of Will Elder that comes to mind when they think of the magazine.

Elder remained on good terms with Kurtzman -- a childhood friend -- after Kurtzman left Mad, and they continued to work together on various projects, such as Playboy's Little Annie Fanny and Goodman Beaver. But despite his immense talents as an artist and humorist, Elder always worked in the shadow of the charismatic Kurtzman. Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art, published in 2003 by Fantagraphics, finally gives Elder the recognition he deserves.

Every page of this monster-sized book is filled with examples of Elder's obsessive attention to detail, which separates his work from Kurtzman's (who was a broad brush kind of guy, albeit a great one). Elder's technical chops are supreme, and the longer you look at his work, the more you are rewarded. I love his talent for imitating other cartoonists' styles (which he used to parody Archie, Li'L Abner, Alley Oop, etc.), and I love the tiny little gags he inserts into nearly every panel. Unfortunately, the worst piece of art in this book is on the cover. Too bad Fantagraphics didn't use something like this Norman Rockwell parody instead.

Included is a lot of Elder's stuff from Mad, as well as sketches, paintings, and gag cartoons done for other magazines. Dan Clowes (Of Eightball and Ghostworld) wrote the intoduction, and there's commentary by Hugh Hefner, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee (another of Elder's childhood friends), Terry Gilliam, William Stout, and Jerry Garcia.

400 pages, 9"x12" full-color softcover.

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February 16, 2004

Charles Schulz's pre-Peanuts comic anthology

This looks like it'll be great. According to Fantagraphics, in late February the Charles M. Schulz Museum "is releasing LI'L BEGINNINGS, a complete collection of Charles Schulz's LI'L FOLKS and panel gags, amply annotated and referenced. This superb 300-page softcover, which collects many panels that have not been seen for over 50 years, will not be readily available for general sale in bookstores so far as we can tell. It costs $30.00 plus $6.00 shipping and is available for pre-order right now."

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Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963–1975

Dr. Fredric Wertham nearly succeeded in killing comic books in 1954. That was the year his book Seduction of the Innocent sparked a nationwide anti-comics crusade. The psychiatrist's frenzied diatribe, illustrated with comic panels depicting gruesome and sadomasochistic scenes, painted a horrific picture of children losing their minds and morals to the lurid four-color pulps. Wertham's factually inaccurate, hysterically toned polemic was a big hit. Its wide coverage in the press led to hearings by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency to deal with the comic-book menace. Almost overnight, dozens of comic-book publishers went out of business. The survivors established a self-censoring organization called the Comics Code Authority, which issued a set of explicit guidelines on what was forbidden and what was mandatory in comic-book stories (e.g., "Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities" and "In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds"). With the exception of Mad, comics became bland and safe for kids once again.

In retrospect, Wertham probably should have gone after Mad, too. In the early chapters of Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975, by Patrick Rosenkranz, Mad's sneering contempt for the establishment is frequently cited as a source of inspiration by the pioneers of the underground-comics movement. (In fact, it was Mad creator Harvey Kurtzman who hired Robert Crumb to draw pictures of street life in unfamiliar places like Bulgaria and Harlem for his short-lived humor magazine Help! in 1964.)

Rosenkranz began working on Rebel Visions nearly 30 years ago, interviewing every major cartoonist and publisher in the underground-comics movement, resulting in the first book that definitively chronicles one of the biggest countercultural artistic and literary movements in America. It's not only authoritative, it's also great fun to read. Illustrated with art and photographs (many previously unpublished) spanning a fascinating and riotous 12 years of artistic reawakening, Rebel Visions is largely an oral history told by the surviving originators of the movement. The quotes Rosenkranz selects vividly recount the birth, explosion and decline of underground comics.

Laid out chronologically in chapters that cover two years apiece, Rebel Visions begins in 1963, four years before the publication of Crumb's seminal Zap #1. At that time, artists who didn't want to follow the rules of the Comics Code Authority worked their way into science-fiction fanzines, college humor newspapers and hot-rod magazines. In the early days, artists like Rick Griffin, a surfer from Southern California, and Gilbert Shelton, a college student in Austin, drew in isolation from the nascent hippie counterculture. The early underground cartoonists were less interested in overthrowing the status quo than they were in poking fun at it. As long as Griffin could sneak a few marijuana references into his surf-mag funnies, and Crumb could lampoon the staid office protocols in his comic strip for American Greetings' employee newsletter, that was enough.

