Burning Blogging Man

I'm sure I'll be pilfering images from it from time to time, but if you want to go straight to the source, there's a blog for the current Burning Man class here:

http://sncburn.wordpress.com/

A link has been posted to the "student blogs" list to the right of the page.

Some samples of what can be found there:

Prayer/Protest/Peace Peace Peace

There are a few performers who I passed up chances to see, and then they died before I got another chance -- leaving me with pangs of regret. Fela was the first, then Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and then I actually had tickets to see Nina Simone but something else came up. Fortunately, I caught Abbey Lincoln at Yoshi's on a valentine's day with my wife a few years ago. I don't know if any other valentine's day will beat that one.

A voice can transmit many things. Abbey had a beautiful voice, but I think what I treasure most about it is that it's a voice that seems to embody dignity. It was fun that night to watch the quiet deference of her band, all young men sharply dressed, and all aware of their good fortune to be sharing the stage and the music with her.

I hope the recent spate of obits here doesn't seem morbid -- but one of the perks of having artists in our lives is that, when they go, they leave behind things that are easy to celebrate -- things that give us the illusion that they're still here, sharing the room with us.



I've used a recording of the Abbey Lincoln/Max Roach piece above for a "Digital Darkroom" class a few times. It's a photoshop class, and I find that, with easy access to images from Google and stock photo sites, it's sometimes hard for students to climb out from under the shipwreck of images that have preceded their ideas -- to identify images that come from within, instead of without. To encourage students to pay attention to the stuff that bubbles up from behind their eyes, rather than in front of them. So we shut off the computer monitors and I play three songs for them, for them to listen to with eyes closed, and see what sort of visions appear on their inner movie screens. Then they make sketches and share what each of them saw.

The first song is a song with a strong story, kind of a movie with lyrics. The second song has more oblique lyrics -- there are words, but they don't always connect up in obvious ways. And then the third song is Abbey, abandoning words for raw sound. It can take students to some interesting places.

Here's a clip of Abbey acting in the 1964 independent film "Nothing But a Man" -- might show it in an "independent film" class I've been cooking up:



And here's Abbey in her later period. It's always different to hear a song from somebody dead than it is to hear one from somebody alive, but the lyric "you can never lose a thing if it belongs to you" has an extra sharpness now:



You can catch an interview with Abbey on Fresh Air here.

Cake!

Mary Kenny's show is currently up at Riverside Studios in Truckee:


(Thanks to Sheri for the pic)

Riverside studios has moved into some new digs this summer; see their facebook page for hours and a map.

All the marbles

One surprising thing I discovered this summer was the secret blueprint for Russell Dudley's show at the Silverland Gallery last year, "Scratch Built." It turns out Russel was standing in the shadow of a Belgian marbleologist. Compare and contrast:



The full story is here:

R.I.P. Harvey Pekar

I'm slowly trying to get back into the blogging swing of things, and while about a month has passed since Harvey Pekar died, I didn't want to just let that go by unremarked here. My interest in comics came about partly because I started to forge my cultural identity in the 80s -- which seemed, to my teenaged jaded eyes, like a cultural wasteland. Movies and TV were generally abysmally stupid, the music that got played on the radio was usually godawful, the contemporary novel seemed to be in the doldrums, and the fine art world wasn't a huge part of my consciousness, outside of the NEA performance art kerfuffles. The place where interesting things seemed to be happening was comics. For a variety of reasons, in the 80s comics were detaching themselves from the juvenile subject matter that had long defined them in the U.S. -- a whole crowd of cartoonists were creating work outside of the superhero genre, and sometimes outside of anything that could comfortably be typified as a "genre" at all.


Pekar, whose work I discovered in the 80s, probably took comics further than anyone else beyond the zone of fantasy and escapism. His great subject was everyday life -- not romanticized or blown up to heroic proportions, but presented warts and all. You could say his work had an ethical relation to the warts. Neurosis, boredom, impotence -- it was all perfectly acceptable subject matter, and in fact it demanded to be subject matter, since so much art just sweeps that stuff under the rug. Pekar really opened my eyes to what comics were capable of, and for that I owe a debt of gratitude.

