Category Archives: art

Glass Sea Creatures

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On every walk I take there must be something to study of nature…I think a man can never finish these studies and is never too old to learn from nature. *

Off I went to Cambridge (MA) yesterday. The major motivator (answering the question, “why yesterday?”) was this book-signing event, but it seemed like a perfect opportunity for a two-fer – and so it was. I spent the morning at the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Peabody Museum before braving the crowds of Harvard Square and meeting Chris Onstad.

I took so many pictures that I’m going to post them in batches, First batch – glass sea creatures created by the father and son team of Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka. The Blaschkas are probably best known for their glass flowers, but I thought I’d start with anemones of the oceanic persuasion. Modeling transparent/translucent bodies of marine inverts in glass is a perfect match of material and subject.

A blanket mea culpa for all the HMNH photos – I think the museum uses extra-reflective glass for the front of their cases. You’ll see a lot of odd angles – that’s me trying to minimize reflection – and a lot of reflection that I couldn’t avoid.

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For the whole set (not a slideshow) click here.

The 50 Things That Every Comics Collection Truly Needs

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The Comics Reporter spins off a variation on a meme:

Leave Plain = Things I don’t have
Make Bold = Things I do have
Italics = I have some but probably not enough (optional)
Underline = I don’t agree I need this (optional)

1. Something From The ACME Novelty Library
2. A Complete Run Of Arcade
3. Any Number Of Mini-Comics
4. At Least One Pogo Book From The 1950s
5. A Barnaby Collection
6. Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary
7. As Many Issues of RAW as You Can Place Your Hands On
8. A Little Stack of Archie Comics
9. A Suite of Modern Literary Graphic Novels
10. Several Tintin Albums
11. A Smattering Of Treasury Editions Or Similarly Oversized Books
12. Several Significant Runs of Alternative Comic Book Series
13. A Few Early Comic Strip Collections To Your Taste
14. Several “Indy Comics” From Their Heyday
15. At Least One Comic Book From When You First Started Reading Comic Books
16. At Least One Comic That Failed to Finish The Way It Planned To
17. Some Osamu Tezuka
18. The Entire Run Of At Least One Manga Series
19. One Or Two 1970s Doonesbury Collections
20. At Least One Saul Steinberg Hardcover
21. One Run of A Comic Strip That You Yourself Have Clipped
22. A Selection of Comics That Interest You That You Can’t Explain To Anyone Else
23. At Least One Woodcut Novel
24. As Much Peanuts As You Can Stand
25. Maus
26. A Significant Sample of R. Crumb’s Sketchbooks
27. The original edition of Sick, Sick, Sick.
28. The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics
29. Several copies of MAD
30. A stack of Jack Kirby 1970s Comic Books
31. More than a few Stan Lee/Jack Kirby 1960s Marvel Comic Books
32. A You’re-Too-High-To-Tell Amount of Underground Comix
33. Some Calvin and Hobbes
34. Some Love and Rockets
35. The Marvel Benefit Issue Of Coober Skeber
36. A Few Comics Not In Your Native Tongue
37. A Nice Stack of Jack Chick Comics
38. A Stack of Comics You Can Hand To Anybody’s Kid
39. At Least A Few Alan Moore Comics
40. A Comic You Made Yourself
41. A Few Comics About Comics
42. A Run Of Yummy Fur
43. Some Frank Miller Comics
44. Several Lee/Ditko/Romita Amazing Spider-Man Comic Books
45. A Few Great Comics Short Stories
46. A Tijuana Bible
47. Some Weirdo
48. An Array Of Comics In Various Non-Superhero Genres
49. An Editorial Cartoonist’s Collection or Two
50. A Few Collections From New Yorker Cartoonists

Guess I just never recovered from my first encounter with Cooch Cooty…

Thinking about fall

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“One should not talk to a skilled hunter about what is forbidden by the Buddha” -Hsiang-yen

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A gray fox, female, nine pounds three ounces.
39 5/8″ long with tail.
Peeling skin back (Kai
reminded us to chant the Shingyo first)
cold pelt. crinkle; and musky smell
mixed with dead-body odor starting.

Stomach content: a whole ground squirrel well chewed
plus one lizard foot
and somewhere from inside the ground squirrel a bit of aluminum foil.

The secret.
and the secret hidden deep in that.

– Gary Snyder

(more than) A couple links

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Signor Poletti puts up a kaiju Fickrset. Worth a look or two or three (also – check out COOP’s vinyls in comments).