But by 1965, it was clear that a social revolution was taking place, and cartoonists who didn't want to draw pictures of men in tight-fitting colored underwear gravitated to San Francisco and the East Village, where they instantly became absorbed into the subculture dedicated to dope, free love and rebellion for the hell of it. LSD was legal, the Vietnam War was a sham, and rock music was an antidote to the assorted poisons spewed out by the establishment. The underground artists fit right in, becoming celebrities on the level of rock stars, Eastern religion proselytizers and psychedelic gurus. New inexpensive printing processes were helping to spawn underground newspapers like the East Village Other and the San Francisco Oracle. And rock music posters, most of them being drawn by the same artists who did comic strips for the underground press, became popular as wall art, resulting in the establishment of a national distribution system. According to Rosenkranz, "It was the production and distribution of ballroom posters that created the infrastructure for San Francisco to become the center of the underground comix industry."

ARTISTICALLY, THE MOST IMPORTANT event in the genesis of underground comics can be attributed to a "fuzzy" acid trip that Crumb took in November of 1965. In the months that followed, Crumb's perception of the world around him was altered, and his sketches reflected the new twists and turns his brain was making. "He started drawing strange characters and stories set in a soft, squishy, cartoon world," Rosenkranz writes. "Big-footed, pin-headed goofballs crowded the pages of his sketchbooks . . . There were plump nudes, working stiffs, cool cats, eggheads, holy fools, and men whose heads silently exploded -- lots of those." Crumb's trip lasted nearly five months, and he credits it with the birth of his most famous characters, including Mr. Natural. "It was during that fuzzy period that I recorded in my sketchbook all the main characters I would be using in my comics for the next 10 years," said Crumb.

Crumb used the characters to populate the pages of Zap, a famously successful comic book that he sold from a baby stroller on the streets of the Haight-Ashbury district. In subsequent issues, Crumb invited his favorite artists, such as Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Robert Williams, Gilbert Shelton, Manuel "Spain" Rodriguez and S. Clay Wilson to contribute -- and share equally in the ownership -- of Zap. In short order, hundreds and hundreds of underground-comic titles were weighing down the racks of head shops and comic-book stores.

Rosenkranz pegs 1971 as the year underground comics peaked. Titles were typically selling over 40,000 copies. The cartoonists felt that they were part of something big and wonderful. Maus creator Art Spiegelman told Rosenkranz, "It did feel like this must have been what the Cubists were going through. All the magic of being in Paris for the Post-Impressionist movement did feel somehow like being in San Francisco in the early '70s."

Of course, the magic had to end sometime -- but no one expected it to vanish so soon. By 1973, underground-comics sales had nosedived. Rosenkranz cites several factors: a nationwide crackdown on head shops, the Supreme Court's ruling on community standards for obscenity, and an increasingly politicized underground press that censored what it interpreted as sexism or racism from stories. Mainstream culture had changed, too. In a 1998 interview, cartoonist Jay Kinney told Rosenkranz that underground-comic artists, once regarded as "taboo breakers and iconoclasts," lost their mojo after mass media began dishing out their own brand of extreme sex, drugs and gore. How could underground comics "out-gross slasher films, video porn, Hustler magazine and Cheech and Chong?" asks Rosenkranz rhetorically. Twenty-five years after the death of the movement, his Rebel Visions brilliantly recalls the astounding influence, giddy thrills and sense of freedom that underground comics provided during a pivotal point in American culture.

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February 13, 2004

Marvel Masterworks: The Fantastic Four Vol 5

The 1960s were a wonderful time for Marvel comics. By this time, Jack Kirby had already created some of the most famous characters in pop culture, and was hitting his stride with fantastic stories and villains. (Stan Lee took the credit for the stories and characters, but it really was Kirby who wrote as well as illustrated everything. He told me so when I met him when I was 15, and I believe him.)

The lavishly produced hardcover edition of Marvel Masterworks: The Fantastic Four Vol 5, collects Fantastic Four #41-50 and the Fantastic Four Annual #3. These ten issues are arguably the zenith of Silver Age comics. The story arc introduces Galactus, one of the most awesome villains ever, and the Silver Surfer, who just exudes cool. I get shivers thinking about these comics. If you have never read Fantastic Four, I recommend you start with this book, then go back and buy Volumes 1-4, which are good, but not as good as the issues in Volume 5.

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