There have been several good obits posted on Pekar -- for some shorter appreciations, you could read Phil Nugent:

I remember reading an article about Pekar in 1983--in The Village Voice, as it happens--and sending away for copies of all the issues of American Splendor that were still available. They came a few weeks later and I read them all in one gulp, but I know that the "story" that made the biggest impact on me was the one that began with Harvey waking up on a cold morning, alone in bed between marriages, thinking about how much his life sucked, consoling himself a little by masturbating, picking out which of his worn-out, sorry-looking duds he was going to wear, getting dressed, and going to work, his actions accompanied by one pissed-off thought balloon after another. That was Pekar making, as bluntly as possible, the point that he was put on earth to make, the same point that Arthur Miller once managed to inflate to cosmic proportions by reducing it to four simple words: attention must be paid.

Or Jeet Heer:

Harvey was stubborn and willful, hard qualities to live with as at least two of his three wives would attest. Yet it was his very prickliness which made him a successful cultural revolutionary, a man who through sheer force of will helped transform a children’s medium, the comic book, and turn it into the graphic novel, a venue for literate, adult storytelling. As Harvey often noted, he was born in Cleveland in 1939, just a year after two other Cleveland Jewish boys launched Superman upon the world. Harvey saw his own intensely realistic stories as a response to the type of fantasies found in superhero comics: He liked to call himself Schlepperman, an ordinary Joe who struggled not to save the world but to get through the working day.

The most definitive obit I've read was by Tom Spurgeon, at the Comics Reporter.

And there's a nice selection of panels at John Glenn Taylor's blog.

Pekar had some minor celebrity as an oddball guest on David Letterman's show. He got himself booted from the guest list by refusing to be a performing monkey -- or at least by committing the cardinal sin of being a monkey with a political opinion. I don't think Letterman has ever looked like more of a shmuck; for my money, Pekar provided some of the most memorable moments of live television I've ever seen.



His work was also adapted into a film, "American Splendor," that to my mind lost a bit of the meandering, quotidian fundamentals of Pekar's comics -- though it featured a very good performance from Paul Giamatti, as Pekar. Here's a clip:

FALL CLASS: Watching and Making Documentaries

Under the umbrella of the "Special Topics in Film and Video" class this semester, I'm offering a class I haven't taught before; I've been going over it this summer and I'm pretty excited about it. It's the sort of thing I'll only be able to offer once every four years or so -- just wanted to post about it since it's new, and I didn't get the chance to talk it up at the end of last semester. The pics below are from some of the documentaries I'm intending to screen.

DOCUMENTARY CLASS: WATCHING AND MAKING DOCUMENTARIES

Spec Topics:Documentary - DART 480 1
CRN: 80087
Class 10:00 am - 12:45 pm MW

Filmmakers have created documentaries for a wide variety of reasons: to expose injustices, to explore history – or sometimes simply to tell an irresistible story. Most documentaries exert the fascination of the “real,” demonstrating the adage that truth is stranger than fiction.


In this class, we’ll watch several contemporary and historic documentaries, applying various documentary techniques to the production of short, student-directed documentaries. FinalCut Pro will be the primary software used. Methods and topics will include:

1. Using narration to shape what people see and understand.


2. Cinema Verite – the movement to abandon narration, to let footage “speak for itself,” without imposing a meaning through interviews or narration.


3. Using photos and recreations to give visual dimension to events that weren’t captured on film or video.

4. Documentary and propaganda – examining how documentaries have been used to shape opinion, focusing on the Nazis’ use of documentary (and how documentaries exposed the truth behind the propaganda).


5. Nature documentaries – exploring how documentaries about animals often impose human values on their activities.


6. The “found footage” documentary – using public domain and stock footage to tell a story – sometimes even a story that is directly opposed to the intentions behind the original footage.


7. Experimental documentaries – using reality toward poetic ends.

If you want to see a draft of the syllabus (I'm still tweaking it), drop me a line at clanier [at] sierranevada [dot] edu, and I'll send it along.

Silent Witness

This is the last month for a show I've been included in at The Collection, in Lincolnshire, England. It's the first time I've had art shown in England, and I'm very honored to be included in the exhibit, which features work by several artists I deeply admire -- artists whose work has served as inspiration and model for my own process. The exhibit, called Silent Witnesses: Graphic Novels Without Words , focuses on comics that tell their narratives in purely visual terms, without resort to word balloons or captions. My interest in the format (which arguably goes back into history far beyond the time people were thinking about "comics" as a medium) is an interest in a purely visual language: a language that stands apart from (while being related to) spoken and written language. The curator, Darren Diss, chose artwork from my wordless comic "Combustion," which tells the story of a soldier lost behind enemy lines.

