French Fashion Illustration

Garance Dore. Spare and elegant. A bit like Josei manga, but no screentone.

Chattenigma

For some reason this book jacket stuck in my memory and has haunted me since I was a kid in the Eighties and saw it in a cardboard display stand at Waldenbooks. I'm asking my design-oriented friends about the typeface... I'm fixated on it. It screams "Eighties" to me. Maybe it's associational. The Eighties were a time of following my Mommy from one store to another under a snowy Chattanooga sky. Bare trees lining the grey city streets, Christmas lights twinkling in the branches. Everything seemed charged with totemic mystery. Every drab department store seemed dusty and enigmatic.

There was a restaurant called the Brass Register which had, as part of its arch decor, a bathtub with a life sized soft knitted female rag doll taking a smiling bath. It weirded me out, embarrassed me, but amused my Mom into commenting on it. I was afraid to pass it on the way to the bathroom... it held the promise of danger, the same danger I sensed when grown women kissed my little-boy face.

I'd love to see it again, but I suspect it's long gone.

I'm wildly excited about a forthcoming con. Specifically, this. Art-comics champs are going to be in attendance, and if the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise, Laurie and I will get to meet folks we've admired for years! I'm so provincial that the idea of meeting Jaime Hernandez makes me swoon. Of course when it comes to meeting celebs I reckon it's important to act like someone they'd actually want to speak with, rather than like a gibbering fool. As a local actor I've actually met folks who were starstruck to speak with me, as strange as it seems (I'm only a local actor, for heaven's sake!) and I found it a distinctly worrying experience. I love to talk with folks who enjoy theatre, but watching grown people quaking with excitement over someone who was in a local play is disorienting. C'mon, folks! As John Waters said, you're not famous until you're in the Enquirer.

Added: Frank Santoro, artist on the oddball adventure comic Cold Heat, will be there too! I can't wait to ask him how he acheived some odd color effects. And Sammy Harkham, the editor of Kramer's Ergot will be there! Plus
Kevin Huizenga, one of the most thoughtful, nuanced, innovative cartoonists of the new breed! Apologies to my regular readers, none of whom care.

Obama-Cola

Obama gave a great speech, that Race speech. Here's how good it was: all the Yahoonews opinion pundits, on both sides of the aisle, whose bread and butter depends on oversimplification, phony outrage, demonization and cheap rhetorical games, are tirading about how lousy the speech was. If Obama actually manages to acclimatize us to political rhetoric that is heartfelt, subtle, meaningful, and which honestly addresses deeply buried anxieties in a productive fashion, then all the Coulters and the Ralls and the Malkins will be faking Nazi muggings for attention like Morton Downey Junior.

Some folks are asking why Obama would go to a church in which the preacher says things like "God damn America." I suspect a lot of those asking are folks who don't have much experience going to church. Here's the deal: You don't always agree with your Preacher. And that's okay, at least in the better churches. It's not when you disagree with the Preacher that you gotta leave; it's when the Preacher demands that everybody agree that you gotta leave. (Of course you may substitute Rabbi, Priest, etc. for Preacher on an as-needed basis)


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Heard about this shop on NPR. Apparently they have a bazillion brands of soft drink (or coke as we say here... it's all coke. Pepsi is coke) in their brick and mortar store. The online shop is more limited, but the NPR story suggests that the shop is an Aladdin's Cavern of fizzy drinks.

I'd love to visit. I hate soft drinks, but I'd love to hear the owner, who obviously has a cultivated palate for soft drinks (which is odd; the whole point of soft drinks is that they don't require a cultivated palate) explain the subtle distinctions between a dozen different kinds of orange pop. Maybe I'd find something I'd like. Chocolate egg creams sound tempting. Too bad it's all made with corn syrup instead of sugar nowadays.

Play For Me...If You Ever Play

Laurie is sick, but she's gotta work anyway for reasons she's too weary to explain right now. To paraphrase Charlotte Haze, pray for her... if you ever pray.

Speaking of whom, I'm rereading Edward Albee's theatrical adaptation of Lolita, and I still think it's a mess. Sometimes two great tastes do not taste great together, and this blend of Nabokov with Albee (two of my most cherished creators) doesn't work at all. It might work if you forgot Nabokov and thought John Waters.

Here's an idea: Troublesome Theatre. Some theatre should do a season where all the plays are works that frustrate the directors, not necessarily by being outright bad, but in subtler ways. I think Albee's Lolita would make Nabokov ill, which would be okay if it were only a good Albee play. It's an interesting attempt at best. Still, I've read it over and over, trying to imagine a production that makes a solid night's theatre of it...

dollop

Okay, maybe my last post went a bit too personal in icky ways. Sorry.

Removed a link, Yesterday's Papers, because it appears to have shut down. Added some new items. Peruse at your leisure.

Thassall I got. Behind at work!

Item!

Item! I had a marvelous time in Kannapolis NC, Land of Splendour, this weekend. Laurie and I are really in a groove now. I've never enjoyed squeezing her more than I did this weekend; we're becoming a couple in earnest.

We got to hang out with her friend Jennifer, who is awesome and gave us wine that far surpasses the plunk I usually drink. Yay Jennifer!

Item! Stalker is a luminous movie. Like Alphaville and Tetsuo, this SF movie knows that the stuff you can find within a few miles of your home is more enigmatic and alien than any Hollywood wizardry (although in this case it may be more likely to give you cancer). Alexander Kaidanovsky as The Stalker gives one of the most extraordinary performances I've ever seen in a film. His awareness of the dangers around him, his frantic rant about what The Room means to him, and his final tirade about secular eggheads, make him my new thespian idol. And The Writer's revelation of why The Stalker's mentor hanged himself gave me pause for thought.

It's essential viewing for anyone who needs more slow-paced three-hour philosophical Russian SF movies in their lives. You probably know if this means you.