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Bookride runs down prices on one of my top ‘want it, but can’t afford it’ books – Ricky Jay’s Cards as Weapons. Sigh.

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Peacay, at the always excellent BibliOdyssey, posts one that’s right up my alley:

The book’s [Topographische und naturwissenschaftliche Reisen durch Java] author was an enigmatic character by the name of Franz Junghuhn (1809-1864). He overcame depression and a suicide attempt as a medical student, a prison sentence following a pistol duel (he escaped), and a stint in the French Foreign Legion on his path to becoming one of the foremost naturalists in 19th century Indonesia.

This  plate reminds me a bit of a much later artist – O’Keefe:

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Click over and read – beautiful illustrations and a fascinating character.

North by Northwest

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I watched North by Northwest (again) last night; what a wonderful movie. So cool – the clothes, the 20th Century Limited, the cars (especially the Continental convertible), Vandamm’s house on the top of Mt. Rushmore and it’s furnishings, even the tail of the Connie in the Chicago airport scene. Just enough vinegar to cut the sweet – at least for a modern viewer – the black faces of the porters on the train are a reminder of how other Americans experienced the 50s.

My favorite aspect of the movie (at this moment – subject to change without notice) is the double MacGuffin. Sure there are the government secrets on microfilm that motivate Alexander Waverly’s The Professor’s pursuit of Vandamm, but I also think Kaplan counts as a MacGuffin – he is Vandamm’s central concern. Hitchcock makes it clear early in the movie that Kaplan doesn’t exist – a perfect placeholder for the characters to play-act around. What could be better? Hitchcock: “People, there’s nothing there, but I’m going to use that empty suit as the center of the story – watch me.”

Put it in your movie queue and when it arrives, mix yourself a nice Gibson, sit back and enjoy. (Editorial comments: 1) Gin, dammit. 2) If you don’t want to drink vermouth, don’t – just call it a cold glass of gin w/ onion or olive – dirty martinis are acceptable – the second component bumps it back to cocktail status).

And the last shot? Canonical.

Even the ants, saved in a Noah sugar-pan

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Some random links…

  • COOP’s posted another bit of musical goodness – check his mix page for the whole list. At the moment, I’m very partial to Ghetto Organ and Bloodclot. Bloodclot has one of my desert island tunes on it – Ark of the Covenant – love it!

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  • And an odd submersible, seen by the side of the road yesterday:

Glad

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It’s a beautiful spring day. Lex10 has won a small victory over Blogger and the Glyphblog is back with another great bit of moving image + music. I’m glad, I’m glad, I’m glad.

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Lex10’s Youtube channel is here, his workup of the Greatest Nancy Panel Ever Drawn is here. I reiterate: I’m so glad.

Connectedness, part eleventy-trillion

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I’ve been getting a lot of hits on searches for Gabrielle Drake – something I find myself taking a perverse pleasure in. I thought I’d use the google and see what was coming up; before I got anywhere near DoaMNH, I encountered this essay, Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon, on the Ballardian. Yes, Ms. Drake appeared in a 1971 short titled Crash!, opposite some guy named J.G. Ballard. Click through and read the essay – meanwhile, I’ll just continue to shake my head in amazement.

Indeed, the egocentric popular culture of today, the all-invasive media landscape in which the private becomes public — the Myspace glossolalia of intimate, private space projected onto a global screen — can perhaps be understood in these terms, a result of what Ballard sees as ‘the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape’.

Mild warning – the film is titled Crash! after all…

More Moore

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Win! Hooray for serendipity. I started at Bruce Sterling’s and followed his link to a post on Amazon’s new Kindle (wisdom of crowds says, “Fail!” – also, read this). Speedbird – the blog with the Kindling post – looked interesting; I read a bit. Down a ways mention is made of a new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen title – The Black Dossier. Great news – and news it is. Though I love me some graphic novels, I’m out of the loop – there is much in the comic book world that I’m not particularly interested in, and I haven’t figured out where to find my kind of stuff (I read FLOG, but that’s just one – great – publisher). The only decent comic book store in the area having gone out of business and Million Year Picnic being too far to drive for one book (although I do want to get down to Cambridge soon – visit friends and the HMNH), off I go – virtually – to Amazon.

For those of you who know the League only via the movie – as is often the case – the books are far superior. I need to rent V for Vendetta and make that comparo sometime soon…