Here is a sampling of the artists on display (not necessarily the work being shown at The Collection). Click on artist names to see more info or more work. Firstly, there are pioneers of the form:

Max Ernst, who I briefly blogged about last year.


Frans Masereel, whose masterpiece "Passionate Journey" directly lead me to "Combustion" (the ending of "Combustion" is actually a tip of the hat to, and a sort of inversion of, the end of "Passionate Journey").


Otto Nuckel


Lynd Ward


Laurence Hyde


There are several contemporary artists whose work I've avidly devoured:

Hendrik Dorgathen


Eric Drooker, who I worked with on the upcoming "Howl" movie:


Jason


Andrzej Klimowski


Peter Kuper


Shaun Tan


Jim Woodring



And several artists whose work I'm glad to have been introduced to, thanks to the show:

Lars Arrhenius, who had work at the NMA a few years ago:



Matt Forsythe


Alexandra Higlett


Zoe Taylor


Sara Varon



Here's the press release for the show (they used a panel of "Combustion" for it, which was nice):

Silent Witnesses: Graphic Novels Without Words
Curated by Darren Diss

Artists include: Lars Arrhenius, Hendrik Dorgathen, Eric Drooker, Max Ernst, Matt Forsythe, Alexandra Higlett, Laurence Hyde, Jason, Andrzej Klimowski, Peter Kuper, Chris Lanier, Frans Masereel, Otto Nuckel, Shaun Tan, Zoe Taylor, Lynd Ward, Sara Varon and Jim Woodring.

This exhibition brings together the work of internationally recognised artists and illustrators from around the world working in Graphic Novel form. Spanning publications from the early twentieth century to the present day, the works contained in the exhibition are distinct in that all use the capacity of images alone to communicate narrative, functioning entirely without the use of text.

The exhibition celebrates the book form and in particular the Graphic Novel as an increasingly popular medium for artists and explores its enduring appeal to readers of all ages. By focussing on works without text it examines the underlying structure and mechanics of developing a Graphic Novel, exposing it as a unique art form. It looks at the Novel in the true sense, as an extended sequence conveying a narrative. The show includes preparation and working drawings, writings, flat plans, sketch books and character studies and associated works alongside complete book-works to reveal the various developmental stages in creating a Graphic Novel.

The exhibition combines works from a wide range of cultural contexts, from modern popular Graphic Novels, with scratchboard images by Eric Drooker produced for his novel ‘Flood’, to woodcuts by Frans Masereel for his his 1925 work ‘Die Stadt’, to original drawings by Sara Varon for her well loved books, ‘Sweater Weather’, ‘Robo and Hund’ and ‘Chicken and Cat’. Also in the show will be a large scale flat-print version of ‘A-Z’ by Lars Arrhenius, a novel produced on the iconic A-Z map of London. Shown in print form it allows the viewer to scan the intersecting narratives sewn through the map in a single image, creating ever new readings.

Works for the exhibition have been loaned to The Collection from the British Museum, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Klinspor Museum, Offenbach, Scott Eder Gallery, New York, and from the exhibiting artists.

The show’s curator, Darren Diss, is an established illustrator and Senior Lecturer in Illustration at The University of Lincoln. He has a specialist academic research interest in Textless Narratives.

And here, lastly, are a few pictures taken at a preview of the show -- looks like they did a terrific job, it all seems very attractively laid out. Wish I could've hopped the pond to see it in person.

Releasing a HOWL

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I did some storyboarding work for an animated sequence in the upcoming film "Howl." The film opened the Sundance Film Festival, to wildly mixed reviews. Oscilloscope Pictures finally picked it up for distribution -- the release date is Sept. 24. The film has been outfitted with a terrific poster (anchored by the distinctive font City Light Books used when they first published "Howl"), and a trailer is online.


Here's the trailer:



The only bits of animation in the trailer are almost-subliminal glimpses, alas. I'm kind of dying to see how the final animation turned out.

I wrote a few paragraphs about the experience of working on "Howl," for an interview with SNC's Eagle Eye last semester. Here are my comments in full:

A friend of mine, Eric Drooker, was tapped to design the animation for the film, which looks at Allen Ginsberg's famous Beat poem "Howl," and the obscenity trial that followed its publication. Drooker and Ginsberg were friends, and Drooker had previously illustrated an edition of Ginsberg's poems. Drooker is a cartoonist who specializes in wordless or "silent" comics, where the story is told purely through images -- no captions or word balloons. That's related to how we met; many years ago I did a comic in that vein, and approached him to blurb the book. He called me up, agreed to do it, and we hit it off from there.

At any rate, the film-makers were looking to Eric to design the characters and storyboard the animation (the movie mixes live-action recreations of Ginsberg's milieu, with James Franco playing Ginsberg, and animation that seeks to give a visual interpretation to the poem). In a way, his work as a cartoonist already resembles storyboarding -- that's when an artist breaks down what the shots will be for a film, sketching out ideas for composition, camera movements, and so forth, so that when it's actually time to shoot the movie, there's a well-defined visual plan. On Eric's first pass, the storyboard flowed well on paper. But once it was timed out to a reading of "Howl," the timing seemed to move too slowly. Then, other animators were brought on to work out a more quickly paced storyboard, using Eric's draft as a starting point.

I was one of those animators -- I got the chance to take a whack at the third section of the poem. I worked up digital drawings that were emailed to the animation studio -- I even worked out a rough "animatic" (which is basically a storyboard that's timed out to the soundtrack, with some rudimentary animation from one shot to the next) in Flash. Because the poem free-associates from one strange image to the next, it was a very open-ended task. I took some images from Eric's draft, and pushed them in other directions, and sometimes I just came up with images of my own (stemming, of course, from the text of the poem). The storyboard went through at least one more draft, with another animator, after I was done with it. At a certain point it seemed like no one working on the storyboard really "owned" any of the images -- the images were just passed from one artist to the next, tweaked, digested, discarded, regurgitated. I haven't seen any of the finished animation, and I have no idea if any of the scenes in my draft made the final cut.

"Howl" is a poem I've admired for a long time. Its incantatory vividness made an impression on me -- I wrote at least a couple of bad poems in its shadow, back in the day. It was somewhat daunting trying to come up with a visual interpretation for such a famous, and such a self-sufficient, work. Ultimately, I felt it would be obvious that the animation was a riff on the poem, and not an attempt at a definitive encapsulation. The poem is singular and strange enough to resist any whiff of encapsulation. It was certainly the most enjoyable storyboarding gig I've ever done. I felt like I really got to inhabit that stanza of Ginsberg's poem -- it forced me to think it through, line by line. It was a chance to play in Allen Ginsberg's mental sandbox for about a week.

Hapless Hooligan: Dance & Animation

This is right up my alley -- a collaboration between artists I've admired for a while. Art Spiegelman, whose graphic novel about the Holocaust, "Maus," really opened my eyes to the possibilities of the medium, has worked with the dance group Pilobolus (who I most recently caught at Artown last year) to create a blend of drawing and dance. The show is called "Hapless Hooligan," and I'd love to get a chance to see it.


Spiegelman did a strip on the collaboration for the New York Times, here (Spiegelman is proud to be a philistine, but calling "The Red Shoes" dull is a bit much):

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/07/11/arts/dance/SPIEGELMANWEB.html

And here's a preview of the process, below. I worked with Element Dance Theater several years ago to create a blend of dance and animation, called "Zoetrope" -- the dancers interacted with animation that was created to specifically play off the dancers themselves, and they also did some shadow-play with an old Betty Boop cartoon. I really identify with the push-and-pull between stasis and movement, and the particularly ephemeral qualities of dance that Spiegelman talks about in the interview.

The Student Gallery is T-Shirt Crazy

What better way kick off a brand new school year than with a brand new shirt? The Student Gallery is looking for your help to make that that possible. Check out the call for entries for the upcoming t-shirt design show, Plastisol. Don't let the image fool you though, the show is not at all limited to screen printed shirts! Any way you can put it on fabric, we're willing to take a look at it.

Oh and did we mention that submissions are free?